The bottom drawer stuck the way it always did.
Isla Reyes braced one sneakered foot against the steel shelving and yanked, shoulders straining. The drawer scraped open with a judder and a metallic shriek that made the fluorescent lights buzz in sympathy.
“Of course,” she muttered, breathless. “The fifteenth-century reliquary glides like butter. The unlabeled junk drawer fights me.”
Her voice was swallowed by the quiet heaviness of the sub-basement archives. Down here, the city vanished. No traffic. No endless construction. Just concrete, climate control, and the low hum of the dehumidifiers that were, in theory, the only reason the medieval textiles hadn’t turned to dust.
Her phone, wedged between her shoulder and ear, crackled. “You know I can hear you abusing city property, right?” Maya said, her best friend’s voice amused. “Somewhere in the bylaws there is definitely a line about conservators not wrestling drawers like drunk raccoons.”
Isla huffed out a laugh, dropping the phone into the pocket of her oversized cardigan so her hands were free. “If the city wants the medieval collection inventoried before the board visit, they can buy us decent cabinets. Or hire another conservator. Or, wild thought, stop pretending this museum can run on interns and vibes.”
“Oh, *now* you’re radicalized,” Maya said. “Is this about your promotion again? Because if Dr. Halpern snubs you one more time, I will personally haunt his tasteful little Prius.”
“The Prius didn’t do anything,” Isla said, sliding the drawer out inch by inch. The metal screeched again. She winced, imagining paint flaking somewhere overhead. “And it’s not a promotion. It’s… an adjustment.”
“Uh-huh. Title change, more responsibility, not a cent more pay. That’s a promotion in nonprofit language.”
Isla stopped arguing. Maya wasn’t wrong. She hooked her fingers under the foam tray in the drawer and lifted, heart ticking up with the familiar tiny thrill of it—of not knowing yet what she would find. The tray was heavy, wrapped in acid-free tissue and outdated labels.
The cardboard edges were soft with age. The top layer of tissue had a year scrawled in someone’s hurried hand: 1954. Then one word:
UNIDENTIFIED.
Her pulse stuttered, just a little, in that way it always did when the past cracked open an inch for her.
“Hey,” she said, pushing her tortoiseshell glasses up her nose with the back of her wrist. “Remind me, when did the Schmiedler Collection get dumped on us?”
“You live there and you’re asking me?” Maya snorted. “Pretty sure it was Eisenhower era. Why?”
“Because I think I found the black hole they threw the overflow into.”
She peeled back the tissue.
Something inside caught the light and flared.
Isla sucked in a breath. “Whoa.”
“What?” Maya’s voice sharpened. “Is that a good whoa or a bad whoa?”
Isla leaned closer, biting her lower lip, glasses slipping down again as she forgot to push them up. The object nestled in the foam was the size of her palm, irregularly shaped, like a piece of armor torn from something larger. Its surface was layered, translucent in places, with a sheen that wasn’t quite metallic and wasn’t quite stone. It shifted from deep forest green to smoky gold as she tilted it, almost as if the color was moving under the surface.
It looked like a scale. Not like the dusty taxidermy lizard displays upstairs. Like the artistic imagination of a medieval illuminator had collided with reality and won.
There were tool marks along one edge where someone had clearly tried to cut it, sparks of raw, angry-looking brightness where they’d failed.
“Isla?” Maya said. “Use your words.”
“It’s… I don’t know.” Her voice went soft. “It looks like… a scale? Maybe? But too big for any reptile that actually existed. You could tile a shield with this thing.”
“Like a—”
“Don’t say it,” Isla warned on reflex.
Maya laughed. “Like a… komodo dragon?”
“You are insufferable.”
“But you love me.”
“Debatable.” The overhead lights hummed. Somewhere behind her, one of the industrial fans kicked on, blowing a draft through the narrow aisles. Isla shivered and tugged her cardigan tighter. Four floors up, the gala prep was probably in full chaotic swing. Down here, it felt like the air hadn’t moved since 1342.
She held the scale—*probably* scale—in one hand, reaching for a magnifying loupe with the other. The surface under her thumb was smooth but not glassy; there was a faint, fine texture, like the thin grain of a fingernail.
“So?” Maya prodded. “We talking rare medieval resin? Baltic amber? Cool rock with an identity crisis?”
“I don’t think it’s stone,” Isla murmured. “There’s organic structure in it. Latticing. Almost like keratin. Or enamel. But the striations…” She trailed off, lip caught between her teeth.
“You sound turned on.”
Isla snorted. “It’s called enthusiasm for my field, you philistine.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now?”
“I am hanging up on you.”
“You won’t. I’m your only link to the world above.”
That was embarrassingly true. Isla had come in early, as usual, to get paperwork done before the rest of the staff descended, and then she’d gotten distracted by a mislabeled crate, and then the ancient HVAC had started leaking into the northwest corner, and four hours had gone by without her noticing. The basement always did this to her: swallowed her time and her intention until only the objects were left.
The objects, and the whisper that had started in her chest when she was ten, standing in front of the battered Spanish shield in the medieval arms gallery. *Someone held this. Someone carried this into a real battle.*
She’d grown up in a small house over her parents’ hardware store a few blocks away, hand-painted Virgin Marys watching from every wall. No dragons. No monsters. No room for that kind of fantasy. But when the school had taken a field trip to the museum, Isla had stood in front of the pitted metal for as long as they’d let her, feeling something in her bones lean toward it.
Wonder. Longing. Recognition.
She trusted that, now. Even when labels didn’t match, or funding dried up, or the board talked about “refreshing” the medieval wing into something “more interactive.”
“What’s your vibe on it?” Maya asked, dragging her back to the present. “Your sacred conservator instincts humming?”
“Yeah,” Isla admitted. “It’s… weird. I’ll send you a picture.”
“Good. And then send me a picture of you pretending to eat the board president’s face at the reception tonight.”
“Can’t. I’m not invited.” Isla’s mouth twisted. “You have to be at least mid-level management to bask in donor glory.”
“Rude. You’re the one who made their fifteenth-century tapestry look like a Renaissance influencer’s thirst trap.”
“Please don’t say ‘thirst trap’ and ‘Saint Ursula’ in the same sentence.”
Maya cackled. “Like the board doesn’t already.”
Isla shook her head, smiling despite herself. The scale—she couldn’t *not* think of it as a scale now—caught the light again, a glint like distant fire.
The phone buzzed a tinny calendar notification from her pocket.
She fumbled it out and glanced at the screen. “Shit. I have to hang up. Halpern moved the condition report meeting up. Again.”
“Boo,” Maya said. “Okay. Text me later. And seriously, send pics of the mystery thing. I want to see your dragon.”
“It’s not a—”
But Maya had already hung up.
“—dragon,” Isla finished to the empty room.
She should put it down. Log it. Note the location, the accession number, the condition. Be a responsible steward of cultural heritage.
Instead, she held it a little closer, charmed by its weight, its coolness against her palm. There were no accession tags attached. No numbers inked along the edges. Just one tiny scrap of brittle paper folded alongside it in the foam, the ink half-faded to brown.
CAUTION, it said in looping old-fashioned script. DO NOT —
The rest was illegible. Water damage. The ink bloomed out, unreadable.
“Helpful,” Isla muttered.
She reached for the scale with her left hand, meaning to flip it over, see the underside.
Her finger slipped on the smooth surface. The sharp, half-cut edge from some earlier attempt to carve it bit into the pad of her thumb, the way a fresh paper cut sliced before you even registered pain.
She hissed and jerked back. A bright bead of blood welled up, richer and darker than the old ink on the label, vibrating red against her tan skin.
“Damn it,” she said, automatic. “Of course.” She stuck her thumb in her mouth, the metallic tang of blood hitting the back of her tongue. “Real professional, Reyes.”
She fumbled blindly for the box of Band-Aids in the drawer where she kept nitrile gloves and compressed sponges. The cut stung, but it was shallow. The kind of wound she got a dozen times a week. An occupational hazard.
She didn’t see the blood that smeared along the edge of the scale, a streak of red soaking strangely quickly into the surface.
She did feel it when the air changed.
It took her a second to register that that was what it was. There was no sound. The lights didn’t flicker. The dehumidifier churned along steadily. But the air—not the temperature, exactly, not the pressure—
It thickened. Like she was underwater. Like the breath in her lungs had turned to honey.
The hairs rose along her forearms.
Isla froze, thumb half-wrapped in bandage, head turning slowly as if she might catch someone standing just out of sight.
No one. Just the dim aisles of metal shelving, the labeled boxes, the cardboard edges, the sense of being watched by too many relics with too much past.
“You’re tired,” she told herself under her breath. “That’s all. Go upstairs. Get coffee that tastes like nihilism from the café and remember that daylight exists.”
She looked down at the scale.
It pulsed.
The shift was subtle: a faint contraction, as if a huge, slow heartbeat had passed through it. The colors under the surface swirled, then steadied, the deep green deepening further, shot through with threads of molten gold.
Isla’s own heart slammed once, hard, against her ribs.
“No,” she whispered. “Nope. No. Absolutely not.”
She’d had exactly one mental breakdown in her life, her first year of grad school, when she’d been working two jobs at once and her father’s second heart attack had landed him in the ICU. She’d learned the feeling of the world shrinking then, the edges of reality going fuzzy.
This didn’t feel like that.
This felt like the opposite. Like the universe had just pushed *closer*.
Somewhere, faint and far away, there was a sound.
It wasn’t the buzz of the fluorescent lights, or the whir of the climate system. It was lower. Older. A vibration in her sternum more than in her ears, like the waves of bass from a subwoofer you felt through your feet at a concert.
Isla swallowed.
“Okay,” she said aloud. “Okay, Isla. You are in a climate-controlled basement. You are bleeding on an unidentified object. You have not slept more than six hours a night this week. You are not hearing things.”
Something answered her.
It wasn’t words. It wasn’t a voice. But it rolled through her like smoke and heat and the memory of her grandmother’s story voice, all at once. A brush against the inside of her skull.
*—finally—*
Isla snatched her hand back as if the scale had bitten her again.
The motion knocked the foam tray, and the scale rolled—a short, heavy slide—and dropped off the edge.
Reflex overrode sense; she lunged to catch it.
Her right hand closed around it in midair.
For a fraction of a second, it was only what it had been: cool, smooth, heavy.
Then the heat hit.
Not from the object. From *inside her*. A flare low in her belly, racing up her spine, licking out along her nerves like flame finding dry tinder.
She gasped. The scale hammered once in her grip, like a living thing, and light spilled out between her fingers, green-gold and blinding.
Isla’s knees buckled.
The archive shelves, the drawered cabinets, the labeled boxes ripped away, and there was only falling—only the roaring rush of air and wind and something enormous unfurling just at the edge of her comprehension—
Darkness swallowed her before she hit the floor.
***
When she came back to herself, her cheek was pressed against cold linoleum.
The first thing she registered was the hum of the dehumidifier, steady and dull. The second was the faint sting in her thumb, forgotten under the Band-Aid now stuck crooked to her skin. The third was the smell: dust and metal and, faintly, the sharp tang of her own sweat.
Her head throbbed. Her stomach rolled.
She groaned and rolled onto her back.
The overhead lights glared down at her. No halo. No dramatic flickering. No sign that anything had changed at all.
For a moment she lay there, breathing hard, trying to piece together how long she’d been out. A minute? Ten? An hour?
Her phone buzzed angrily in her pocket. She jumped, then cursed because the motion made her head pound. She fumbled it out and squinted at the screen.
Three missed calls from Dr. Halpern. Two from the front desk. One text from Maya: *Send me your mysterious rock, coward.*
Isla stared at the timestamps. Eight minutes.
“I fainted,” she whispered. “I actually fainted on the job. Like a Victorian heroine.”
She pushed herself upright slowly, one hand braced on the floor. Her legs trembled. The room tilted, then wobbled back into place.
The foam tray lay tipped on its side where it had slid off the open drawer.
The scale sat beside it, perfectly still on the floor.
No glow. No heartbeat. Just that impossible, beautiful, terrible surface, catching the fluorescent light and throwing it back oddly, as if it knew something she didn’t.
“Okay,” Isla said again, because if she didn’t talk, she was pretty sure she would scream. “Okay, so you had a vasovagal syncope episode. That’s normal. That’s a normal human thing that normal human people do when they see blood.”
It didn’t matter that she saw blood on artifacts all the time. That she’d cataloged bone reliquaries and battlefield relics without flinching.
“This is fine,” she insisted, mostly to herself. “You are going to put the weird scale in a properly labeled container. You are going to log it. You are going to go upstairs and make apologetic noises at Halpern. And then you are going to eat something that isn’t a granola bar from 2019.”
Her hand trembled as she reached for the scale again, but nothing dramatic happened this time. It was cool. Heavy.
Normal.
She almost laughed—the high, brittle edge of it skirting hysteria.
“No more touching mystery objects without gloves,” she muttered, sliding it carefully back into the foam and covering it with the crinkled tissue.
She paused, glancing around at the silent rows of shelving.
“Also,” she added under her breath, “no more blacking out on the floor of the archives. HR will make you take mandatory mindfulness courses.”
The thought was terrifying enough to get her on her feet.
By the time she sealed the scale—all right, Fine, *object*—into a temporary polyethylene case and scribbled a hasty label, her hands had mostly stopped shaking. She slid the case onto a cart with three other items that needed cataloging and rolled it toward the staff elevator.
As the doors closed, she caught one last glimpse down the aisle. The lights were steady. The shadows fell where they should.
Nothing watched her.
Probably.
***
Upstairs, the museum was a different planet.
The first floor buzzed with the low murmur of school groups and the shush of the volunteer docents trying and failing to wrangle them. The lobby smelled like coffee and hand sanitizer. Someone had put on a playlist in the café—lofi beats and soft synths.
Isla blinked under the sudden light from the windows, her eyes protesting. She’d been in the basement since 7:15; now the clock over the admissions desk read 11:43.
“Hey, Isla,” the security guard called from his post by the coat check. Tim. Late forties, shaved head, deceptively kind eyes. “You look like death. You okay?”
“Faint praise,” she said, managing a smile that felt almost real. “Just a lot of paperwork.”
He snorted. “Paperwork doesn’t usually make people walk like they just got off a roller coaster.”
“I’ll take that as my sign to get lunch,” she said. “Call me if that third-grade class tries to redecorate the knight exhibit again.”
“Those kids have great instincts,” he said, deadpan. “It *needs* more glitter.”
Isla actually laughed at that. The sound steadied her.
By the time she made it to Dr. Halpern’s office on the second floor, she’d shoved the fainting spell into a mental drawer labeled “deal with this later.”
Later, in Isla’s experience, was flexible. Sometimes it meant that night, discussing everything down to the last neurotic detail with Maya over cheap wine. Sometimes it meant three years later in therapy. Sometimes it meant never.
Right now, it meant knocking on the half-open office door and pasting on her Good Employee face.
“Come in,” Halpern called without looking up from his computer.
She stepped inside and shifted the weight of the tablet and folder in her arms, ignoring the faint pull in her lower back. She was not yet thirty and already her spine had opinions about all the bending and lifting this job required.
The head curator of European collections looked up, peering over half-moon reading glasses. His beard was whiter every year. His tweed jacket was the same as the one he’d worn when she’d started as an intern at twenty-one.
“Ah, Reyes,” he said. “I was starting to think you’d fallen into a crate down there.”
“Not permanently,” she said lightly. “You rescheduled the conservation review? Sorry, I lost track of time in the archives.”
His mouth compressed, but it wasn’t a real reprimand. He loved the archives as much as she did. “Sit. Let’s see where we are for tonight.”
She sank into the visitor’s chair and pulled up the digitized condition reports, talking him through the most recent restorations. She could do this in her sleep: thread counts and pigment stabilizations and humidity levels. The practical, grounded language of her work wrapped around her like armor.
Occasionally, her thumb throbbed under the Band-Aid.
She did not think about the way the scale had pulsed in her hand. The way something had *answered* her.
Halpern interrupted her once, peering at the tablet. “And the Schmiedler overflow crates?”
“I started inventorying them,” she said. “There’s more mixed material than we thought. Some pieces might be miscataloged from the original acquisition. I, uh, found an unlabeled organic object in drawer B-14. It needs further analysis.”
She kept her voice neutral.
“Organic?” His bushy eyebrows climbed. “Bone?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe keratin. Or something similar. I’ll run it by the lab.”
He grunted. “Do that. Schmiedler was sloppy. Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s something interesting down there. Donors in the fifties thought provenance meant ‘I bought it from a guy named Pierre who swears it was medieval.’”
She smiled thinly and made a note.
She did not write “Maybe a dragon scale?” in the margin.
When the meeting ended, Halpern clapped a meaty hand on her folder. “Good work, Reyes. I know you’ve been carrying more than your share.”
The faint praise was better than nothing. “Thank you,” she said, meaning it.
He hesitated. “About the title adjustment… they’re still deliberating. Budgetary constraints.” His mouth twisted. “You know how it is.”
Isla did know how it was. She’d known the moment she’d seen the board’s agenda last month.
“It’s fine,” she lied. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Didn’t think you were,” he said. “You and your saints and swords. You’re as rooted here as the gargoyles.”
She didn’t point out that the gargoyles were on loan from a private collection.
He leaned back in his chair. “You ever consider teaching? You’d be good at it. Might pay better than this place, if you’re willing to leave your dragons and ghosts behind.”
She jolted.
He chuckled at her expression. “Figure of speech, Reyes. Don’t look so stricken. We both know the last dragon died three hundred years ago.”
Isla opened her mouth, then closed it.
For a moment, in the back of her skull, there was a whisper of heat.
*—wrong—*
Her fingers tightened on the folder.
“Yeah,” she said, hearing how thin her voice sounded. “Everyone knows that.”
***
She worked straight through lunch, riding the low-grade buzz of nerves and caffeine, then stayed late to oversee the installation of a newly conserved French reliquary in the medieval gallery. It was almost eight by the time she finally peeled off her nitrile gloves and admitted defeat.
The gala hum filled the air even up here, music and laughter seeping up the stairwells from the grand hall on the main floor. Isla caught a glimpse of sequined cocktail dresses and dark suits through a window overlooking the sweeping staircase, donors drifting with wineglasses in hand past banners advertising the new “Treasures of the Middle Ages” exhibit.
She hovered half in the shadows behind a tapestry.
She wasn’t officially part of the event, except as a name on the tiny accreditation plaque at the entrance to the exhibit. Conservation Staff: I. Reyes. Her mother would have cried if she’d seen it. Her father would have taken a picture from five angles.
They weren’t likely to see it. They hardly ever came to the museum. Busy with the store. Busy with church. Busy with the life that had never really had room for Isla’s particular oddities.
She could picture her mother’s frown. “Trespass. It’s not good to disturb old things. You bring their stories home.”
Isla had brought them home anyway. Pressed between the pages of library books. Hidden in notebooks under her bed. Whole genealogies of imaginary knights and queens and, yes, dragons, scribbled in the margins of her chemistry homework.
It had never occurred to her that one of those stories might decide to follow her back.
By the time she made it back down to the conservation lab, the building had started to quiet. The gala was still in full swing, but the public floors were sealed off. Only staff and security had access to the back corridors now.
She checked on the reliquary one last time, mostly out of an anxious habit. Then, telling herself she was *not* avoiding the scale in the archives, she made herself go back down to the sub-basement.
The air met her like a damp cloth.
The hallway light outside the archive flickered.
Isla stood with her hand hovering over the handle for a second too long, then sucked in a breath and went inside.
The rows of shelving were the same. The hum of the dehumidifiers. The faint smell of paper and time and dust. The overhead fluorescents glared steadily.
Her cart was where she’d left it, next to drawer B-14. The polyethylene case sat on top, plain and unremarkable.
Isla approached it like it might bite.
“You are being ridiculous,” she told herself. “It’s an object. Objects don’t… talk. Or light up. Or… whatever that was.” Her throat worked. “You fainted. You imagined it.”
The thing inside the case—*scale, scale, scale*—gleamed dully through the plastic.
She told herself she was going to pick it up, carry it to the lab, and run a non-destructive spectrographic analysis. Like a scientist. Like a professional. Like someone who lived in the world where dragons were the products of anxious medieval imaginations and not—
Not anything else.
Her fingers closed around the case.
Heat pricked along her spine, a phantom echo of that earlier flare.
She froze.
The case was cool. The plastic a little slick under her hands.
Her pulse thundered in her ears.
“Okay,” she whispered. “You know what? No. Not tonight. I’m too tired for this.”
She slid the case back into the drawer and shut it gently. The metal glided for the first time all day, as if the drawer were suddenly well-oiled.
Isla stared at it.
She reached for the handle again, half-ready to yank the drawer open and glare at the thing inside until it behaved like an inert object. Then her phone buzzed.
She jumped, then cursed.
A text from Tim: *Heading out. You want me to walk you to the train?*
Relief flooded her so hard she almost swayed.
*On my way up,* she typed back.
She did not look back at the drawer as she left the archive.
If she had, she might have seen the faint, almost-imagined glow seeping through a hairline gap in the metal. A pulse like a heartbeat.
Down inside the polyethylene case, nestled in its outdated foam, the scale shivered.
Far above, on the fourth floor, something old and heavy turned in its sleep.
***
The gala lights burned late.
The last of the donors drifted out close to midnight, the clink of glass and laughter fading into the marble echo of the entrance hall. Staff bustled around, breaking down tables and collecting linens. The janitorial crew wheeled in carts, the squeak of rubber wheels loud in the acquaintance-laden silence.
By one in the morning, only the skeleton crew remained.
Security cameras blinked their red eyes. Sensors watched over cases and canvases.
In the shaft between the old building and the newer wing, behind a faceless wall that had once been part of the city’s original fortifications, something stopped pretending to be stone.
It had sat there, unmoving, for a very long time.
Three hundred years, by the accounting of the small, bright, short-lived creatures who’d built scaffolds and strung lights and hung banners over the city that had grown up around it. Generations had come and gone. Empires had risen and fallen. The ground had shuddered under bombardment and subway construction and a thousand thousand heartbeats.
Through it all, he had slept.
Sleep, when it had first wrapped him, had been like drowning in a lake of ice.
Three heartbeats before the spell closed over him, he had been *burning*. Roaring. Raging in a circle of sigils, his claws tearing furrows in stone as the sorcerer’s words sank into his bones. The roar in his ears then had not been sleep; it had been fury, and loss, and the certainty that he would tear this man and all his blood from the earth.
Then the spell had taken hold. His limbs had gone heavy. His lungs had seized. His vision had narrowed to a bright, searing point.
He had reached for his hoard, the way he always did when hurt: for the glittering weight of gold under his coils, the cold caress of steel and jeweled hilts, the steadying presence of *mine*.
The men in the chamber had dragged it away piece by piece as the freezing darkness crept over him.
He had fallen with the image of his hoard torn from his grasp, with the sharper pain of a face he had not expected to carry with him into oblivion, eyes like stormlight widening in betrayal—
And then there had been nothing.
Time had worn away some edges of that last moment, the way water smoothed rock. But not all. Never all.
Three centuries later, the first thread that tugged him loose from that black lake was not any human wizard’s work, not a chanted spell or a sacrifice brought to his feet.
It was pain.
Not his own.
Sharp and small and *near*.
His consciousness swam up toward it by reflex. A spark against the dark, the faintest flavor of copper and salt on a tongue that did not move.
Blood.
*—mine—*
The awareness stole through stone and mortar and steel, finding the only fragment of himself left unshackled: a scale, torn from his hide by a clever coward’s blade and bound in a separate thicket of magic.
Once, the sorcerer’s blood had been tied to that splinter of power—a leash. As long as the bloodline endured, the binding held. The scale had lain dull and dead in the dark, cut off from the deep well of his being, as useless as a dried-out leaf.
But bloodlines end.
Even the most stubborn ones.
When the last bearer of that cursed blood had sighed out his fragile life in a hospital bed three nights ago, machines beeping softly around him, something had stirred.
The leash had snapped.
It had taken time—time measured in hours and days, not years, laughably brief from the perspective of stone—but now the thread of his awareness could seep into the old scale, reaching out with a sullen, animal tentativeness.
He had smelled the human before she’d cut herself.
Soft. Warm. Beneath the inevitable varnish of city and sweat and steel, there was something else on her—old wood, old paper, the faint metallic whisper of gold leaf.
She had picked up the scale. Blood had fallen.
Pain had flared. Not his. *Hers.* A sharp, bright sting, the sort of wound his people would not have even noticed.
It had been enough.
Enough to bridge.
Enough to crack the lake of sleep, to let the smallest trickle of his will run through the old bindings.
He had only a heartbeat to gather himself, to press his consciousness into that sliver of self and fling it outward like a grappling hook.
He had not expected the explosion of sensation that followed.
Light. Sound. Smell. The sharp, sterile chill of the room. The metallic taste of fear.
The presence of the human, *so close*.
For a fraction of a moment, as her hand closed around the scale, he was *there*: behind her eyes, under her skin, heat licking along her nerves.
He felt her heart stutter.
Felt her stubborn, sensible mind try to put the sensations in order.
Felt—for the first time in three hundred years—another living being’s thoughts brush against his.
Not his kin. Not one of the four-legged herd animals humans rode. Not the scuttling mice that had occasionally braved the edge of his hoard.
Human.
He had hated humans.
He had loved one.
He had sworn never again, as the spell had closed around him.
Now, the echo of her—this *other* her, this new, strange human—tasted like something he had not anticipated at all.
Intrigue.
She had fallen. Their contact had broken.
The stone had lowered itself between his awareness and the world again, heavy and thick.
But he was not laughing in a circle of spells this time. He was not drowning.
He was—*waking*.
Slowly. Grudgingly. With the weight of centuries like chains around his limbs.
The sorcerer’s original spell, anchored now only by stone and stubbornness instead of any living blood, fought to keep him under. It had been built to last. To bend with time. To grow roots into the bones of the city.
He pushed back.
The building shuddered imperceptibly.
On the security monitors, the cameras in the old foundation corridor glitched for a second, the image blurring with digital static, then steadied.
No one noticed.
Two nights later, as the last cleaning crew wheeled their carts past the medieval wing, the wall between an old storage room and the sealed-off foundation cracked down an invisible seam.
Dust sifted out.
Inside the stone, something enormous took a breath.
***
When the wall finally gave, it did it without drama.
No thunder. No earthquake. Just a deep, grinding groan, like an old man getting out of bed.
The spell shattered like thin glass.
The world slammed into him.
He roared.
The sound didn’t reach human ears. It rolled through stone and steel, a subsonic bellow that rattled the foundations and made the climate control sensors hiccup, logging a temperature spike in the now-empty room.
He *was* empty.
He knew it before his eyes opened. Before his lungs dragged in air that wasn’t frozen stillness.
His hoard—
He reached for it instinctively, the way a human might reach for a limb in the dark.
Nothing.
No cool caress of gold links along his flanks. No familiar weight of chalices and coins pressed under his paws. No clink and clatter of metal against metal.
His hoard was gone.
The realization punched through him more brutally than the awakening itself.
Even the memory of the sorcerer’s face could not cut as deep as that.
His eyes snapped open.
Light seared them, painfully bright. He hissed, pupils slitting, the nictitating membrane flicking down over his eyes until the glare softened enough that shapes resolved.
He was not in the cavern under the sorcerer’s keep.
He was in a box.
No—not a box. A room. Stone on three sides, the fourth blown outward where the wall had crumbled. The ceiling was low; if he lifted his head more than halfway, his horns would scrape it. He was curled in on himself, tail wrapped tight, wings cramped against his sides.
His joints ached with disuse.
He uncurled slowly, each movement stiff. Bones cracked. His scales rasped against stone.
Dust fell in a soft rain from his back, trickling around the ridges and catching in the seams. He shook once, violently, like a dog flinging off water, and sent a cloud of grit whirling through the room.
He sneezed.
The sneeze sparked.
Flame spat from his nostrils, a short, sharp burst that scorched the nearest wall black.
He inhaled again, slowly this time, tasting the air.
It was wrong.
Where there should have been the damp, clean smell of underground water and stone, there was instead a hundred unfamiliar layers: rust and oil and concrete and tar, the faint chemical tang of something he didn’t have a name for. Old dust, new dust. Paint and plastic and—
—people.
Thousands of them. The smell of them hung like a haze: sweat and skin and fabric and a hundred different soaps. Most of them distant, high above his head, but a few far closer, moving somewhere along the length of the structure that wrapped around him.
The building, his sluggish mind supplied.
He had seen the beginning of something like it in the last days before the spell had taken him. Humans had been stacking stone on stone in ways that made his own caverns look like childish burrows. Towers, they’d called them. Cities.
He’d seen them as an inconvenience.
Now they pressed around him, heavy and full of human noise.
His lips pulled back from his teeth.
He turned his head—slowly, slowly, like an ancient tree creaking in a new wind—and peered out through the ragged hole in the wall.
Beyond the collapsed stone was another narrow space—a corridor, lined with unfamiliar devices and wires. A metal door stood slightly ajar at the far end.
Beyond that…
He closed his eyes briefly, reaching outward with senses that had nothing to do with sight.
The world exploded into being.
Heat signatures. Heartbeats. The skittering of tiny rodents in the walls. The thrum of distant engines. The faint vibration of something great and silent moving far away—no, not silent, just pitched so low only his bones could hear it.
An entire world, thrumming with a technology he did not understand, wrapped around him like a net.
He sucked in another breath.
His hoard was nowhere near.
That alone made everything else relegated to a distant second.
He tried to stand.
Pain flared through muscles that had not moved in centuries. His right foreleg buckled; his shoulder crashed into the cracked stone, sending more rubble raining down.
He snarled, more from frustration than hurt, and forced himself upright.
Bit by bit, stretch by agonizing stretch, he unfolded from the cramped coil the spell had held him in.
He was smaller than he had been.
The realization came with a humiliated flicker of rage. The spell had leeched at his essence, feeding on his power to sustain itself. He could feel his bones, his spine, his ribs—too close to the surface. Where once he had had mass enough to rattle mountains, he was now… compact. Lean. Hard.
Commander’s build, not king’s.
He flexed his wings experimentally. The tips brushed the far wall. Pain shot down the ligament where some old injury had knitted wrong. He hissed, then shook it off.
He was alive.
He would remake the world around that fact.
Starting with whoever had scattered his hoard.
He padded to the gap in the wall, claws clicking on stone. The room beyond the corridor felt wrong in a different way, all sharp angles and smooth surfaces. No torches. No sconces. Light came from glowing panels in the ceiling, humming faintly.
He pulled himself through the hole, folding his wings tight to squeeze into the corridor.
The metal door at the far end hung on its hinges, the lock warped where his roar’s resonance had cracked the frame. He shoved it aside with one forepaw; it tore free and crashed to the floor, the sound ringing like a struck gong.
Somewhere above, an alarm beeped.
He paused, listening.
No rush of footsteps yet. No clamor.
Good.
He stepped through.
The smells hit him harder out here. Cleaning chemicals. Old plaster. The sharp, artificial tang of something electrical.
He followed the corridor, shoulders brushing both sides, tail dragging a groove in the concrete. It took only three strides to reach the base of a stairwell.
He eyed it with a sort of detached disbelief.
The steps were laughably small. Human-sized. His claws would never fit.
He closed his eyes and exhaled.
In the space between breaths, he let go of the dragon-shape.
It was like stepping through a curtain of his own skin. A pull, an inversion, the sickening half-second of vertigo as mass redistributed and bones reformed. Fire raced along his nerves, condensing, condensing, condensing until—
He stumbled, bare feet slapping the cold concrete.
The air felt *colder* like this, with human skin and human senses. The stairwell rose ahead of him in an unremarkable gray spiral.
He stood there, panting, one hand braced on the wall.
His other hand flexed restlessly, fingers curling into claws that weren’t there.
He had never liked this shape.
His people used it rarely, and then only out of need: to walk among humans, to reclaim something stolen, to listen at a court. They had laughed about it—about how fragile it made them feel, how flimsy, how narrow.
Now, it was a necessity.
He looked down at himself with a clinical sort of detachment.
Male. Brown skin, darker now than it had been before the sleep, more bronze than copper. Scar on the left forearm, pale against the deeper tone. Broad shoulders, lean muscle stretched over bones that felt… cramped. The old rune-scars along his ribs glowed faintly in the half-light, a reminder of the sorcerer’s circles.
Dark hair fell into his eyes as he tilted his head—shaggier than he preferred, hanging to his jaw. He pushed it back, irritated by the unfamiliar weight.
His face—he did not care what it looked like, not right now. There had been women once who’d traced the line of his jaw with appreciative hands, who’d called him handsome in languages long since turned to dust.
They were dust, too.
He set his jaw.
Name, he thought abruptly, an odd, floating tangent. The human tongue had always snapped and twisted his true name into something smaller, more easily held.
Cael, they had called him.
It would do.
He started up the stairs.
***
By the time Isla finally unlocked the door to her studio apartment at one the next afternoon, she wanted to sleep for a week and possibly also die.
She dropped her bag on the tiny IKEA table that served as both desk and dining area and toed off her sneakers, wiggling her toes in mismatched socks. The afternoon light slanted through the narrow window over the sink, catching the lingering gleam of yesterday’s washed coffee mug.
Her entire body ached.
She’d spent the morning elbows-deep in that Schmiedler miscellany, carefully repacking textiles and trying not to think about the scale in drawer B-14. Every time she’d reached for something, the bandage on her thumb had caught, a constant reminder.
She wanted a shower. And food. And her couch, which was technically just a futon but which she spoke to fondly as if it were a person. Maybe also several glasses of wine.
Instead, her phone buzzed.
She groaned and fished it out of her pocket.
*You alive?* Maya.
*Define alive,* she texted back. *Home. Tired. Everything hurts.*
*Sexy.*
Isla rolled her eyes, smiling despite herself.
*How did the fancy people like your shiny medieval thingies?*
*They liked the free booze,* Isla replied. *The reliquary remained stoic under pressure.*
*Proud of her. Pics or it didn’t happen.*
Isla snapped a quick shot of her Band-Aid instead and sent it. *My most significant emotional connection of the night.*
Maya’s reply was immediate. *Did you get that cut on your MYSTERIOUS OBJECT?*
Isla’s fingers hovered over the screen.
She could lie. Say she’d cut herself on a box cutter or a piece of foam. Mystery avoided. Life remained firmly in the category of ‘mundane with occasional annoyances.’
Instead, she typed, *…yes.*
Silence for a heartbeat.
Then: *THE DRAGON SCALE??*
Isla’s heart lurched. She looked around her empty apartment, as if someone might have heard.
*Do not text those words to me,* she wrote. *You’ll jinx it. Also it’s not a dragon scale. It’s… probably… horn. Or nail. Or something.*
*Did it do anything?* Maya prodded. *Glow? Whisper secrets? Imbue you with the strength of ten men?*
Isla stared at the screen.
Her thumb throbbed.
Her mind tried, again, to rearrange yesterday into something sane.
*I fainted,* she typed, finally. *Probably low blood sugar. I’m getting it analyzed next week.*
A pause.
*Dude,* Maya wrote. *You need to eat. I’m coming over tonight with empanadas. Don’t argue.*
Relief loosened something in Isla’s chest. *Bless you,* she answered.
*Of course. Also I want to hear more about your magic scale-induced swoon. I’m already picturing the period drama adaptation.*
Isla snorted. *There is no swoon. There is only my embarrassing collapse and subsequent vow to never touch mystery objects barehanded again.*
*You’re no fun,* Maya complained. *Fine. I’ll bring dessert if you agree to at least *consider* the possibility that you’ve been chosen as the mortal vessel of an ancient draconic power.*
*That is a big ask for a Thursday.*
*Live a little, Reyes.*
She tossed her phone onto the futon, smiling.
Then she went to the tiny kitchenette, opened the fridge, and stared bleakly at the half-empty jar of salsa and the carton of eggs that had been there since the beginning of the month.
“Empanadas it is,” she muttered.
Her thumb ached in quiet punctuation.
She turned on the shower, letting the pipes bang themselves into life.
She didn’t see—couldn’t see—how far, far below her, something moved through the museum’s underbelly for the first time in three hundred years, wearing the same air she would breathe tomorrow.
She didn’t hear the low, shuddering growl that rose from the sealed foundation and vibrated faintly through the ground, too deep for human ears.
She didn’t know that somewhere in the dark, when that growl rolled outward, the scale in drawer B-14 whispered back.
***
End of Chapter One.
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