all towards that paper-pale hand fumbling in the fire and let it burst, fire and fury and light and electricity and sound and lightning and digital screaming and glass and stone and dirt and heat and shadows - how many shadows could one city hold? - we threw them into it as well, sucked them up from the streets and let them rage, scream through the air towards Mr Pinner, too thick to see, closing our eyes against their weight, crumpling down into the middle of the street, hiding our head in our hands as they screamed up from all around, too many to comprehend; too thick, too heavy, too much of too much. Open your eyes and understand it, and you know why the dragons were mad; too much of too much couldn’t stop it, couldn’t do it, too much of too much, burn!
Something dragged us forwards, like the sucking in of air to a fire. Then, the fire being sated with what it could eat, it threw us backwards, twisting and turning us on the air and throwing us across the street, blasting stones and glass and electric fire and paper, so much paper, throwing it into the sky and then dropping it back down. We fell into the gutter, the shock of it knocking the fires out in our blood, sending us reeling into some dull, stupid part of our mortal skull, little mortal frail flesh trembling at the blast, and it was all I could do to tuck our chin into our legs and shield our face from the shockwave as it rippled down the street, shattering every brick and pane of glass that had survived the storm, blasting spinning paper along the road and into the sky, suffocating heat in the cold night air.
And slowly, it too settled.
I opened my eyes, peered out between my red bloody fingertips. Mr Pinner stood in the middle of the street, paper falling gently all around. His hair was dishevelled, his coat torn, his skin dripping small receipts and lines of ticker tape. He wasn’t alone. His head was turned upwards to the thing that had grown out of the darkness behind him, his eyes fixed on the twin points of red madness that stared back down at him. I heard him start to laugh, but he didn’t take his eyes from the creature. “Is this it?” he chuckled. “Is this the best your city has?”
The thing, standing as high as the street, its wings bent back uncomfortably to make space for the buildings, put its head on one side and looked down at him. To call it a dragon was . . .
. . . an efficient way to describe something we did not wish to comprehend.
“I am the death of cities!” roared Mr Pinner, opening his torn arms to the beast. “I am your undoing, the breaking of the legends, the stories and the shadows! Your city is damned by its own people, condemned out of the mouths of your own! Betrayal and vengeance! You cannot harm me!”
I crawled to my feet. Bits of me that shouldn’t have made the sounds they did made sounds. My heart was a steady, dull dedum in my chest - too steady, too dull, as if it had run out of the strength to race. I called out, “Mr Pinner?”
He half-turned, saw me, smiled. “Mr Mayor!” he called out merrily. “Do you keep a pet dragon?”
“No,” I replied with a sigh. “It keeps me.” I turned my head up to the black shape of the shadow-beast, skirted my eyes over the edge of its mad own, couldn’t look, couldn’t bear to look, to risk infinite falling into a red void. I looked just past it and said, “Fido! Walkies!”
Mr Pinner spun back round, raised his hands up towards the beast. It opened its jaws and fell, spinning darkness and scarlet endless falling, down on top of him.
London is a dragon.
New York is probably King Kong.
It’s just a way for mortals to understand something too big for the brain.
On the other hand, Mr Pinner did have a point.
What good is a city against its nemesis?
We turned our face away from the darkness in King William Street, and as the paper tumbled gently from the sky, hobbled towards Monument. Behind us we heard . . . sounds not fit for the human ear, sounds we could not explain, comprehend, had not the vocabulary to describe. We call them sounds only because the human