The horns came in slowly; that was the part that always surprised me. It seemed to make more sense that the beast would arrive all at once like a storm breaking. But instead, the pressure started at my temples, deep beneath the bone, and built outward in a grinding sensation like something pushing through from the inside.
I didn’t reach up to touch them. I knew what they were.
The scales came next. They moved across my forearms first, and the sensation was somewhere between itching and burning. Not painful, exactly, but just wrong. The skin didn’t break; it just changed, hardening in patches, the color deepening from gold to something darker, almost iridescent black, the way a raven’s wing catches light.
The tattoo moved as the dragon on my chest shifted beneath my tunic, the ink pulling and contracting like something breathing, like something waking up inside the lines that had been drawn to contain it. The heat that radiated from it pressed through the fabric, and I could feel each coil of its body as it turned, reorienting itself toward Guinevere the way a compass needle finds north.
Galahad’s blade was still at her throat.
She was now underneath him, on the ground, and he was hovering above her, the blade pitched at her throat, but his eyes were on me. And they were wide. Her eyes found mine across the length of the hall, and they were just as wide as his. She was afraid and her fear did something to me. It did something to the dragon.
Ignited the fire, caused it to burn even hotter.
OURS.
The word came with heat, and the heat was everywhere at once: in my chest, in my skull, in the backs of my teeth.
Guard her. Keep her. The blade touches our treasure. We must destroy the threat.
I didn’t fight it.
That was the thing I’d think about later, in the dark, when the scales had receded, the horns were gone, and I was a man again, sitting alone in my chambers with wine I wouldn’t drink.I didn’t fight it.Every other time the dragon had pushed forward, I’d fought it with everything I had, every scrap of will I possessed, pushing back against the tide until it receded. But not this time. This time I let the tide come in.
Because Galahad had his dagger at her throat, and he wasn’t going to move it. Not for my voice, not for Mordred’s procedural objections, not for the weight of three hundred witnesses. He’d made his decision, and he was going to see that decision through. If I didn’t intervene, he would kill her.
Nothing I could say would stop him. But the dragon, the dragon could.
A second crack ran through the stone underfoot. Shadow pooled up at my ankles, and then followed like an old friend, breathing just like I was breathing.
Someone wept softly behind me down at the far end of the hallway, their sobs barely audible, but still there.
Galahad was trying to hold his ground, but his sword hand had developed a tremor. I watched his knuckles go white around the hilt and then to something bloodless and waxy.
I let the horns come fully, and soon my mouth was filling with fangs.
The grinding reached its apex, and then there was a sound like a key turning in a lock, and the pressure released as both points curved upward through the air above my temples.
The double timbre in my voice when I spoke again wasn’t a shout. It didn’t need to be.
“Drop the dagger.”
The words moved through the room the way the roar had: not through the ears but through the body, through the marrow, through the soft animal parts of a person.
Galahad’s hand shook, but he made no motion to drop his weapon, and in response, I opened my mouth, and something that had never happened before happened now.
A stream of fire billowed out of me, catching on the rug beneath me and the pendants that hung from the rafters above. The stream of fire was close enough to Galahad that he instantly backed away from it, and that was my cue.
The scales had reached my jaw. I could feel them there at the hinge, just beneath my ear, and the skin of my face tightened as the beast continued its advance. My hands at my sides were no longer entirely mine. The nails had darkened and lengthened by less than an inch, but enough to be seen and enough to be understood.
The hall had gone completely still.
Even the crying had stopped.
Guinevere’s eyes hadn’t left mine. Her chest moved in a slow, controlled breath but her chin stayed level. And something in her face had changed, not to relief exactly, more like recognition. She wasn’t afraid of me. That was the first thing I recognized. The dragon noticed that too.
“Move the fuck away from her!”
Galahad’s blade finally came all the way down.