You have always guarded the tower, even before the king left the first orphan-daughter under the apple tree. Curled around its pearlescent moon dome, your black scales invisible against the night sky, your red eyes watch the courtyard where a little girl paces left then right and then stands in the middle, utterly lost.

The soft bend of her arms, the dimples of her elbows and knees, the fiery red of her hair, remind you of someone you lost long ago. So when she slumps down to the floor, puts her fists to her eyes and sobs, you uncurl yourself from the tower and slink down to her like a shadow. When you appear next to her, a writhing, clicking mass of dark scales, she looks at you perplexed, tilting her head like a little bird. And when you scoop her up in one massive claw she wilts in relief, and you lift her up to the branches of the apple tree, hovering just close enough for her to pluck a single gleaming apple.

That is how you spend your days. She, sinking her teeth into crisp apples, and you, watching her.

“Tell me a story,” she says, often.

There is not much for a child to do here; even the tower is just a single set of endless stairs and empty rooms. So you agree. You tell her where you came from, an inverted land of fire below a lake, how you always snuck out at night, crossed the doorway and swam to the top of the surface to watch the merriment and the dancing, and the prince, oh, the handsome prince. You longed to step in to this world. Your parents warned you, but your heart wouldn’t stay still, and one night, you slipped into the shape of a young girl and crossed the threshold.

Yes, all Devs can shapeshift, but you’ve been a serpent for so long, you don’t think you can do it anymore. For a while, you told yourself you and the now-king were happy. But then you grew with child, and instead of an heir, you gave him a daughter. You were overjoyed, but when you carried the squirming, fragrant bundle to the king, he turned his face away.

When your prince first put the shackles around your feet, hot, iron, forcing you to leap and frolic, you turned into yourself for the first time in years. A hulking being of smoke and ash, your only visible features dark curling horns and burning red eyes. Your audience gasped. You were a monster, you deserved to dance in red hot irons, no matter that the shackles came before the transformation.

But a king has many amusements, and your torment didn’t last long. You were exiled, your now-cold shackles bewitched to prevent you from shifting and escaping, and tethered to this tower. It’s strange how quickly one will adapt to a new reality just to survive. You embraced your serpent-hood, fighting the princes who came hacking through the woods to free the orphan-daughters, your heedless fire-child self forgotten.

But over time, you grew lonely, sad—resentful of this repetitive and violent existence, nursing the scars on your abdomen from countless blades. And then they dropped me off, the youngest orphan-daughter you had ever seen.

One day, as we sit at the foot of an apple tree, your tail curved around me like the arms of a chair, I tell you a story in return. The story of how I came to be an orphan-daughter. How the now-king had become displeased with my mother, once a first-courtesan, now a queen—but only for a short time. She too had produced a daughter, but she was no Dev who could be repurposed into heroic servitude, so it was off-with-her head, and I was brought here to serve the only purpose I was fit for—to be a prize at the end of a quest that would turn a prince into a king. You look wistful then, I can tell, even though your eyes are uniformly red, from the way your breath changes and your armored shoulders droop a little.

“How far is the threshold to the inverted world?” I ask you.

“Just over the mountain is a lake so still it mirrors the sky. Dive deep into the lake and you’ll reach the doorway to the inverted world.” You move, and your shackles groan. “If I didn’t have these, I could turn into a bird and fly there, unnoticed, then slip into an eel, slithering to the bottom of the lake, and then step through, becoming smoke and ash once more.”

I can see the heartache in your eyes as you speak. So I come up with a plan. I’ll find the inverted world. Years of servitude have dimmed your rebellious fire and you’re scared. You don’t know what will happen to me if I cross the threshold, or worse, what will happen if the new prince arrives to find me gone. You beg me not to go but I fashion myself a cane from applewood and set out.

You must have waited so long. The apple tree loses its leaves and is weighed down with snow—it falls from the branches between your scales so that you look like a fallen pinecone—and still, you never move. The prince arrives, and still you barely lift your head. He taunts you, waves his sword, smacks the flat of his blade upon your armored head but all he gets in return is a groan of misery. Like his predecessors before him, he comes armed with all sorts of enchantments to defeat a shackled serpent, and though he is now disappointed he will get to use none of them, he still desperately wants to be king. So he lifts his blade and swings it towards you. It connects with a clang, not with your scales, but with a different blade—mine.

You look up then, and your eyes gleam brighter to see me. No longer the dimpled little girl tripping over rocks and curling into your claws, but another thing entirely. Covered in armor that shifts and spits like lava, tendrils of smoke lifting off it every time I move, hair like a candle flame in the wind. To you am I a sight to behold, but to the prince I am a nightmare.

He looks shocked and I bear down on him in his confusion. His blade burns with my heat and he drops it in panic. His blood soaks into the roots of the apple tree, the way yours has over the years; come summer, the tree will be adorned with fruit, unnaturally bright.

I turn towards you and hack at your shackles with the prince’s enchanted tools. They crack and for the first time, you’re free. You can’t help it, you flutter between endless shapes, eagle, fox, hound, hummingbird.

And then, you become a dragon.

I’m too big now to be held in your claw, so I climb onto your back. You unfurl your wings. Higher and higher, we soar, swerving past the turrets of the old kingdom, our shadow swooping over the lake that leads to the inverted world. But you don’t stop. You turn towards the horizon, where the sky becomes a doorway of light.

I look down at my hands, ember-stained, smoke-threaded. I am no longer a prize, and you are no longer a guardian.

We slip through the seam in the sky and leave behind every name they ever used to keep us.