Somewhere around the split monolith, we were expecting a cave. We circled its skirt and encountered an open area. Artificially made, the trees were whacked from the base by blunt force. Instead of being cleanly cut, the trunks were ruptured and cracked, the trees were sometimes split along the trunk from where the force ripped it from its roots. All branches were neatly stomped and flattened into the ground with the trunks.

Across the open space, opposite from the monolith, a trail of broken trees, resembling the openings in the Ark. More evidence.

As if the compass, the searing sensations, or even the eyewitnesses weren’t enough, I felt like this had become reality only now. The dragon was here. No, it is here. Right across that trail, across the opening, and down there under the monolith. Inside that opening — a cavern.

“The dragon’s lair,” said Misa, almost whimsically.

“Careful,” I warned her. “This is a real dragon. Much worse than the demon we fought off last time. This might just be the ultimate battle. Wizards and dragons were the Archenemies.”

“Until we killed them all and vampires became our number one concern,” finished Padrict.

And they are again. The supernatural war could go on for all we cared, but a dragon let loose was our number one concern. A problem so big that if the Cabal knew it was real, they’d dispatch a company of wizards. Heck, the Council themselves would spearhead the crusade against Thanatophagon if they knew. But no one would believe us unless we had a way to bring evidence, and, even then, they would conduct an investigation to find out if that’s true. Wasting even more time before the dragon could cause irreparable damage.

“Are we sup— super— surprised to enter there?” asked Shkadaur, and I found his mistake adorable, replacing supposed with another word.

“No way we’re doing that,” reproached Orlan.

“I thought knights killed dragons inside the dens,” Shkadaur said, confused.

“Do we look like knights, Sir Knight?”

Shkadaur’s unreadable alien face did not seem to catch the sarcasm. To them, we were just as knightly as the knighted hadtherads. That’s what his in-head translations made him believe. It could be left unsaid that this was further from the truth. While wizards are brainwashed to become weapons against the horrors of the preternatural, we are not soldiers, we’re more like genetically enhanced super-spies.

“What, then?”

“We call it out,” I said. “Force it out. Outside, where we have space to work with.”

“I thought small and cramped spaces worked against big adversaries,” said Misa.

“Yes, they are,” I started explaining. “Except when it’s a dragon.”

Misa looked at me expectantly, hoping for me to say some genius tactician explanation about dragon slaying.

“They breathe fire,” explained Padrict.

“Or radiation,” I corrected.

“Oh,” she answered and turned red. Embarrassed she missed the obvious.

But looking at Shkadaur, it told me the answer wasn’t so simple to get.

“We’re asking to be turned into chicken rotisserie in a confined space like a tube. All it needs is one good yawn and we’d be bombarded by enough alpha particles to make the Chernobyl incident blush.”

I saw the metaphorical gulp from Misa and literally saw the Knight turn yellow with fear, then green, probably from imagining the symptoms of radiation poisoning. Thanatophagon could probably kill us in less time than it’d take us from vomiting. We’d feel our skin burn like hell, then quickly all our organs start failing, including the brain. And before we could think ‘I’m dead,’ we’d be convulsing on the ground, unconscious, and finally snap to our deaths.

“Smoke it out,” she summarized. “What then?”

I shook my head and turned to see Padrict, who was just as lost as I was.

“Kill it,” I simply said. “Quickly.”

“Does it have any weaknesses?” she asked, almost like she was playing a Role-Playing Game and was expecting the dragon to be weak to ice damage.

“Yes,” I offered. “It’s alive.”

She shook her head.

“Meaning it can die.”

“That’s not a weakness,” she reprimanded.

“Considering what we’re usually up against, fear of death is a weakness. It will defend itself when possible. And defending means it is not attacking.”

“So,” she elongated the only vowel for just a heartbeat longer. “No weaknesses.”

“It is outnumbered,” Orlan suggested. “It cannot target us all. And if we fight it out here, it will be surrounded. We can overwhelm it.”

“That’s more like it,” she said. “We can hit it, and whoever is attacking will get its aggro; all they have to do is tank it, avoiding its attacks while the rest swarm him with high DPS.”

“Damage per second?” Tedet asked, bewildered.

“You’re a nerd?” asked Orlan.

Misa turned red, and she reminded me of the person she used to be: a shy young adult in a world of horrors. But now she’s more outgoing, much more involved in the scene. That makes me both proud and ashamed of what we had created. She used to be innocent, as all mortals should be, unaware or untainted from suffering the terrible reality of the paranormal.

“I used to play MMOs,” she explained, abashedly. “I tend to think in those terms sometimes.”

“Not a bad plan, regardless,” Tedet agreed.

“I don’t understand the plan,” complained Shkadaur. But after Tedet translated in Goktoga, Shakadaur responded with a red face: “Smart.”

“Say, we leave it to the dungeon guide for this one?” I suggested and tried holding back a chuckle, it didn’t feel right to laugh.

Peeling her eyes, Misa shook her head, denying the new responsibility.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Not in real life!”

“And neither has anyone of us. Remember that last battle with the demon?”

“You fought a demon?” coughed out Orlan.

“It went just as bad for us —” I pointed with my thumb to Shakadaur “— as it was for them. As far as I can tell, you have far more experience killing bosses than we are.”

“I don’t think games translate that well to reality.”

Humble as always. I was not expecting her to be a war chief. All we needed from her was to analyse the situation and call out orders while the rest of us are concentrated on killing the hell out of the dragon. Leave the killing to the grunts and have your commanding officer assess the battlefield and the troops.

“You’ll know what to do when the time comes,” I reassured her. “But first, we need to pull the guy out of his coup.”

Misa looked at the lair entrance with concern. I knew she was aware of what she needed to ask of us, but I did not force her or gave her help. She needed to get into this role by herself and let the grunts go with the flow. She’ll gain confidence once we notice we’re trusting her.

“Who’s the fastest runner, here?” she asked.

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Radera have stubby legs, given how short they are. It would be impossible for them to run as fast as a human. Not only that, but humans are anatomically made to run. Although not made for sprinting, we are still pretty good and fast with our long gait. That said, the taller you are, the better you are at running. And while I am not considered very tall, I always feel pride in my above-average height.

Today, however, I felt like I was the unluckiest man for being as tall as I was.

I gripped my staff and ventured deeper into the lair. The air wasn’t hot, but I swore I could feel the heat of the radiation emanating from Thanatophagon’s body. I was so sure the dragon could exude radiation like I excrete sweat.

I wiped my dripping forehead at the thought of it, and felt a small chill when I imagined the dragon doing the same with a million neutrons shooting across the air at a fraction of the speed of light. I swore I saw the little devils ripping through the air in front of me, creating streaks in the air, condensing the water vapor, like they do alcohol in a Cloud Chamber.

I frowned.

“Sweet Mary,” I prayed. “Lord Almighty, don’t wake the dragon before I get to see it.”

The little rocks shifted under the pressure of my feet and the sound made me think they had tiny little megaphones next to them. The cracking and clanging from the small rocks reverberated all around the cave and burst my eardrums. I was only slightly hoping it burst the dragon’s eardrums too.

On second thought, maybe I don’t want that.

“Oh, sweet Mother Mary, save me from myself.”

The staff almost slipped from my hands when it hit a rock in the darkness. I fought gravity to get a hold of it before it snatched it from my fingers. I imagined my struggle like a man dropping his tray of pans, in the kitchen, while his wife slept in the bedroom… except the bedroom was also the living room, and the bed was the couch. And the kitchen was also a kitchenette separated only from the living room by an imaginary line.

In essence, I was dropping my pans right next to the dragon’s earholes.

And yet, there was no response once I had fully taken control of the staff and sat still for what felt like a million eternities. I took a gulp of air the size of Sovail, hurting my throat in the effort. I had not realized just how hard I was holding my breath and who knows for how long I did.

I calmed myself. I tried breathing in slowly. I was reassuring myself that this was not any different than when we were walking around the Ark. Only I could not convince myself when the situation was not at all comparable. Last time, we were running from the dragon. Secondly, I wasn’t alone. And if that wasn’t enough, I had finally stared at the face of death and seared its shape into my gray matter — somewhere within my brain, there’s a web of neurons, a million dendrites, in the shape of Thanatophagon’s visage, completely traceable with an MRI. I knew what I was looking for, and while some people say that the unknown is the greatest fear of humans, that’s only because they have not been breathed on with radiation by a freaking dragon.

“Radiation,” I mumbled between my breaths. I wish I had brought some Geiger counter. But when I imagined the dreaded sound it would make, I decided I would rather brave the invisible stream of particles than announce my entrance like some old twentieth-century Soviet propaganda.

Or worse yet, like an ice cream truck.

The small chuckle that came from my dumb thought gave me a slight boost in confidence.

So, I used whatever scarce courage I had gathered to take a step and push my feet to keep moving.

“Sweet Mary,” I kept praying as calmly and softly as possible. I wanted to make sure not even I could hear it. “Sweet Mary, Sweet Mary, please. Save me from myself.”

After only a few steps, I felt it. In the calmness of the air within the cave, I felt a change in the atmosphere. My wizard senses were tingling, and my hairs immediately stood. I felt like a cat. The chills ran down my spine and arms, and followed their way to the tip of my toes. My fingernails and toenails were rising like hair usually does and I knew I was hallucinating.

But the hallucination I wasn’t so sure about was the heat in the air. Almost like the temperature in the cave suddenly rose, I knew I was getting close. It wasn’t natural, there was magic mixed in. Still, I tried calming myself, I could still be all in my head.

I walked even further and, while I couldn’t see it, I felt the cave opening up; the sound wasn’t echoing as close to me. I sensed sound taking longer to reach back until I noticed the sound did not reach back at all. I forced myself to make as little sound as possible. This must have been the place where the dragon rested.

That’s what I thought as I walked in, given how little the dragon was moving.

The dragon was not moving, right? I would’ve known. Surely, I would’ve noticed if the dragon moved by now. Right?

Almost like in cue. I felt a small breeze. It was hot.

I forced a flinch back into its little hole and forced the lead closed.

Slowly, I turned around and searched for something. My senses tingled, there was something. But I thought I could still be hallucinating. So, I calmed myself down even more and stood still. I closed my eyes and reached out with my simple human sense, keeping the magical ones closed. I tried sensing something. I tried using my metaphorical inner eye to search for something. There was something here; there was the dragon. I had to find it before it found me.

I turned slightly, opening my eyes. Darkness.

I shook my head. I told myself it was all in my head.

“Sweet Mary,” I prayed for the third time. “Show me a sign.”

I closed my eyes and moved my head around, trying to feel the magic brush against my cheeks and nose. Trying to feel, or sniff, with my skin where it felt the roughest or smoothest. Trying to touch the heat and feel where it came from.

As I turned my head slightly downward, I noticed that the heat reduced.

‘Colder?’ I thought.

I lifted my head at level, and I sensed it again with the same intensity.

‘Warmer…’

Lifting my head further the heat came with great intensity, like putting your face against the sides of a fridge. There must be something coming from above.

‘Warmer…!’

I stood on my tippy toes and felt the heat rise too far.

‘Hot!’ I cried in my head, both in the game I was playing and in the heat that made me feel like I was about to burn my face.

The great change in heat made me open my eyes.

Two amber stones stared down at my body. Still. Unyielding. They glowed with such a warm intensity that they almost entranced me to reach out to hold them, like a moth to a flame.

But as I moved my hand beyond my face, I felt the tip of my fingers touching the surface of scalding water. The magic before me made me react like I was burning myself.

The hypnosis broke with such intensity that it startled me, and, with it, came the flow of images; I finally saw it. The silhouette of a lizard head in the ceiling, just barely visible thanks to the shimmer of its eyes against the polished scales. Its long neck flowed, dark against darkness, deep into the cave where the rest of its body should be, curving against an imagined rocky wall and down towards my sides. It surrounded me somewhere beyond the veil of darkness.

I had no time to think or say anything. My animal instincts took control over my body as the spell on my body broke, and I could tell the twitch of a muscle initiating the flight reflex.

I ran.

I did not know if I was going the right way, my brain simply created a map of where I had already walked through and took the imaginary trail back with the speed and bounds of a gazelle.

I kept running and leaping, thinking there would be some boulders in the way.

I finally came to myself after a few seconds, and I felt the ground trembling. Shaking and shifting just before the touch of each of my bounding feet. The ground was moving under me. I thought it was sliding and rinsing, then dropping. The shaking in my head almost made me fall but I managed to catch myself with speeds, skills, and reactions I did not think were possible with a human body, even when enhanced with magic.

Light shone before me, and, while at first it gave me hope, I thought of the imagery of running towards the light at the end of the tunnel. Was I running towards life or death?

There was no time to think anyway. Only running.

Behind me was the oppressing heat, pushing against my back like a vice, but just before me, my nose touched the fresh air of the forest, pulling me toward safety. The pressure of the heat made me feel like I was floating, rising towards heaven. The contradictingly cool sun awaited me as the sky parted.

Glory, in the shape of a red beautiful forest, greeted me in a cold embrace, just as the dragon froze me in place with a roar that blasted my ears like a gunshot. My body contracted in response to the blasting sound that came from behind, even slamming into my back. For a moment, I thought I was just shot because I felt a light punch.

Still, I turned to see death. The grim reaper transmogrified into a gigantic black lizard that sparkled under the sunrise. Smiling with a pointy grin and amber eyes that pierced the heart, Thanatophagon was simply deliberating how to kill me better. It stood there looking at me. I thought he was toying with me.

From the low position it took, stretching its neck parallel to the ground, it then straightened, erect against the floor. And he loomed before me, the sun against its tar-black skull. No iridescence to its sheen, it simply made the white reflections look black against its scales. Its skin was eating even the light. Only some coating on the scale reflected the sun, but behind it, it was deep dark. Darker than the night sky. Darker than the space between starts.

The dragon did not only eat death, it ate light too, and I wish I was being figurative about it. I knew enough to understand what that meant: photosynthesis. Or something of the like. I thought that nuclear radiation was its only source of energy, but I was stupid to forget what was just before my nose. Light is radiation. The dragon ate and breathed radiation, of course, it would eat light whole like that. And with that much energy within him, it was impossible to simply convert all that energy into useful energy without some loss.

The heat. The heat from its body was like the heat from a nuclear fission reactor. And the radiation it emitted from its maw was just another way for it to direct excess energy away from its body.

I glanced dumbfounded at the dragon and it simply stared back. Whatever happened within my brain, the thoughts must have been processed at lightspeed or faster because I felt like, with the end of that last thought, time had resumed its course.

“Edwhite,” his voice, like a subwoofer the size of a house, echoed through the forest. “Edwhite Samiel Avarez.”

Again, the subwoofer shook me to my core. But I realized too late that the shaking was only within my body. Thanatophagon had just spoken my name. My true name.

“Come to me,” it called, imperative.

Even with the demon I had not seen such a magnificent control of the Words. This was magic in its purest of forms to the likes that only the highest of the Fay, the Faery of the Courts of the Season, can pull off. The dragon called and the world bent to its will. Genius was an understatement. He was a lusus naturae. A freak of nature. Born to magic like any land animal is born to breathe. The dragon filled its lungs and it breathed; the dragon turned its neck and it moved; the dragon opened its eyes and it saw; the dragon existed and he was.

The dragon told me to walk and I did.

Towards him.

Every step, unwavering. I took a step and I simply took another. I felt no resistance. I didn’t even think of the danger. I only knew to walk. Walk towards the dragon.

“Edwhite Samiel Avarez,” it said. “Be eaten.”

And I was.