As the hero found, in the jumble of stone, a crack large enough to take his body and crawled inside it, he realized he had not been too early. For the dragon was not legless, and seemed so only to those who saw it crawling forward from a distance. Through the stone the hero could hear a heavy stumping, as one foot after another groped forward; in between and all the time, the heavy slither of the belly dragging on the ground. The leather belly, if reports were true. They had better be.

The hero tried to lie on his back, then hesitated, changing position rapidly. Now he lay on one side, facing the direction from which the dragon must come, propped on his left elbow, right elbow down and sword across his body. His eyes and the top of his head projected above the track. It would look like another stone, he told himself. The truth was that even this hero could not lie still and wait for the thing to appear above him, or he—even he—would be unmanned. He had to see.

And there it was, the great head silhouetted against the gray like some stone outcrop. But moving; its armored crest and skull-bones like a metal war-machine rotating. The bloated swag body behind it. Some trick of the starlight caught one foot planted on the stone, and the hero stared at it, shocked almost into paralysis. Four toes, sticking out from each other like the arms of a starfish, but each one the size of a man’s thigh, warty and gnarled like a toad’s back, dripping slime. The very touch of one of those would kill from horror. The hero had just enough self-command not to shrink back with fear. The slightest movement now would be deadly dangerous. His only hope was to be a stone.

Would it see him? It must. It was coming toward him, directly toward him, padding forward with great, slow steps. One forefoot was only ten yards from him, then the other was planted on the stone almost on the lip of his crack. He must let it walk right over him, the hero thought with his last vestige of sense, let it walk right down to the river where it drank. And when he heard the first noise of drinking, of the water gushing up as it must into the belly above him, then he must strike.

As he told himself this, the head reared up only a few feet above him, and the hero caught sight of a thing of which no man had spoken. The dragon’s eyes. They were white, as white as those of an old woman with the film-disease, but light shone through them, a pale light from within.