Temeraire

There is a small estate spread out before him, houses and trees dotted like miniatures below. He is at the wheel of an aeroplane, he thinks. He must be, because he can hear the sound of propellers, slightly off-beat, and behind him there is the faint murmuring of passengers.

Movement on the ground catches his eye. He leans to look, the craft tilting with him, and the sight takes his breath away.

There are creatures below him, massive grey things, with blunted lizard heads and enormous wings, dappled with white and darker grey. Each of them is unconcernedly devouring a cow to the hooves, and as he watches, one licks its bloody chops and starts on another.

"Those are milch cows," says an indignant, lightly accented voice. One of the passengers, he thinks.

Someone just behind him shifts, and a voice says in his ear, "Signal the attack."

And the voice, though he is certain he has never heard it before, is one that pulls at his heart with the steady insistence of a fan belt, of a rotor; and he knows in an instant that he would do anything for that voice, should it ask it of him; and without thought, without question, he folds his wings and the world comes up to meet him, and he opens his mouth and an immense, terrible noise bursts out of it, like oncoming thunder, so powerful it rattles the bones in his head--

--and he is not in an aeroplane, he is not in an aeroplane at all, and it is his back the passengers are climbing on, and up ahead another enormous form, this one brilliant copper and bronze, is dropping out of the sky to bear one of the grey beasts to the ground even as it tries to rise, and Temeraire cries out in protest--or he tries to, over the sound of his own mouth roaring--