High in the black and storm-pummeled mountains stood a wizard’s keep. Its occupant was not a genial man.

Grandmagus Brume was easily provoked into fits of distemper and nettled in the face of stupidity. His ire, more often than not, was directed at his boy-for-hire, Quin.

Now Quin was not at all stupid and possessed an inquisitive mind, sharp and keen. No apprentice he; his master had no patience for that tired old trope. A tall and wiry lad, Quin, not yet bewhiskered, was kept occupied with the most basic of tasks: drawing eldritch waters for distillation, polishing crucibles, manning bellows, running up and down stairs to fetch and carry. But the night hours were his own, and he spent them in a garret poring over texts and tracts and copper-bound tomes.

The new day was still aborning when Brume commanded young Quin to fetch him a basilisk egg, for the magicks contained within were potent indeed. Wrapped in cloaks to ward off the bitter wind, Quin paused at the keep’s egress, a puzzlement recalled from the prior night’s reading.

“Grandmagus,” he said.  “How can dragons be?”

“Hmm?” his master replied absently, measuring elixirs into a glass retort, vapors curling about his long, braided beard.  “How can dragons be what?”

“Dragons are vertebrates,” Quin explained, “and vertebrates have four limbs. Beasts in the fields and birds on the wing, all are four-limbed in number. But dragons have six: four legs, two wings. A six-limbed vertebrate as advanced as the dragon should not be possible.”

The grandmagus turned. “What?”

“Where is the fossil record, Grandmagus? Why are there no other six-limbed vertebrates in the evolutionary chain? Nor here in the present day? As if the creatures just appeared, fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s brow.”

“Zeus- What?”

“Their very existence is improbable to say the least, but exist they do.”

“Quite. They do. Fetch me my egg.” The Grandmagus returned to his elixirs, irritated by the delay.

But the boy was undeterred. “And how exactly do they fly, Grandmagus, wings notwithstanding? The conundrum is getting them airborne, the relationship between wing area and mass. The greater the mass, the more expansive the wings, and with such very large creatures there’s not enough room for large-enough wings. Then there is the matter of power. Hard work, flying, which requires an immensity of muscle, which adds to the mass all the more.”

“Ha! Therein lies your ignorance,” the grandmagus exclaimed with pointed precision. “Dragons are the masters of flame, you cheeky boy, and flames are more buoyant than air.”

“And yet logs in the hearth are aflame,” countered Quin, “as are coals ‘neath the stove. One does not see them soar about the room.”

“Be quiet,” the grandmagus said, his ire mounting anew.

Flagstones rumbled in the deepest regions of the keep. Such were the ways of the master’s chaotic magicks, that the very environs around him reacted to his moods.

“Firstly, boy, you speak of birds. Birds have air chambers affixed within their innards. Secondly, there are lifting gases less dense than air. Thirdly, bacteria can produce such gases. Fourthly, all creatures have bacteria in their gut. Ergo, bacteria in the dragon’s gut generate lifting gas to be stored in chambers which, in turn, lighten the beast. Now begone with you and fetch my egg.”

“But the mechanics of flight and, more importantly, the likelihood of spontaneous combustion deserve proper exploration, Grandmagus. There does appear to be a correlation between flight and flame, though correlation does not equal causation.”

“Hang your insolence, boy! Biological gases are not flammable unless there is a catalyst. A spark. The dragon grinds flint in its fangs to acquire the catalyst. When the dragon snaps its jaws, its fangs strike together. The resultant sparks combined with an expulsion of digestive vapors produce the blasts of flame that characterize the species.”

“Flatulence, then.”

“D’oh! Be quiet!”

“The nearest like of which I am aware is the bombardier beetle,” Quin offered, “which has an explosive chamber adjacent its anus-” 

“Stop! Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!”

Tallow candles flared. Eyes of newts burst within discolored vessels. Herbs and medicinals crumbled to dust. 

“And why a special taste for virgins? Does having enjoyed the throes of sexual congress somehow make one less… flavorful?”

“Fool of a barnacle! Fetch. My. Egg!”

Glassworks boiled over. Armillaries spun off their axes.  The very foundations shook. Familiars turned tail and fled.    

Ever dutiful, Quin nodded. He turned to the door, then paused again, contemplating his master’s demand for a basilisk egg. Basilisks were hatched from cocks’ eggs, matured on dunghills and sat upon by toads. A cock’s egg…

“Grandmagus,” he said. “How can a cock-”

The mountaintop erupted and ceased to be. A luminous cloud of smoke and ash rose from where the grandmagus’s lonely keep had stood.

“Now there’s something one does not see every day,” said Teraax the Insatiable from a neighboring peak.

“Oh, I do,” replied Gorgaust of the Black Domains, picking gobbets of flesh from between his fangs with an iron-tipped claw. “Happens all the time. The old sod has quite the temper.” 

“Indeed.”

The remains of a milkmaid charred black on a spit.

“A tasty one, that,” Gorgaust continued.

“Agreed. But not very filling,” observed his ravenous companion. “Shall we fetch us another?”

“Yes, lets. Twins, perhaps. Or a nunnery!”

“Brilliant!”

They unfurled their mighty wings and took to the skies, Teraax and Gorgaust, neither one any the wiser that, by all rights, they should not exist at all.