It was a birthday present from her aunt that started it all. Much later, Morgan would harbor dark suspicions about that particular aunt; but that was later, and a great deal happened before that.

The present was a picture book, where all the pictures at first appeared to be nothing but trees or grass or bushes or other uninteresting things; but when you looked carefully at them, suddenly a line here and a shadow there all fit together and you could see, for instance, a giraffe, or a wolf, standing there in plain sight. Morgan was delighted with the book, and once she had spent a couple of afternoons finding all the hidden animals — some of them were very well hidden, and some pictures had more than one — she went outside to see what she could find there.

The front yard was disappointing; there simply weren't enough bushes or anything to make the right kind of shadows. The back yard was a little better; by cocking her head to one side and squinting, she could almost tell herself there was a penguin underneath the azaleas. But it wasn't a very good penguin; and besides, what would a penguin be doing in her back yard?

After casually looking around to see if her mother was watching, Morgan shoved a loose board in the back fence to one side and crawled through the gap. This wasn't precisely being bad; her parents — both afflicted with a serious lack of imagination, which just goes to show the tricks genetics can play — had only forbidden her to go out through the gate without permission.

Behind the back fence was a small patch of ground rather half-heartedly choked with weeds, and then a precipitous but short slope down to the bottom of a small canyon that meandered between two suburban housing developments. A small stream — which sounded a lot better than "a small ditch" — flowed sluggishly down the length of the canyon, dammed here and there with old cans and other miscellaneous garbage.

Morgan, of course, loved it.

This was much more fertile ground for her new game; she worked her way slowly downstream, conjuring up an impressive safari's worth of wild game out of the overgrown bushes. She had almost gotten to the limit of the canyon — the stream flowed into a large sewer pipe that Morgan was, gradually, working up the courage to venture into — when she startled herself greatly by finding an actual dragon.

He was even harder to find then the hardest animal in her picture book — a panther, woven cunningly into the branches of a tree — and even once she had picked him out, she kept losing bits of him into shadows or stray reflections. But as soon as found the outlines of his head — long, narrow, and with a spiky crest — he opened his eyes, and there was no mistaking those eyes for anything she could imagine.

They looked at each other for some time.

Morgan was not afraid, because she belonged to that special breed of child that drives parents grey-haired by lacking any sense of fear whatsoever. However, she was also fairly wise for her age; and the same wisdom that would have told her to kick the strange man in the knee and run for her parents — after taking his candy — was in this case telling her to hold still and be very cautious in what she said.

"Well?" said the dragon.

"Um... hello?" said Morgan.

"That will never do," said the dragon, his eyes closing halfway. "'Hello' is a commonplace, and I assure you that in this day and age, meeting a dragon is far from commonplace. If you keep on in that vein, you'll be inviting me in for tea next."

"Do you like tea?" asked Morgan, clutching at the only part of that that she understood.

"No," he said; and there was a short silence.

"What should I say, then? It's just that I've never met a dragon before, and my parents never told me what to do."

The dragon's head lowered in a way that suggested he was amused. "No, of course not. There are many things you can say; it all depends on what story you want to be a part of."

This was over her head again. "Story?"

"When a human meets a dragon, it is always part of some story, which is to say that the meeting has a point, or a larger purpose. This is because, if the meeting lacked such a point, it would be not a story but a mere anecdote; and I assure you that no dragon has ever been part of anything so vulgar as an anecdote."

Morgan mulled that over. "I don't understand that," she announced, finally. She was a fairly direct little person, in her way.

"For instance," the dragon said, "I could eat you. You would then be the heroine of a cautionary tale about little girls who go places they shouldn't."

Morgan slid a cautious step back. "Why just girls, though?" Her parents had managed to instill some things in her, if not a sense of fear.

The dragon half-closed his eyes again. "A cogent point. Perhaps there is a different story you would like to be part of?"

"Do I get eaten?"

He waved a claw. "Let us banish from consideration all stories where I eat you. Let us also overlook the ones where I carry you away to a remote cave; because then I would have to wait for a succession of idiot rescuers to come by, and frankly, I have better things to do."

Morgan tried to think of other stories that involved dragons. It was a bit like being called up to the board at school; she thought there must be several, but she couldn't think of any of them.

The dragon seemed to be looking at her carefully. "Perhaps," he said, "a variation on an old classic. Have you noticed that there is a large thorn in my foot?" He held out one of his front claws, which did indeed have an enormous thorn sticking straight through it. Not only had Morgan not noticed this before, she was certain that it had not been there a moment before.

"Does that hurt?" she asked, looking carefully at the thorn. It was more than a foot long, and wickedly curved.

"The pain," the dragon said calmly, "is quite indescribable. Perhaps the small child would be so kind as to pull it out?"

She looked at him a bit doubtfully. She was mostly certain that he hadn't really meant it about eating her (she had not learned, yet, that dragons are never to be trusted, because they always speak the truth), but he was still rather alarming. However, he didn't say anything, just held out his foot; so she stepped forward, took hold of the thorn, and tugged on it until it came out.

"Thank you," the dragon said, tucking the foot back underneath him with no evidence of discomfort. Morgan held the thorn up; a few drops of blood clung to it, so dark red they were almost black. One of them was trickling down towards her hand, and she hastily dropped the thorn.

"Now," said the dragon, getting to his feet — which was a startling sight, because he was rather larger than she'd originally thought — "I am in your debt. I do not intend to remain that way, so I will repay it now. I notice that you only have one shadow — "

Startled at this turn in the conversation, Morgan said, "Yes."

" — so I will give you one of mine."

Morgan blinked. "One of?"

"Yes. I have seven shadows, and you may have the smallest. There may come a time when you will need it. In fact, there will come such a time, or this would be a very poor story; and I am not about to stand for that."

"But how — ?"

"Never you mind. The shadow is yours. And now, young lady, I will take my leave of you." And with that, he faded back into the shadows and lines she had originally found him in, and then was gone.

Morgan spent some time peering into and behind the bushes, to see if she could find him again — although part of her was whispering that it might be better if she didn't — and then she turned around to look at her shadow.

She had two now, there was no mistaking that. It was difficult to say how she had two, exactly, because they were both in the same place and they both had exactly the same shape, except that one of them was undeniably shaped like a dragon. She puzzled over this contradiction for a while, then gave it up and began picking her way home, mulling over a bigger problem.

Explaining this to her parents was not going to be easy.