But por que no los dos the other way! What if the dragon's death were a mixture of devastation and wonder that were so intermingled and subtle that it took hundreds of years for people to truly understand what all had to do with the death of the dragon and how it interacted?
What if, when you killed the dragon, you had the initial outburst of fire and ichor; this, more often than being eaten or incinerated by the flame breath or cut apart by claws, was what actually killed the knight, and the torn corpse rested there in a pool of acid held from leaking into the soil by a solid layer of glass from the heat of it.
And then the scavengers come, the dark creatures and the lesser wyrms eager to feast on the flesh of the dragon, and the greater and more subtle horrors that hunt them.
Those horrors also eat the local monsters, so that the aftermath of a dragon's death sees a significant drop in the population of werewolves and kelpies and things that haunt the woods and hunt the abandoned roadways, which the local populace sees as a blessing and spent many years connecting with God's blessing for killing the dragon and don't yet realize it's because bigger monsters arrived and will eventually make their presence known.
Eventually the glass cracks and the acid leaks into the water table and there are years of famine and pestilence, years or decades down the line.
And then there's the magic, which after being released from the dragon, spends some time enriching the local witches' and wizards' magical abilities and causing a higher-than-usual number of magically inclined children to be born.
Later on that high background radiation of magic attracts a whole nother level of predatory beings---perhaps the place of the dragon's death becomes a fairy hill, in the Pratchettesque "fairies are bad" sense. Perhaps demons arrive. In any case, the presence of such beings warps the nature of the magic, and the children born with magic tend to incline themselves towards darker arts.
Then eventually the last of the dragon's corpse is devoured, leaving a host of final-generation scavengers with no other food than the humans nearby, and after an initial hesitation, they are propelled by starvation to swarm and devour.
Oh, and the killer of the dragon, if they survive, has probable thermal, acid, and radiation burns to deal with, plus some inheritance by conquest of something of the dragon's power in a way that makes them a magnet ever after to the things that want to eat that power themselves.
TL;DR: killing a dragon releases a host of short and long term curses and blessings, some overt and some subtle, all interconnected, such that the land nearby undergoes a ping-pong effect of changing fortunes over nearly a century.
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