“I’m not going to eat you,” said the dragon in the voice of Scarface.

I felt myself relax ever so slightly - as in I somehow managed to squeeze some oxygen into my lungs before I passed out. Everything else, though, remained tight as a drum, and I was utterly rooted in place beneath this behemoth.

“There’s really not enough of you to bother, if I’m honest. I could have summoned up the motivation for a morning snack if you’d ridden in on a horse - been a while since I had a good horse - but you look a bit bland and stringy on your own. I never could be doing with the ginger-flavoured ones, either.”

You may be expecting a quip from me in reply here. But did I mention the fucking size of this monster? It’s one thing to like a good bit of banter, but there’s a time and a place. Like, as far away from my current position as possible.

I tried to follow the steps Merlin had shown me to fast-travel back to our starting position, but my Qi had seemingly dried up as a response to my panic. As survival mechanisms go, this felt as helpful as when deer freeze in the headlights of oncoming vehicles.

“That being said, I cannot stand the smell of Qi at the best of times, and you absolutely reek of Merlin. So, unless you have any amusing last words, I will move right along to the fireball thing. I’m listening.”

Of all the times for words to fail me, this felt like a particularly poor one.

With that, this lizard the size of a small town took a deep breath, and smoke began curling out from its nose and out of the side of its mouth.

I closed my eyes to prepare to die.

Again.

At the very least, it seemed I should get credit for the increasingly exotic nature of my demises. There cannot be too many people throughout history that were hit by a lorry one day and then flame-grilled by a dragon less than forty-eight hours later.

Or maybe there were. Perhaps, as with so many things in my life, other people were out there doing these amazing, weird things, and I was the one missing out. Maybe what I thought was the absolute cutting-edge of shuffling off this mortal coil was actually painfully vanilla. Like the first time you sprinkle salt on your chocolate muffin and rave to your housemates. Or... nope, I’m too scared to complete what was going to be an unnecessarily lewd comparative sentence there. Please use your own imagination.

Knock yourself out. Go really smutty.

But, and I was surprised about this as you, no fiery death occurred.

Realising I was still alive, I cracked open my eyes again to see the dragon observing me, almost thoughtfully, through its amber eyes.

“What are you doing?”

I cleared my throat and squeaked out an answer. “I was preparing to die?”

The dragon blinked. Once. Twice. And then the smoke vanished.

“For fuck’s sake,” and like the world’s most enormous burst balloon, the dragon began to deflate, accompanied by the sound of epic flatulence and some Premier League complaining. “After all this time, he finally bothers to show up with another apprentice, and it turns out this one doesn’t even have enough Qi to summon a proper shield. I mean, I have my standards. If I’m going to bother to drag myself out here and puff myself up to defend my lair, it better be worth it, is all I’m saying. And what do I have? Some little pissant fledgling with barely enough Qi to warm my tea. Fucking liberty, Merlin, that’s what this is. A fucking liberty.”

At the end of this monologue, the dragon had reduced down to the size of a small pony. It was, therefore, somewhat disconcerting that it... pranced towards me precisely like one too.

“So, where is he? Where is that good-for-nothing-Qi-hoarding-beardy-lair-robbing-bastard?”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Now the scale of the thing was somewhat more manageable for my brain to handle, I seemed to have regained the power of speech.

“That’s a slightly more difficult question to answer than you would think.”

The dragon snorted at me, utterly incinerating the tree to my right. Like, full-on reduced it to ashes in a moment. Proper Nazi-frying Arc of the Covenant stuff.

“Try.”

I had no idea where Merlin had gone, but as this particularly flamey shit show was his idea, I didn’t feel any particular desire to protect his secrets. He could feel free to pop up and try to resolve the situation to his satisfaction whenever he wanted.

“I think it best if I start right at the beginning...”

*

In what used to be a village, a short ride from Morgan’s current predicament, Pæga licked his lips.

He liked doing that. He thought his tongue whipping up and out around his mouth gave him a wolfish aspect.

Everyone else thought it made his face look like a pasty worm exploded out of the earth on regular occasions. It goes without saying that they would have agreed with Morgan’s designation of him as Dick #1.

As far as he could tell, the invasion was working out pretty much as the High King had predicted. It had taken years of negotiations, and no small amount of gold, but he and a bunch of his fellow Warlords had been persuaded to stop fighting each other long enough to cross the Tamar and start laying waste to everything they found in Uther’s kingdom.

Of course, he still flinched every time he saw a burst of Qi, expecting Merlin to appear and slaughter them at any moment, but so far, it had only been his own wizard, Melehan, who was bringing the magical doom.

“And we’re still at the forefront of the advance?”

Melehan cycled his Qi to make it appear he held his eyes still whilst rolling them in massively expansive circles. He had no idea which god he had angered which had led to his attachment to Pæga’s force, but he was making nightly sacrifices to all of the ones he could think of to make amends.

“Yes, my Lord. We are the tip of the High King’s spear. My fellow wizards speak in awe as to your belligerence and bravery. They cheer you onwards whilst chastising their own cautious commanders.”

Or, to be more accurate, they offered Melehan their sympathy and were extremely glad they were not in the section of the army that Merlin was going to vaporise first. Despite the High King’s assurance they would not see him on the battlefield, all of the invading army’s wizards had a fast-travel spell prepped to get them back home the second that dread presence appeared. No one thought, due to Pæga’s apparent need to dip his cock in every comely native first, that Melehan would get a chance to cast his.

And yet...

There was far more Qi in this land than there ought to be. Legend said that Merlin’s cycling needs had drained all the power from the surrounding area, and yet he had never been anywhere that felt so alive with Qi. And he had travelled overseas to some of the great sites of power: Uppåkra, Uppsala, even the incredible energy at Schnippenburg felt thin gruel compared to the bounty here.

And hadn’t he seen that Celt literally glowing with power in that first village they had come to? If there was so much Qi in the land that cultivators could just allow it to leak out of them in such a way, what did that say about those who actually had proper control?

But they hadn’t come across any other cultivators.

And Merlin had not turned them into smoking corpses...

Melehan’s nose wrinkled in distaste as he thought about the skirmishes thus far. He’d barely been needed to cast a spell, such had been the paucity of resistance. The High King had been right; these people had become complacent.

“Who is the nearest to us?” His ‘master’ was speaking again.

Melehan reached out to brush against the Qi-presences in the other invading forces. As he feared, they remained well in front of his fellows: the first response from Uther, or more likely Merlin, would smack them right on the nose.

“Warlord Heard is just reaching the last of the villages we sacked to the North. His wizard reports he is much angered to find it despoiled.”

Pæga smiled and licked his lips again. “Excellent. So where next?” There was a pause. “Wizard, I asked where do we push to next?”

But Melehan was not answering. He had gone white as a goose, his tattoos showing in stark relief on his face.

Whilst questing out for the other cultivators in the army, he had touched on a power signature he recognised as the Celt from the village.

Was she following them?

That seemed a peculiar choice, having been given every opportunity to run the other way. But there was no accounting for stupid, he guessed. He pushed down on her presence, wondering if he could panic her to flee to safety, and was surprised to feel she appeared much more continent than she had been the night before. In fact, if he had not known the taste of her Qi from their previous meeting, he wondered if he would have noticed her at all.

Interesting. It was like she’d advanced an entire tier in a few hours.

Ignoring Pæga’s question, he tried to get a fix on the Celt’s exact whereabouts, but his senses were quickly engulfed by a presence he had never experienced before.

But, my word, he knew exactly what it was.

Pæga licked his lips and reached out to cuff the wizard out of his reverie. “I asked you a question!”

Malehan focused his eyes and, in fear, moistened his own lips. “My Lord, what do you know about dragons?”