Under the old king's barrow, in a hollow place hidden from the winter mists and the summer sun, a dragon coils.
Round and round a hoard of gold its long length stretches, pin tail to razor snout, plugging the airless space like a giant bung. The old king, who had once sat proudly in the centre of his gift hoard, now lies in a corner, a clump of bones swept into the shadows and forgotten.
In the darkness, nothing stirs. The dragon lies as still and silent as a graveyard skull. For a thousand years or more it has never moved, not an inch. But its mind is burning.
The fire is barely a needle prick in size – a blood-red point glowing in the dark, a tiny flame of anger, lust and greed, squeezed almost to nothing. There is no air in the barrow, but the dragon does not need it. The flame of its mind feeds off its own white fury, and burns, burns, burns down the endless years.
Far overhead, in the bright, green world, little things with hasty bodies live and die. But here in the stillness, change is banished, for the dragon has learned to ignore Time.
To do this, the dragon compresses its mind clean of its memory. It allows the pressure of the earth to squeeze out all traces of the life it has left behind.
One by one, across the centuries, it purges its thoughts; they rise, coiling and uncoiling, through the dead ground like bubbles in the sea. At last, almost imperceptible except where they shift the dew, they emerge from the earth and hang above the grass until the breezes drift them away.
The ground where the discarded thoughts appear is thickly grown with foxglove and harebell, and home to a large company of brightly-coloured lizards and little birds. Eager for strange knowledge, their quick eyes watch from hidden places, waiting with a silent hunger.
Only rarely – once, twice in a millennium – does the dragon notice the sagging earth pressing down upon its back. Then the red point flares with sudden anger, and far above, the earth quivers.
Long centuries pass.
The barrow flattens under the weight of grass seeds.
The dragon lies still.