Below is an excerpt from a novel I drafted in 2024; this is the inciting incident in which the POV character, Morgan, discovers their content-creator roommate Roy is a mage, and that the ordinary-seeming world around them is a mundane masquerade concealing an urban fantasy.
The month after was when everything changed.
I wasn’t sure when it started, but I first noticed when I came home on a Friday night after a trip to the gym, and found the apartment was hotter than Summer in Florida. Seeing as I had just stepped in from Summer in Florida, I felt the comparison was appropriate, and I almost staggered as I opened the front door and the heat rolled over me.
My first thought was that the apartment was on fire, but I didn’t smell any smoke, and everything looked normal. The sweat I’d built up from lifting weights, which had started to dry in the cool hallway, immediately started pouring down my face and neck again.
Closing the door so Yuki wouldn’t run out — although I didn’t see her in the living room — I checked the thermostat and found it was switched off. Crossing to Roy’s door, I banged on it frustratedly. “Hey, what’s wrong with the A/C?”
Apparently the door hadn’t been shut properly, because it swung open under my fist, revealing Roy slouching in his chair. He was still wearing a nice shirt, although the sleeves were cuffed up, and sweat was beading on his forehead. He looked up when the door opened, alarmed. “Morgan, I–”
“Roy, what the hell?” I interrupted, no longer looking at him.
As soon as the door had opened, my attention was drawn to the brazier sitting in the middle of his floor, surrounded by a painted circle and containing a large oval-shaped rock.
I was torn between demanding to know why he’d lit a fire in his bedroom, and why he was just staring at it instead of putting it out, when the incongruity struck me. Roy wasn’t a lunatic, and he wasn’t this careless. There were a few scorches on the sheetrock he’d laid down under the brazier, but the blaze was… contained? It was like the circle was actually preventing anything outside it from catching fire, despite the heat pouring off it being enough to make the air shimmer.
“What– How…?”
“Crapbaskets,” Roy sighed, wiping his face with a towel, but the sound jolted me out of the rut my brain had been stuck in since the door opened.
“Oh, you say that too?” He looked at me incredulously, but I was leaning down to inspect the fire. “Is that… an egg?”
“Dragon egg,” he agreed. “I think, anyway. They’re pretty unmistakeable.” He glanced at the doorway and grimaced. “Of course I forgot to put up the recording sign. Sorry about the heat. I was hoping to be done by the time you got home, but the damn thing won’t hatch. I’m not very good at fire; I’ve had to rejigger the circle twice already.”
“Is this–” What was I going to say? Real? Valuable? Necessary? “–going to take much longer?”
He gave me an unreadable look. “It shouldn’t. That egg is from an ignispirous species; they nest near volcanoes and breathe on their clutch, so the concentrated heat from the current circle should be enough.”
He kept staring, and I shrugged. “You’re hatching a dragon egg, that’s rad as hell. Where did you get it? Are there dragons in Florida? There must not be, you said they nest near volcanoes. Unless they migrate? Do dragons migrate?”
Roy started laughing. “There are a few smallish venispirous species around the everglades, mostly amphibious. And one aciduspirous drake in the Gulf; not a true dragon, but a cousin species. They can’t fly, but they can leap out of the water and glide like flying fish.”
“I take it ‘spirious’ means ‘breather’? Or ‘breathing’? Are these official terms or just yours?”
“Something like that. They have taxonomic species names, but I don’t know them all. I think I remembered the Latin construction of ‘fire-breather’ and ‘venom-breather’ correctly. Are you really okay with… everything?”
“I’ll freak out later,” I waved him off, and he laughed.
Before he could press, there was a crack from the egg. Hurriedly wiping his face, Roy waved me out of shot and hit a button on a remote, causing the camera light to blink on.
“And there you have it, first crack after…” He checked his phone. “Eighty-six minutes of concentrated flame. Over two hours total, but that’s including the initial circle that wasn’t hot enough. Apparently even after doubling my first estimate, I was still underestimating how hot dragonbreath is, so take that as today’s first lesson: dragon fire can melt steel beams. And stone. And bone. So if you see it aimed at you, maybe dodge.”
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