Thomas Blackwood was twenty-eight when he lost his fear. It happened on a Tuesday, in a room that smelled of coal smoke and old blood. The creature on the table before him was no bigger than a hound, but its scales caught the lamplight like hammered copper, and when it opened its mouth, Thomas saw not teeth but a mirror.

He had learned to tame them in the war. Not the kind of taming that involved chains or whips, but something older, something that lived in the space between breath and heartbeat. The officers called it a gift. Thomas called it a curse he could not refuse.

The first dragon had been easy. It had come to him in the trenches, a small silver thing no larger than a cat, its eyes black as spilled ink. He had reached out his hand, and it had climbed onto his palm like a kitten seeking warmth. That night, for the first time in months, he had slept without dreaming of the men he had killed.

But when he woke, he could not remember why he had joined the army.

That was the price. Each dragon took something. The silver one took his fear. The blue one took his hunger. The green one took his love for the girl in Manchester whose name he could no longer recall.

Now there were seven dragons, and seven things gone.

The eighth dragon sat on the table before him, its copper scales flickering like candle flames. Thomas felt the familiar pull in his chest, the ache that had become his constant companion. He reached out his hand.

"Please," he whispered, though he did not know what he was asking permission to do.

The dragon opened its mouth, and Thomas saw his own face staring back at him, distorted and ancient, with eyes that had watched empires rise and fall. He pressed his palm against the scales, and the world went dark.

When he woke, he could not remember his mother's voice.

The copper dragon was gone. In its place lay a single scale, warm to the touch, inscribed with a single word in a language Thomas did not know but somehow understood: Remember.

He kept the scale in his pocket and walked out into the Manchester fog. The city stretched before him, vast and indifferent, its factories belching smoke into the gray sky. Somewhere out there, another dragon waited. He could feel it in his bones, in the hollow space where his fear used to be.

Thomas Blackwood did not know that the dragons were not tamed by him. They were taming him, one piece of his humanity at a time, until nothing remained but the mirror.

And when the last dragon came, and the last piece of himself was taken, he would finally understand what the copper scale had been trying to tell him.

He would remember everything.

And he would understand that remembering was the cruelest gift of all.