There is a story they tell about a dragon. They tell it wrong, of course, but that's never stopped anyone.

  The version most people know goes something like this: once upon a time, a terrible dragon terrorised the kingdom. A brave hero rose to slay it. The kingdom was saved. The end. It is a story told in every nation, in every tongue, across every age, and it is always, always, about the hero.

  Nobody ever asks what the dragon thought about it.

  Dragons, as a rule, are not villains. They are ambitious, which is not the same thing, though the distinction is lost on anyone currently on fire. A dragon pursues its desires with the single-minded devotion of a cat stalking sunbeams, except their sunbeams tend to be kingdoms, and their devotion tends to involve more fire than is strictly necessary. They are proud, ferocious, and above all, sovereign.

  A dragon does not bow. This is, depending on your perspective, either admirable or the reason your village no longer exists.

  Most dragons express their nature through hoarding. Some collect gold, meticulously sorted by mint year and lustre. Others collect thrones. A rare few, the dreamers, collect something altogether stranger.

  They collect stories.

  This particular dragon was a dreamer. She had been collecting tales since before the oldest civilisations had worked out the concept of a prologue. She listened to every story mortal kind could offer, and in every single one, the dragon was the villain. The monster. The obstacle to be overcome so the hero could marry the princess and restore the kingdom to order.

  She took this personally, which is a phrase that carries rather different implications when applied to a creature capable of levelling cities.

  Other dragons shrugged this off, in the way that dragons shrug, which is to say with a motion that registers on seismographs. But this dragon could not let it go. She had studied mortal stories with the obsessive attention of a literary critic who also happened to breathe fire. She knew their archetypes, their conventions, the shapes their tales always took. The hero rises. The villain falls. The dragon burns.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  So she decided to be the hero instead.

  She shed her scales, took the shape of a human girl, and called herself Jehanne of Arcadia. She led armies. She liberated cities. She burned with the righteous fire of a saviour anointed by destiny, which was, admittedly, rather easier when you were literally made of fire. She was so convincing that the people crowned her, and she took the name Aeloria: the Sun Queen.

  For a time, it worked. Her reign burned bright. Armies followed her banner with hearts ablaze. The great cathedral of Notre Dame was renamed Notre Reine in her honour, because the Maid had become a Queen, and nobody renames a cathedral on a whim.

  But here is the part the story always gets wrong.

  They say she was a tyrant. They say her fire was unholy, her ambition profane. They say she was the villain all along, that the mask merely slipped. This is the version the court wrote after the trial, which is to say it was written by the people who had very good reasons to want her remembered as a monster.

  The truth, as usual, is more complicated and less satisfying. She was brilliant and impossible and utterly alone. A dragon wearing a crown is still a dragon: sovereign by nature, incapable of the small surrenders that make connection possible. She could inspire devotion but not earn trust. She could command loyalty but not return it. The court grew frightened, as courts do when they sense something they cannot control. The clergy whispered. The nobles conspired. A trial was arranged.

  They sentenced her to burn.

  One imagines they had not thought this through.

  The fire revealed what the crown had concealed. In a roar that cracked the heavens, the Maid of Arcadia shed her mortal guise and reminded everyone present why dragons feature so prominently in stories about things going terribly wrong. She fled, injured and furious, to the mountains of Auvergne, which have since appeared on most Gallic maps as 'scenic but inadvisable.'

  And here is where the story should end. The dragon was defeated. Order was restored. The hero, or in this case the villain pretending to be one, retreated to lick her wounds, and the world moved on.

  But dragons are patient creatures, and this one had spent an eternity studying stories. She knew that the best ones always had a second act.

  From her mountain exile, she watched. She learned. She saw a fae queen rule through diplomacy where she had ruled through fire, commanding loyalty that outlasted even her departure. And she understood, at last, what she had done wrong.

  She had tried to be the hero by force. Next time, she would try patience.

  She began planting seeds with the careful deliberation of a gardener who knows the harvest will come long after the planting is forgotten. She chose her soil carefully. Old bloodlines, noble houses, the deep roots of Gallic power.

  And the de Vaillants would make such interesting seeds.