Japanese dragon with flames line drawing

Under the hill, where the seam bends like a wrist, the dragon lay coiled around a sphere of fire the size of a bread loaf. Its claws were locked round it, and its scales ran gold wherever the heat came through. When the colliery men cut too deep, the dragon lifted its head and breathed, and the flames ran up the shafts like a tide, and the choke-damp rolled after them, and men died in their own dark. Nobody knew why. They only knew to stop digging when the air went strange.

Then, in the hungry winter, a boy called Eli Corran went down alone with a tin lamp and a heel of bread. He didn't go for coal. His father had gone down three weeks before and not come up. Eli found the dragon not raging but worn thin, its fins drooping like wet sails, its jaw open for breath. "You're holding the whole hill up," he said, and the dragon's eye, the colour of a banked fire, turned to him. It did not eat him. It loosened one claw by the width of a finger.

His father was there too, propped against the wall, breathing slow and alive, because the dragon had kept that pocket sweet all along. Eli sat with the beast until the pit-gate bell rang at first light. When the men came up the shaft, they found the air clean and the dragon's coils slack across the rock like a cat asleep in the sun, and the sphere rolling gently into a boy's arms. Ask any old miner in Hollin and he'll tell you the lamps burn steadier to this day.