Leon looked at the eye.
He'd been talking for what felt like several minutes now, filling the silence with words because silence felt worse. Assurances, explanations, the carefully diplomatic language he'd absorbed from a year of war councils and foreign delegations.
"Our world was linked to this - to yours - and we mean no harm. We're not enemies." He paused, hearing how hollow that sounded. What did a promise of non-hostility mean to something this large? What threat could they possibly represent that would require the assurance?
He pressed on anyway.
"Our earlier meeting, weeks ago. When you - when you spoke. Did you want to-"
Visitor.
Leon stopped.
The word hadn't come through the air. Hadn't come through sound at all. It had arrived the way a memory arrived - already inside, already present, as if it had always been there and had only just been noticed. He hadn't heard it. He'd simply... known it.
He looked at the dragon's mouth. It hadn't moved. He was almost certain it hadn't moved.
The ground was trembling. Not the irregular tremors of something shifting its weight- this was rhythmic. Continuous. A pulse.
Leon listened to it through his boots.
A heartbeat, he realized. I'm standing close enough to feel its heartbeat through the ground.
Which meant any sound he produced - any volume he could generate with human lungs and a human throat - would be attempting to compete with a pulse that moved through the earth itself. The dragon didn't hear with ears, maybe. Or if it did, they operated at frequencies so far removed from human speech that shouting would be less than meaningless.
It communicated mind to mind.
Which meant magic.
Which meant-
I can't use magic, Leon thought, the realization arriving with a particular, sinking quality. Not panic. Just the familiar weight of yet another situation in which he was catastrophically unequipped for what was being asked of him.
Impressive. You created such a way without the use of magic.
Leon's attention snapped to the dragon.
The thought hadn't been his.
He turned it over carefully. The dragon had heard him - not his words, something else. His thought, but specifically that thought, not the ones before it. There was something different about the way it had moved through his mind, some quality he couldn't name or describe or replicate intentionally, like trying to explain how you'd balanced on something before you fell off it.
He filed it under impossible to understand, revisit later and focused.
Such a way. He turned around, scanning the field behind him for whatever had caught the dragon's attention. His footprints should have been visible in the grass, but the constant vibration of that enormous heartbeat had erased them. Nothing remarkable. Nothing that should impress a creature of this scale.
He turned further.
To his right, where the horizon gate stood, the sky had changed. The world beyond the gate - his world, the swamp, the towers - was settling into evening. Dusk bleeding into the grass, into the reeds, into the water. The light was going soft and dark.
But the dragon's world remained fully bright. Midday light, or close to it. The gate hung in the sky of this world like a window left open, showing a different sky, a different hour, a different state of existence.
Two worlds, two times, visible simultaneously through one impossible aperture.
The gate, Leon thought, turning back to the eye. That's what it means - the gate. But that wasn't - we didn't build that. That isn't something I-
For allowing me to witness such a phenomenon that supersedes magic. I will give you a gift. The dragon said, arriving in his mind with that same quality of already-there.
Leon opened his mouth. Closed it.
Right. It couldn't hear him unless he thought it in whatever way that had worked before, and he had no idea how he'd done that, so verbal responses were decorative at best.
The eye lifted.
Then the head.
Slowly, with that geological patience, the vast architecture of skull and horn and scale rose away from him, ascending back into the clouds it had descended from, until the detail was gone and there was only scale and the distant suggestion of structure.
Then a foot moved.
One of the front feet. Pivoting toward him with a smoothness that made the ground complain audibly, covering the distance between them with the casual efficiency of something that didn't need to hurry.
It stopped.
A talon - single, the size of a turret, ridged with age and darker at the tip than at the base - descended toward him.
This is it, some part of Leon's mind offered, with great calm. This is the part where it ends-
The talon touched his forehead.
Gently.
With a precision that had no right to exist at that scale, the tip of something the size of a siege weapon made contact with his forehead and held there. Not pressure. Just presence. Warmth, unexpectedly - the scale was warm, warmer than the ambient air, carrying that same mineral-and-sky scent he'd noticed before.
It held.
Leon didn't breathe.
Then it lifted. Withdrew. Settled back into the earth miles away with a sound like furniture rearranging in a very large house.
The head descended again, stopping higher than before - not at eye level now, but above him, angled down. Regarding him from a new distance.
You surprise me.
Something in the quality of it - the cadence, if that word applied - carried what might have been genuine interest.
I imparted a portion of my magic knowledge and you received it without difficulty.
Leon stood still.
He waited to feel different. Wiser. More capable. Aware of some new dimension of the world that had previously been invisible.
He felt exactly the same.
Not even a flicker. Not a warmth, not a pressure behind his eyes, not the sense of something new settling into place. Nothing. Whatever the dragon believed it had given him had been received so completely that no trace of it remained.
Or hadn't arrived at all.
Or had arrived and been immediately consumed by whatever fundamental wrongness existed in Leon that made him invisible to magic, that made formations work and mana detection fail, that had allowed him to walk across a field of gate energy that made trained mages nauseous without feeling so much as a headache.
He was so busy not feeling different that he almost missed the next part.
This seems inadequate, the dragon said. For what you have shown me. Accept my crown's horn.
Leon looked up.
He looked up because something had changed in the quality of the sound above him- not the telepathic communication, something physical, something real - a sound like boulders the size of trucks colliding.
The horn fell.
It came toward him with too much deliberateness. A section of one of those jagged forward-thrusting horns, broken cleanly from the crown, descending through the space between them with what would have been elegance at a smaller scale and was, at this scale, simply annihilation.
That will kill me, Leon thought, with perfect clarity.
He screamed. Something shrill that he would later be grateful there were no witnesses to. His eyes shut. His arms came up in the universal and completely futile gesture of a person trying to stop something massive with their hands.
Something landed in his palm.
He opened his eyes.
A ring sat in his hand.
Gnarly. Dense. The surface of it carried the same ridged scarring as the horn it had come from, darkened at certain angles, ancient in the way only things that had existed long enough to forget being new were ancient. It was warm. It fit his palm like it had always been there.
He stared at it.
He looked up at the dragon.
He looked back at the ring.
Take it, the dragon said. And I will study your way in turn.
Then it turned.
Not quickly - nothing this size could turn quickly - but with a finality that was unmistakable.
It was an ending of a first meeting between two beings who had acknowledged each other's existence and found it worthy of note.
How did the fraud just keep growing? He wondered