Free Son of the Hero by Rick Shelley

the best news I’ve heard since I left school. What would happen to the buffer zone if my world blew itself to hell in a nuclear war?” Parthet sat next to me. I was confident that he knew what I was talking about. He had visited us often enough in Louisville.
    “I’ve wondered about that more often than you might imagine,” he said. “I don’t have an answer, though.” He looked off into the trees, and his voice got reflective. “It frightens me when I think about it. I fear that Fairy would overflow us and move into the void. What might happen then, I can’t even guess. I don’t think it’s something I’d care to experience.”
    Timon looked back and forth between us, his eyes wide with wonder. It may have sounded like gibberish to him. Or maybe he simply assumed that we were discussing magics beyond his capacity. Maybe we were, come to think of it. Nuclear winter sounds beyond the limits of objective possibility to me too, like witches and wizards and elflords out of Fairy. I wondered how the buffer zone’s translation magic had rendered “H-bombs” and “nuclear war.”
    “Whenever your world is at war, Fairy grows stronger here,” Parthet said. He shrugged. “Of course, there is always war of one dimension or another going on there, but major war is what I’m talking about. I remember your Second World War. I think that’s what your father called it. Before he was born. The seven kingdoms were all hard pressed to hold their own against a series of invasions out of Fairy—that’s when your mother’s parents were killed—and we’re still trying to clear out the last of the dragons and a few outlaw bands of elves.”
    I missed something in that at the time, the bit about my mother’s parents being killed during the Second World War, which meant that she was also older than I’d thought. I didn’t recall what Parthet had said until much later.
    “Shouldn’t we be moving on?” Lesh asked.
    I looked up and nodded. We had taken more of a break than I had planned. It was maybe an hour later before I brought up the subject of the dragons again. I described the lizards I had seen the day before.
    “Is that what you call a dragon?” I asked.
    “You saw one of those near my cottage?” Parthet asked, a bit stridently.
    “Two of them, one in the forest and another in the cave where I came through from our basement. Were those dragons?”
    “Dragonkind, but not dragons. Bad enough if you’re not careful. You saw one of those near my cottage?” he asked again.
    “Yes, not too far off. What’s wrong with that?”
    “There shouldn’t be any of those creatures within fifty miles of my home, that’s what’s wrong. They usually don’t stray far from Battle Forest.”
    “They didn’t look all that dangerous,” I said, crossing my fingers mentally. The one in the cave had looked dangerous enough at the time.
    “Those beasts can bite you in two like that.” Parthet slapped his hands together. Timon’s pony shied at the noise. The heavier chargers didn’t pay any mind. And Parthet’s Glory just pointed his ears, as if he didn’t have the energy to get upset at the noise. I swallowed, remembering my first encounter with one of the lizards.
    “They can be hunted at least,” Lesh said before I could wander too far down memory lane. “But they make foul eating, nothing you’d care to taste if you had any choice.” He looked at the sky. “They can be hunted, not like a real dragon. A real dragon hunts you.”
    “How big?” I asked, not at all certain that I wanted to know. I looked at the sky myself.
    “Like a castle with wings,” Lesh said.
    “Try thinking of something like a 747 with bigger wings and a badly swollen gut,” Parthet suggested. “A pregnant 747. That would make a small dragon. They’re hungry all the time. The four of us and our horses wouldn’t make a decent bedtime snack for a dragon.” After that, there were three of us looking at the sky. Only Parthet didn’t