THE HOARDING DRAGON'S LOST-PROPERTY OFFICE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — the dragon who has everything you've lost, but the one thing you want.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am a dragon, and I keep the lost-property office at Drudgeford, and I have a hoard, and I can see the disappointment forming on your face already.

You were expecting gold. Everyone expects gold. They picture the dragon coiled on a glittering reef of coin, breathing smoke at knights, rich beyond the dreams of accountancy. I would gently direct your attention, instead, to the left sock. To the lid that fits no surviving tub, and the tub that has lost its lid, lying three counties apart and never to be reunited. To the single glove — always the left, always the good cashmere, never the wool one you could spare. To the second cufflink. The missing jigsaw piece (it is the corner; it is always the corner). The little brass key to a door that was demolished in 1788. The biro that actually worked.

This is my hoard. I am the dragon of lost property, and I am the most thorough archivist of worthless things the world has ever produced.

It is damp, my hoard, because everything in Sogmarsh is damp. The drift of odd socks at the western end has, over the centuries, fused under its own weight into a single felted geological stratum that the younger draughts have begun to mine. The tupperware breathes. The biros have wept their way into a small black tarn at the bottom of the cave, which I am told smells of every airing cupboard in the realm opened at once, though I no longer notice; I have become my own weather.

And I cannot stop. That is the part the fables leave out. It is not greed — there is nothing here to be greedy for. It is a compulsion in the marrow: I know the precise location of every lost thing in three counties, I feel each new one fall through the cracks of the world like a tooth coming loose, and I must, must, go and fetch it, and sort it, and keep it, and it physically pains me to give a single item back. I am a god of returning who can return nothing. Sort it out, I often think. I cannot. That is the whole of the curse: the sorting never ends, because the losing never does.

You would think no one ever visits.

But they do, now and then. They come down the long wet tunnel — past the hum that lives even below my hoard, that low patient thrum the whole sodden country seems to sit upon — and they come, always, for one specific thing.

She came on a grey afternoon: an old woman, careful on the slick stone, with the particular composure of a person who has already cried all the crying there is. She did not want socks. She did not want lids. She wanted her wedding ring — worn thin as a wish over fifty years, slipped from a finger gone too small at the very end, lost somewhere in the last terrible week, and she had heard, she said, that the dragon under the fen keeps what is lost.

And I, who have everything — who could produce, on demand, the comb your great-grandfather mislaid at a dance in a year with no surviving name — I went into my hoard with a hope I had not felt in an age, and I looked.

It was not there.

It is never there. This is the secret of my office, and I will tell it to you because she has gone and it can no longer hurt her to hear: the things that truly matter never reach me. They do not fall through the cracks. They are held too tightly, or grieved too hard, or go down into the ground with the hand that wore them. What slips loose and tumbles into my keeping is only ever the unmissed — the spare, the duplicate, the thing whose loss is an irritation and not a wound. My hoard is vast beyond counting and made, every furred and mildewed scrap of it, of things no one will ever come down the tunnel to ask for.

I could not give her the ring. So I did the one kind thing my nature permits. I let her sit among the lost things a while, in the dark, and I told her what I have just told you — that the ring was never lost to me because it was never lost at all, only carried somewhere I cannot follow — and she nodded, the way you nod at a true thing, and after a long while she climbed back up the wet tunnel and left me to my sorting.

She left nothing behind. There was nothing of hers to fall.

And yet that night I found I had begun a new hoard — a small one, off in its own cold alcove, separate from all the rest. It holds exactly one item, which is the memory of her face in the moment she understood. No one will ever come asking for it. I check on it constantly. I would breathe fire on anyone who tried to take it.

We guard hardest the things no one will ever come asking for.