“Aye. Fade . . . He lasted much longer than the others, another thousand years! The Magruwen kept him at his side in Dreamdark, and he was safe. There was little in the forest to subdue a dragon’s appetites, but as long as he lay dormant he had scarce need to feed. Imagine. He was the sire of his race and the last. He must have ached to join his kindred here, to fly again—for in Dreamdark he could do naught but sleep—but he wouldn’t leave his master alone . . . as others had done before him. . . .” Her face clouded with a look of shame and she went on, “And so for the Magruwen’s sake he hid there like some hunted thing and not the king of creatures he was. And he would have gone on with that living death. . . .”

She gave Magpie a keen, searching look and said, “They share dreams, the dragon and the Djinn King. They had always done and do still. Did you know that?”

Magpie shook her head.

“Nay, well, so it is. And the Magruwen saw in Fade’s dreams that the dragon was withering . . . dying the death that grows from within and kills the spirit as well as the skin, and he knew . . . he knew that was worse even than murder. So he let Fade go. He sent him to fly and to feed, knowing he would never come back . . . and he never did. He was murdered like all the others.”

Magpie thought of the stories she’d heard of the dragon massacres and she had to close her eyes. Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.

It had been possible for faeries and imps to hide their existence, but for dragons there was no hiding, and humans had gloried in the slaying, written ballads, epics, as if they were doing great deeds! And sure the eejits believed they were. They thought dragons were predators! The dragons were the first life the Magruwen dreamed—how could they be predators, when they had existed before prey? In fact, they fed on something quite different than meat, though mannies would never guess what golden goose they’d slaughtered.

Dragons ate ore. They smelted it in their fiery bellies and excreted luminous molten metals, gold, silver, copper, that would harden into veins in the earth. This they had done since the beginning, but it was over now. There would be no new gold made, ever again. Countless humans would lose their lives clawing what was left from the ground, and they would never understand what they had done.