Page 37 of Dragon Chaos Around

“1938.” He stood beside her. “Action Comics, number one. June.”

Alani pressed her fingertips to the glass. Both hands, all ten fingers, splayed like a pianist finding a chord. The comic sat in its archival display—the cover still vivid after eighty-eight years, the colors unfaded because this copy had been stored in conditions that most museums could not replicate. The paper was supple. The binding intact. It was not the most expensive item in the archive—several paintings on Level One held higher appraisal values—but it was the fulcrum. The single object around which an entire era of storytelling had pivoted.

“This is the issue,” she said. Her voice had gone thin. “This is where it all started. Superheroes. And every villain that came after them. Every Joker, every Lex Luthor, every Magneto. Every story I have ever loved exists because “this” exists.”

“Yes.”

“How long have you had it?”

“I purchased it in 1942. Four years after publication. From a bookshop in Cleveland. The owner did not know what he had.” A pause. The memory surfaced—vivid, as dragon memories were, time compressing so the past sat beside the present. “I did.”

She lifted her hands from the glass. Ten fingerprints remained—visible for a moment before the archive’s air circulation erased them. She turned to face him. Her eyes were full.

He had seen tears across his long life. Every variety of human weeping: grief, rage, ecstasy, manipulation, the involuntary overflow of sensation too large for the body containing it. He knew tears by what they cost the person shedding them.

Alani’s tears did not fit any category he had built.

They fell without sound. Two tracks down her cheeks, catching the display case lighting and shining against her brown skin. She was not crying from sadness. Not from overwhelm, though she was overwhelmed. She was crying because she stood in a room that contained the origin of the stories that had shaped her entire life, preserved by a being who had loved those stories before she was born—before her grandparents were born, before her country existed in its current form—and the scale of that devotion had exceeded her capacity to hold it without spilling.

She understands.

The thought arrived with the force of revelation. Not she is impressed. Not she is grateful. She understands. She looks at the archive and sees not a collection but a confession—centuries of declaring, through preservation and curation and the loving maintenance of objects that the world would have let decay, that these stories matter. That the villains who populate them matter. That the act of keeping them alive is itself a form of love so vast, it requires a vault beneath a city to contain it.

Her hands were still raised from the glass. Her tears fell in silence. The archive hummed its constant, low note of preservation.

Chaos looked at Alani Nores and understood, with the iron certainty of a being old enough to recognize what could not be rebuilt once broken, that he was in catastrophic trouble.

Alani

She was crying in a dragon’s vault, and she could not stop.

This was not in the plan. The plan had been simple: arrive, store the film reel in appropriate conditions, tour the archive with the detached appreciation of someone who understood the value of rare artifacts, maintain composure, leave. Giselle had texted her a bullet-point preparation list that included Do not touch anything without asking and Do not cry and If you cry, at least cry attractively and I’ve packed waterproof mascara in your bag, left pocket.

Alani had laughed at the mascara note. She was not laughing now. She was standing in front of a 1938 first edition of Action Comics number one—the single most important artifact in the history of the medium she had dedicated her life to—and her mascara, waterproof or not, was being tested by tears she had no power to stop.

Get it together. You direct conventions that seat thousands of people. You do not weep in the private vaults of dragon billionaires because they showed you a nice comic.

It was not a nice comic. It was the beginning of everything. And this was not a vault. It was⁠—

She turned from the display case and looked at the rest of Level Two. The scope of it. Row after row of glass cases housing comics, manga, graphic novels arranged by villain rather than publisher—a filing system that told her more about the mind behind it than any conversation they’d had. He didn’t think in brands. He thought in characters. In the people who chose to be interesting.

Beyond the comics, visible through a glass partition: the manga wing where her first-edition gift had lived. Beyond that, a section she hadn’t reached—smaller, more intimate, the lighting warmer. She could see framed pages on the walls. Original art. Ink on Bristol board, the brushstrokes visible from twenty feet away.

“There’s a third level,” Chaos said behind her. His voice was careful—the same measured tone he used in meetings when presenting data he expected to be challenged. Except the data he was presenting now was himself, and the challenge he expected was her walking away.

She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. The gesture was graceless and she did not care. “Show me.”

Level Three was where the dragon lived.

Not literally—though the ambient temperature dropped another four degrees as they descended, and the air took on that faint metallic quality she had learned to associate with his proximity. Level Three was smaller than the other two levels. More intimate. The ceiling dropped to nine feet. The display cases gave way to open shelving in some sections—artifacts that were handled, rotated, revisited. Not museum pieces behind glass but living objects in an active relationship with their keeper.

Film reels occupied the far wall—silver canisters in chronological rows, labeled in handwriting that changed as her eye moved across the decades.

The film section. Silent era through mid-century. She recognized titles from her film history courses at NYU—German Expressionist works, early horror, the noir thrillers that had defined screen villainy for a generation. The reels were pristine. Each one a time capsule, sealed and preserved by someone who had been alive when the cameras rolled.

“You watched these being made,” she said. Not a question.

“Some.” He stood at the entrance to the level, giving her space to move. The distance was deliberate—she recognized it as the same instinct that kept him at the head of conference tables, slightly apart. Except here the elevation was reversed. She stood deeper in his archive than anyone had been. She was below him in every physical sense and above him in every emotional one, and they both knew it.