In the month of October, on the proper day, a man wearing a strange hat sat in the middle of a dusty old side-road and sang an even-stranger song five times.
Then he left a little bit of folded paper on the road and walked away.
Ten minutes later, a dragon stepped on the paper and stopped cold.
“Oh fuck,” it thought. “Not AGAIN.”
The sorcerer did a little dance. He’d planned it since the night before and so it both lacked spontaneity and showed (unflattering) insight into his character. Especially the little shuffle at the end with the rapid clapping.
“Ha-hah!” he cackled.
The dragon waited.
“Ha-HA!” elaborated the sorcerer.
The dragon waited a little more.
“Ah-HA, HA HA HA, BWA AHA, HA HA, HA. HEH,” concluded the sorcerer. “Right. Dragon!”
“Yes?”
“Beast of the fiery pit!”
“Sure.”
“Fiend of the higher air!”
“Okay.”
“I command thee-”
“Yeah, if you must.”
“-I command thee to grant me wishes three!”
“Three wishes. You don’t have to be fancy about it. Sure. Release me.”
The sorcerer squinted at the dragon down his nose, which was tricky because it was pretty small and somewhat adorably button-like. “Do you – do thee think me a fool, wyrm? Thine confabulations and deceit shall find no purchase within me! Swear to me by the fire, by the air, and by the blood that make up yourst bits!”
The dragon held up a claw. “Right. I swear. Done. Let me out.”
“Did thou-”
“Cross my hearts and hope to die, pull off my wings just like a fly. And please stop saying ‘thou’ ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ and anything else like that.”
This seemed to annoy the sorcerer.
“Fine, you’re bound. Three wishes are mine! For my first wish I desire…dominion over men and women!”
“’Dominion?’” asked the dragon.
“What?”
“Oh, forget it,” said the dragon, and it flapped its wings and launched from the ground with all four limbs at terrifying speed, kicking up a windburst that sent the sorcerer’s pants over his head and his ass over his teakettle.
An hour later, it returned.
“Climb aboard,” it told the sorcerer. And he did, and it launched again and this time he was there to see the explosion of force from the other side, to gawp in surprise as the whole world became as small and unreal and far away as a picture in a child’s book of bedtime stories.
Then they landed, and he fell off.
“This is Stebs Hill,” said the dragon. “I asked around town for the deed, here it is, you now possess a dominion over the six hundred twenty five men and seven hundred fourteen women of the visible horizon from this point. It was pretty cheap; the soil up here’s garbage and there’s no prospects for mining or quarrying. No wonder everyone else around here lives in the valley.”
“Barf,” said the sorcerer.
“Yes. Barf indeed.”
“You twisted my words!” yelled the sorcerer, hastily scrubbing the bitter juice from the corners of his mouth.
“Me?” asked the dragon. “No. Not really. I just misinterpreted them. I mean, I assume I did, since you’re so angry. Unless you wished for something you hated?”
The sorcerer paced seven mystic circles into the summit of Stebs Hill, chanted some ominous words that sounded suspiciously like swears, and made elaborate, thaumaturgical gestures in the direction of the dragon and the dragon’s friends and family.
“Dragon!” he shouted.
“Well, yes, we already-”
“Worm with wings!”
“It’s got a ‘y’ in i-”
“Carrion-thirster, goat-fucker!” said the sorcerer, with more spittle than words.
“What? And that was just o-”
“DO AS I SAY AND COMMAND,” shrieked the sorcerer, “and GRANT ME WEALTH BEYOND MORTAL UNDERSTANDING!”
The dragon shrugged and took off in the same instance, an economy of motion only available to a very lucky subset of vertebrates. The sorcerer coughed his lungs out for the duration of its absence, a hardship shared by many smokers.
“Climb on again,” said the dragon.
The sorcerer climbed on again. This time he shut his eyes for the entire flight, out of principal, spite, and the suspicion that he was within rights to demand a refund.
Thump.
The sorcerer opened his eyes again. They were standing on the (slightly smouldering) remains of a pea garden, outside a university.
“Their philosophy classes were all fully occupied, and you have no accreddition,” said the dragon, “but I removed a few of the excess students and a few officials and now they’re open to you staying until your degree is complete.”
“wealth,” said the sorcerer, blankly. “grant.”
“It’s SORT of a grant,” said the dragon. “Or maybe more like a fund. Or insurance. Incineration insurance. I guess protection money’s less oblique.”
“Stop,” said the sorcerer, recovering a part of himself that had slipped from his body. “Go. Go away. With me. Now.”
This time the sorcerer watched the clouds in the sky. They looked like faces. They looked like they were laughing at him.
“Why?” he asked the dragon.
“Why what?”
“Why have you done this?!” screamed the sorcerer into the wind. “I’ve asked nothing that wasn’t within your power! I’ve asked only what you could gran – GIFT me, with the barest of efforts! Less effort than your idiotic games have cost you! Why torment me thus – are you so depraved, so wicked, so perverse?!”
“Look,” said the dragon, “here’s the thing: if we’re having problems, it’s because I can barely understand most of this language I’m using – I learned my first when I was eight hundred and nine. I’d never understood the idea of anything else having thoughts. I’d never understood the idea of communicating anything, to anyone, ever. Frankly, it’s amazing I haven’t eaten you yet in a fit of solipsism, spell or no spell. Me and you communicating at ALL is more than you should ask for, and you’re just quibbling over the wording.”
The sorcerer opened his mouth, shut it, opened it, made a hissing sound like a kettle, puffed up like a toad, twittered like a songbird, and slumped over like a man who’d just had his every dream skewered with a sharpened steeple.
“Take me home,” he said.
“Sure thing,” said the dragon. And it dropped him over a volcano.
The sorcerer tried to make a wish on the way down, but the screaming made it very difficult to concentrate and besides it was his fourth anyways, and therefore null and void as all fourth wishes are.
The dragon then made a wish for a nap, settled into the volcano, and worked on fulfilling it. Which it did, although there were a few uncomfortable twists into the second decade, when its leg fell asleep.