Calliope ground her teeth as she tried to incant a spell. As her captor had stated she couldn’t summon up so much as a spark of magic. It was as though a leaden blanket had been draped over her mystical senses. Grinning the smaller man stepped towards her pigish eyes hungry. Calliope swung her body upwards, ignoring the pain in her wrist as she wrapped her legs around the neck of the surprised servant. With a scream of hatred she wrenched her legs in alternate directions. There was a strangled cry and an ugly crack and then the unfortunate chamberlin slumped to the ground.
“Ah,” her surviving captor observed and then spoke an arcane word. Pain lanced from her wrists up into her body and darkness enveloped her.

Calliope found herself in the gray nothingness in which her spell craft sometimes transported her. At some level she was aware that she was unconscious and suspended from her arcane shackles. A massive presence moved in the dark, a shadow against the mist.

“Little Wyrm,” a voice like mountains grating together sounded in her mind.

“Who are you?” she demanded, turning on the spot in a vain attempt to locate the speaker.

“Have you no inkling little Wyrm?” the voice asked in amusement.

“The dragon,” she responded, speaking on instinct rather than on logic. She had fragments of memory, swooping down like lightning from the skies to tear the mage on the deck of the enemy ship to shreds in her talons.

“Good…” the voice rumbled, still circling her. The massive presence was obvious even to her muffled senses.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“The wrong question,” the voice responded. Calliope considered it, forcing herself to be calm and rational.

“Why have you bought me here?” she asked, and was rewarded with an immediate sense of amused approval.

“Better, I have bought you here to ask you a question. You are at a turning point in what you humans would call your destiny,” the voice rumbled.

“One fork leads to slavery for a time, perhaps for many years but when you are finally free you will find some measure of peace. The other is bathed in dark magic and ruin, but your desires can be yours.”

“That doesn't sound like much of a choice,” she admitted. A terrible barrage of images burst through her mind, burning ships, drowning men, cities in flames, black wings wheeling over head.

“Perhaps not, but if you choose to feed your hunger now it will never be sated,” the voice purred. Calliope folded her arms beneath her breasts definitely.

“You knew what I would choose when you bought me here,” she declared. There was a hollow booming chuckle.

“Perhaps Little Wyrm, but mortals have surprised me before. All you need do to attain what you desire is ask for my help.”

“Very well, help me,” Calliope asked the misty darkness.

“Then our bargain is sealed,” the voice rumbled.

“Our kind is patient, return now and await your killer from the seas…”

Calliope started awake. Two servants were dragging her by the arms, and she had been changed into a dancing costume of black diapponus lace. Her hair had been pinned back in Arad Lund fashion and she could feel make up on her face, dark charcoal eyeliner. She glanced down to where her dragon necklace should have been, to her shock, she saw that it was gone, replaced by an intricate dragon tattoo the spread over her left breast, her collar bone forming the ridge of its serpentine eye. Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard an empty booming chuckle.