As he crawled through the desert, the voice of his father sounded in his ears.

  Little runt! After all I’ve done for you, you still take away!

  He felt his father’s heavy boots cracking into his ribs. He felt the fingers curling through his hair, his face slamming into the wooden floorboards of their little hovel. He felt the fists, the ribs breaking, the spittle in his eye. Yes, this was not the first time Koronzon Hammyr had crawled as blood and life and hope drained from him. He had been a child then; he was a man now—and possibly something more. But still, the voice of his father sounded, like the Bell of Endtimes prophesied in the final chapter of The Book of Beltanus.

  “And he shall mould from divine ore the Ending Bell,

  and sound it from the Deepest Emptiness,

  where stars, afraid to shine, wink out

  and all the agencies of gods and men are dust.

  The universe shall hear its knell,

  resounding through the Dark Expanse,

  and Hell itself shall open wide

  to free its horrors for the Final Dance.”

  Grim words. But even when The Warden had entered his deepest atheism, he had always held them to be true. All things died, eventually. Even planets and stars. Even Time and Space. Even Koronzon, he thought. Even Death himself.

  But not this day. This day, his own death was drawing closer than ever before. The Daimon’s voice was still with him, but muted somehow, as though the ghost of his father could shout down the entity dwelling in his body, as though memory were stronger than blood.

  The dragon slumbered. He felt a dim, dying connection to it. The blood calls… He had shared a little with the beast. Just enough for them to form symbiosis.

  Not far now. The dragon’s bulk was hidden from view of the town by the two huge red cliffs. But visible to him now, though his sight was blurring, dimming, dimming. Fight, the Daimon screamed. Fight!

  He was fighting. Everyday, he fought. That was all his life had been. Struggle, conflict, war. A war against the world itself, against the injustices of Fate, against the gods.

  Against himself.

  Death had a way of clearing certain mists—even as another descended. He saw clearly now his self-loathing, a mirror of his father’s. If only he had been better, his mother would have lived. If only he had been stronger, his father would not have beaten him. If only he had been more good, Iliyet might have survived or avoided her sickness altogether. If only he had fought harder, then the King might have recognised him, might have honoured him.

  If only he had defied the King’s orders.

  If only he had spared the women, the children.

  He dragged his near lifeless body along. Every inch he gained was an agony. The sand was in his wounds, his blood, his mouth. He’d left a trail nearly a mile long. It was a miracle he had any blood left. His hands were paler than the stars, luminous almost in the black. The serpentine tendrils that’d once sprouted from his back had entirely withered, their shrivelled husks falling away. He was a man again, in some ways. But about to become less even than that.

  Just a few feet, just a few feet.

  Always, he had met limits and gone beyond them. There had never been a question. But now, he faltered. Now he contemplated what it would be to let himself die here, to let the parasite within him die, to retreat into the dark solace of his Shell, never to emerge again, to take the gift of Koronzon with silent grace. He had done his fair share of evil. Maybe a little good, too. But mostly, he saw, he had lived a life of violence. How welcome stillness sounded! How tempting! How perfect!

  And then came an image, an image that would have made any other soul on the face of Erethia laugh, but which filled The Warden with a burning pitch blacker even than the depths of his current agony.

  Two pale buttocks, whiter than the moon.

  A sound of a man’s ribald laughter.

  A joke. A stupid fucking joke. And I was the punchline.

  His taloned hand formed into a shaking fist. Though he had lost his other hand, still the phantom fingers curled. He gritted his teeth so hard that his gums bled. No. No, no. It cannot be allowed to stand. I cannot die, not without the wrong righted. Not with this shame still borne!

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  His failing strength found new reserves, a fire fed by Daimonsblood. His muscles, drained and worn to the point they seemed to hang slack on his bones, now surged and flexed with some final spirit of animation. He pulled, heaved, kicked. His vision was a black ocean of strobing colours. His mind was a whirl of indecipherable thoughts, the epicentre of which was the one burning flame of clarity: hatred, revenge.

  Telos… Kill… The thief…

  The thief... must die.

  I cannot die until it’s done.

  He had always despised thieves. His father had been a thief in a different sense: he stole joy, time, and hope from Koron’s life. What was taken by a thief could never be repaid, for time always marched on, and moments were lost even if the artefact was recovered. Telos had stolen honour and dignity from him. He was the reason The Warden now crawled like a snail, like an animal, in pools of his own blood and faeces. Yes, his bowels had let themselves go—Death was that close. But perhaps these grotesque bodily functions would serve him, would unburden him of just enough deadweight... The will to survive conquers all! In this, he and the Daimon were one fell cry.

  He reached to pull himself along—and his fingers touched scale. Cold, hard, dragonscale. He had made it. He had crossed the gap! But now what?

  The Daimon within him knew. Even as The Warden flagged once more, his head slumping to the sandy ground, the strength guttering from him, the Daimon flared one last time with brightness.

  You must transfer yourself, transfer us. Into the dragon. Bite down. Quickly! Bite down and seek the heart! It is the only way.

  His mind was a cauldron again. Even the flame of his hatred was guttering now.

  Transfer? Into the dragon?

  What did the Daimon mean? Had it gone mad in its final moments?

  You were always meant to shed this feeble flesh. All Daimons do… We would have prepared you for it. But time runs against us. Quickly now! Bite down!

  He lifted his head. He still did not understand, but he also had no strength left to resist a command. Despite his ferocious nature and iron will, he had always been good at following orders.

  He opened his mouth and bit down. His teeth clattered comically upon the scales. The dragon snorted but did not even awake.

  Harder! The Daimon screamed. Harder!

  He bit again. This time the dragon groaned. He felt the scales like barnacles shells between his teeth, tongue, and gums. Sharp. Pricking him as they broke. These were not like any lizard scales. These were more like brittle jewels.

  Bite! Bite! Devour! Plunge!

  He bit once final time and the dragon’s eyes snapped open—great gemstones of flame. The creature roared, perhaps more with irritation than anything else, for the wound was tiny. But still, the Warden tasted blood. Coppery. Sweet. Thick.

  Something rose up his gullet. He gagged and then vomited. But it was not true vomit, rather, a limb. A pustule-ridden serpent. A black, filthy thing, more like the accumulated waste at the bottom of some sewer-reservoir than anything living. Yet it moved, pulsed, writhed. It reminded him of a snail. And I am its shell. It’s filthy shell.

  He could not feel his limbs. His body was suddenly cold to him. He tried to thrash, to reach his limbs, but there was no use in it. He was this thing. His dying eyes were looking at himself, but himself in a form he could never have imagined even in his darkest dreams.

  Then all went black. The horrid slug slithered slowly out of the corpse of what had once been Koronzon Hammyr. Slowing its progress was a mycelial network of nerve-endings and tendrils—pieces of matter that served it parasitic aims. These animated tendons and nerves stretched, explored. They found the dragon’s wound and entered.

  The dragon flinched only a moment. But pieces of the Daimon had been buried in it before, and now they were gaining control again, asserting themselves. The slug thing squeezed itself with horrid efficacy into the tiny wound, chewing without a mouth but rather some acidic excretion that bored away flesh, muscle, and bone more easily than any flame. Then, it was ensconced and travelling up the beast’s limb and into its torso.

  To the heart.

  The Warden was still there. But his thoughts and memories had become strange. So much of memory existed in the body and now the limbs he felt at his beck and call were… strange. The process of assimilating these new parts was gradual. Pain flared through him. He felt the nerves that’d once belonged to his former body plunging like roots into the epicentres of motion and thought. I am a flower, transferred to new soil. And how much riper this is!

  Now his fear and panic were melting away he felt gladness. For the dragon—the dragon was power.

  He felt the freakish strength of its limbs and tail.

  He felt the power to command fire in his gullet.

  He felt his wings—and stretched them to their fullest expanse.

  He opened his mouth and a roar left them that shook the red cliffs and made the dunes quiver, sand shifting and slumping as though some dark thin tunnelled underneath. My eyes! They are so clear! He saw the stars as never before, saw through the veil of night into a deeper blackness beyond, where the great ships of the Deep Ones roved and darted and searched for new worlds.

  I am alive as never before! As never imagined!

  Yes, the Daimon cried. Now you see what it is never to be bound.

  But this was not the end of the story. For even as he swelled and flexed and grew into knowledge of his new body, so he felt the Daimon augmenting what was already there, the bones changing and hardening as the Daimonic influence asserted itself, a weed that could only be uprooted by one power: The Nergal.

  The Nergal. I must find it! I must destroy it!

  That was his quest. He saw the lights of Azalton flickering on, the villagers hearing his mighty cry. It was time to leave.

  Time to soar.

  He spread his wings and beat them. With a single bound, he was airborne. A great, rumbling laugh left his throat as he rose higher and higher, the zephyrs of Aurelia lifting him and all his brawn into the black beauty of the endless night.

  Below, the skin he had shed flapped in the wind.

  Like the tattered banner of a kingdom that was no more.