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Chased by a grizzly, a turquoise kobold darted across Patronus’ vision.

Prone, and camouflaged by foliage, the large Silver watched with keen ghostly eyes. Webbed head fans fluttered on the entertained dragon.

Panting and whining, the kobold Venter sprung through logs and brambles, dashing sometimes on two feet/sometimes on all four.

Cornered at a steep rock ledge, he spun backward. Before him, slathering bear jaws split with a spittly roar: The beast several times his size lumbered forward with its hulking gait, its muscles rippling through its burly russet coat. Whirling in peril, Venter scrabbled up the slope of sifting stones. He ascended far enough for his little hind paw to flick higher before a paw tried mauling it. That smashed stones and pebbles into an avalanche below.

Venter was pawing up the slope as determinedly as he could. Then a soundless rumble drilled the area—disoriented him. He thought it to be a side-effect of his trepidation. Or maybe it was the bear beginning to climb. No, please don’t be that—he dared not look down—

THUMP. A god-like jolt made debris steam in shafts of sun. Aloft he backflipped; his desperate claws groped at the sky. Then … then, hurt punched through his spine and flesh, and ringing of the ears and confusion followed.

But of one factor he was not confused: He had fallen. And for that he would pay the price.

A bear roar resounded, then was snipped off suddenly, like a clipped thorn.

Eyes stayed worriedly squeezed closed. Then, one risked a peek.

What Venter saw weren’t the splayed jaws of his ursine predator. Hot slather which splattered down on his short snout came not from his ursine predator. Instead, suspended about five Venter-heights above were the stretched jaws of a thorn-bearded dragon. Light silver gullet plates flexed and rippled, twinkling with sun as the dragon’s throat distended per lurch and squelch of its vast, serpentine length. From the mouth of the squinting Silver, the grizzly rustled in weakening spasms. Groans of the bear softened with each powerful gulp of the superior predator through muffling sheets of convulsing silken muscles.

Patronus rose three Venter-heights off the ground with his forepaws, balancing on sturdy haunches. He swallowed the ursine menace’s forelegs. Then, its curved thickset gut. The dragon’s skull and neck trembled with labor as the body of the bear throbbed, the bear slashing uselessly into the sturdy, lubricated esophageal flesh. One staggering swallow planted down the paws of the Silver. GU-WOULCH came the crisp squelch. An anatomized bulge cantered down the meandering trail of underbelly plates. With a deep clear gurble, the metallic belly of Patronus distended, the bulge of the bear curving it like the shielded backside of a pudgy armadillo.

Rolling onto his belly, Venter saw the engorged dragon midriff, and felt his world slow with fear and reverence. The belly pregnantly swollen with bear—wrought with his would-be demise—threshed beneath the barricade of dragon armor in a moist, acidized sac. Humming with deep pleasure, Patronus flumped, anchoring his body weight on his paunch. Suddenly, Venter was slugged by the rank, heavy slime of a thunderous belch! The sound clattered through nature’s girth with the resonance of clanged bronze; with the weight of a hoard of the same.

Instinct urged Venter to flee—to be safely off with his life. But as he rose to his feet and took those first steps back, the dragon’s sea of silvery scales and pearly white eyes pierced his soul with a hook—one which reeled him toward the dragon’s turgid middle.

Patronus snorted, leered at the kobold and lowered his head, slithering with it toward the kobold intimidatingly.

“I chose the grizzly over the smaller meal,” said the dragon, “aye. But I am not so temperate as to pass on seconds if the second one tempts me.” Fires flashed from slitted nostrils. “Go, kobold. Be glad that you were in the company of two preying beasts, and not one.”

Small feet pattered backward at the threat. But then, they slowly plodded forward. Their owner’s snout was shyly veered, as well as his eyes.

“Forgive me, dragon … I wish no insult to your kindness. But I am indebted to you for my life. If you choose to take it, you have every right. But for as long as I draw breath, it is in my will to repay you for this kindness. Let me serve you.”

“The same way the grizzly served me?” Patronus asked. He harrumphed humorously.

Venter shook his head, then raced to the side of Patronus’ burbling stomach. The dragon blinked. There came a delectable pushing of paws below his ribs. Although no more powerful than a small critter, the kobold with his massage stirred both the dragon’s heart and the contents of his gut.

Soon, Patronus found himself salivating and grinning like a devious dope. That’s when the bear struck at the kobold through the belly walls. The plated paunch ricocheted and mauled Venter to the ground, but its absorbent interior flesh took most of the shock, so that Venter only seemed minorly dazed.

Still, the dragon’s face warped in a flash: He looked inflamed at the bear’s offense. He breathed in deeply, and then released a belly-purging belch, depriving the bear of oxygen as punishment. From then on the ursine was weakened and squirmed tamely, and the bubbles of the dragon’s chyme seemed to shudder the belly walls with more vigor than the bear could.

“He will not harm you again.” Patronus narrowed his eyes on Venter with a protective resolve. “So you may continue.”

And continue the kobold did. It was then that Patronus rolled onto his flank to expose the center of his round gravid abdomen. It was then that Venter tended to the guarded dome of flesh, to the rumbling, glorping compliments of the babbling stomach brew. The dragon stretched and purred his approval, enveloping the smaller reptile in a sonic embrace …

This he seemed to do for twenty more years, which seamlessly slipped by in the same spot, the rubbing of the dragon’s belly uninterrupted. Around the two of them, autumn leaves fell, made naked the trees and patched the ground; winter snows descended, made misty the air and blotted their scales; spring winds swept color over the blank canvas of the woods like invisible custodians, and took all leaves and snow with it; summer seized their surrounds with floral and fruity and fervid hues and smells. Twenty times this happened around the two of them, faster, faster. In an illusion of time that illustrated seconds, the dragon and the kobold aged and grew a couple of inches larger each. The dragon grew a longer thorn beard.

How seasons came and went … How their first time of meeting seemed like only a moment ago.

Lazily straightening his neck along the foliage, Patronus crooned to his companion’s rubbings. Finally, a squlorch pushed through his gullet. A rugged round bulge rippled his throat plates, and then a large belch erupted, disposing the bones and skulls of a couple of wolves. They lay in a carpet of slather and of belly goop from his jaws to the rock ledge, which Venter had tried to climb twenty years ago. As Patronus contemplated this, his sated stomach lull him toward a summer day’s sleep.

But today—today—a strong, surreal feeling of vividness and of purpose overcame him. It was right when a bridge between his surroundings and his dreams was starting to form.

“Venter.” The dragon spoke soft, but blinked wide awake. “I should tell you. A few months after I first met you here, I had a dream. It has been recurring since then, but I’ve said nothing of it to you.”

“Oh?”

“I thought it to be an old parable that I had heard somewhere, or the result of eating too many antelope before sleep-time. But the night last, the dream was so strong: again, I was the sea dragon, and the blood of thousands boiled the water around me, and then the gem was mine and the village was there and the smells of the marina so real, so undreamable …”

Venter’s paws stopped toiling away, and he listened precisely.

“What else happened in the dream, friend?”

“I see it now as not a dream, but as a play of the true past,” said Patronus. “Believe me when I say this is true. Embedded in the navel of an unworthy sea dragon, who stands on two and is no larger than you, there is a sky blue stone. It was plundered despicably—stolen from a dolphin tribe of an unnamed island—and his possession of it was paid for with the blood of the innocent. What this gem does is reincarnate him each time he is eaten. And so every month he stands on the docks of the village, and he sacrifices himself to a sea serpent before the people. And when they see him resurrected, he renews the claim that he is a god; and so they believe him, worship him and feed him lavishly.

“You are much more worthy of the gem than he, Venter. What he uses for everlasting fame, you deserve for everlasting protection—a kind more durable than my dragon armor; a kind that can fend for you in a way my dragon fangs can’t. I have dreamt that you may someday be unafraid of stomachs, including my own. And you could be! Think, Venter. You could feed me, and I could give you the hospitality of my belly, without fear!”

Venter thought of his last close call. Not even a month ago, a panther had nearly sheared him to scraps, but he had fit into the hole of a tree and Patronus had happened to be around to hear his resounding cries for help.

“Would it hurt?” the kobold asked.

Patronus shook his head. “I have died as the sea dragon, and it doesn’t.”

Venter’s eyes glistened. “This all sounds better than anything. So what are you thinking?”

Patronus brooded this as he rose tremblingly onto all fours, his wings slowly spreading, readying him for the sky. “In a sanctuary, below a guarded passage in a seaside village, the sea dragon makes his bed. I want to go to the villain; I want to take his gemstone and give it to you. Will you let me?”

Venter pondered this for a while, then agreed. And then Patronus rolled onto his belly then straightened his tail into a diagonal walkway. The kobold hopped on top of the tail and teetered his way to the top of the dragon’s haunches, and then seated himself on a leather saddle between the Silver’s shoulder blades and secured himself with straps.

Oak trees bowed to gusts of the dragon as he winged above them. He then accelerated southward and thumped musically along a thermal.

The Silver soared through a lush, prehistoric ravine of bluffs which stood a thousand feet tall, and then some, on either side of him. Below his shadow, trees regressed in height and largeness and eventually receded at the decree of a boundless beach. The beach was of sands of a more piercing white than ivory: And on the stony shore, before the deep blue, a rock shaft spanned as wide as dozens of lined-up blue whales spanned long; reached as high as the few bright clouds in the deep blue above, almost; and between its juts of vegetated stone, a proud village had been wrought.

“This is it,” breathed the dragon, “the place from my dreams.”

All the sunbaked bricks, the roofs and the markets and the plaza, as vibrant as the village’s dispersed menagerie of flowers … it was just as the dragon had dreamt it in the sea wyrm’s eyes. The delightful whip of wind on his wings, the refreshing smell of the ocean and the flowers and the freshly caught cod and the prawns and the clams, the seafoods being smoked—he had been delusional about none of it!

Venter cried out happily, his voice tornadoing away, as the dragon swooped down toward the village with strokes of his wings. He set afoot a plaza roamed by orcas and dolphins and gators. The marine folk awed as he strode slowly through them and into a market street, for the only dragon they knew was their own god.

Patronus wandered by their shops and up their slopes and across their bridges for some time, but his focused seemed muddled. Where is the passageway? He could not remember.

“Dragon,” said one of the dolphin folk, “you’re some cousin of Calamar the sea dragon, are you not?”

“Or might you and your friend be to do us harm?” asked one of the gator folk.

Patronus and Venter eyed each other, brooded, then knew by the look of the other’s face exactly what the story would be.

“Aye,” Patronus said. “It has been too long since I have seen my brother. I have heard that he is here but don’t know my way about the village. Where’s he?”

“You are going the wrong way,” the dolphin said. “Brother of our god, I would be honored to take you to him.”

The three descended to the bottom of the village, then walked a path which went to a great cave mouth that faced the sea. It was gulping much of the water of the sea—enough water for several galleons to dock there. The dolphin stepped onto a long dock, and the large dragon took to flight to follow the dolphin to a ledge above the crashing waves. The dragon thanked the dolphin, then the dolphin left the dragon at the entryway to some passage to be questioned by a couple of orcas wielding spears. Uncontent with Patronus’ answers, they blocked the way with an X-shape of crossed weaponry.

“I’ve heard of no brother of Calamar,” said one of the orcas. “Leave.”

“You would challenge a dragon?” asked Patronus, amused.

“There’s one way to find out whether you’re a brother or not,” said the other orca. “I’ll send for him.”

Dragon eyes flared with cinders, as well as slanted nose holes. “I’ve waited years to see my brother.”

“Then you can wait another half an hour. He may still be out hunting.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then your refusal will be met with spears.”

“You would be so foolish so as to fight a dragon? Your spears would stab through my next dinner as chopsticks, but little else. In fact, I think my next dinner will be the two of you.”

“Die to serve our god, or live safely to disobey—the choice is easy. One brings us great joy in the afterlife; the other, no.”

“Oh, you won’t be serving your god—my stomach on the other hand, mayhaps. Does your god look most favorably on the ones who digest slowly in other dragons’ stomachs?”

Putrid breath buffeted one of the guards as giant, ivory teeth grinned inches away from the succulent fat fish face. Both pairs of guard armor began to clatter and both fish mouths chatter. The X-shape of weaponry disappeared.

“It’s good that you serve a dragon,” rumbled amiably Patronus as he stalked past the shaken couple. “Remember, no dragon would celebrate the death of a good servant. Make your dragon happy, and live for him.”

Gawking, both orcas saluted then faced away from the dragon.

Clusters of sapphires glowed on the porous walls, lighting Patronus and his way as he paced down a spiralling passage. But the greatest glow of all—which mesmerized Venter—strengthened once they had made seven loops. It was a fluttery light: the light of sunbeams, of rainbow coral. Before the kobold could question how (how was such light down here), his dragon had stepped into the answer. They were beneath an invisible, magical dome; and beneath Patronus’ feet lay a dry sea floor decorated with sea stars and sand dollars.

Venter awed with his face bathed blissfully in all the sea floor’s hues. Then, the colors seemed to dim a little. “Calamar … is he a magician too?”

“Don’t worry, he’s not. One of his genius devotees put up this dome, not him. He’s crafty, but not in a magical or physical way. Leave worrying about him to me … Since they said he’ll be done hunting soon, expect to see him swim through this force field at any second.”

“Force field?” The kobold unharnessed himself, slid down Patronus’ snout with the dragon’s helpful head-decline, then paced to the unseen. He rubbed his paw over it, but it was awkward because of its arcing surface. The picture that was the sea beyond rippled as he did so, so, in some respects, the force field was like a cold, tense belly. “How would anyone get through this?”

“With a certain gem.”

Venter raised a claw with a sunny aha expression. Patronus’ eyes filled with reflected movement, and he gawked and made a fierce fish-catching motion toward himself. Confused, Venter glanced at his raised claw, then back at the dragon as a pearly pink sea dragon no larger than Venter homed toward the dome behind him. The roiling of the field happened so sudden, and so did the sea dragon’s leap. Calamar tackled the kobold, and pinned him beneath a pudgy gut of pearly white.

“Offering a sacrifice, are we, dragon? A live, squirmy one? The afterlife will be sweet to you.”

The kobold cried out for his dragon, an auroral echo bouncing through the dome, but the sea dragon swallowed his prey too quickly to be stopped. A greedy maw of gold-pierced white lips stretched to a nightmarish length, and then Calamar hefted up Venter and swallowed his whole head, his copious thick slather splattering over the prey entire, the golden piercings of his aquatic ear membranes quaking as the membranes fluttered to a series of swift, voracious gulps. Crisp squelches assailed Venter’s ears as abyss filled his eyes and slimy blubbery fish smells his nose. Peristaltic muscles pulled him toward the hadalpelagic depths of the dragon’s digestive system.

Within seconds, the sea dragon with his lewd grunts-for-gulps had turned his same-size prey into a plump, glimmering bulge. The bulge slunk its way down a generously bloated gullet and a chest cavity. Soon, the tip of the turquoise tail slid through the lips of the pred. Calamar’s stomach ballooned behind the puckered flesh of a navel that was plugged by a sky blue gem.

A meaty slap of the sated midriff preceded a monstrous, maw-fissuring belch! Ghosts of the deafening sound resonated through the dome and through the passage for several seconds after its release.

“Urf, thank you for that delectable little kobold, dragon. Might I have your na—”

Calamar may have completely tuned out Patronus’ threats when he was swallowing Venter, but the sea dragon definitely didn’t miss the sight of the Silver charging forward with mouth ablaze. The sea dragon reeled backward on his heels, then hurled himself toward the ocean behind with such clumsiness, he would have landed under his stomach’s suffocating weight, but the water broke his fall.

A huge forepaw slammed against the dome, curling talons where a bloated belly had been just a blink before. Patronus looked grim but hard to read, and he did not open his paw.

Calamar jetted to safety with an upside-down J of motion, then swam with elegance through the illuminated sea, darting across the Silver’s vision. He taunted the Silver with gut slaps and bubble-roiling bursts of his lips: muffled rumbles that Patronus understood to be big corpulent burps.

Inside of his predator’s stomach, a panicking Venter elbowed and shouldered and rammed into his pliable pearl-pink confines. But any assault against the gut only stretched it like a thick, slick taffy before it rebounded to a splatter of acids and a sick, petering string of groans and gurgles. The pred would grope his squirming bulge yet again and push out a spiteful belch, smiting the waters with quakes and foam.

The supply of oxygen waned. The belly bulge sucked tighter, carving the kobold’s frantic, shapeshifting shape into the full paunch. Calamar roamed the gurgly canvas of his sated gut with his paws. He fondled over every kicking jut, every crease—even reached to massage the sunken folds around his navel stone …

The stone? The stone?

Bubbles geysered up from Calamar’s maw in an incomprehensible scream. Blinded by his own aquatic smog, he darted forward, socked his fists against the unseen dome. When the stuff of his anger cleared, a lethal countenance was leering him from a horned head: Held in the C-shape of the Silver’s claw and thumb-claw was the sky blue gem.

Aye, Patronus had missed Calamar’s belly by an inch, but not its sparkling cerulean protrusion.

“You have a treasure of mine, and I of you,” said the dragon. “I’ve not swallowed yours yet, but I might.”

Red faced as a piranha, Calamar whipped up a frenzy of bubbles, beating his body against the barrier. Minus some blood, it looked as effervescent outside as the feast of a piranha pack.

“Or, we could swap treasures.”

The sea dragon’s eyes swelled as large as gemstones. Lust and yearning and nothing else reflected off them. His hands seized his struggling gut bulge with wild, twitching claws. He heaved and heaved. His eyes welled with tears. His throat warbled—inflated in segments with sickly paroxysms of the deflating gut and the swollen sphincter. Hope and vigor returned to the squirms of the kobold bulge, going up, and up and—

The deep sea steamed again as that monstrous maw wretched up its meal. The turquoise kobold speared out—clutched the dome, gagging, slapping at Patronus’ image—

The right maw harpooned through the barrier, yawned its giant jaws over Venter. SNAP.

Enveloped by the magical clearance of Patronus’ body, Venter was pulled through the force field. He was shaking—was clutched by shock. But he was on the tongue of his dragon’s warm, toasty maw, guarded by arcs of legendary teeth. And he was safe.

Patronus spat him up.

“Stomach bile flavor,” he complained, and spat again the other way. “You don’t usually taste so rancid.”

“I didn’t know your mouth could fit me.”

“Never took any chances.” Patronus saw the sea dragon flogging the force field like a lunatic. “You want your stone back, Calamar? The dolphins want their lives back. Here you go, Venter.”

Seeing the Silver place the sky blue gem in the kobold’s hand, Calamar speared off past a spongy wall of rocks.

“I put it in my navel?”

Patronus’ face changed: He looked intuitively sad, but he smiled and nosed the kobold’s temple.

“Aye. Thank you, Venter.”

“For what? Patronus? … Are you okay?”

“Thank you for serving me.”

Patronus opened his mouth to speak, but the gemstone did it for him. Its voice was a grand and solemn one, the voice of a dragon as old as the seas themselves. It was stimulating and it was soothing.

“The living rise and fall, the tides of a sea … The one who holds the stone is the sea. When one part of him recedes, another ascends to replace it. Would you accept the role of the sea for the fall of another?”

“Patronus, do you know of this riddle from your dreams?”

“I was always somewhat aware of it, but disbelieving … fighting the current, I suppose. Venter, go on—you know the answer.”

The dragon sounded choked but did not stop smiling. Venter did not want to delay—it would sadden his dragon further.

“Alright—yes. Yes, I accept my role!”

The kobold pressed the stone into his navel, and the waters of the sea around them buckled as though a great naval ship had broken the surface above. Suddenly, Patronus roared and his legs collapsed, and he fell as a tide falls. Dragon arms wrapped around Venter, hugging him against a belly you could almost see the other side of the ocean through.

“I wasn’t sure, but now I know my fate.”

“Patronus?” Venter was surprised to find that he blinked tears. “What fate? What’s happening?”

“Stay your tears, little kobold. Did I not tell you that I would die to protect you? This does not sadden me.”

And the kobold screamed his name, clutching tighter at the tide which was receding. And the dragon chuckled and stroked his head and began to hum a certain tune. And then the humming subsided, the belly scales Venter had buried his snout in disappeared, and Venter dropped to the sea floor.

A quake lit his navel stone a bright white. The second next, the stone gleamed sky blue no longer, but silver, like the scales of a protector.

Venter looked down at the stone. Yearning and nothing else reflected off its spherical polish. He rubbed it manically; he cried the name of his dragon, beckoning him to return. But instead returned the dragon’s words:

Make your dragon happy, and live for him.

He had not been speaking to the guards, but to Venter.

On his gaping mouth, streaked with tears, a smile began to spread. It was then that a quick stamping of metal boots reverberated from the passage, and Venter became alert and aware of his belly stone. He wrapped his tail around his belly, the way he would if he were afraid. But he was not afraid.

Calamar charged into the dome, leading two dozen guards. When he saw the seemingly scared kobold alone, he halted three yards away from him, and his entourage halted too. The sea dragon considered him as a king considers a thief’s accomplice, but his eyes broomed right over his belly-wrapping tail.

“So your friend abandoned you as soon as he got what he wanted,” the sea dragon mused.

“Not like you think. He’s gone, but he’s with me.”

“Cutely poetic. At least he left me some dinner. Guards, search the perimeter for the Silver. This one escaped my stomach once. He won’t a second time.”

A tongue as thick as a small snake lashed along the sea dragon’s lips. Those eyes turned to slits as slim as his serpentine nostrils. Venter hugged himself tighter with his tail—hugged his tail, and braced himself—

The dragon pounced, pinned him, swallowed him. A taut chute of flesh, so familiar to him now, raised him and sent rushes of blood toward his head. GULP, GULP, GULP … The humid, sticky constriction of the ravenous predator pulled him toward the fate he had fought so hard to escape once. But now, when he squirmed, he squirmed because he indulged in and treasured the tight embrace of the squishy confines.

That pearly pink paunch swelled again with his shape. And it shook, and it shook—and chyme ticked away at it and shrank it. This took only a few minutes with the beast’s speedy metabolism.

Venter’s last defined expression before he melted was happiness …

When he unmelted (he lay curled in a white abyss), his expression was the same.

A talon brushed his belly. He opened his eyes. A large dragon tongue slurped over his vision. The smell of Patronus’ breath stirred his soul, and a draconic croon stirred his bones.

“I wasn’t done humming to you.” Patronus chuckled.

So he began humming again. And soon, he started to sing. And the kobold sung back.

“Don’t you forget our lyrics,” Patronus said. “You won’t forget?”

“I won’t,” Venter promised.

“Good … Find another dragon … Serve him as faithfully as you served me … It is time for me to fade … Goodbye, little kobold.”

And so Patronus drew his last breath, and his chapter was ended.

When Venter awoke, he was alive again. His navel stone was slightly less silver, tinged with its original sky blue.

The kobold journeyed back to the woods. He searched and searched, but couldn’t find the cave of his dragon. Sometimes he could not help but mourn, but his sadness and regrets receded as he grew older.

One day a grizzly cornered him at an unfamiliar rock ledge. But he was not afraid, he was not afraid.

He lived quite a few lives after that. Each life had fuzzier and fuzzier memories of a silver dragon. In each life, he remembered clearly the lyrics to a song: a song of servitude and of belly-rubbing. But finally, there came a time where he was born and his navel stone was purely sky blue, and he could recall nothing of the dragon who had first sung the lyrics.

And then one day, a wolf stalked him through the woods … And a dragon found him: a dragon hungry for wolves, who would be in need of belly rubs.

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