After centuries of being confined to this stone in what once was a raging river, and had now formed into little more than a stream, set in marshland, he lived for the days the magic set him free. To be able to breathe, to eat, to take flight, and to just be himself, free of restraint for those precious twenty-four hours in the human realm meant everything. He’d very quickly learnt that humans were not his friends. In the early centuries he’d been hunted, barely escaped with his life, in fact, as the stories about him grew. Hunters sat in wait for him to emerge from the stone, and his body bore the scars to prove it. Cloaking himself the minute he emerged was the only way to go, and as time marched on, and dragons became mere legend the pressure on him eased. As humankind marched toward the twenty-first century, he was blown away by the advances he witnessed. He also spent less and less time in the human sphere, preferring to spend his time in his castle, and on his land. The only place to have escaped the original curse, hidden by the veils of time, after the witch’s frantic attempts to amend the curse, which had condemned her own father.
