Artur strolled across the blasted earth barefoot, because supernatural creatures don’t need expensive sneakers.  Or common sense, apparently.  I could tell he was looking at something about the wreckage that I wasn’t, or couldn’t.  Maybe it was magical, or maybe he was a part-time private investigator.  Nah, that kind of thing has been done before.

“Thorns,” he said.

“Watch out for your feet,” I replied, helpfully.  I should never, ever, EVER sound like my mother.

“No, these aren’t–,” he broke off and gave me a Look.

I and Nikolai moved a little closer to the stair.   The stairs were huge, definitely not made for your average human stride.   The whole entrance looked like nothing more than a landing strip, if done in early 70’s Dungeons and Dragons.  (That’s a kind of fashion experience, honestly.)

Nikolai sniffed the air and then shook himself.  He didn’t like it.

“Do we have a plan?” Artur asked.

“Did you want to tell me about the thorns?” I shrugged.

“I..”  He shook his head.  “I am just making a guess from what I see.  You do know that torch is horrendous?”  He was changing the subject.

“I didn’t want to shred the shirt.”  I frowned.  It hadn’t quite gone out, but you couldn’t really count it as “lit” either.  I blew on it a few times, making a small flame erupt.

“What is your plan?” he asked again.

“I was hoping to come up with one when we finished hopping down those stairs.  If that didn’t work, I was hoping to wing it.”  I shrugged.  “I figured the Dragon wanted something.  I’d try and negotiate with it and get Doloise out of there.”

“Not a sword amongst us.”

“I have a pen,” I pointed out.  “That’s mightier.  That fight scene in `Grosse Point Blank’ is one of my favourites.”

“Why should we know how Dragons reproduce?  Excuse me,” he rolled his eyes, “How they `make with the squishy’ for all you juveniles out there.”

“Nikolai, he’s trying to hurt your feelings,” I mock-pouted.  Although that was going to be a new punchline of a joke, that spells age in dog years.  Um, if I could make it funny somehow.  “What, you think we should use thorns?”  I looked at the wood shards.  Funny.  I could almost see that, yes, the shards all did kind of look like thorns.  “Are Dragons plucked from bushes?  Dragonberry pie?”

“They’re rare.  Very rare.”  He sighed.

“And delicious with whipped cream.  Look, all I wanted was a bunch of new folks to talk magical theory with, especially from a different cultural perspective, and I got dragged into this whole crazy situation.  `Save Ivan’s heart!  Oh wait, I took it and gave him the power to talk to the dead.  But he only talks to his dead lover and I’m jealous, so I’m going to steal your fairy and get your fairy’s Daddydragonkins on your case. ‘  You know, if I had a chance to sign up for this crazy stuff, I would turn it down!  I feel like Bilbo Baggins – I want my ham and my eggs and a good sleep-in until noon.”

“The reluctant hero?” Artur asked, quietly.

“Not a hero, not a burglar, not even a particular preference for ham and eggs, but that and the song about the dwarves in the five fir trees are what I remember off the top of my head when I think of the book.  No, really not a hero.  I don’t even really believe in Dragons.”

Artur chuckled.  “There is definitely a wisdom in your words.”

“Don’t get me started on your Vasilisa.  If she was so wise, what was she doing hanging out with us for a few cryptic moments?”

Nikolai shivered and let out a faint whimper.

“I want to know why a spell would do that,” I pointed at the dog.

“Because he’s built of the things that Viktor found particularly doggish in nature.  To hunt the evil, to protect the master, to need attention, to run, and to sense.”  Artur was at least willing to answer that.

“Sounds like a dog enough to me.  Do the spells get used up?” Nikolai came over to get scritched behind the ears again, and I obliged.

“There is probably some kind of trigger that activates it as a chain of events.  It’s actually a brilliant use of magic, if more temporary than the figurines Viktor probably had learned.  At least we won’t have to feed him.”

“Figurines?” I asked.

“Mind on the quest,” Artur said, pointing down.  “What’s plan B?”

“`Get her.'”

“That’s it?”

“It’s plan B.  Plan C is, `run in circles, scream and shout.'”

“Hashbrown world, man, hashbrown world.”

“Some of us aspire to be grater than that,” I winked.

“As we balance on the tater-totter of life?” he tried.

“Shouldn’t you be making a vodka reference?  You are Russian, are you not?”

“French fries aren’t from France, you know.”

“You realize, we’re standing on the precipice of a dungeon, about to meet a Dragon with our bare hands, a spell turned into a dog, and bad jokes.”

“Oh, we have more to it.  Ancient grudges, and thus revenge is on our side.”

“So much for the pure heart.”

“What do you say?”

“Excelsior!”

We entered the dungeon.

The stairs were getting in the way of my brilliant plan.  Not that I really had a plan, but they at least got in the way of a quick getaway.  Not that we had done more than climb down about three of them, but I couldn’t reconcile the idea of getting back up them with the action movie that played in the back of my head.  Nikolai took them as small jumps, but was not comfortable with them at all.  I was surprised as he was kind of built like a goat.  Artur had shorter legs than me, well, he had had shorter legs but after the second step he got mad and Hulk’d out.  If the Hulk was green because of chlorophyll.

“You know, if I were some kind of sadist, I’d bring these stairs to a physical therapy facility and just laugh and laugh.”

Artur just grunted.  He may have had huge strides, but they still took all of his attention.

“Think of it this way, we probably won’t survive to climb back up.”

“Always an optimist?” he huffed.

“If it keeps me from having to reverse this trip, yeah, sign me on for sunshine and puppies, baby.”

I managed to get Artur to pause long enough to consider this.  Or give me another dirty look, although I couldn’t tell as I was busy with scooting down another “step.”

We continued in silence.  I gave up on maintaining the torch after step seven.  What good were wizards if they couldn’t create fire, anyway?  I stuck it kind of in the belt loop of my pants.  My eyes had mostly adjusted to the dim lighting from above anyway.

After four more steps I decided to count the ones I could guess at.  Who put twenty-something steps like these anywhere?  Jack’s Giant’s castle?  That’s time to install an elevator.  A beanstalk.  Something.  I didn’t know what the mystical equivalent was, but this was ridiculous.

“What was your plan?” I asked in the quiet.

“What do you mean?”

“You want a piece of her hide pretty badly.  Some ancient wrong to right or something.  What were you going to do?”

He sighed.  “You had flushed her out before I was ready.”

“Guess I just needed to get off the pot,” I grinned.

“I suppose that means something funny where you come from,” he grumbled.

“Us juveniles have to laugh at something when it isn’t your shorts or the sex lives of fire-breathing lizards.”

“I had to jump at the opportunity.  I’ll lure her aside by offering your head as a treat, and then bring on what I’ve got.”

“Why my head and not my liver and lights?”

“Yummy, yummy proto-sapience.”

“Ha-ha.”  I missed the edge and rolled down faster than I planned.  It knocked the air out of me for a moment.  “Anyway, what have you got?”

“Hopefully your serpent’s daughter will be so tearful at your demise she’ll throw me a bone or two.  Sorcerously speaking,” he waggled his dark eyebrows.

“Hey, hands off my fairy!” I protested, faintly.  I coughed, sitting back up.

Nikolai shivered, another little whine.  I held in another cough, listening.

Artur changed his stance, one foot to a stair, arms pulled in to his body.  There was tension there, although tree trunks don’t normally have knees.

We didn’t move for a long time.  I finally had to start breathing again.  “Did you hear anything?”

“Yes.”  He didn’t say anything else, just went down a few more steps.  “There’s light down this corridor.”

I kind of hopped down the few last steps.  There was an archway into more darkness with some light at the end of the tunnel.  Needless to say, the obvious metaphor did not thrill me.

“Hey,” I said.  The light flickered – probably a torch, I figured.  “Let’s get this straight.  Are you really going to feed me to the Dragon in more than a `You only have to run faster than the halfling’ kind of way?”  I looked up at the half-Lesiye.  “Because I don’t have a chance if you are.  You might as well put me out of my misery now.”

He looked down at me for a long minute, and I kind of wanted to close my eyes and not see it happen.

“Nah, you’re vaguely amusing.  Whose side do you think I’m on, anyway?”

I tried to smile.  “Come on, let’s show this mythical beast how we do things downtown.”  Yeah, I misquoted “Ghostbusters,” but the mythical beast on my side wasn’t going to kill me outright.  So sue me.

While we walked through the tunnel, it nagged at me that I had spent far too much time outside the real world.  With various scare quotes and philosophical constructions of what determined “the real world” (which we codename “reality”) versus the place I (my physical and determinative self [which was also a matter of scare quotes and philosophical constructions]) seemed to be.  Part of me wondered how easy or difficult it was to create another world, and the limits thereof; if we walked far enough, would we have looped around somewhere?  Was this Nellie’s lair part of the place Ivan opened or had we passed more thresholds?  Did the rules of portals imply a kind of Zelaznyesque reflection of the worlds and soon we would run into another Viktor or even another Nikolai? 

The ideas of “intent” and “will” and even those of “imagination” run into the argument here as well; my DM has created a world with years to add depth and the effects of our journey in it, and for the purposes of my gaming it is as real to my character as this one is to me, even though at the time we play I’m not experiencing the darkness, or the thrushing sound of Artur’s treelegs (like sea legs, only…not), and the hot wind the way I am here.

I am well aware that I use this kind of philosophical meandering to fill up my brain’s idle sessions.  It’s a great way to be too full for fear.  Alas, if you were going to measure the overall emotional effect of meandering versus a single instance of fear, I think the fear generally wins.  We are wired for fear.  We aren’t wired for philosophy.  (Although I might suggest it for a new race in the aforementioned DM’s worldbuilding.  “Fight, flight, or ponder.”  Nevermind, they were all eaten by sabretooth’d tigers.)

I was able to tell that the light ahead of us was some kind of flame from early on in our walk.  I saw the cage around it as we got closer.  Bits of fire stretched out of the bars, and in the center was some kind of intensity that hurt my eyes to look at directly.  The heat was near blistering, and I would not be surprised to find that I had some sunburn or equivalent on my exposed skin as we moved around it. 

“It wants to be let free,” Artur said.  He stood near it to apparently no ill effect.  It didn’t seem to bother Nikolai either, who sniffed near it.

“What is it?” I asked.  I didn’t offer to go near and unlock the cage or anything crazy like that. 

“It’s an… elemental .  It’s offering to not raise the alarm if we let it go.”

“How can you tell?”  I didn’t hear anything, but then again, I wasn’t part tree.  Or wizard.  Or anything but an idiot for getting myself into this situation.  What’s the worst Peredur could do?  Chew me up before he swallowed me whole? 

And there’s the kind of philosophical meandering that brings on fear.

“Besides,” I continued, “won’t it blow things up if it’s let go?”

Artur didn’t answer. 

“This is one of those moral stances we talked about,” I guessed aloud.  “You’re morally opposed to living a long healthy life or something that you’re telling yourself is more against imprisonment or some other kind of important point.”  I sighed.  “You’re the wizard,” I reminded him.

“Yes, I am,” he reminded me in return as he reached over.  Nikolai pushed me against the stone wall as the light became too bright, even as I closed my eyes, even as I put my hands over them, and I felt… protected.

The dog barked as the light receeded.  “I got it.  Good doggy.  If I had a bone or a scooby snack I’d give you one,” I said.  I couldn’t see anything for a moment, but I could see that I couldn’t see anything, which was hard to say, but at the same time, it made me feel better.  If I couldn’t see that I couldn’t see I would have been blind, you see?

Um.  Yeah.  Nevermind.

“Quick,” Artur said.  “It’s moving inwards.  I think it’s looking for something.”

“Yeah, revenge.   The problem is, revenge here is super-sized and I only ordered a small.”  I kept blinking and there were spots, but I could see we were in increasing darkness.

“Looks like you got a bargain.”  Artur started to move, so I kind of aimed myself at the sound of his rootlike feet.  I tripped over Nikolai, who gave me the kind of look you can only get from a dog when you step on them, and he pushed ahead away from the clumsy human.

 We followed the elemental around a large column and into a grotto of fire.  Well, I suppose in someone’s viewpoint it was probably romantic, and if it had been candles and soft music I could see bringing a non-combustible girl I liked there.  It wasn’t though.  It was screaming and fire, fire in cages, fire in bottles, fire in …

I took a deep breath and tried to focus my watery eyes on it.

The intensity of some of the light was similar to the flare we’d just experienced.  This was one of the reasons why wizards don’t get great health insurance plans.  Extended life, some varieties of magical healing, sure, that was all good, but I was going to get skin cancer just from standing in the entrance of this room.

“It’s a firebird,” Artur breathed.

All the other flame in the room seemed to give attendance, some kind of attention to one reddish-rainbow.  Our hovering elemental guy was dancing around the large cage.  How Nellie had managed to trap the kin of a phoenix… well, maybe Doloise was just making some kind of obscure collection for her. 

I tried to find words to describe it.  Fire is fascinating.  This was more than just the brilliance of light, though.  It was the scintillating blend of colour and feathers and a sense of presence on its own.  Words like “beautiful” seemed too obvious.  Words like “brilliant” were too pale. 

“I’ll do it,” Artur said.  He walked across the room and opened the cage.

All the lights went out.

The darkness was interrupted by a voice.

I have never held that darkness has a menace to it all on its own.  That’s just something we give it because we’re creatures with poor night vision, and for those things that use it to hunt, that’s sometimes their only bonus.  We are capable of handling the dark – too much light is actually more of a problem.

This sudden darkness, though, had brought silence to it.  The screaming had gone away, the illusion broken, and now there was only this voice.  This familiar voice that had brought gloom to my city, and spoken words of doom in a parking lot outside a restaurant that had served more than its fair share of trouble to me in the last few days.

Light flickered with the voice, and I saw the immensity of the Dragon for the first time.

There’s this scene in “The Neverending Story” where Atreyu meets Falcor the Luck-Dragon, and I don’t know why it came immediately to mind because Nellie was not like that at all.  I think it’s because you see this huge head and the comparison to the boy and I felt both this panic and this glee, just like when I saw the movie for the first time, because, wow, Dragon.

If you’re a genre fan like I am, you see them all the time.  I have dragon statues around my house.  In doing research I saw literally thousand of pieces of dragon art.  Heck, I’m guilty of some of my own from when I was bored in my classes.  They’re a metaphor, a representation, something that has layers and layers of meaning besides even the obvious overwrought physical specimen.

You’ve probably never seen a Dragon.

Two in a week was more than enough for me.  I don’t have a dodgy heart (I considered rethinking that phrase in light of Ivan) but I could have expired on the spot.  I did not visit Peredur in his lair – his was the lightest brushing of his presence upon my life, and still I knew he was serious, a serious…something.   I was paralyzed.  I could not breathe, could barely think.

Well, I could think things like, “Big.  Um.  Big.  Very.  Um.  Big.”

Of course, I’ve thought things like that just before getting into fights in middle school, too.

There’s this thing about ancient Dragons in the Monster Manual that talks about their aura of fear.  No, I would not recommend using the Manual for anything regarding monsters – they’re the kind of thing written by guys who stay up all night drinking Mountain Dew instead of going out on the town.   Yeah, guys like me, except very few have shown signs of anything but a faint hope that magic exists.

Somehow they instinctively got this part right, and I failed my saving throw.

My brain finally made sense of what the sound was.  Words.  “That, my dear Lesiye, is how I collected the birds in the first place.”

“There was one you should never have touched,” Artur responded from somewhere to my right.

I had to agree if you wanted to call Doloise a “bird.”  Of course, that was a slippery slope and I’d start calling legs “gams” if I started down it.

Light began to build from around the Dragon’s scales.   I could see why they suggest caves for Dragons, because they create their own luminescence, so additional light would be foolish.  My eyes adjusted to her bronze glow, and I saw all sorts of things – broken and destroyed as if she had set out to crush them under her immense paws.  Unless paws was only for furry things – she had huge claws, kind of like eagles, curved black talons that themselves needed a sanity check to be within fifteen feet of – one of them had a broken tip and I focused on that for safety’s sake.

“You will not find me so easy to digest,” Artur said.  I spun through my recent memories – had I missed a reply?  The aura of the Dragon could maybe have been messing with my mind.

“Devouring and digesting are different,” the Dragon agreed.  “But you are here, in one aspect of my place.”  One dimension, one thin slice of Dragon reality.  I could see that my my view of the multiverse had a ways to go.

I got it then.  Ivan’s heart – it was the firebird!

What was Ivan?

What had I gotten myself into?

My mouth formed words.  “I have no ancient grudge.  I’ve come for Doloise.”  I did not debate whether or not I was a tasty morsel.  That’s the kind of argument you never want to have.

“E!” She was there, suddenly.

“Doloise!”  I was freed from my paralysis with her voice, and instinctively, I hugged her.

Bleepin’ dirty words.  Just as instinctively, I realized that had been the absolute wrong thing to do.

She was still… Doloise.  She still had the saffron curls that made it hard to describe her as blonde or a redhead (as if that was the only descriptor that mattered.  If there were words like that for legs, I’d probably use them.  “She was a tall-waisted thin leg…”  I take it back.  I take it back quickly.)

“Blood and thorns,” she whispered.

My blood dripped over her from all the tiny places she had punctured me.  Luckily, I was wearing my good jacket, and she had only pulled thin strands of wet ruby (there’s a euphemism for you) from my hands, neck, and cheeks.

She turned to Nellie.  “You cannot hold me.”

“Then walk, daughter of Peredur.  I have these as hostages.  Or lunch.”

“I am only concerned with one.”

Wait.  She used “I.”   She had stopped doing that when I had figured out what she was, but it had never sounded natural to her.  This was a confidence I hadn’t expected from her.  Had something happened?

“Ah.  The boy.”  Boy?  I guess it was better than “mortal” and it was a heck of a lot better than “wizard.”  Of course, Nellie was a Dragon and probably no one schooled Dragons in syntax.

“I am Guardian and Guide,” Doloise said, stepping between Nellie and I.

“But you have already hurt him twice.  Ready to make it a third time, fey thing?”

Nikolai bit her then.  A rush and a growl, and the hound was released in a wave of magic.  I could almost see the various pieces as they unfolded like a piece of clockwork.  To hunt the evil.  Nikolai got his fangs near the Dragon’s throat.  To protect the master.  A shield of visible light rushed towards us, as Nikolai disappeared.

“Ah.  One of Viktor’s constructions.  I wondered what had been shielding you,” Nellie said.  There was no blood, but a golden substance that dripped from the shallow incisions.  She shrugged it off.

Artur took that shrug as a chance to draw a wooden sword he’d produced out of seemingly nowhere.  I remember at the time that the idea of it coming out of “his butt” was a hilarious one.  It was surrounded with a hint of flame.

“Run,” he said.

I couldn’t move.  I knew I certainly couldn’t touch Doloise.

“Go,” I told her.

She stared at me, her eyes wild and a golden green.  I realized I had never seen her eyes, but these, these were almost human, and full of all those extremes one might feel in such a situation.  Then, just as I had had a taste of the colour, like a summer’s day but not in a feminine hygiene product way, she was gone.

You’ve seen swordfights in movies.  Depending on the choreographer you either get the really artsy spinning and blow-by-blow rendition, or the brutal hack-and-slash.  This was not a blade that Artur wielded – no one with an iota of sense would wield a sword against a Dragon.  There were probably specific anti-Dragon weapons.  Atomic bombs.  Other Dragons.  Mechagodzilla.

The aura around the sword extended, slashing and slicing as if the sword were more a wand, a direction for some kind of green, vegetable death.  A smell of loam and evergreen, and the little things that lived and died in the roots of trees, and the stickiness of the sap, the slash of branches across unprotected skin, the striving for the sunlight of each leaf.  It was the concentration of a forest.

And it was doomed.  One forest wielded by a tall guy with some trees for legs did not a dragonslayer make.  She had claws – four sets, and wings to use as baffles, and a long tail, teeth, magic, and experience.

I was able to move just as she bit him in half.  Part of me reflected that it was even more disturbing than Cooking Ivan, no matter how inevitable.

“Next!” She spit out leaves and sap, making the word a slush of terror.

I stared into her blue eyes, blue like tropical waters, blue like tears, as she snarled and lunged at me.

She got a mouthful of Doloise instead.