I am the mighty dragon, Flux. I am two hundred meters long and capable of magic beyond any mortal ken. I have eaten men and women whole. Fools who came to my lair seeking power, seeking to kill me, or seeking to steal what little treasure I bother to keep. But a child? No. I may be a massive dragon, but I’m not a monster. I do not eat children, and I am no babysitter.

  One fateful day, many years ago now, this… tiny, mewling thing wandered into my lair. My first six hundred years of life were spent as a guardian for my makers’ shipyard, they were a pair of space-faring wizard brothers, but nevermind all that just now. Those early centuries left me with a powerful need to protect my lair. I awoke when I sensed the child above and started to make my way up. I didn’t need to eat her, I planned to just shoo her away.

  But, I could hear her crying. Ugh, those bastards that created me, made it hurt in my heart when I hear a child’s cries. Why would they do that? My heartache made me freeze up in emotional distress; my eyes watered and a pit of guilt formed in my stomach for having even entertained the thought of eating her for the barest of moments. I was forced by my creators’ ancient will to change tactics; rather than terrify the child away, I’d have to enchant and charm the child away. First, I wrapped myself in the finest illusion magic I knew. I’d appear as nothing more than a part of the stone wall as I approached. I suspected a massive dragon would terrify the crying little thing, so I produced a pixie illusion that I would speak to the child with.

  Or so I thought.

  The little girl couldn’t have been more than three or four: walking, running, and talking poorly like little humans often do. Oh, and a master of a magical replication like none I’d ever seen in all my years. Not even the makers were so skilled at instantly replicating a spell they’d seen only once.

  “Ohhh pretty ‘lusion!” She stole my pixie illusion with a gesture. The little girl who could barely speak correctly grabbed my magic and took control. She made it dance and flutter and it left a trail of shimmering dust in the air as it did loop-de-loops above her head. I didn’t put shimmering sparkle dust in that spell. She not only stole my magic but riffed off it, and played with it like a pro.

  I could certainly have just made another, but before I got the chance, she looked me dead in the eye, the eye I thought was hidden by my finest illusion magic, and she said, “Dagron!” and then started to giggle.

  “Dra-gon.” I grumbled back, surprising even myself.

  She giggled more, and with a gesture, she wiped away my illusion and stared me down. This tiny little human, who was smaller with her whole body than the eye she stared into, bore right into my soul with her cute little recently-teary eyes and firmly said, “Dag. Ron.”

  I had to suppress my laughter; it would have shaken the mountain and surely scared the strange magical child away. After a moment of settling myself, I rumbled to her, “My name is Flux, little mistress, at your service. And you are?”

  “I’m Yourmom!” I swear she said ‘I’m your mom’, but I had just awakened from what turned out to have been a decades long hibernation nap.

  “You’re my mother?” I asked, and the little girl giggled in a way that lit up my heart. That same part that wouldn’t let me scare her away was now burgeoning with joy. Those bastards made me love children, how dare they.

  “Nooo, you’re silly Flux. I’m Yorna! Yor-na!” She made the pixie do a loop-de-loop right into my face and puff away in a cloud of sparkles. Then she asked me a question I never thought I needed asked, “Do you want me to be your mommy?”

  “Oh… uhm? Sure little one, you can be my mommy.” I’d never had a mommy, the wizards who made me were men, and not terribly fatherly men either. “But maybe for today, you should go back to your village. I’m sure your mommy is worried about you.”

  I sent a ping of detection magic out to scan down the mountainside outside my lair. I hoped to find her parents out looking for her. When the information from the detection ping started flowing back, Yorna’s eyes lit up.

  I don’t mean the normal meaning of that, I mean they started to glow.

  “Ohh neat spell!” Then she sent a ping out herself.

  “Stars and stones, Yorna, I need to be careful what I cast around you.” She picked it all up far too fast.

  “Thank you for the map, Mr. Flux Dagron!” she said, apparently perfectly able to parse all the information flowing into her mind from that incredibly complex spell. It took my makers a hundred years to perfect that magic, and she mastered it in mere moments.

  “You’re welcome?”

  “Okay, bye-bye!” and then she blipped away. Teleportation magic. Had I shown her that? Did she just… figure it out on her own? As a toddler? Stars and Stones.

  “Well… I always knew high magic would rise again one day.”

  She visited again a few weeks later, and every few weeks over the next few years. Our relationship changed from ‘amused dragon and lost toddler’ to ‘annoyed dragon and insistent apprentice’ over the next few years. She insisted she was my apprentice, I insisted I wasn’t teaching her magic. I was wrong, of course. I wasn’t teaching her magic on purpose, but I was teaching her magic. Far too much of it.

  Once, when she was a teenager, away in her village, I cast a spell. She had been extra insistent and annoying that day as moody human teenagers are wont to be, and I wanted to take the edge off after she left. I used a spell I hadn’t in centuries to reach into a pocket dimension my makers made, full to the brim with dragon-sized quantities of magic space weed. The makers were wizards of the leaf, and the occasional puff for a magic dragon helped me relax. So I thought it would be harmless to pull myself a dragon-sized doobie while Yorna was away. Only she wasn’t far enough away, and she sensed my spell.

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  An hour after I finished my appropriately dragon-sized doobie, my apprentice appeared with a puff of smoke. That wasn’t normal; normally she just appeared.

  “AM I EVER GOING TO BE NORMAL AGAIN!” She was halfway to hysterical, and halfway to the moon. “I copied your spell I felt, but I was making a potion and that stuff fell in my bonfire. I ended up burning down my hut. Flux, I feel really weird!”

  “Stars and Stones, Yorna. I have warned you repeatedly about casually copying my spells when you don’t fully understand them… but here we are. I’ve a spell that might help calm you.” I cast the destonification spell to mellow out her over-high, and no surprise, she cast it right back at me. Then, because I wanted to preserve my high, I accidentally taught her the general counterspell. I hoped, but was wrong, that she wouldn’t remember it later because she was still a bit high. Alas, the damage was done; she could now counterspell anything.

  By the time Yorna was twenty she probably could have taken over the world with what I didn’t mean to teach her, but she never did. Instead, she chose to stick around my mountain, protecting her village (and others) from natural disasters, the occasional bandit group that found its way here, and general peril all around. And of course, she continued to be my friend and unintentional apprentice.

  One day, it dawned on me that she now looked exactly like the kind of person I would have once snapped up whole for daring to walk into my lair. A bit late for that now, I suppose.

  “Get up, you lazy ol’ DAG-ron. It can’t be good for any living thing to be so lackadaisical!” she said as she blasted me with multiple puffs of brisk, awakening wind.

  “Dra-gon.” I grumbled as I refused to get up.

  “Come on Flux, up up up! Spring cleaning time, I’m gonna dust your whole cave and clean up in here. You need to go for a flight and move that big ol’ noodle body of yours.” The wind she was puffing at me kept getting colder and colder, when it dropped below freezing I got up.

  “Fine, Mother!” I tried to rumble the mountain with my words, but she’d reinforced the stone with magic years ago so that I couldn’t accidentally cave it in on myself, or her, again. “I’ll get up. Just… cut it out with the icewinds.”

  “There’s whole herds of critters on the mountainside, just waiting for you to snatch and eat a few, look.” She hit me with an ideablast, a telepathic message with more than just words. Did I teach her that? Maybe, but I don’t remember. She does figure things out on her own occasionally.

  I went outside and spread my wings. Technically I don’t need them to fly, I was made with something called a gravity bladder, but I do have some tremendous wings, and on a planet like this one, they work just fine. My gravity bladder is for flying in places without air, like the depths of space.

  I hate to admit it, but Yorna was right; she was always right when she told me to go outside and touch grass, eat a mountain beast or two, and fly around a bit. I think she might also have been using my annual trips to the sky to ward off an encroaching empire. Doesn’t make sense to lose all your men trying to take the villages at Dragon Mountain when the damn dragon flies around it once a year to remind you he’s still there.

  All the same, that empire looks a lot more developed than last time I went for a fly. Humans can be wildly industrious if they want to. Like ants, but much bigger. I could sense the fear from that more developed human empire, many eyes -afraid- were on me. I circled the mountain and sampled a variety of large wildlife before returning home; their fearful eyes did not sour my appetite.

  “PAWS!” she shouted at me as I tried to walk back into my own home. I scampered back outside, as much as a two-hundred-meter long dragon can scamper, and took a moment to clean up. I used a spell she invented and taught me to slick the dirt and blood from my feet. I hit my face with the same magic as well, for good measure, before going back inside.

  She greeted me with a smile this time, “Thank you, Flux, for keeping your own place clean.”

  She laid it on thick, but two could play at that game, “Gee thanks, mom!” I replied.

  We shared a laugh, and a sigh.

  The silence grew between us for a moment, and I felt the tenor of the conversation was about to change. The magic in the air around her shifted, and though she hadn’t said a thing yet, I knew we were about to have a rare, serious conversation, like when her own mother died.

  “Flux, my friend, do you know how old I am?”

  I stroked my chin with a nice clean paw, and said what I thought was true, “Thirty-five, ish? I have a hard time telling a human's age.”

  In my maker’s day, the great wizards all stopped aging around thirty-five, but as the ages of magic turn, the rules change, and that ‘wizards are immortal to time’ rule was apparently one that had changed.

  Yorna laughed softly. I’ve known her since she was a little thing, and that was a sad laugh. “Oh Flux… I’m one hundred and thirty-one years young, but I stopped aging around thirty-five, ish. So I guess you’re right in a way.”

  “Oh…” That was unexpected. “I guess the years really have just been slipping by, haven’t they?”

  “They sure have.”

  “You know… my makers did that too; stopped aging around thirty-five. They ended up living just short of seven hundred years. Nice pair of brothers.”

  “You don’t talk about them much, but I’ve seen them in your dreams, Flux. I’ve seen the great ships they made to fly about the cosmos. I know from your long naps that there is so much more than my little world out there.” So she’d been watching my dreams? That was a somewhat startling revelation, had she been doing this all along? “I’d have been happy to stay here, only experiencing other worlds through your dreams, protecting my village from the insignificant threats of this world, but now…”

  She started tearing up, emotions welling so strongly in her that for a moment, she couldn’t speak.

  “Yorna, my first and only apprentice, what has happened?”

  “You saw that empire to the north, they came to annex the villages of your mountain, and I- I stopped them.” I dared not ask her how, “And now the villagers all fear me, they think my magic is evil. Do they not remember the rains I brought them during the droughts? Or the countless other miracles I have performed for them? The crops, the healing, the protection from predators! The avalanche I stopped!?”

  “The curse of a long life is a longer memory than all those around you, Yorna. Most alive probably do not remember most of those things, just as you don’t remember me turning this whole continent from barren waste to fertile farmland. They only remember the last thing that happened, which I’m guessing wasn’t you politely asking the empire to go away.”

  “I started with polite.” She sighed, “But things got out of hand when they tried to kidnap the villagers. I stopped them, I snuffed out all those soldiers with a snap, and now the villagers I love and protect look at me like I’m a monster. They want to kill me, I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their thoughts.”

  “Yorna… I-” Wasn’t sure what to say, but somehow settled on, “I don’t think you should be reading their minds without permission.”

  “Flux, my oldest friend, I cannot stay here.” She wiped the tears from her eyes, “I need to leave this world. Teach me how to make a ship like your makers flew in, a magical starship to sail the cosmos. Something big enough that you can come with me.”

  “Very well!” I, apparently, didn’t need a moment to mull it over. In that instant, I realized something terrible and true; for my little Yorna, I would move mountains and boil the seas. I would uproot whole forests or smash the moons down on this world if it served her ends. Hearing that anyone wanted to harm her lit a fire in me that threatened to destroy them, but I knew that would have only made Yorna cry, and that I could not abide.

  She was right, as always; it was time to move on. I had lingered on this world for far too long, but at least I’d found a real treasure, one worth taking to my next home.

  And so, for the first time, I planned to teach my apprentice something intentionally.