If Ariel had done as the wizard intended, accepted the role for which he had been manufactured, the result would have been his death. I am sure of it. Even if not literal death—even if the boy’s biological processes continued, perhaps forever, in the care of the dragons—then true death: the absence of event. Here was the opposite: an event as large as any that had occurred since the fall of the Anth. Ariel stepped through the portal.
