While the ‘Dragonslayer’ title is one commonplace among the wealthy who wish to show off, it rarely means anything. Young dragons are cornered, hunted by groups, brought down by a dozen noble scions and twenty trained adventurers. Needless to say, this is never done where any adult dragons can observe. That’s an easy way to lose a whole generation’s heirs.


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    Life as a tiny lizard in a dungeon shaped by a cruel and capricious ancient dragon was surprisingly simple.


    Run for your life. Get mauled, eaten, or otherwise dismembered. Reverse time. Repeat.


    Repeat.


    Repeat.


    Jair could summon Maelstrom, but it was massive. He could barely climb up onto its pommel, it was like scaling a silversteel cliff. The threaded blades through its hilt were still sharp enough to cut him even in his lizard form, but he couldn’t revert to before he entered the dungeon.


    The first time he reverted, he thought he’d found the way out. Golden light sliced his tiny form apart in an impossible network of lines and he reappeared back at the entrance to the dungeon, just after Skyclaw had deposited him, before he’d even used Darkflame. Fortunately, the reversion unwound his state back to human, albeit with some poison-dragon injuries from the passage in.


    No thank you. Further please.


    He gripped Maelstrom, Temporal Reversion tore through him, and he reappeared the exact moment again.


    Not good. He needed to get away.


    He’d been mauled by a star hydra, half eaten by seascourge, and came close to losing himself in Oronthire more than once. Nothing in his countless years of experience came close to Mercurios’s power. Even Ryenzo was like a trivial, inconsequential thing compared to this.


    The last thing he wanted was to be kept as a dungeon’s pet for eternity, his self slowly supplanted until all that remained was yet another creature for it to direct at will.


    No. He couldn’t stay here.


    Again.


    Again.


    “Where do you think you’re going?” Mercurios’s voice echoed around him, deep and mocking. “Don’t you remember where you are?”


    Right. Dungeon rules applied: he had to enter or leave physically, couldn’t use a soulspell to escape.


    Jair hissed, ran a hand through his hair—or, rather, ran the melted remnant of his hand across the raw flesh of his skull. “Gah.” He darkflamed himself back to Skyclaw’s mouth. “We’re leaving.”


    “We just got here. And who was that voice?” She stared up wistfully at the endless fog that passed for a ceiling. “It sounds familiar, like I’ve heard it before in a dream.”


    It felt as though his body and soul were still disconnected, thoughts and control drifting further apart by the moment. “I just wanted to see the place, now I have, we should go.”


    “Jair? What’s wrong?” Skyclaw nudged at him with her nose, concerned.


    Jair fell over, his body no longer responding to him even enough to stand.


    Mercurios chuckled. “Leave him. This is his punishment.”


    “Punishment?”


    “He refuses to release you from your oaths, daughter.”


    “I don’t want to be released. I want to travel the world with him and fight the vampires on the moon!”


    “That is only your foolish attachment talking. I will teach you better, as soon as he divides you from his soul. But it seems he must learn that there is no defying me before he will do so.”


    The hint of irony in Mercurios’ voice was enough to forewarn him.


    Jair knew what was coming an instant before the full force of Mercurios’ wrath hit him, but knowing wasn’t enough to let him counter it. The force of the grand-patriarch’s will pulverized his body, scattered his manabody, and left his soul drifting and dying.


    Normal dungeons were dangerous enough, but Mercurios was ancient beyond compare. He did things Jair would only have considered theoretically possible in the most extreme of circumstances, and casually broke the restraints common dungeons operated under as though they were inconsequential things.


    Before he could panic too much, Mercurios made him a new copy of his newt body and shoved him into it, and once again Jair was a tiny newt.


    Skyclaw towered over him, a single claw bigger than his entire body. She leaned down, grinning. “Ooh, is that him? He’s so cute!”


    One of the strange alien elves stepped out of the shadow of a pillar and came over to pick Jair up.


    Mercurios’ voice echoed down as Skyclaw came to follow. “Do not try to help him, or I will have you separated by force.”


    So she stood back, and Jair’s life became the most torturous repetition since his run up Mount Sanctum.


    The attendant dropped him into a maze full of rats. Which wouldn’t be a problem if they weren’t easily ten times the size of the tiny newt that was now Jair.


    He could summon Maelstrom, but it didn’t fit in the maze so it ended up wedged in his way and blocked the way forward, and getting past the crossguard to reach a bladed part was a struggle.


    The rats were hungry.


    Jair had nothing to fight back with. He ran. He summoned Maelstrom to hide behind.


    He died. He reverted to the beginning, spent a confused moment as the human he’d once been before Mercurios grabbed him and crushed him and threw him back into the maze.


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    He lost track of time, as he often did when repeating a specific section of the timeline. He survived a few minutes longer, called Maelstrom at just the right moments, tricked his adversaries into running into it, the one weapon he had at his disposal.


    Finally, when he cleared the entire maze and stood perched atop Maelstrom’s hilt with a small pile of dead rats around him, Mercurios only laughed.


    “Still defiant, I see. Don’t imagine you’ve won anything. I have all the time in the world.” And had one of his attendants drop him into an even bigger maze.


    This more closely resembled a dungeon floor, more open areas and cave-like tunnels rather than the flat stone walls of the rat maze, but this one also had cats. Playful kittens, who would bat him about and carry him around without killing him.


    He didn’t want to imagine what Mercurios got up to in his free time, if he had such a sadistic sequence of trials already prepared. How many people had he broken in this same sequence? Or did he only wait until the presence of the dungeon wore away at their soul enough to let him take over?


    Either way, Jair had a limited timeline.


    But being a tiny newt did restrict his ability to really… do anything but run and hide.


    And die.


    Sometimes Mercurios grabbed his soul and shoved him into a replacement body, let him continue the current trial rather than starting over. Sometimes he waited until the last moment, then nudged Jair back into contact with Maelstrom so he could revert.


    The kittens were harder to outwit than the rats, and just thinking that made Jair want to murder someone. That he was wholly at the mercy of something so helpless frustrated him to no end.


    But if Mercurios thought this would be enough to break him, he hadn’t taken nearly a deep enough look at Jair’s soul. Frustration was a familiar companion. He wouldn’t ignore it, wouldn’t dull it, would endure it and face it and listen to what it told him. Even if that was just Mercurios is an evil old monster.


    When he finally survived long enough and found the perfect route to destroy the kittens, there were swarms of wasps half the size of him and those were another new layer of awful. After a while, he took to prolonging the time running desperately in the rat maze and being tormented by kittens just to avoid moving on to the wasps, and even he could tell how warped that was.


    When instead of searching for the optimal path forward he was optimizing staying stuck in place the longest, it felt like a betrayal of everything he was… but he was so tired and so afraid all the time. However much he might try to tell his dumb little lizard body to relax and just wait it out, he always found himself running, fighting, hiding, running.


    Dying.


    Surviving.


    Existing.


    The maze. The tunnels. The hive. He couldn’t do anything about the hive. It was simply overwhelming, no matter what sequence of events he undertook. Too many enemies, no way to really protect himself.


    Run. Die.


    Repeat.


    “Just give up, foolish mortal. Let my children go.”


    “Never.” Mercurios hadn’t made him a mute lizard, and Jair’s grasp of draconic was sufficient for him to speak, just so he could admit defeat when he’d had enough. But, being Jair, ‘admit defeat’ wasn’t something he was capable of.


    Only reframe. Attack the situation from a new angle. He was no stranger to feelings of helplessness, overwhelm, crushing impossibility. Sometimes he could win by throwing himself against it over and over, but sometimes he needed to change his approach before he could progress.


    And though he was here to protect Skyclaw, she was still an asset. He didn’t have to do this alone.


    He summoned Maelstrom the moment he was dropped into the hive, then called out Skyclaw. She looked around in confusion for a moment, then noticed Jair.


    “Why does it feel like it’s been a long time since I was out here?” She looked around, swatted away a few wasps that came close, and Jair hid under her claw. “Jair? What’s happening?”


    “I’m tired of getting killed, so I figured you could help relieve the monotony.”


    “So you’ve finally decided to give her back?” Mercurios demanded, his laughter rumbling through the dungeon. “Come, daughter. Bring the wretched thing with you.”


    Silverscale picked up newt-Jair and followed the path the dungeon opened for them back through passages and into Mercurios’ throne room.


    Mercurios looked significantly larger from his perspective as tiny tiny. Oddly majestic, probably intentionally so. He loomed over the two of them with


    “Huh, I would have expected you to look less like a lazy lizard from this angle,” Jair commented with faux innocence. The initial shock of helplessness from however months or years ago might have kept him silent or cautious at first, but after playing Mercurios’ games for too long left him desperately in need of anything that wasn’t the same dull chases over and over again.


    Mercurios growled low and stalked forward. Green acidic fog wisped from his mouth, so dense it melted through the diamond of the floor and the stone of the pillars as he walked closer. “I grow weary of your tiresome defiance.


    Skyclaw set Jair down and crouched over him protectively, even taking a step toward her irate ancestor. “He is mine, not yours.”


    “All within my domain is mine.” Mercurios circled her lazily, prowling the edges of the room. “You can do nothing I do not permit.”


    Skyclaw turned to keep herself between him and Jair. “I don’t understand why you’re so unhappy. He’s only ever helped us! Well, apart from the time when he killed the entire clan, but we undid that.”


    “He holds undue power over you, over your siblings.” He huffed out an acidic breath that burned through the diamond layer to the gold underneath, sending it running and warped. “My grandchildren.”


    “I gave myself freely and do not regret my trade. My siblings chose this without anything being promised in return or threatened if they did not.” She reared back, then shouted at full volume, “Silverscale, back me up here!"


    Silverscale appeared beside her, to both his and Jair’s confusion. "What? How am I here? I thought I was with Qahri-Seni."


    "It''s time for us to convince grandfather to let our soul-brother go." Skyclaw stamped a tiny foot imperiously. "Come on, Zyesi. Enry! Ynze!"


    One by one the entire clutch emerged until they stood around Jair in a protective circle.


    Mercurios’ eyes narrowed dangerously. "You would defy me? For a miserable thing like him?"


    "He saved us," Enryzan said hotly. He raised his head and huffed out a cloud of poison gas, which then exploded with a spark. "Stop tormenting him."


    "You are my children, not my masters. If you insist on pitting yourselves against me, I can put you in with him."


    "Do it." No hesitation. Zyesi stepped forward, and Detyar and Silverscale were close behind. Skyclaw wavered, glancing up at the patriarch, then down at the tiny lizard beneath their gaze.


    "Then join him." Mercurios'' voice echoed and reverberated, fury shaking the ground. The three who''d stepped forward froze stiffly, then their bodies lifted into the air helplessly before they scattered apart, torn to unrecognizable shreds of blood and bone under the weight of Mercurios’ fury, splattered across the walls.


    But where Jair''s soul had lingered after his body''s destruction, theirs were not free for Mercurios to play with.


    Maelstrom pulled them back in, protective, and Jair felt their souls nestle warm within him.


    "You dare interfere?" Mercurios snarled. He jumped down from his throne, so irate that he physically shoved Skyclaw and her remaining siblings aside to glare down at Jair. "You think you can turn my family against me so easily?"


    Mercurios raised one foreclaw. The cold fury in his eyes made it clear that he wasn''t going to be letting him off with something simple like becoming a lizard this time.


    "Grandfather, don''t!" Skyclaw threw herself forward, snatched up Jair in her mouth and crouched over him in a protective ball.


    Mercurios stopped, stepped back and stared her down.


    Skyclaw''s chest was pulsing rapidly but she stood defiant. "He''s mine. You won''t hurt him."


    "Just get us out," Jair whispered. He summoned Maelstrom, and Skyclaw jumped as it sliced into her tongue. "Get us out."


    Temporal Reversion swept them away, back to the entrance. Darkflame carried Jair from where he lay to right beside Skyclaw. He''d become so used to being a lizard shape that his human body didn''t respond correctly, but Skyclaw was on it. She grabbed him in her mouth and dove out of the dungeon entrance.


    "Daughter! What are you doing?"


    Skyclaw clamped her mouth tight around Jair and leaped out through the dungeon entrance into the lava beyond.


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