“How much do you know about my service in the war?” Georg began.

Hansel stared at the man for a moment, baffled.

“Why would I know…?”

“I know that some rumors probably circulated, and I was trying to gauge how much I have to tell and how much you may have already heard about my past,” Georg replied.

“What does that have to do with the destruction of our village?” Hansel asked. “Some old enemy of yours held a grudge? Raiders from the Empire, perhaps?”

“No mere raiders,” Georg said.

“Who, then?” Hansel asked, trying to control his growing impatience. It was starting to feel as if the other man was only jerking his chain. But the former merchant had every reason to keep his feelings in check. The mysteriously ageless man across from him was his only chance of learning what had happened to their village.

“The story starts with the war,” Georg said. “When we fought to get out from under the Braeden Empire’s influence, I was a member of an elite unit. As such, I was read into certain secrets that go to the heart of our continent’s history. Secrets that are drenched in blood. They were uncovered as a result of much that did not make sense, and many events that seem impossible in retrospect. The Immortal Emperor, for instance. And the fiery fields. The first and most important secret was—” Georg stopped talking and put a finger to his lips, urging silence. Then he placed his palm to the side of his mouth to block anyone other than Hansel from seeing his lips, and Georg mouthed the words: “Dragons exist.”

Hansel’s first impulse was to laugh.

That is your secret? You believe in monsters from out of a child’s bedtime stories? Georg, seeing you after all this time had passed, and observing that the man who everyone thought was dead had not apparently aged at all, somehow I thought that you must be coping much better than me with the tragedy. But it seems that madness has taken you. The affliction looks good on you, to be sure, but madness, it must be.

He opened his mouth to say words to that effect, then froze.

Georg’s cold eyes looked into Hansel’s, judging, appraising—giving Hansel the strangest sense that Georg knew just what the former merchant was thinking.

Think carefully before you speak, those eyes seemed to say. I chose to speak to you out of generosity on my part. After all that I have done and seen, I will not be mocked by the likes of you, merchant.

Hansel swallowed hard and pressed his lips closed again. The silence hung over the table for a minute, then two, the atmosphere between the two men thick as a fog. Each waited for the other to speak.

But at last, Hansel acknowledged to himself that Georg could wait longer. The other had the patience, either of knowledge or of faith driven by madness.

“How can you expect me to believe that?” Hansel finally asked.

Georg chuckled mirthlessly. The sound was so cold that it was almost metallic.

“After what you saw in the village, is it so hard to believe that the supernatural was involved?” the warrior asked.

Hansel flashed back to the insane behavior of the flames that he had witnessed—how they caught seemingly anything except the ground on fire and then burned the object until there was nothing recognizable left, only horrifically charred remnants.

“Even with what I saw,” Hansel said slowly, “even with the loss of my senses that the years have brought—even after witnessing a fire that burned even the metal in the blacksmith’s forge—still. I still need some proof that it was—” He lowered his voice, feeling ridiculous as he did so—“dragons.”

“Oh, if you want proofs, I can show them to you,” Georg said, shaking his head. “Evidence abounds if you know what to look for.” He parted the cloak he was wearing, to show the armor he wore underneath. “Here, have a look at this.” Georg tapped the chest of his armor.

Hansel squinted. In the mediocre lighting of the inn, it was difficult to tell for a moment, but gradually, his eyes comprehended what they saw. The gentle glint of the firelight off of the material told him what he was looking at.

“I do not understand,” Hansel said firmly.

“You do,” Georg insisted coldly. He closed the front of his cloak again, and a moment later, the bartender stepped into view.

“Can I get, er, either of you gentlemen anything?” the man asked.

Hansel ignored the skeptical look the bartender directed his way and simply shook his head.

“I request nothing but quiet without interruptions while I finish my drink,” Georg said. He gave the bartender a thin smile and then drew a silver coin out and held it out in the bartender’s direction. “Here.”

The man’s eyes went wide. “No, no, sir, I cannot accept that. I have not brought your change from the coin you gave me earlier. I just thought that I might offer you something else, considering how, er, valuable your custom is here.”

“Well, please consider the remaining value of the coin a tip, then,” Georg said, lowering the silver in his hand. “I only want quiet. If I would like to make another purchase, I will approach you.”

The bartender bowed his head and, muttering apologies, quickly made himself scarce.

“How do you do that, anyway?” Hansel asked.

“Pay a serving man to leave me alone?” Georg replied, wearing a slightly amused smile. “All it takes is money.”

“No,” Hansel said. “How did you know he was coming? You did not look in his direction, but you closed your cloak as if you were worried about him seeing what you were wearing, under there…” His voice trailed off as his mind returned to what he had seen beneath Georg’s cloak.

“That was simple situational awareness,” Georg replied. “It is perhaps the most basic skill I possess. You had some form of it as a merchant, I have no doubt. It is part of why I was willing to speak with you. But as a warrior in this fight, I have had to go beyond the normal capacities of a human. The universe is made up of matter and energy. In my journey, I have learned to tap into energies that I never understood existed before.” Hansel had the feeling he was hearing an ongoing process described, rather than something that had been accomplished in the distant past. Georg sounded like a man on a quest to him.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“This is also why you appear not to have aged in the last twenty years?” Hansel asked.

Georg simply nodded.

“I do not understand how any of this works,” Hansel seethed. “What in God’s name—”

“First, you must accept what it is you are seeing,” Georg said, interrupting Hansel’s blasphemy. He opened his cloak again, and Hansel saw again the strange clothing item that had drawn his attention before. “You will not be able to grasp what I tell you if you are not willing to properly acknowledge what your own eyes are telling you. You are observing something that few humans have ever seen, but it is real. Accept it. Explicitly acknowledge it. Not to me, if you do not wish to, but to yourself. The rest of the discussion requires this leap of faith. If you cannot accept the basic premise, nothing else of what I say will be believable.”

A dragon’s scale, Hansel thought silently, staring right at the manifest impossibility in front of him. It is a dragon’s scale, forged into the center of Georg’s armor. It cannot be anything else… Somehow, a mythical creature’s parts have found their way into his possession. Maybe dragons are real. Hell, something mad has to have happened. What else could explain that day…?

Hansel almost lost himself in memories then. The burning village had never truly faded for him. The fires were dancing in his eyes when Georg spoke up again and snapped him out of his trance.

“All right,” said Georg, looking Hansel directly in the eyes. “We can begin.” This reaction subtly enhanced the former merchant’s sense that Georg was somehow reading his mind.

Hansel just nodded dumbly. He was beyond asking questions for now.

“When I joined the Royal Army, we were all tested for aptitude,” Georg began. “There were some who were better with spear, some who had trained with bow and arrow from a young age, some who were good with sword and shield, some who understood the terrain better than others, some who were suited to cooking—you get the idea. A specialty and a place for everyone.

“Well, my story was a slightly uncommon one. The King selected me and two dozen others for a special unit. I could see that we all had unusually high aptitude in close quarters combat and good balance, combined with a certain something that I could not put my finger on at the time. The selection criteria for the unit were opaque, but I did not ask questions. Perhaps I should have… At the time, I was simply honored to be chosen by His Majesty. You remember the patriotic fervor that everyone felt back then.”

Hansel nodded, although he personally had thought the patriotic fervor of the Autonomy War was misguided and a bit foolish. That had been a different time for him, when all he saw was the value of coin—before he lost what was truly valuable.

“We were given special training,” Georg continued. “Told that we were the most promising warriors of a generation. We were told many things over long weeks spent sparring and meditating and camping in the woods. We were guided up into the mountains and instructed to bathe naked in cold rivers every day, to purge ourselves of impurities. The training went on so long that I sometimes wondered if the war was not over already, in the time spent to prepare us for it. I knew there was far more to our training than what the normal conscripted men were put through. There were a thousand rituals to daily life, a disciplined routine that grew more stringent with each day… And, in retrospect, I can say that we were brainwashed.” Despite the words coming out of Georg’s mouth, the warrior was smiling as if recalling fond memories.

Perhaps, from his point of view, he was.

“Brainwashed?” Hansel asked, just to have something to say—so that Georg would know that he was, in fact, listening to this strange digression.

“Well, over the course of those months, in addition to drilling greater military competencies into us while other men, in more honorable branches of service, were fighting and dying, we were also told that our unit was in an especially honorable field. Which was frankly a crock of excrement. You see, underneath it all, we learned in the end that we had been selected as a squad of assassins. The King wanted to send a message to the Empire by removing a high value target. That was what they were training us for. To go off and kill a member of the Imperial Family.

“When do the dragons come into the story?” Hansel wondered aloud. An assassination mission might make for a fascinating story, in normal circumstances, but he could not see how this related to the dragon that Georg claimed had destroyed their village. Hansel would listen to Georg’s story all day and into the night, if he had to, but the longer it took the warrior to get to the point, the higher the odds were that the two would be interrupted, and perhaps the mystery would go unexplained.

Georg sighed. “I understand the desire to get to the point, neighbor. I was coming to it. I mentioned the legacy of the Immortal Emperor. Well, that was one of our Royal Family’s first clues that the Empire’s ruling caste was, at the highest levels, nonhuman.”

“What are you saying?” Hansel asked.

“You are aware of the story of the Immortal Emperor?” Georg said.

“I have heard the myth,” Hansel replied mildly, almost shrugging before he noticed how annoyed his conversation partner looked.

“Do you remember that I asked you to suspend your disbelief?” Georg asked.

Hansel nodded.

“This is one of the areas where you will need to simply try to take what I say at face value,” Georg said. “The Immortal Emperor was real. The Empire had a ruler who reigned for over five hundred years. He ruled only two hundred years ago, but people in the Kingdom have convinced themselves it was a myth, because it was just long enough that it falls outside anyone’s living memory, and it does not fit with our experience of the world.” The warrior’s voice seemed full of contempt for a moment.

“What does this legendary emperor have to do with the story?” Hansel asked, careful not to use the word “mythical”.

“He was a dragon,” Georg said insistently, lowering his voice when he spoke the word “dragon.” “The Kingdom’s adventurers had gathered information about dragons wherever it surfaced for many years. Its scholars had spent the same period analyzing the history of the Empire, looking for weaknesses and verifying information about their government and their nobility. When the current King took the throne, he put these two groups together, and they discovered something. There was a common pattern among the Empire’s ruling nobility. They seem to live unusually long lives. The King’s scholars used a mathematical technique they called ‘statistics’ to compare lifespans between different regions and peoples. They compared the nobility of the Empire to the nobility of the Kingdom and the common folk of each region to each other. Nobles of the Kingdom lived a long time, but not an inhumanly long time, compared with commoners from either the Empire or the Kingdom. Commoner lifespans were short in both nations. But the imperial nobles seemed, sometimes, to live for centuries, based on records. It was impossible—for humans—but consistent with legends of the dragons, their long lifespans, and their mystical powers, including the power to shapeshift.”

The warrior had dropped almost to a whisper every time he mentioned dragons, which did almost as much as anything else about his manner to convince Hansel that Georg was serious.

“So, you believe that the top nobility of the Braeden Empire are—are dragons,” Hansel verified, lowering his own voice when he spoke the last word. “Including the Immortal Emperor.”

“At the time the Immortal Emperor lived, our record-keeping and technology in general were so primitive that the dragons at the helm of the Empire were comfortable in throwing their impossible longevity in our faces. Perhaps hoping that humans would see that they did not age and die like us, and we would be cowed into submission to a superior race. Even now, when they act more subtly, we still have records that show many nobles of the Empire live an impossibly long time. Perhaps they only ‘die’ when a dragon grows tired of a particular identity and decides to become his own ‘descendant.’”

Hansel shuddered. “Eternal tyranny.”

“Exactly,” Georg agreed.

“What did you come back here for, Georg?” Hansel asked. “After all these years, after the village was burned to ashes, there is nothing left for you anymore than there is for me.”

Georg’s voice shook slightly as he answered. “I want to kill the monster responsible.”

“Why do you sound so afraid?” Hansel asked.

That disturbed Hansel more than any of the borderline insane things that Georg had said since the two men met up. There was a steel in Georg that seemed unbreakable, yet he had seemed genuinely afraid of the prospect of killing a dragon. Were the beasts so terrible, so monstrous, that even this ageless warrior who’d had twenty years to prepare did not believe he could manage the deed?

Georg hesitated, and for the first time, Hansel saw a flicker of what looked like despair in the man’s eyes.

Finally, Georg said, “No one has ever done it before.”