It had not hurt his hands at all and the sudden release of energy, twinned with Dom's fall, gave him a sudden lunatic rush of euphoria.

He wanted to roar like a lion on a cement floor. And bellow like a polar bear with yellow fur worn down to pink skin against the tiles of an enclosure in a zoo. The disgust must come. Let it drip down the walls. Scorch the ceiling black with hatred. Liberate rage.

He just existed before it and within the terrible presence that filled the cramped space of the attic.

Through their discomforts Dom and Phil were missing everything of interest: the sudden strip marshes, the faces in the rock formations, the perfect lakes, the awesome måskoskårså valley grooved into the earth during the Ice Age, the golden eagle circling above it, and the views of a landscape it was impossible to believe existed in Europe.

From the very core of each of them, their ancestors seemed to cry out in inarticulate voices. right then, they screamed in alarm from times before symbols and language could depict such things that hunted and meant murder.

Some teeth long for ripping, gleaming wet from black dog gums. So you keep your eyes closed at the end. You don't want to see such a mouth up close. before the bite, before its oblivion in the goring of your soft parts, the speckled lips will curl back in a whinny of excitement. You just know it.

...there is something demoniac in human nature that we are unable to stop revering.

For Anne and our cub,for making me and my life less beastly

The greatest treasures were most often guarded by the slyest and cruellest dragons.

But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions voted their approval with a click of a mouse. The internet. It brought governments down and rewrote history...