Sophie had a fickle heart.
She didn’t know at first what fickle meant—the word reminded her of tossing a coin and waiting to see which way it lands—but her mother kept using it, and her sisters, and her brother. Maybe fickle meant that she liked sewing one day and sword-fighting the next, or that she kissed two different boys (and one girl) within the span of a single fortnight, or maybe it simply meant that she laughed too much, and often cried, and sometimes screamed.
Sophie knew, however, that there was a witch beyond the woods that bordered her village, and that witches could take care of such things for people, for the right price. She also knew that one shouldn’t—at any cost—approach a witch and ask for such a deal, because witches were cunning and snaky and fickle, in their own magical way. But Sophie was fickle too, and she wasn’t afraid.
So in the height of summer, before the larches began to fade to yellow, Sophie left her sisters under the guise of hide-and-seek and hurtled deep into the forest. The smell of earth and pine needles filled her nose as she darted between the trees, stomping the wild ground, frightening a rabbit and a group of chiffchaffs before reaching the sloping rise of the mountain to the north. She began to climb the mountainside, expecting to battle the crumbling earth and loose rocks for a while, but not a quarter-hour went by before Sophie stood on a narrow ledge, hunched and panting, with the mouth of the witch’s cave looming over her.
She recognized it at once. All around her the earth was made of dirt and root and rock, but the cave was different, carved in dark, translucent stone that crept from under the surrounding dirt and gravel, and rose like the shadowy maw of a giant overhead. The dark stone glimmered in the midday light, dampened slightly by the trees, and any other girl would have considered the sight menacing, somber and macabre—but Sophie simply deemed it beautiful. It looked like a cave of gleaming black diamond, or what Sophie imagined diamond looked like, from the stories she’d heard.
The inside of the cave was made from the same shiny rock, bulging and jagged and covered with reflective facets that met at odd angles. But the daylight didn’t follow Sophie inside, and she soon found herself shrouded in darkness, before a different kind of light found her searching eyes.
Three fires were burning in the cave, though smoke rose from none of them. The largest was at the back and resembled a hearth (with a black-diamond mantel and fender, of course), and the other two burned closer to Sophie and were heaped with various pots and cauldrons and steaming clay jars. Between these two fires, and tending to both of them, scurried a tall woman—a feral woman—wearing a motley of rags and carrying a large mortar under her arm. In the other hand she held a wooden pestle and was busy driving it up and down in a swirling motion, pounding and grinding and scraping, and occasionally whipping up a cloud of what seemed to be bright yellow pollen.
Then the witch noticed Sophie, and the two cooking fires dropped to a flicker, and the witch put the mortar and pestle down on a stool and approached the girl in the dimming orange light.
“Yes?” asked the witch. “And who are you, exactly?”
The girl found she had no words. This wasn’t at all what she’d expected. The cave wasn’t foul-smelling and rotten, but beautiful and gleaming, with a scent of herbal incense wafting through the air. The witch’s voice, too, wasn’t croaky and guttural, but soft and smooth and deep, almost lilting. But what was worse—or better, Sophie couldn’t tell—was that the witch wasn’t the wizened, withered crone everyone in the village thought her to be, but a young woman in her prime, tall and lean and strikingly lovely.
“I’m Sophie,” answered the girl at last. “I need your help, please.”
“My help?” The witch beamed with pleasure. “I’m sure we can arrange something, child. What is it you need?”
Sophie drew her breath. She knew that when talking to witches one had to be careful with what they asked, what they gave, and what they accepted in return. The witch no doubt was really a withered crone, and the cave must have been rotting all around her underneath this glamor. But Sophie wouldn’t let this magic take her wits as well.
“I have a fickle heart,” the girl said. “I want you to take it out.”
The witch’s eyes widened. “A fickle heart, you say? Let’s see.” She stepped closer to Sophie and put her palm to the girl’s pounding chest. Sophie could feel the color rushing to her cheeks as the witch touched her skin; the woman was extremely beautiful and elegant—with a shock of dark hair, high cheekbones, and questing eyes—and under different circumstances Sophie could imagine herself falling madly in love with such a girl, who appeared not much older than her.
“Indeed,” said the witch and, pulling back her hand, drew her fingertips to a point over Sophie’s chest. Sophie felt a tiny snag when the witch’s skin left hers, and when she looked down, she saw a little purple butterfly pinched between the witch’s fingertips, its wings beating gracefully above her hand.
All color had drained from the world. The polished facets of the diamond walls shone no more, and the witch was just a woman, neither beautiful nor ugly, and the buds of passion Sophie had felt now wilted and crumbled in the stagnant air.
“A very fickle heart,” said the witch with a monotone whisper before plunging the butterfly back into Sophie’s chest, where it thawed her frozen soul and spread along her abdomen and limbs like fire. “You want it gone?”
“Yes,” said Sophie, though she wasn’t so sure anymore. “But … will I die? If you take it?”
The witch smiled, as radiant as ever. “You will not die, child. Many people live a life of constancy, though I cannot promise it will not feel like death. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she added, turning to pluck a scroll that hung on a nearby wall. “If you want me to remove your fickle heart—which is very fickle indeed and will require much cleverness to remove—” she glanced at Sophie playfully “—then I need you to fetch a heart for me as well: the heart of the Woeful Dragon.”
Sophie swallowed. A witch she might’ve been able to handle, but now a dragon too?
“Don’t worry,” added the witch hastily, her eyes dropping back to the scroll. “I wouldn’t give you a task you were unable to perform; neither of us would benefit from that, would we? It will require cunning, however, and a good measure of shrewdness—but these things tend to come with a fickle heart, which is why I’m asking you to do this before I pluck it out.”
“But if I can get the dragon’s heart, why haven’t you already?” asked Sophie. She had no doubt that the witch was cunning and shrewd enough, and more fickle than anyone she’d ever met.
“The thing is,” began the witch, “the Woeful Dragon knows of me—indeed, he knows me well—and he wouldn’t let himself be found within ten miles of my person. Dragons have very keen senses like that. I’ve been after him for years, but he always manages to slither out of my reach and elude my grasp. He wouldn’t be afraid of a little girl, however,” and here the witch’s eyes shone with impossible ardor. “And I will give you all you need to fetch his heart and bring it back to me.”
Sophie’s first instinct was to refuse. Her second was to say nothing, to turn around and run, and tell her sisters that she bested them yet again in hide-and-seek, and to never think of this magnificent woman—who was really a withered witch—again.
But Sophie’s heart was fickle, and after another moment’s thought she said, “I agree,” and the matter was settled.
“Excellent,” said the witch with a glint of excitement in her eye. She paced about the cave for a while before returning to Sophie with three items. The first was a cloak that would transport her to within a hundred yards of the dragon when she wore it, then transport her back to the witch’s cave when she removed it. The second was a dark-blue potion that could put any beast into a heavy slumber. And the third was a kitchen knife that could cut through stone, which—Sophie realized with a start—was intended to cut through the dragon’s flesh and bone and carve out his heart.
“Usually I’d keep you here and talk for longer,” said the witch wistfully. “Fickle-hearted people are the best to talk to—about anything, really. So much enthusiasm and broadness of mind. But I’m afraid I really do need to win that heart, and urgently,” and as she said it, she lifted the cloak and draped it over the girl’s slender shoulders.
Sophie was now standing in a smoldering wasteland. The potion still hung heavy in her pocket, and the knife was sheathed beneath her belt; but aside from these two, and the cloak flapping around her, everything had changed.
She grabbed the collar of the cloak, knowing that if it flew away she’d be sent right back to the witch’s cave, empty-handed. She tied it snugly around her neck and looked around.
The sky was grey and clouded. The earth was grey and scorched. And before her rose a blackened tower, grey too underneath the patches of soot, and every few seconds its windows glowed with firelight as if it hadn’t been a tower, but a furnace.
The Woeful Dragon was in there, Sophie knew. Not just because only a dragon could have breathed such flames, but also because he had nowhere else to hide. He had burned the earth around the tower for miles all around, until only blackened tree stubs were left to dot the barren field of ash. And snow was falling now; except Sophie knew at once it wasn’t snow.
She began walking to the tower, leisurely at first, and then more briskly when she spied the dragon’s shadow dimming one of the lower windows. If he had craned his neck out at that moment, Sophie had no doubt he would’ve seen her and burned her where she stood. But she made it to the tower first, and pressed herself against its outer wall, the witch’s cloak shielding her from the stone brimming with heat.
To her left was a small door—or rather, a doorway—since nothing remained of the wooden thing but a powdery sheet of black and two melted hinges clinging to the arched stone frame. Sophie shuffled toward it, thankful for the ash-covered earth that muffled her steps, and hopped inside.
“Foolish, foolish, foolish!” rolled a voice like thunder over her. “Foolish villagers don’t learn! This field is mine, I tell you, and the tower! No mob will chase me out! They think they can send a girl after me, and that I wouldn’t notice?”
Sophie’s muscles tensed as she realized the dragon was speaking about her.
“I can hear the flakes of ash cracking under your foot, child. I can feel the threads of your clothes as they scrape against the stone. Turn around and return to your village, and tell the cruel and foolish men who sent their daughter to die that there’s no evicting the dragon, and that if they leave me and this tower alone, then they will be left in peace as well.”
Sophie had half a mind to do as he said, to run out the way she came and return to her village, though hers clearly wasn’t the village the Woeful Dragon was talking about. And Sophie began to understand why the witch had called him Woeful in the first place, because under the rumbling bravado of his voice there crept something sadder, and Sophie knew at once that this dragon had been much harassed during his life and wanted nothing more than to be left in peace.
It would have been so easy to doff the cloak at that moment and leave all this ash and soot and heat behind. But fickle-hearted people rarely take the easy path, and so Sophie drew her breath and shouted back at the top of her lungs, “This tower is mine now, monster!”
Sophie had a plan, and its first part was to draw the beast to her. But the growl that came next shook all faith she had in her scheme. Indeed, the throaty bellow seemed to shake the very foundations of the tower itself, and Sophie heard massive footfalls descending the spiral staircase at the center of the tower. She felt the wall vibrate behind her as the writhing body smashed and sped along it overhead, and soon chunks of crushed rock tumbled off the stairs before her, smashed under the dragon’s feet some distance up the stairway.
Then the Woeful Dragon slowed and crawled down the last few steps one by one, and smiled at her.
Sophie screamed. This wasn’t part of the plan, but right there and then, there was nothing else to do but scream. The dragon had the scaly body of a snake, the face of a newt, the feet of a lizard—and he filled the rising stairwell from wall to wall, the stone crumbling where it met his shiny green-brown scales. And when he smiled, his newt’s mouth stretching wide, it only emphasized the fact that Sophie’s body could easily, and quite rightly, fit in there.
“Go home,” thundered the dragon, and Sophie realized that his smile was intended to be kind, not cruel. “Go home, or I’ll singe you, munch you, and eat you.”
“No you won’t,” said Sophie, sticking to the plan despite herself. “You won’t eat me because you’re afraid of little girls.”
“Ridiculous,” said the dragon. “I can fit ten of you inside my mouth, thirty if you’re boned and cooked.”
“I don’t doubt that,” answered Sophie. “But you’ve never eaten a single person, have you?”
The dragon recoiled. “You don’t know that. I have eaten many.”
“Well, eat me then,” she said. “Or else this tower’s mine, and the field, and I’m going to send word to my village that they can come and claim this land because the frightened dragon wouldn’t dare eat a person, no matter how loud he growls.”
Smoke rose from the dragon’s nostrils, and Sophie knew she’d done it. The dragon had avoided eating her this far, but now that his home and peace were at risk, she left him no choice. And so, with a gleam of hurt in his dark-green eyes, the dragon drew back, inhaled, and rushed at her.
But Sophie was prepared. Before he charged, her hand was already on the collar of the cloak, untying the string. And as he sprang, she whipped the mantle off and disappeared.
She saw the witch now, sitting by the hearth and singing to herself. The beautiful woman turned to look at her, her lips parting, but before she could make a sound Sophie had already donned the cloak and reappeared in the ashen field.
A thunder rumbled behind her, the clash of dragon-scales on stone, and when she turned she could see the dragon’s head and forelimbs jutting from the broken tower, its wall punched through and crumbling around the body of the muddled beast. But he didn’t seem hurt, not even delirious as Sophie had intended him to be. Instead, he groaned and writhed and crawled violently in an attempt to loosen his trunk from the tight hug of the fractured wall, all the while spitting fire and screaming, “Foolish, foolish, foolish villagers! Ruining everything and every place and every time!”
Then he looked at Sophie, and she caught her breath midway, because she knew he’d heard it. She ran to the other side of the tower, where there stood another burned-out doorway, and when she saw the dragon slither out the other end she scrambled inside and began racing up the stairs. It would take more than that, she realized, to take the dragon down. And somewhere, in the ficklemost regions of her heart, she began to wonder whether taking him down was really what she wanted in the first place.
But, she realized, even the most fickle-hearted girl couldn’t afford to change her mind while being chased by a fire-breathing dragon. So she ran up the stairs and threw herself into the first room she found, which no doubt had used to house chairs and tables and wardrobes, but now contained nothing but piles of ash.
“You’re no girl!” roared the dragon outside the tower. “You’re a witch!”
Such open contempt rang in his voice that Sophie knew at once that whatever reservations he’d held about eating her before, he had none now. She ran to the large window that watched over the barren field, and there, crawling over the ash and rubble, she saw the dragon. And he saw her too, and heard her, and smiled again, and spread his filmy wings and launched into the air.
It was like the cave, she thought, and like the witch: scary, and menacing, and overwhelming—but also beautiful. A cloud of ash puffed up behind him as he left the ground, framing him in grey and white, and three wingbeats later he was already facing her, gigantic and growling and impossibly sad.
“I’m not a witch,” Sophie shouted out the window. “But I know one, and she gave me this.”
She unsheathed the kitchen knife, which now appeared innocuous compared to the smallest of the dragon’s teeth. But Sophie remembered what the witch had said, so she picked up a loose piece of rock and held it out the window.
“This knife can cut through stone,” she yelled. “Munch me and I’ll cut my way out.”
She raised the stone to demonstrate and sliced with the knife along its middle. The blade went right through, sliding as if through butter—but it went down too fast, unexpectedly smoothly, and before Sophie could pull back the knife had split the stone clear-through and slammed into her palm.
But nothing happened. The two halves of the rock tumbled sideways and down, and her hand was uncut, uninjured, without so much as a scratch.
Sophie jerked the knife back, hardening her face to hide the realization that swept over her. The witch had lied. Well, she hadn’t lied—the knife could cut through stone—but it could only cut through stone. And from the broadening smile on the dragon’s monstrous face, he’d realized it too.
“Well, well, well,” he said, flying closer, fanning Sophie’s hair. “It seems the witch had not only betrayed me, but you as well. Perhaps we can—”
Suddenly the floor shook beneath Sophie’s feet, which was strange, since the dragon was outside the tower, hovering just before her. The floor shook again, this time kicking Sophie’s legs from under her, and she fell, and lay flat against the floor as the tower swayed this way and that, before tipping to one side and beginning to collapse.
“The hole!” bellowed the dragon. “The hole in the base—it’s taking the whole tower down!”
But what could she do? She could take off the cloak, but would she appear back on the cave floor or some twenty feet in the air? As the tower gradually drooped lower and lower, Sophie felt she had no time to make decisions, to devise plans, to change her mind. All she could do was lie flat against the floor, and close her eyes, and wait for the tower to still.
Something crashed into the wall above her, breaking through the window, and she felt something tender and smooth wrapping itself around her. She wouldn’t open her eyes, but she felt the dragon’s measured heartbeat pulse against her skin. And then she thought she was flying, weightless, because the whole tower was falling now, with her inside it. And if it hadn’t been for the dragon’s flesh encasing her, the tower crashing on the field would no doubt have made her deaf, and blind, and dead.
She lay, stock-still, her dusty cheeks muddied by tears. She could feel the weight of the dragon around her, could feel his resistance as he strained to force the rubble out.
“Who—” he groaned, pushing and writhing. “Who are you?”
“Sophie,” she whispered. “I’m Sophie. I’m just a girl. I’m not a witch. Please help me.”
“I’m trying!” thundered the dragon, and Sophie could feel the pressure release around her as the dragon pushed the rubble out and away. A few moments later she no longer felt his scales brushing her skin, and when she opened her eyes and rose to her feet, Sophie found the dragon lying in a circle some two feet around her, covered in boulders and rubble and many layers of dust. And overhead, the sun came out from behind the clouds, for just a moment.
“Why did you come, Sophie?” breathed the dragon hoarsely. “Why did you have to come and take it all?”
Sophie walked over to his neck and brushed some dust off his scales. “I came to take your heart,” she whispered in his earhole, though even before the words had left her mouth she knew it was a lie.
“My heart?” The dragon laughed, then coughed. “Good luck with that. My scales are impenetrable, even to magical knives. And we both know that your knife doesn’t cut anything but stone. Why would you want my heart anyway?”
“I made a deal with the witch,” Sophie answered. “She said if I bring her your heart she’ll take the fickleness out of mine.”
“And why would you want to do that?”
The question seemed odd to Sophie, which is why she had avoided asking it herself. When her mother and sisters and brother called her fickle, it was clear that they meant something bad—a stain to be scrubbed off. But the witch had looked at her purple butterfly as if it had been a precious thing, and now the dragon was questioning it too, and maybe being fickle wasn’t so bad after all.
“I won’t be a child for much longer,” said Sophie. “I’m growing—that’s obvious to everyone—but Mother says I need to grow up as well. I’ll marry soon, and have children, and manage a household, and fickleness is not a thing that a young woman should have.”
“I see,” said the dragon, wriggling under the rubble but unable to get loose. “But if you don’t want that, don’t want to marry, or children, or a household—”
“Don’t want it?” Sophie laughed. “But of course I want it! At least one moment I do, and the next moment I don’t, and the next I want something else altogether, and then both things, and then nothing at all. And after a while I’m not sure what I want anymore, and when I tell that to my sisters they call me fickle, and when I tell that to my mother she calls me fickle, and when I tell my brother—who used to be like me some years ago—he only laughs and says, You’ll grow out of it, Sophie, you can’t be fickle forever. But it seems I can’t grow out of it, because anything I do is not the right thing, and anything I don’t do I should have done, and I’m not even supposed to think about what to do next, because that’s being fickle too. It’s like everyone but me knows the right answer, but I’m the only one who knows the question being asked. And what if they got it wrong?”
The dragon relaxed now, most of his body still trapped under the remains of the tower. “I made a deal with the witch too, once. Except she gave me what I wanted without asking for anything in return. Maybe she did so because she knew I didn’t really want it. I only did it because others mocked me.”
“Maybe I did too,” said Sophie weakly. “Maybe it’s them who weren’t fickle enough.”
The dragon was in much pain now, Sophie saw from the lines creasing his face. His scales might have been impenetrable, but the boulders were crushing his insides, and Sophie wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold.
“She got me in the end,” said the dragon mournfully. “I escaped her for so many years, Sophie, all around the world. I saw infinite sand dunes, and mountains so high I had to fly for hours before reaching their summit. There are large towns being built, with pointed buildings taller than hills, and every once in a while I met a child who wasn’t scared of me, but fascinated. But most people were scared, and either ran away or chased me with pitchforks and clubs and swords. This is why I came here and made the tower my own. But you did what she couldn’t all those years, Sophie. You got me. Which means she got me, because I don’t think I’ll ever get out of here again.”
“Don’t say that,” muttered Sophie.
“Why not? I’m not even very sad about it. I’m tired of the years spent running away. If only I could sleep in peace, and—”
“Sleep?” asked Sophie. “I have a sleeping potion.”
“You do?” asked the dragon excitedly. “The curse prevents me from sleeping, but if the witch gave you this potion it will no doubt work on me. Pour it into my mouth, please. I beg you.”
And when the dragon opened his mouth, which had caused Sophie to scream just earlier that day, she wasn’t afraid. This was another perk of a fickle heart: the ability to change your mind about people—and dragons—and choose friendship where so many others chose spite. She fished the potion out her pocket, uncorked it, and dripped it on the dragon’s tongue. Seconds later his jaw clamped shut, and he lowered his head, and closed his eyes.
The rubble around her shook, which was odd, because the dragon was asleep. But Sophie now saw that he was moving, not in the helpless writhing motion he had before, but inward, toward her. His body contracted, scales folding over one another like the grooves of a fan, and his limbs shrank, and his neck shortened, and his head tilted forward and grew smaller and smaller until it was no bigger than a bale of hay, then a barrel, then a pumpkin. Rubble fell off him as the body under it receded, and a minute later a young boy lay before her, no older than she was, and more likely younger.
He wore rags, like the witch, but his were normal clothes worn by time, and around his wrist was a grey stone bracelet, with a newt’s head—which was really a dragon’s head—etched upon it. Sophie lifted the knife from the ground and cut it at once, the blade going right through the stone and stopping when it met the child’s skin. After two opposing cuts the bracelet fell, and there was nothing left to do but to hug the sleeping boy, and whip off her cloak, and face the witch.
“You did it!” crowed the witch when the two children appeared in her cave. “And here I thought you’d be too scared to take him on. But you did it, and—”
“And you’re not getting his heart,” said Sophie, laying him down.
The witch flashed a self-satisfied smile. “Why would I need his heart,” she asked, “if you got it for me?”
“What do you mean?” demanded Sophie, who was ready to storm the witch at any moment. “We had a deal. You sent me to fetch the dragon’s heart. Except you lied, because it was a cursed child and not a dragon at all, and the knife you gave me would only cut through stone.”
“The child wasn’t cursed,” answered the witch. “He came to me some thirty years ago and asked to be turned into a scary beast. The children of his village kept making fun of him, you see, throwing out names like craven and coward. He wanted to scare them, to show them that fear is reasonable in the face of danger; but most of all he wanted to be on the other side, to watch his tormentors become the tormented, to feel powerful and in control.”
“But surely he didn’t want to be a dragon anymore!” replied Sophie. “Why didn’t you turn him back?”
“Oh, child, I tried, but he wouldn’t let me anywhere near him. You see, when he first went back to his village as a dragon, he got what he wanted: the children who bullied him all fled with screeches of horror. But he wouldn’t hurt them, of course, and that emboldened the villagers to drive him away. Even his parents turned on him, not knowing who he was, and blamed him for the disappearance of their son. So he flew away, heartbroken, but everywhere was just the same—mobs and armies and self-titled heroes.
“He wouldn’t let me near him, however,” added the witch with displeasure. “He blamed me for doing exactly what he asked. I chased him for decades, but he was always too fast, too clever—and when I told him I’d turn him back, he didn’t believe me. That’s what I meant when I told you to fetch his heart: I wanted you to get close enough, to make him trust you, so you could make him drink the potion and sever the spell.”
Sophie stomped her foot, ready to admonish the witch for not giving her clearer instructions, but just then she understood the true nature of witches. The people of her village had called them cunning and snaky and fickle, but Sophie knew better now. Witches weren’t sly—they were perfectly honest—but the truth they spoke was never obvious, and always revealed itself just at the right moment, and not an instant before.
Sophie looked down at the sleeping boy at her feet, his hair clinging to his clammy forehead. She recalled her first encounter with the dragon, who had seemed so ancient and powerful and wise, while underneath lurked nothing but a child doing his best to appear in control. She wondered how many adults were like that, too, and how many people who had been called cowards all their lives would have sacrificed themselves, like he had, to save her from the falling tower.
“Take this,” said the witch, handing Sophie a vial filled with some colorless fluid. “Put it under his nose, that’ll rouse him.”
She did. The boy began to writhe again, and moments later woke up with a start. He glanced around worriedly, recognizing Sophie, then the cave, then the witch, and got up to his feet and began running away. Sophie saw his silhouette shrinking as he raced toward the light, but when he stepped outside the cave he disappeared at once, blinking out of existence.
“He’s back to his time,” said the witch. “To the time just after he entered my cave. He’s learned his lesson, I think, and will live a happy life. What about you, Sophie?” asked the witch. “Have you learned yours?”
Sophie felt her fickle heart pounding in her chest. Some part of her still wanted the witch to remove it, to make her the same as everyone else; to make her mother proud, to make her sisters shut up, to make the world make sense. But there were other parts too: one that wanted to run up to the witch, and hug her, and beg her to teach Sophie how to be a witch as well, how to turn frightful boys into dragons and fickle-hearted girls into saviors; another part wanted to yell at the witch, to tell her it was none of her business messing with children’s lives like that, and to make her swear to never do it again.
But Sophie said nothing in the end, and simply ran out the way she came. And when she emerged on the other side of the cave’s mouth, there was nothing behind her but a wall of ordinary rock, weathered and cracked.
When Sophie returned to her village, she found that no time had passed since she’d left. Her sisters, who had only begrudgingly agreed to play with her such a childish game as hide-and-seek, now discovered her at once. It’d been years since they won. Usually they’d just leave her hiding, which counted as a victory, but didn’t feel like one.
In the village life was much the same, except now when someone called Sophie fickle, she knew that they were the ones who didn’t know the meaning of the word. They thought it meant unsteady, but it really meant unstuck. Their coin had landed; hers was still spinning in the air.
And when Sophie’s uncle recounted his same-old story, about how he’d lived as a dragon for almost half his life, everyone but Sophie laughed. They knew it wasn’t real—after all, they would have remembered a dragon coming to their village—but Sophie knew that the girl from the tower had been her, even if her uncle didn’t recognize her after all those years. Besides, he had grown up since then, and even he didn’t seem to believe his tale. For him, it was a childhood fancy; for her, it had been her first adventure.
But Sophie knew it was just the first of many, because Sophie still had a very fickle heart indeed.
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Eden Frenkel is a speculative fiction writer and a computer scientist—two endeavors he often fails to tell apart. His hobbies include pro-level procrastination, mental gymnastics, and various other compulsions. This is his first publication. You may follow him on Twitter @edenbynight, but do so at your own peril. |