[Dragon]

Her father looked up, his smile like a forgotten promise. "Girls have to meet the dragon before they can become a princess."

"I don't believe in the dragon," she said. "No one's ever seen it."

"It lives forever, Gerty. It came a hundred years ago and it will come again tonight."

This story first appeared in an edition of Realms of Fantasy, of which Tangent Online said: "So all four stories do something fundamentally new and different with some old genres. The strategy works well in all four cases. For the editor, an innovative move and overwhelming success. Surely this month's issue was well calculated and surely it warrants some type of professional recognition."

T.D. Edge's short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Arc, Penumbra, Realms of Fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Flash Fiction Online.

Includes an excerpt from T.D. Edge's new novel, Bloodjacker.