“Is that you Falouris?” the echoing voice boomed out through the cave. “I rather hope it is, I’d be rather disappointed after all we’ve been through if it weren’t.”

Falouris, of course, ignored the echoing voice for the empty taunting it was. His quarry was one that couldn’t resist such verbal baiting, even though it knew the knight wasn’t one easily intimidated. Tricks and traps in abundance told him that the dragon wanted to make this hunt entertaining, making the hunter have to work to reach his prey. Whether this ultimately was from not desiring any to reach him or from suffering only a worthy opponent to pass, Falouris couldn’t say for certain. He only knew that Gohkhom was a fiendishly clever dragon, and had killed more than his fair share of dragon slayers over the years. Though this was trivial, petty even, to the acts of wanton destruction and slaughter that pervaded every mention of the beast’s name, every recollection of its acts.

“Now now,” the dragon’s voice echoed again chastisingly. “Don’t keep looking over your shoulder for doom to snatch you out of the air. If you made it this far after everything I’ve put you through, I’d say you at least get to stare me square in the eye.” Falouris, of course, did keep his guard up regardless of his target’s assurances; Gohkhom was known for many things, charity not being among them. What he was known for, and had demonstrated in confrontation and massacre time and time again was a fanatical contempt for any form of life besides himself, a murderous megalomania that barely tolerated the dignity of other dragons, much less that of the puny human knight who slinked his way through the massive cave that served as Gohkhom’s lair.

There was no murderous trap, no treacherous hidden spell that lay between the knight and his quarry. Just more cave, cave that after one right turn revealed a bright glistening that hit Falouris’s eyes and caused them to squint as if he were emerging into broad daylight. This was it; this was the actual lair of the infamous demonic Butcherer of Bralm, the killer of three separate kings and God knew however many simple innocents. This was it. The knight had to keep himself alert, sharp, and ready, else there would be no avengement for those countless crimes.

The light, of course, came from the overwhelming reflective power of Gohkhom’s assorted horde, which he had been busy acquiring for at least a thousand years, maybe more. Gold, silver, jewels, gems, all the wealth of the world might as well have been here as Falouris inched forward. The state of these treasures, however, was not one that the knight could have imagined, or conjured in a nightmare, even if he had lived as long as this particular dragon. While much of the wealth was heaped into enormous mountains of treasure, a great deal had instead been fashioned, fashioned into statues, to be precise. Gold and embroidered sculptures of slaughter, murder, men whispering deceptive words into others ears, bodies hacked and shredded into a thousand pieces.

Midst it all, smack dab in the middle of the colossal chamber where the eye could not help but set itself upon, was a jeweled depiction of an immense serpentine monster crafted in the likeness of the lair’s owner, lording itself over a small terrified human child, gripping the top of her head with two claws and gingerly pulling upward, slowly but surely ripping the child’s head from her body. As a father himself, Falouris had to clamp down forcefully on his emotions to keep from staring horrified at the glorified jeweled monument to all that was abominable and evil in the world.

“It’s a strange thing really,” the deep, resounding voice returned, though as Falouris spun he could not discern its source, so he kept to the wall near the entrance to the chamber, keeping himself covered in the dark. “The first thing in a hatchling’s mind when he cracks through the eggshell; grab shiny things, snatch as much up of it as you can. Some of my kind spend their entire lives hording as much glistening treasure as they can. I must confess I myself wasted a great many centuries accumulating as large a pile of precious rocks as I could. In my great age, however, such trivial pursuits have begun to bore me, so I make do with what I’ve accumulated and attempt to make art out of it.” In the opposite corner of the chamber obscured by darkness a great mass moved, slowly moving forward in a way that the knight knew that he was now face to face with the demon he had come to slay. “Tell me, are you... impressed?”

Every instinct wanted to slice the monster’s head off right then and there, odds of actually succeeding be damned. Instead, he marched up to the great jeweled statue of the dragon and the boy and spat upon it.

Laughter was the only reply. “You control yourself remarkably well for a man, though I can see just enough through that hardened exterior of yours.” The beast lifted himself from the shadows enough that its face could be barely discerned. “To evoke emotion in just the way you want it in another... Now that it is art. That is skill.”

“Does this have to do with why you slaughter innocents?” Falouris quipped. He knew he shouldn’t dirty himself with actually holding a conversation with this fiend. It was just trying to worm its way into his mind, to pick him apart piece by piece. The dragon was right, unfortunately. The “art” in question did evoke specific emotions from him.

The beast called Gohkhom laughed in its booming, earth shaking voice. “Why, is there some reason that one action should be denied as a legitimate form of expression while another is permitted? Is what I do evil, or is it merely a simple expression of what I am, a message I try to convey?”

Falouris managed to steel himself from speaking further, but then a thought occurred to him. He always knew killing this dragon was going to be tricky business, and honestly when he set his mind on slaying it he only knew that he had to do it, not how he was going to. But perhaps...

“There’s a message you convey,” Falouris declared hotly. “It’s that you are evil, and you’re insane.”

The dragon let loose his own hot snort. “Pitiful insects such as you are quick to call things insane that are beyond your comprehension.”

Falouris let himself take an angry and impetuous step forward. “There’s nothing, no rhyme or reason that can add the slightest ground for a reason for your acts. It’s easy to call someone who disagrees with you small minded when you have no point to make.”

“I have plenty points to make, tiny knight,” Gohkhom sneered. “If the fact that I spill blood in making them bothers you, then perhaps you should reexamine the world you live in. It is a world where things live, and a world where they die.”

The knight let his anger rise to fore as he now marched right up to the dragon, who himself had stepped forward from the shadows to reveal his night green armored form that had to stand forty feet tall, to say nothing of how long lengthwise he was. And atop a long, ropelike neck was that face, punctuated by black eyes that seemed more rips in the fabric of reality than anything else. The only thing that differentiated them from such were the unnatural white slitted pupils that seemed to snatch at the knight like rays of light in the dark. “What you bring isn’t death, it’s murder.”

“Murder, just another word for death. Just an incidental difference of how the end comes about. And yet you and others like you insist on dividing death into the descriptors ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable.’ Tell me, does that help you rationalize your existence by allowing you to categorize and explain all the ugly parts of it into neat little organized holes? Does it help you sleep at night?” the beast said mockingly.

Falouris didn’t speak at first, he just trembled with rage. The dragon regarded him aloft with a disdaining amusement. “The difference between murder and death is just one you’re too insane and inhuman to comprehend,” he said with ice as he approached the terrible beast, which lowered its head to near eye level with the puny knight.

“And just what, I pray, do you know little man?” Gohkhom asked a dangerous glint in his eye, utterly unconcerned about the armed man that was standing not four feet from his face, letting him approach as close as he dared. “In the few seasons you have seen come and go, what wisdom has your kind learned that is of any worth? What pitiful Aesops and cobbled together pithy aphorisms have you attempted to stick upon the universe? What ridiculous catch phrases and superstitious fairy tales do you use to tell yourselves that your precious families and oh-so helpless infants are so special as to be prized above all else?” The beast stopped, then smiled in that hideous way only a dragon could, curling its inhuman lips in an exaggerated manner to reveal his sharp, rending teeth. “Is there some reason that I should not kill, say, your children? What actual reason can you give me that they are any more special than a frog, or mosquito, or the nearest mushroom?”

In truth Falouris was seething and enraged by the dragon’s callous disregard, made all the more intense by the fact that when he thought of his own children in the context of it... “You think you’re that much better than us, don’t you!!?” he raged right into Gohkhom’s face, who took the berating with heaps of dark mirth. Clearly, the dragon was getting his kicks out of this encounter, getting to see his would-be human hunter absolutely lose control right before him. “YOU THINK YOU’VE- GORLK RLAD!”

Right midst his frothing vent, without missing a beat Falouris uttered the keywords to the amulet hidden on the bottom side of his gauntlet, which he snapped up and shone right into the beast’s face. Gohkhom, of course, had been too busy staring him in the eye, thinking he was seeing his enemy lose self control, and didn’t notice that the knight had ended his tirade until it was too late. He barely had time to widen his eyes before being immobilized by the amulet’s spell.

The amulet’s effect was only for a few fleeting seconds; against a dragon of such age and power even the strongest enchantments the wizards Falouris had talked to could make were only enough to temporarily immobilize the beast, creating a split second of opportunity. Opportunity, with his being mere feet from the dragon’s snout, he had.

Bolting forward in one leap, Falouris took his sword and thrust it straight into Gohkhom’s left eye, ripping through his abominable black eyes, right into the brain. Twisting the blade inside, the knight shook it ferociously, wiggling the sword back and forth, tearing as much apart inside the beast’s skull as he could. When he noticed the amulet’s light begin to fade, he didn’t even bother trying to wrench his weapon from the dragon’s skull, he just bolted back as quick as was humanly possible. In the twinkling of an eye motion returned to the monster’s body, only this time all of it burst forth in a teeth shattering roar and a flailing of several tons of spasming, agonized dragon.

Were this any other beast, Falouris would have counted the battle won. Gohkhom was in a class all his own, however, and midst his mad seizures he somehow summoned the will to look his remaining eye on the puny knight that had driven a sword into his brain.

The air tensed, swirling and cascading suddenly around the dragon as he summoned one last spell to call upon his slayer. Fortunately, the necklace the knight wore had also been enchanted, or at least had been as well as could be done against the likes of Gohkhom, and its own magical aura burst forth just as a slamming wall of hate, loathing and fury lashed upon him. The assault was crushing, overwhelming, but the necklace had been enchanted specifically against this dragon, and though it could not have withstood the beast’s full-out onslaught, it was more than capable of blocking his final desperate acts of attempted retribution.

Had it energy left, that remaining eye would have channeled all the forces of the underworld upon that puny knight that had dared stand against it, but here, at the final breaths, it could do nothing to harm him. A seething cauldron of chaotic madness, denied final revenge, that eye gazed in every direction as the life quickly bleed out from it and the beast’s thunderous spasms sent limb and tail thrashing less and less. Then, the eye of Gohkhom froze, settling on his last, greatest art, the abominable statue of his likeness ending the life of boy.

Even as the life bleed from him like a flood, midst his shaking, labored breathing the dragon’s lips curled in a smile. “W-well, now,” Gohkhom staggered as he coughed up vile acidic draconic blood with each syllable, almost as though he were speaking underwater for all the blood that came out. “No-now you go ho-home to your fami-l-ly, to your...” the dragon’s form became limp as he took his final breath. Only there was something else, some new magical aura that was pouring out, one last titanic effort.

Falouris braced himself, but his magical necklace, drained as it was, had to fend off no assault, no attack. He was no mage, but the magic seemed to rush out from the lair... outside. “Son...” Gohkhom’s throat gasped as air escaped for the last time, pooling in the greenish red blood of a dragon, already its pungent acidity eating away at the stone beneath.

At last, Falouris had slain the mighty Gohkhom, the Butcherer of Bralm and perpetrator countless other atrocities. A dragon that had terrorized lands for a millennia and had slaughtered all who rose to challenge it was now dead at his hands. But this barely registered in the knight’s mind. Instead, a quiet pall of dread gripped his chest, and had he a mirror he would have seen his face was as pale as a corpse. Quickly, not bothering to pick up the slightest souvenir or even to reclaim his trusted sword, Falouris bolted from the lair, running as fast as his legs would take him.

---

“He was fine, he was just fine until two days ago,” Falouris’s wife Nerays said worriedly as she hurried her husband down the corridor to room of their son, Lucien. The knight’s step was somewhat staggered and heavy; he hadn’t slept and had barely stopped in his haste back from Gohkhom’s lair, instead riding as fast and hard as he could. His poor horse was about to keel over from exhaustion, but for once Falouris had pushed his steed far more than was advisable.

“Two days,” Falouris repeated. “When, exactly?”

His wife was not well, her face was worn and haggard with drooping eyes that all indicated she hadn’t been sleeping well either, as instead she was constantly at their son’s side. “It was late in the morning; he was running outside with his sister when he stopped and clutched his side, complaining it was hurting. The servants tried, the local healers, I even had someone who’s rumored to be a witch come to look at him. But no one could even say what was wrong with him.”

Late morning... Just the time two days ago when he slew Gohkhom. “Has he been up from his bed at all?”

“No,” Nerays shook her head. “He’s been in too much pain. Everything he does hurts, we’ve had trouble just getting him to swallow water.” Even after two days, her undiminished apprehension was her sole overriding concern. Even her fatigue was taken in stride when it came to being at Lucien’s side.

When they at last stepped inside, Falouris saw his son lying prostrate upon his bed, attended by nurses on either side. While he had been afflicted by sickness before, never had he looked so... drained. His form was limp upon the sheets, his breathing haggard but shallow, and his skin was pale, discolored and deformed like that of a leper. The knight wanted to be furious, angry, but that was not the feeling pervading the front of his mind, the feeling that unflinchingly and stubbornly occupied it.

Despite all known and collected knowledge available, nothing the nurses did could heal his boy. The dragon may have been defeated, but he was intent not on physically destroying his foe, but on crushing something that gave him a reason to live, by living out the horrible depiction of that jeweled statue. Slogging through all of this, Falouris pushed ahead and knelt at the side of his son’s bed. “Lucien? Lucien, can you hear me?”

A brief stirring came almost immediately in response, and the boy opened his mouth to speak, but only a weak moan escaped his lips. Still, they did slowly pucker and form a frail “da... dad...?”

The five year old child could say no more, as a sudden and violent fit of coughing descended upon him, sending his weak body convulsing in agony. Falouris reached forward to cradle his son’s head, but then suddenly the hair on his neck stood on end. It was faint, almost on the edge of hearing, but he knew the telltale signs of a magic spell when he sensed them. Snapping his head about he searched this way and that, but saw nothing, he could only feel a creeping presence, something gaining power and strength moment by moment.

Like a mist it descended, gradually becoming visible, seeping down like a sluggish swarm of locusts all around them, and slowly but surely convalescing right atop Lucien. Nerays gasped behind them and Falouris snatched the necklace he still wore, hoping that it still had some sliver of magic left in it, desperate to grasp one last strand of hope for his son. He leaned over and embraced his son, holding him and whispering, “It’s ok, it’s ok, I’m here, just hold on.” But still, the mist, which was now quite visibly of a sickly yellow color and nauseatingly milky consistency, continued to pool, flowing right past the knight and collecting on his son.

Panicked, furious prayers spilled from his lips, reaching out as the mist gripped his near hyperventilating son, who was now shaking as gasps of pain escaped as his body roiled. Falouris almost didn’t notice when he felt Lucien’s body push upward. He thought it was simply his son arching his back up as whatever demonic spell was upon him gripped him in pain, but when Lucien started rising despite the fact that the knight was embracing him and holding firm, almost smothering him, he snapped back and saw that the mist was physically lifting his son’s body from the bed.

“Falouris, what’s happening?” his wife pleaded in panic as the nurses themselves shrieked in surprise. Lucien continued to rise, leaving his beds sheets behind him. Falouris gripped his son tightly, only for the skin that he hung onto to detach from the boy’s body. Shrill screams pierced the room as the women screamed in shock; the knight locked his gaze on that skin as it simply peeled off like a rotting tomato. As the mist brightened and his son continued to be lifted higher, Falouris stared at the skin that had just fallen off his son’s body. He was only distracted when he saw part of Lucien’s toe fall off as well.

In other circumstances Falouris himself might have screamed. But no, this couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be real. He stood up and gripped his son’s arm, but there too the skin, and now the flesh beneath as, came off in rotting chunks, drenching the knight’s hands in blood and spattering the bed with it as well. Once again the boy writhed in pain, and with each movement flesh and tissue rubbed and fell off in pieces.

More mist poured in, and after a brief flash of light part of Lucien’s garments caught afire with an unnatural dark flame, giving off a color and luminosity bearing an uncanny resemblance to the eyes of a certain dragon. The flames quickly spread and burned with a twisted, demonic heat that forced Falouris back. This he did only after he tried to push back closer to his son, but the heat seared worse than a furnace and he swore if he stood close any longer his own flesh would literally start melting. Lucien let out a scream as he bent his body forward, backwards, side to side, twisting every which way in some feeble pained attempt to escape his anguish.

Two guards rushed in, alerted by the screaming, and promptly skidded to halt, stunned by the spectacle unfolding before their eyes, as the son of one of their lords was lifted spontaneously into the air and caught fire from unholy black flames. Lucien’s clothes had by now disappeared completely, consumed in a totally unnatural fashion that left no ash. Falouris barely noticed until Nerays gripped him. “Falouris, please! Do something!!”

Their son’s body was now fully engulfed by the flames, as his body burned and whittled away. The room reeked of rot and decay that was several magnitudes worse than what Falouris had smelt from the aftermath of the bloodiest of battles, as if a hundred thousand men had died and crammed all their decay into one body. Nerays simply fell and clutched at Falouris’s side, wrenching her head away. Lucien’s body moved less and less as the muscles and tendons fell away, leaving behind raw, exposed bones that hung limply in the air. His belly melted and dissolved, leaving the inner contents, his stomach, liver, and lungs, to follow. The knight watched as his son’s face whittled away, shrunk, and simply disappeared, exposing the muscles, blood, and finally the bare bones that seemed to grow out from his ever shrinking flesh.

Falouris wanted to look away; he wanted wash that image out of his mind, he wanted to turn away, he needed to cleanse his nostrils of that overwhelming stench that clung to his nose and lungs. It was as if he were breathing in the decaying ashes of his crumbling son. For all that, though, his eyes would not lose their gaze, his attention remained raptly fixated on the set of bones, which despite the slow creeping destruction of tendons, remained aloft and intact by some unholy magic. Lucien’s heart, which with every beat spewed blood with no arteries attached, soon itself succumbed and Falouris beheld as it beat for the last time. The last of the face disappeared; the boy’s soft blue eyes dissolved giving way to empty eye sockets.

At last, all that remained were the hovering bones of a young child, hanging lifeless like some puppet from its strings. At Falouris’s side his wife wept uncontrollably, aside from which all present stood silent and still like statues, unable to summon words. Like the knight, they could only stare in mute shock at the hanging collection of bones.

Swallowing, Falouris tried to comprehend what had just happened. It had been so quick, he hadn’t known what to do, yet it had also taken place at an agonizing pace. Was this the dragon’s retribution, to kill the son of his slayer and dissolve his life before his very eyes and leave the bones hanging as a reminder, surrounded by ashes and blood? The knight wished he could be angry, wished he could be furious. Instead, his body trembled with shock that dumbed him from feeling anything. His heart pounded, his skin crawled, and yet... nothing.

That is, until the bones began moving. Or not so much moving as they began to change in shape with a screeching noise of grinding rocks. Nerays turned from her weeping to stare, tears still rolling down her face, as the body of their son was again subjected to horrors of revenge. The knuckles bent and spread out, the ribcage twisted and heaved.

And the empty jaws stretched forward, accompanied by the slow, steady additions of vertebrae to the spine, extending out behind.

Oh please, God, no...

As if to mock him, pigments appeared across the white bones and spread out and up, reforming new flesh that slowly crawled across the body. Muscles and tendons slowly formed, and with them the body began twitching and turning.

Nerays screamed outright, mixed with tears in a devastated fit of denial. The nurses too, who had tended young Lucien all his young life, wailed and cried as the twisted, creaking bones began to move with new movement, as inhuman and alien muscles latched onto the body of the knight’s son and twisted it to their own ends.

Like a swarm of worms tissue and flesh crawled along the increasingly misshapen skeleton. Bones began forming and suspending themselves out from the back, to be met with a wall of growing flesh. The shoulders creaked and snapped, shifting their positions and shapes along with the hips. Tissue swarmed the interior of the ribcage and melted together, building like insects forming a colony. A twitch, then a full pound, as the discolored mass that formed a new heart starting beating anew, accompanied by a fresh source of a vile, visquicous liquid, a sickly yellowish red in color, which spurted from the new arteries onto the bed, singeing and burning the sheets with acidic corrosiveness.

The reanimating abomination did not stay feebly hanging in the air. Quite suddenly the mass of bones and tissue was released and fell to the bed with a sickening burst of squishes and crunches, splaying all over in haphazard, unnatural angle. The neck in particular was bent over nearly backwards, but as flesh squirmed and clawed its way up the vertebrae, which themselves multiplied and grew long, rigidity returned and the neck spurtingly wrenched itself back into place. As more tissue ran up the arms, they began slowly moving about; soon all the limbs were slowly flaying through the air in random spurts. The body began rolling about, then inched its way towards righting itself, facing directly at Falouris and Nerays. With a slow, staggered deliberateness, one increasingly clawed limb after another moved back and forth in their direction.

Grip was lacking, but with each back and forth movement the reanimating body slid closer, pulling itself off the bed and crashing to the side in another heap. The tail swung about, knocking against one of the legs in a slow whacking motion. Spinning about in a steady flow of bleeding acid the body again flipped itself over and began crawling toward them.

“No,” Nerays sobbed uncontrollably. “No, no, no, Lucien... Lucien!” Her hands gripped at the air in the monstrosity’s direction, gripping at something far gone and utterly out of reach, with the only remnant mocking her with grinding creaks of bones and squishy spurts of flesh as it morphed into the shape of the very thing that was twisting it.

The thing twisted its head to the side in a lopsided manner, as a man who had been struck with a stroke would, able only to move one side of his body. That faceless skull warped ever outward into a snout as flesh with arduous crawl deformed it further. Teeth snapped and sharpened, and a fleshy appendage grew from the top of the throat and slid above the jaw, rapidly forming into a pink, almost prehensile forked mass that settled in the center of the mouth, making its home there.

Like a fungus the appendages on the back spread up and out, the end bones spiking out into terrible claws, the rest progressively wreathed by thinly covered flesh which drooped down into membranes. The rest slowly rose up and hardened into blacked, hardened scales, coating the newly formed wings and spreading down. Muscle thickened across the limbs and torso, growing to unnatural depth and breadth. Inch by inch, it was now only four feet away from the two who had once been parents to a five year old son.

Hands shaking, Falouris fought with himself. The nature of the abomination was clear, the truest depths of what revenge could be at last laid bare and manifest to him. He knew what he had to do, he knew he had to stop this all before it was too late. Even now less acidic blood was bleeding out as more and more flesh built up, and the stance of the creature slowly righted as it got up shakily on all fours. A quick powerful predator was forming, full of potential to rend, tear, and destroy, just like that which had fed it its unholy life. Every moment that passed there was less and less reminder of his son, just that of a foul killing machine, an enemy of man. And an enemy to his family.

It had to be done.

Trembling and silently pleading prayers that this was all a dream, prayers which he knew deep down were utterly futile, Falouris knelt and gripped his scabbard. Though not the blade that had slain Gohkhom, this was the blade with which he had killed his first dragon almost fifteen years before. And now... now he would end this abomination that had torn its way through the body and soul of his son so that it might bear itself into the world; he would end this parasite.

The monster’s body was now almost fully formed, and was at last covering itself with black scales, highlighted with a fierce, crimson underbelly and highlights that cut across the wings, claws, and parts of the face. At last, the only thing yet formed were the eyes, which filled in like lard being poured into a glass. Like an inverse of the scales, the eyes formed, a rabid crimson for what should have been the whites and the irises, filled in with pure black pupils, slitted like those of a snake.

Nerays gasped in hyperventilation on his side, and the beast, taking in its first full breaths, still seemingly adjusting from its unholy birth, trembled as it adjusted to its form and power. Falouris fought with and suppressed all feelings. The beast was awakening. He had to act now.

He approached the monster, raising his sword. The beast slowly raised its eyes, swirling about as they took the world in. Whether from acclimating itself or filled with adrenaline, it gripped the floor tight with its claws. With deep, echoing growls, the dragon breathed in and out quickly but shallowly, taking in what no doubt had to be a shock as it was thrust into the world. Falouris didn’t dwell on it. He poised his sword above his head, ready to strike down.

Then the dragon’s eyes cast up, those horrid, red inhuman eyes locking onto his own.

“...Daddy?”

Falouris’s blood turned to ice. His body froze as if being immersed in the coldest depths of the arctic, rigidly stopping as if stone. No breath came, he just stood, poised. The dragon squatted in equal shock, his entire body trembling and shaking as if emerging from freezing water, his shallow breath a study of shock and terror. His claws gripped the stone floor gouging marks into it, as if to desperately find something in the universe that was solid, needing it. And those eyes, however inhuman they seemed, screamed in fright and shock as if they had seen the world burn around them as everything they had ever known give way.

The first motion that Falouris found was that of his stomach heaving with a violent lurch. With a spurt he dropped the sword, turned and vomited, falling to his knees and emptying the contents of his stomach, as his whole being found it could support no weight at all beneath the crushing weight that had just been smothered on him. Every ounce of strength was sapped away, every reservoir of spirit drained and emptied. In their place burnt and shattered fragments remained.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, something told his eyes to look around. One of the nurses had outright passed out. The other and one of the guards were fervently chanting prayers of deliverance. The second guard stood in stupefied silence. Nerays, behind him, was muttering to herself incoherently.

And there, in the middle, on four shaky legs, a small dragon trembled, his eyes wandering as if he were in a dark dream, searching for one last remaining respite, some last shred of reality to hold onto.

On his hands and knees, Falouris somehow began moving forward. With a ginger gesture he lifted his hand, reached forward... and touched the dragon. Warm to the touch, yet harder and tougher than stone, the scales felt nothing at all like that of the soft, supple skin of a five year old child. The black and red dragon, though, felt it just as well, and craned his neck backwards, then, as if sensing an alien sensation, retracted it shamefacedly, trying to bury and scrunch up his neck. Falouris reached out with his other hand, and touched the boy on that neck, before drawing himself around in a soft embrace. The boy said nothing; he simply stood petrified rooted to the spot.