Solak's expression darkened at Tom's accusations. He put his mug down carefully and stood up, pacing away from the table. Tom shrugged and drained the cup, putting it back down on the little wooden stand.

There was no bar to speak of in this tavern. Instead, at its centre, where the tree's trunk was still solid, a stack of rough wooden barrels was set up, lain on their sides in a hardy frame. The assemblage was in strong contrast to the elegance of the tavern itself. Beside them lounged the closest thing the place hard to a barman or innkeeper. He was a portly man with the common look of the Tree People that Tom had seen so far. For all that Solak claimed a descent from them, he shared barely any resemblance to their racial look. They were shorter than either Solak or Tom, for the most part, with broad shoulders and big hands. Their faces were flatter and their eyes larger. They looked like no kind of race Tom had ever seen at home. None of them had the sharpened teeth he'd seen on Lady Yagan.

At Solak's rise, though, the barman glanced across at Tom, catching his eye. Barmen everywhere, Tom guessed, spoke a common tongue regardless of bizarre Tree People magic, so we picked up his empty cup and waved it. Sure enough, the barman grinned and hurried over.

'You like our fare, then, Worldwalker?'

'You know who I am?'

'For seven days and nights have Lady Yagan and Master Solak worked upon the magics to bring you across the borders of worlds to our village,' he explained. 'Everyone in Dan Damion knows of their efforts. We are not troubled by Queen Zygmor here in the Sarindawold, for now. But we have seen the refugees and heard the tales. It is not in the nature of such evil to sit quietly. Also, Master Solak paid a great sum to our elders for the aid of his great-grandmother. Dan Damion will sit proudly at the next Moot for the work they have done.

'Maybe one day I will tell my great-grandchildren that I served the Worldwalker his first beer in our land before he slew the Queen, eh?'

He wandered off with Tom's cup, leaving the soldier to mull on his words. Solak hadn't gone far. He paced back and forth on the far side of the tavern. He stopped pacing and turned back to Tom, just as the barman brought him a fresh cup.

'One more for you, Master Solak?' asked the barman.

'I've had enough,' snapped Solak, sitting himself back down.

'I've offended you,' said Tom to the mage.

'Yes,' agreed Solak. 'And I'm angry. But I have persuaded myself that I must make allowances. I know nothing of your world.'

'Why don't I tell you about where I'm from, then? Maybe it will help you explain yourself in a way that makes sense to me.'

'A good idea,' agreed Solak. 'But first I must apologize to our host and get another drink.'

Once he settled himself back down, Tom tried to assemble his thoughts to explain.

'First I should say that, as far as I know, there is no magic in my world,' he began. 'We have learned, over tens of thousands of years, to use the rules of the universe to make machines and devices that help us do things you might call magic, though. We can fly in these machines, and send words and pictures across the world. We can create vast explosions big enough to flatten whole cities. We can use the wind and the sun to give our machines power.

'I'll be honest: it's pretty cool. But before you ask: no, I can't do any of those things and, to be honest, I have no idea how they work. They are so complicated, in many cases, that no one person understands all of them and so we work together in teams to make things. Sometimes those teams are vast: tens of thousands of people working together.

'But we have a big problem, which is that the world is only so big and our machines require lots of metal and oil and other things to work and there is only so much to go around. And so we also use our machines to fight. And this means we have to have leaders. Some leaders are like kings. Others are chosen by the people to lead, not born to it. And we also have merchants and some of our merchants are richer than countries.

'I'm just a soldier, Solak. I'm not a knight. I'm not a leader. I'm not one of our machine-makers. I'm what's called a "corporal". Normally, I would be in charge of six, maybe ten other soldiers. Not more. But, to be honest, it gets worse because I don't even do that most times. Because I'm also something we call a "sniper" - a sharpshooter, like a bowman. My job is to shoot the fighting machines with my own little machine, to kill them.

'You talk about things like good and evil and humans and monsters like they are something real, but in my reality there's just a job you're paid to do.'

'You use your little machine to kill?' Solak interrupted.

'OK, I can see I'm going to regret calling it a little machine,' said Tom, chuckling. 'It sounds like you're talking about my dick!'

Solak burst out laughing despite himself.

'Haha! Yes!' he agreed. 'I didn't summon you here for your "little machine"!'

Still smiling, Tom lifted the Cyclone onto the table and pointed at it.

'This, no pun intended, is my little machine,' he explained. 'It's called a "Cyclone".'

He pressed the magazine release catch and lifted the box up to push out the heavy rounds into his palm. He passed one to Solak to hold and, cautiously, the mage took it from him

'It sends these really, really fast, a really long distance. And these are made from really strong metal. They can punch through at least half an inch of steel. And I am very good at this.' He pointed at the scope on the top of the Cyclone. 'I can use this to find weak spots or to hit exactly the right place to do the damage I need to.'

Solak lifted the single round up to eye level and held it at arm's length. With his free hand, he poked the sharp end of the bullet.

'Yes,' he said, passing it back to Tom. 'I can see that this could be the tool to kill Zygmor. Might it be strong enough to penetrate her skin?'

'Or I could hit her somewhere she doesn't have armour, like her eye, ear or mouth,' said Tom. 'But like I said: I'm a soldier. I follow orders from officers who are trained by my leaders, like knights. They are supposed to tell me who to kill, and I trust them to give me the right orders because they have information I don't. But -'

He pointed at Solak with the bullet in his hand.

'You aren't one of them,' he emphasized. 'I don't know you. I have no reason to trust you. I'm not an assassin who just kills whoever he's paid to kill, takes the money and walks away. Plus,' he added, 'I have these five rounds. So unless your world, with swords and magic and giant trees, can also miraculously produce depleted uranium core jacketed point-fifty BMG rounds, I have a maximum of five opportunities to kill your dragon and then I'm basically useless to you.'

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

'So let's re-cap. How did I get here? Why me? What next? Your turn.'

Solak nodded and took another pull on his drink.

'Yes, I understand,' he agreed. 'I do see it from your perspective. I had many reservations about bringing someone to aid us. It troubled me endlessly. I should tell you the story as best I can.

'I was away from the order when Zygmor arrived at Capadua, our once-capital. She brought an army with her, but they were barely needed for she tore her way into the castle and slaughtered the king and his family without their help. The magic of my brothers was near useless and she turned her wrath upon our home next.

'By the time I returned, the city was flattened, mostly in ruins.

'Like most, I fled. I joined the refugee trails to help fight off the monsters that assailed them, and protect them from bandits and we made it as far as the Tempis Citadel in the far south. We spent two years planning, raiding, training. We gathered together the survivors of the orders wherever we found them. But when we offered battle to Zygmor, for all our planning and preparations, we were utterly unprepared. Her power broke us. The greatest of our knights, the Grandmaster Ivor of the Penitent Order, clad in our finest armour, his equipment enchanted to the highest degree, was able to stand before her and land a single blow upon her.

'She was visibly wounded for the first time - a deep cut slicing her cheek and lower jaw. But her response made it clear that we had failed to appreciate her true power. She crushed Ivor to the ground, tore off his head and rendered to ash every thing - human or monster - for a score of yards in every direction.

'It broke us and we fled.'

Solak paused to take a drink. Tom could see his eyes were focused on the past. He had seen his fair share of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had fire his weapon in anger - the Cyclone and his SA80 when just patrolling - more than most in his regiment. He had taken lives and seen friends take shots. Only one had died, femoral artery shredded by a roadside IED, but a half dozen others had been casevac'd in one form or another. He was carrying his own burden of PTSD, he knew, from those experiences.

He tried to imagine facing a fucking dragon in open combat. He tried to imagine the kind of population trauma that Iraqi and Afghani civilians had to carry from the foreign wars prosecuted on their soil and scale that up to a territory terrorized by creatures out of nightmares.

'Take your time,' he said gently, trying to channel the psychiatric nursing officer who had conducted his most recent counselling sessions. 'We can take a break if you want. Talk about something else?'

'No,' replied Solak. 'It is good to have to explain this to someone who knows none of what we faced.

'We fled back to Tempis. I am sure that Zygmor knew we were there. She chose not to pursue because she knew that we realized, at last, that we stood no chance against her - that our greatest efforts had fallen so far short of a threat to her rule that we would understand the futility of our resistance.

'Sure enough, many of our remaining leaders suggested capitulation. Others, that we simply leave our country to the monsters. Only a handful were ready to fight on regardless.'

'And you were one of them?' asked Tom.

'Hah!' he barked without humour. 'No, I was one of those who argued to flee. I wanted nothing more to do with Zygmor, monsters or Aquitan. But I was not truly of their race. A half-breed upstart who could not understand the bond between land and man that made Aquitan what it was!

'I would have spat in their faces and walked away at that attack upon my honour, but I was persuaded to look at another path.'

'Me,' said Tom.

'In a sense,' he agreed. 'We had captured one of the invaders' mages. They called themselves shamans and practised a form of magic alien to our understanding. We interrogated her and learned enough for me to recognize features of their summoning rituals in what I recalled from the little time I had spent with the Tree Folk and my great-grandmother.

'Our original plan was to fight fire with fire. If they could summon a dragon, then so could we! Or perhaps a horde of lesser monsters powerful enough to defeat her.'

'I can't imagine how that could possibly go wrong,' Tom snorted over his drink.

'You are wiser than many of my supposed allies, Worldwalker,' Solak agreed. 'Of course, it was more likely two dragons would ally or, even if enemies, that they would conspire to crush us with even more viciousness. And no amount of monsters seemed sufficient to defeat her in any case. But the greatest obstacle to the plan was that it transpired that the summonings of the invaders had required sacrifices to effect.'

'Sacrifices?' asked Tom. 'Human sacrifices?'

'Not at first,' Solak went on. 'The smaller creates required either the life force of lesser animals or a sacrifice of blood and soul, but not a whole life. This soul magic was dangerous and dark. Larger and more terrible monsters required larger and more terrible sacrifices. And it transpired that the summoning of Zygmor had been an even more desperate measure than we had imagined: they had sacrificed the lives of dozens of their own people to effect the work.

'We were desperate, but there were still lines we would not cross for any price.

'I came here to learn more from Lady Yagan, and she gave freely of her knowledge.'

'Really?' Tom interrupted. 'I mean, I know I've just met the woman, but she bit me on the tongue without permission. She doesn't strike me as the kind to just freely tell stuff even to her great-grandson.'

'Wise and perceptive, World... Tom,' smiled Solak. 'I have been here for months. She teaches freely, but learning what is meant by her words or how to apply those lessons is... It is not like studying within the Azure Order. But I eventually learned enough to understand something about how the soul magic of the invaders worked.

'All magic is predicated upon balance. A lot of what mages like myself do involves building up what you might think of as... favour with the universe. We store it like grain or dried fruit to draw upon when we need it. And, like grain or dried fruit, we can combine those things in ways that make something similar, but different.'

'Like a pudding,' said Tom, and Solak's face lit up.

'Yes! Exactly like that!' he agreed. 'But instead of fruit and grain and beer, I store up different kinds of energy that I can draw on and combine to create spells. And this soul magic is the same but, instead of using these inert energies, they use the life force that binds the world together as we know it, that we can call "souls", but which is far more complicated. The invaders pushed soul energy into the weft and the summonings were what they drew back.

'But the understanding of the invaders was poor, which is what Lady Yagan taught me to see. Their calculations were crude. They poured in more life force that was needed for their summonings to work. Not by a large amount, but enough that, when Lady Yagan helped me to enter a mystic trance to explore the weft, I could see that the balance was off: that there was a huge credit of life force energy within the weft.

'Pulling that life force together took me many more weeks, even with my great-grandmother's help. But soon I could see that there was enough lifeforce to execute a summoning - one nearly of the same scale as that with which the invaders had summoned Zygmor, without needing to expend any cost.

'But what would we summon?'

'I mean, I know how this story ends, Solak,' pointed out Tom.

'You are a terrible audience, Tomas Worldwalker,' replied Solak. 'It is not so simple as that. Do you think you are a summoning equivalent to a dragon, whatever the power of your Cyclone device?'

'Fair point, well made,' said Tom. 'Feelings only slightly hurt.'

'With this knowledge, I returned to Tempis and found that my former friends and allies were at loggerheads and my news was like oil poured upon the flame of their dispute. Yet again, there were calls to summon another dragon, but thankfully they say reason.

'The summonings of the invaders had been guided by generations of experience of this kind of magic and, even then, their monsters were barely under their control if at all. The more powerful the monster, the less it was at their beck and call, and the summoning of Zygmor showed where such things led. Thanks to Lady Yagan I had a better understanding of the nuances of the summoning process, I think, than even the invaders, although I still lacked their familiarity with the process.

'Soul magic behaves a lot as if it has a life of its own, unlike the energies we use in our traditional magical forms. Or perhaps I should say that it behaves a bit like a mirror to the one who uses it. Like traditional magic, it can be shaped and formed and tuned, and I don't think the invaders ever did this. You see, doing this with soul magic itself uses up some of the power of the magic. If you want to summon some big monster, you just set it to "big monster" and it does the job. But if you want "big red monster" or "monster specifically the size of my house" or, indeed, "monster that will obey my commands", the amount of energy it uses up is commensurately greater.'

'I get it,' nodded Tom. 'The finer you tune the summoning, the less energy is left for the summoning itself.'

'And we had the energy for a single summoning,' Solak went on. 'So we had to get it exactly right, first time.'

'So immediately everyone started arguing over what features you needed.'

Solak nodded, sighed, and poured the rest of his drink down his throat.