Isaac went silent. A moment later, the air was filled with an enormous rending crash, and one wall of their little hollow vanished upwards. Brilliant sunlight flooded into the shadowy underside of the rock-pile, and Alice automatically raised her hand against the glare and blinked furiously. She could see the black shape of the boulder, and a long, snake-like protrusion wrapped around it.

It was the Dragon’s tail. It lifted the multi-ton stone out of its way with sinuous ease, flicking it away to crash with a rumble out in the rock-pile. The thing’s arrowhead-shaped snout filled the gap, blocking out the sun and plunging them back into shadow. The hot, fetid wind of its breath washed over Alice like a wave. She stared back at the two closest eyes, and found she could see something moving inside the smoky black hemisphere. Inside an enormous iris was a pupil, contracted to a pinprick but slowly expanding in the sudden gloom.

‘Hello, little wizard,’ it said. ‘I can smell you, you know.’

‘I don’t want to fight you,’ Alice said. ‘Please. If we could just talk—’

‘Were you fighting? It looked to me like you were hiding under a rock.’ It snorted, a geyser of hot breath all around her. ‘Is this the best you can do?’

Alice found her hand closing around a fragment of stone. Before she could tell herself what a bad idea it was, she threw it as hard as she could, right into the Dragon’s eye. It bounced off the black casing as though from thick glass, causing no apparent harm, and the huge pupil swivelled and struggled to focus. A moment later the Dragon’s head lunged forward like a striking snake, thrashing against the rock just beside Alice.

A deep crevice ran away from the newly exposed hollow. Alice grabbed Isaac’s hand and ducked into it, flattening herself sideways to pass a narrow point in the rock. The crevice branched, and branched again, threading through the boulders. Alice, terrified of finding a dead end with the beast so close behind them, summoned a dozen swarmers and sent them on ahead, checking with their monochrome vision to make sure there was enough room for the two humans to pass through. Isaac followed her willingly enough, glancing frequently back over his shoulder towards where the Dragon was tearing their brief resting place to pieces.

When they’d come what felt like a safe distance, Alice paused for breath, the swarmers forming around them like a bodyguard. Isaac let go of her hand and leaned back against a rock, puffing hard.

‘It’s . . . too strong,’ he said. ‘Did you see the way it lifted that rock?’ He coughed for a while, then spat a thick glob of dust on the ground. ‘I thought maybe we could . . . I don’t know, drop rocks on it, but anything we could lift wouldn’t even slow it down!’