Slayed the Survivor Dragon in his lair. Holding the head in the palm of my hands, I watched how the light shimmered around it. The golden dragon's eyes rolled and its skin rippled as if it were breathing. I stared, too, at a tiny spot of color on the dragon's belly. Just that. No more. I wondered what that meant. A few drops of dragon's blood were left on the table and I put them in the pocket of my apron. The dragon would live forever. It would grow and grow, its skin thick and hard and rough, covering it from head to tail. Nothing would ever get in its way. It had all the power in the world. I wondered if there was an endless supply of dragon's blood, like that little drop, and if there would always be a dragon. The light turned from gold to green, and I took out the new doll that was waiting for me back home in the cottage. I held the doll and I kissed its little red lips, its nose, and its ears. A little light shone from its blackened, misshapen eyes, and it smelled of charred bread. All that mattered was that the doll looked like me. I pulled open the drawer under the desk and found the paper, the pencil, and a red ribbon. I tied the ribbon around the doll's neck. When I put the pencil in my hand I knew what I wanted to do with it. I placed the new doll in my pocket, next to the other one, and went into the church where the old woman and her friends were in their special place. I went past them and up into the tower. All the way up. The church creaked and swayed above my head, but that wasn't what made it hard to breathe. I couldn't look down at all the people standing in front of me. And when I looked up at the sky, I couldn't see it, either. I shut my eyes. The wind picked up, stronger than ever. The first one to jump was a man with a big beard. "Jump!" I said, and he looked down at me, confused. A woman ran to him and pulled him up, but another man jumped just behind him. Then another man and a woman. Soon all of the people were on the tower stairs, the women and children first, holding their arms in the air like that was something normal to do. A child's head snapped back like a bird breaking the surface of a lake when a wave passed beneath him. "Jump!" I shouted at them all, and they looked at me. Some of the men pushed others up and away. I grabbed the old woman's shoulder and pulled her toward the edge. "Don't do it!" she said. "Do it!" I yelled, pulling on her jacket. "Jump!" "No," she said, holding out her arms as if she wanted to push me away. "That's my house. I live there." "I don't care about your house. I care about you. Jump!" I dug my nails into her arm, and she stood there, frozen. And I was tired. There was too much to carry and it was too much to get through and it was going to keep going on for all time and I wanted to stop it. "Stop the fire!" I shouted. I looked around and saw someone up on the wall, too. A man was shouting at me, but I couldn't hear him. He couldn't see me, either. He stood at the end of the row of people, trying to wave his arms around, too. The wind was like a wall. The world shrunk to one thing. The church tower and the tower stairs. One thing to grab, one thing to do with my hands, one thing to stop. The bell tower on the church, dark, smelling of burnt wood. The stairway, dark, smelling of burnt wood. And a figure standing at the bottom of the stairs. The doll. The new doll, wrapped up in the red ribbon, all alone. "Jump!" I shouted again. "Jump!" The woman with a hat and red earrings stood there and shook her head. I tugged on the ribbon that had been tied around the doll's neck. I pulled, harder and harder until I thought the doll's head would come off. "Jump!" I shouted, but my voice was drowned out by the wind. "Jump!" The man with a beard fell and the first woman, the one with the red earrings, was running toward him. I held on to the stair railing and screamed. I fell toward the figure standing below me. I don't know how I did it, but the moment my feet hit the first stair I kicked off the red ribbon and threw it to the side. I fell, and then I fell again. A sharp pain hit my leg, but it was gone just as quickly as it came. My body smacked hard against the stairs again and again. It hurt and it burned. There was so much light in the stairwell. And there was another light in my head. A beam of light, like the first time we walked through the forest, when I felt the way that something else would be coming. All the way down to the bottom of the tower stairs. My legs crumpled against the wall. I was on the ground and I could see over the heads of the crowd. The man who was trying to climb up the stairs had a beard, but it was smooth. There wasn't a single hair on it. He could have been the man who used to clean at the shop. He must have tried to climb up to escape the fire. I didn't feel sick anymore, not one bit. I didn't feel like I was falling apart. I felt stronger than ever. "Hello?" I said. My voice sounded very small in the echoing tower. "Is anyone there?" The man crouched down next to me. He picked up the red ribbon, wrapped it around my neck, and he pushed it through the hole in the neck of the old doll. "What?" he said, and I could hear how the hair on his neck stood up. He squinted, thinking that maybe the light in the stairwell was just as terrible for him. "What's going on?" I raised my arms, holding out the doll, and the man's hand reached out toward it. "I'm here," I said. "I've come to get you." And I pulled him into the stairwell and closed the door behind him. When I came back out I found the stairway empty and quiet. When I stepped out onto the wooden planks in front of the church, everyone was there, standing around the fire. The man who'd wanted to climb up into the tower with the red ribbon was standing at the bottom. He pointed at me. "That's the one," he said. The man had a beard. He had a short beard and a hat like I had imagined. It seemed so long ago. I remembered that it was he who locked me up in the shop and now I'd saved him. And he'd saved me, too. I turned back to the crowd that was gathered around the fire. It looked like a whole town. They all turned to look at me. One man put out his hand as if he wanted to say something, but I turned my back on them and ran down the street to get away. The bell tower and the stone church were dark when I arrived at home. A fire was raging in the town across the way. The house was dark. Everything was dark. There was no sound but the wind blowing around the building. I stood in front of the house for a long time, with the new doll in my hand. "So the old woman is gone," a voice said from behind me. I turned around. The dark figure was standing on the porch. It was the woman with the hat and the red earrings and her voice was just as I remembered. It didn't sound like her, though. The voice that came out of her was the same as it always was, but it sounded wrong. I stared into the dark. "So the old woman is gone." "How do you know?" I asked. "I've been watching you." She reached out toward me. It was strange to see her with no hand. "What happened to the old woman?" I asked. "You know very well what happened to her," she said. I knew it all the time, but when she said the words out loud, they took on an awful new meaning. I remembered that the old woman fell from the tower stairs and was on the ground. I saw the ground where she had lain. I remembered that she had tried to get up and I had knocked her down. I thought of that fall and my own head. It came into