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The madman, caught in a contradiction, dashed the bubbling pot of soup in his general direction. Hadubrant lifted his arm, letting his vambrace take the brunt of it. When he dropped it again, the old fool had dropped his guise. His torso stretched out as he went, carried by thinning legs. The hunter fetched his bardiche from where he'd left it against the wall.

"So it was you," Hadubrant said, shaking loose fat droplets of murky stew. The old man was gone, fled like the serpent he was. There was a dull thud as it crashed through a false cupboard and slithered down a tunnel, leading without a doubt to his real lair. To his connection with the rest of his power. Ducking low, he gave pursuit.

"My legend does not end at the edge of a blade," the dragon called behind him. He risked a slice at the unctuous tail in any case, for not every blow need be the killing one. He hit the rock underneath, sparks shedding brief light on the path ahead. The cavern widened further until it swallowed both in darkness.

How long he walked down that hidden path. Had it been an hour? Perhaps two. His thoughts drifted from the hunt to his traveling companion, still outside with the horses. It was hard to say how long the portly squire would wait for him.

"Show yourself!" He cried, wringing the hilt of his bardiche. From the gloom came back only a thundering hiss that shook the floor with its virulence.

At first he thought it a trick of his cursed eyes, but sure enough the sides, the floor, and the ceiling of the tunnel all began to glow. They shone a faint blue, tinged here and there with green. This was no hellmouth; if anything, the air grew colder still. His breath congealed to rime about his lips.

On second thought, he'd heard it said that Hell itself contained some undiscovered, glaciated county of winter without end. A punishment worse than any Hadubrant could conceive. The blood slowed in his arteries, his toes and fingers numbed. He shook off the soporific chill and trudged on with the sullen determination of a soldier.

He trudged on right off the edge, tumbling and clanging down a rocky incline. Rocks and crags pummeled him, clanging off his armor, before he rolled to rest on flat ground. His head rang like the bells of Clairvaux. Above him, stars whirled. No, not stars. The serpent clung to the roof of the domed cave, coiled back on itself in a senseless tangle. Its scales glinted with stolen light--a mockery of a moonless sky.

"Witless whelp," it sighed.

The zodiac swirled into foreign asterisms, a twisting counter to his dizzying vertigo. His brain shuddered like a pot of soup stirred one way, then the other. His right hand touched something hard, but warm--the haft of his bardiche. Reduced to a walking stick, he leveraged it to stand on his own feet.

By what light there was he saw a hemispherical cavern, hundreds of yards wide. The sloping floor was not of bare, unhewn rock, but rather littered everywhere with bones--bones enough to fill a whole tenement of charnel houses. Cow and human, wolf and sheep, all were stripped of flesh and bleached to unearthly hue. Bile rose at the back of his throat; he swallowed it and braced himself for the fight to come.

"None survive," it continued, "who venture a dragon's lair." The source of his voice moved at an astonishing pace around the circumference.

"Hear me, dragon!" Hadubrant screamed. He took a deeper breath, filling his lungs with thick miasma. "Repent your crimes and return to the grace of God!"

He did not much point to such an empty declarations, but he swore an oath to show mercy even to these abominations. His voice, so much smaller than the dragon's, did not seem to touch the false stars. Here, under the hostile, chartless stars, he perceived most utterly the hopeless plight of Job.

"We have our own gods," it replied, as though to a small child. "If there are eighty gods or eighty-one--what consequence is it to a dragon."

"You blaspheme."

"So be it. Farewell, little human."

It roared in its own tongue, of which Hadubrant knew more than a little. Part of it was a name, the dragon's name. In Latin one might render it: Istereniallus. A male, then, one of the draco sideris. Dangerous, to be sure, but not without singular vulnerability. The concealed journals of George of Lydda, copied and recopied in secret for generations, described in detail their mortal weakness: an orb of crystallized humors suspended just behind where the nasal bone met the skull. His only chance at victory, then, would be to pry apart the joint, thrusting his bardiche in the gap.

But as the graceful serpent's head descended from the ceiling, his innermost being betrayed him. The dragon's call demanded his obeisance. His heart, all but gone cold in the frigid depths, burned with forgotten longing.

He fought against it with all his will.

Though his weapon was but a twig before his chosen enemy, though he walked on the grave of countless other men--men who, after all, often grew taller and broader than him--who had fallen before, he would not falter here. By the God whose oath he swore, the monster would be defeated. He readied himself to counter the dragon's charge.

Earlier that month he had seen the serpent fly out in the world, under open skies. There, its speed could exceed a comet, and to disasterous effect. Yet it was sluggish, slow to start, only reaching its swiftest as a speck on the horizon. In these cramped corners, it could never attain such blinding speed. Indeed, it slowed to a stop some distance from his bardiche point.

It stopped, and it sang. Hadubrant grew light, light enough to float above the bone-scattered ground. He struggled against it, but it was as though a thousand hands bore him up. They spun him in the air until all direction left his mind. There were stars in motion at every quarter, above and below, and no notion of where the ground lay.

"Please, do not resist. Too much stress will ruin your flavor. As will all this metal..."

So many hands made little work of his mismatched bits of armor. Buckles burst, straps broke, rivets snapped. His sabatons slipped free, clanging somewhere in the distance. They were followed by his vambraces, the single pauldron, and even the greaves lashed to his calves. His long chainmail shirt was rent in two, ringlets flying off to God knows where. At last the helm tore free from his bony head.

"Damn you, wyrm!" Hadubrant cursed.

The lost armor was worth more to him than the dragon's prize. At least the bardiche remained, clenched in both his white-knuckled fists. Blessed by the priest, his mentor, it might remain concealed from evil eyes. Other than defeat, there was nothing to be ashamed of.

The serpent's hum continued as the hands unlaced his doublet, ripping through the seams. He set his jaw against this last indiginity as his skin prickled in the cradling air. Whatever foul magic the dragon deployed against him, he would still prevail. His tumbling slowed, and he came to rest before the dragon's face. Its maw stretched wide enough to swallow him in a bite, its eyes squinted tight like twin sapphire moons, waning crescent gems. The pointed tips of its antlers, great skeletal trees of coral fanning out behind its head, glowed like drops of dew at morn.

"Now, this is interesting," it said. Its braying ceased; its voice returned to the common tongue. It was the first time, he noticed, the wyrm had betrayed a lack of confidence.

Its head bobbed around him, regarding him from all angles. He feared an attack from the rear, but it did not come. After an interval it returned to face him again. It held him below the waist by several of its coils, each thicker than any snake Hadubrant knew. They ground against him, slithering across his thighs.

"Answer me," it said, "To whom do you belong?"

"No one," he said. He found it hard to hold his tongue. "I am Hadubrant, dragonslayer. The doom of all your kind."

Istereniallus blinked.

"A human can slay a dragon perhaps once a century, by dumb luck." It condescended. "For one of your kind, it would be quite impossible. I think I understand now why you were so much more polite to my human guise. To think I thought you some noble bastard's second son, left errant to find some valor easily gained."

"As I intended."

"Of course, I could smell the glamour on you then. It would be trivial to dispel such a pitiful sorcery--yes, I could do it with a single breath. Almost a single thought, even." It inhaled, sniffing him again with exaggerated delicacy. "But then, what would be the point?"

Hadubrant said nothing, weighing carefully the words, biding his time. He concentrated his focus on the bridge of the dragon's snout. It was a wrinkled thing, so finely scaled it shimmered. He could lie across it, perhaps, clinging to the cleft under either eye. Or, in the worst case, he could grab on to a nostril--at the risk of being sneezed to an untimely death. Dragon noses were sensitive things, after all.

"Well," the dragon continued, "Perhaps I should renew your brand. Your company is dull, but you might be of use in keeping the warren tidy."

"No brand can subdue me." He retorted.

"Perhaps, perhaps not. I learned the runes before they were wrought. Few remain who could say such a thing."

From anyone else, Hadubrant would think it an empty boast.

"Try it, then." He goaded the wyrm.

"Alas, I forgot how tiresome conversation can be. At least the stars allow centuries between replies."

It yawned again. This was the moment, he thought, the crucial juncture between victory and death. There would be no second strike. The dragon's coils hoisted him forward and up, into the breach--but his feet found holds and he jumped across the gap, landing sideways across the broad nose. He sank his bardiche deep into the snout.

Istereniallus yelped, surprised. It drew back askew, but by then Hadubrant had abandoned his polearm and straddled the bridge, riding it as a horse without a saddle. He gasped as his flesh dug between scales colder than ice. The dragon chuffed, scraping the top of its snout against its coils, but the force did not dislodge him. For its next move, he predicted, it would shake him loose. Or try.

Out of time, he unleashed his claws across the dragon's face. He tore at the divot he had spied, digging out ragged strips of hot flesh with all the fervor and rage of one falling off a cliff, tearing nails and breaking fingers at a vain attempt at survival. Flesh gave way to soft cartilage, and then to bone--and then the dragon flailed anew, for it understood too slowly his purpose.

"Stop, you mongrel!" It roared again, to no avail. "I will not perish here! I cannot! My fate--"

The world lost its moorings, cut loose again by draconic malefaction. All the down he needed was the joint under that anatomical notch, that hollow right between the dragon's eyes. With the sharp tang of ichor he found fresh strength and tore savagely into the ragged wound, digging in up to his chest. Foul blood and gristle flowed in his wake until at last he touched something smooth and hard--the core of the dragon, the source of all its vitality.

Grimly he held his breath and pounded against it, willing it to crack beneath whatever force he could muster. The dragon squealed in exquisite agony. Though he could hear it from outside, albeit muffled by warm flesh, he could hear it with a different quality from within. It was a death knell, the turning of a season, the end of an age. Beneath his claws he felt more than heard the snap of glass and ice and steel.

They hung in middle air. Cocooned within, Hadubrant shuddered as the breath flew out of the massive, magnificient wyrm--so much life, more life than forty humans, more than forty times forty. A poor match for the forgotten ossuary below. They fell and kept falling, one continuous avalanche of mountains of serpent flesh.

It was lukewarm, gelatinous, and, above all, completely silent when he regained his senses. He thanked God he did not choke on the dragon's fetid humors, that he was not crushed beneath its terrible mass. Then he thanked him a third time for his profound lack of a sense of smell. His bardiche he found still buried in the snout, but the rest of his things... he had not the strength to dig under heaps of serpent offal. Caked in blood, stripped bare, bruised and sore in a hundred places, he crawled back up to the tunnel and retraced his steps back to the surface.

He was relieved to see his companion's nerve hadn't failed him. Guano sat tending the campfire some hundred yards from the cave, still in his tattered harlequin's costume. The poor fool fainted at the sight of him, human guise or no. It was for the best. He was in no mood to explain the gritty details of dragonslaying to an ignorant, if entertaining, buffoon. Fetching his spare tunic from his saddlebags, he retired to a nearby stream to wash the corruption from his body. He prayed again before the setting sun, there on the slopes of the Schalke, within a stone's throw of the den of evil so recently cleansed.