2:47 PM September 14th, 2026

Some Government facility somewhere relatively close to New York City.

Kyle had never seen a dragon up close before.

No.

That wasn’t strictly true.

He’d seen living dragons in human form. At military or religious ceremonies, across the room at galas that’d he’d attended with his parents or while maintaining delicate displays for the museum during fundraising events. What he’d never seen up close before was a dragon in dragon form. Certainly, never a dead one – that was, baring the few minutes of examination of this dead dragon in dragon form the day prior.

It was different this time. Yesterday, the dragon had just been a source of danger. A puzzle that had to quickly be solved to make the city safe as swiftly as possible. And when that puzzle was solved, it was a moment of triumph and excitement for a young warlock apprenticing in his career field. Yesterday was something to be proud of.

Today it was a corpse.

A dead person.

The dragon had been brought to a facility outfitted with refrigeration and magical insulation that both had features of containment and collection. The magic collectors were removable, so once they were full, they could be replaced with empty ones. They were harvesting the arcanes the dragon gave off through the natural decomposition process. True, being chilled slowed organic decomposition, but arcanes came off a dragon corpse whether it was rotting or not. Those arcanes needed to be contained.

In Kyle’s opinion, the arcanes didn’t also need to be… harvested. Because that’s what they – whoever had set up this facility, that is – were doing with the magic this poor dead dragon was giving off as the moving truck around it was dismantled. Or maybe they did. Insulating the corpse to prevent magical contamination from it getting out into civilization was all well and good. But how safe would that make working around it in a forensic capacity?

Those were questions of morality that a certain young warlock struggled with as he watched with as much detachment as he could muster. Now, Kyle wasn’t necessarily cynical, but this facility was entirely too convenient. He was standing in an observation room on a second floor with reinforced glass windows looking down at the dragon from above… Ish. It was above-ish.

“It’s a bit on the small side, isn’t it?” That was Jones, stoically standing beside Kyle trying to make small talk while his groggy sister snickered at him from a chair. Before the Warlock of the Archivist could answer, another voice spoke up.

“It’s probably young then, right?” Kyle turned from the macabre scene before him to glance at the speaker. His sister’s partner, Alex, he thought her name was had finally looked up from worriedly watching Sam to participate in the discussion.

“That’s…,” Kyle hesitated because, “Eeh…maaaybee.” It came out a little higher and more unsure sounding than he’d intended. He felt himself flush with embarrassment as Sam chuckled over her second cup of coffee. He’d considered offering her one of the stamina potions that were a standard part of a museum field kit, buuuuttt…

“You don’t even have an idea?” She shook her head. “This is not looking good for you baby brother.” He’d been trying. Really Kyle hadbeen trying to keep their sibling issues separate, but Sam – was SAM!His face and voice turned cold.

“Youth is just one of the many reasons this particular Eastern Dragon could be so small, Sam.” He shot back with as little hostility as he could manage. Couldn’t she just be, not… this… for one freaking day? “But sure, I could be an irresponsible jerk and make the assumption that it’s small because the elders let a teenage dragon, the equivalent of a human fucking baby loose in America. You know what dragons are like with their young. How protective they are. Why would anyone assume that a dragon child would be dead in an American city? Or that a dragon child could have enough magic to kill a city’s magic collector?”

There were more reasons not to assume this dragon’s small size was due to youth. Yet Kyle didn’t have the heart to fight Sam like normal because her face, that was already paler than normal, blanched a sickly ashen shade. Her eyes lost some of their spark and a haunted expression stole across her countenance settling there like a shadow.

“The other dragon was an adult.” It was quiet. Voice hoarse and thready with barely the strength to sustain itself. Those whispered words flowed through the room and stole some of the light out of it and a little bit of the joy that might ever be in the world.

Her words were significant not because she’d put any emphasis on any of them. Because she didn’t. They were important in and of themselves.

“Adult dragons don’t just die like that.” She was haunted by whatever she’d seen while Kyle had been of saving their younger sister. “Not with so much magic sublimation that living bodies are subsumed into a monster manifestation.” Setting his jaw in a tight clench, Kyle tried not to snap at his sister. He knew. He knew these things. And yet…

“You’re right.” Sighing, he turned back to the bloody efforts below to separate the corpse from the truck without damaging it too much. “And while dragon corpses give off significant levels of arcanes, the amount of magic that flooded the city should have taken hours, days, weeks, months, maybe even years to build up depending on circumstances. Even now, this corpse is losing arcanes faster than it should be.”

“It doesn’t seem that small.” Alex offered hesitantly. “Maybe it’s not a young dragon? It’s almost as tall as this floor.” That amused Kyle a little bit. Either this woman actually had no idea. Or she was deliberately trying to distract everyone by getting Kyle into an informative lecture on the dragon.

“Eastern Dragons can get quite tall in the diameter of their bodies as well as very long.” The warlock’s voice took on the lecture tone he used when giving tours at the museum. “Fully grown adult bodies can be two to three times the diameter of this one on average. Elder dragons will have a body diameter as tall as this floor. This one,” he gestured down at the busy scene below them, “has been squished up into a cube that was over a story tall. So, while that volume makes this dragon seem like it is quite large, it’s really just an optical illusion. Once it’s unfurled and laid out, we’ll get a better sense of its real dimensions.”

“Or you could just cast one of those handy Archivist spells you have for examining things and be done with that already.” Damn it Sam. Kyle could not work with her snarkiness. Regardless, he put his foot down and played a hand that was little more than an educated guess.

“No one is casting magic on that corpse until we see what is in that truck that killed it.”

Kyle the Apprentice Warlock

Chapter 72