Smaug was in pain. It was to be expected really, having a huge arrow sticking out of you tended to hurt. He was in pain but he was not dying, it would take more than that to kill him. He was also strangely not angry. By all rights he should be furious, but for some reason he just couldn't bring himself to be. Now he had an excuse. An excuse to not just sleep and gaurd that treasure anymore, not an excuse for the humans or the dwarves or the tiny barrel-rider but an excuse for himself, for as much as Smaug loved treasure and gold it got terribly boring after a few years, even for one so longlived as himself.

The humans and dwarves thought him dead and he would take that opportunity. The dragons were a magical race and even though most of them thought magic a waste of time seeing as they could just crush of burn their enemies Smaug was not fool enough to dismiss it. It had been his only source of entertainment while guarding his treasure. He had gazed into other worlds, different dimensions, some similar to his own, others vastly different. But the most entertaining ones were the worlds populated almost entierly by humans.

He pulled out the arrow. He had made his decision. His form glowed, his whole body looking like when he was breathing fire. The glow grew stronger with each passing second until you couldn't make out an exact shape. When it receded his enormous form receded with it shrinking and changing shape until he looked to the eye like a human child before he vanished completely from this realm.

})i({

Sherlock was the identity Smaug had created for himself, an orphan with no last name. He was clever and observant and that intimidated people. But one family reveled in such talents. A little under a year after Sherlock had arrived in this human realm he had been adopted and became Sherlock Holmes, son of Siger and Violet Holmes. The couple already had another son named Mycroft who was also very intelligent, at least for a human.

Violet Holmes had always wanted two children but had lost the ability to bear them shortly after giving birth to Mycroft and so after several years when Mycroft was twelve Siger had conceded to adopt a child. They had immidiatly taken a liking to the (seemingly) five year old Sherlock.

As Sherlock grew up he enjoyed his life as a human, mostly. There were times when he could get severely annoyed by human stupidity and times he felt irritated that it was much harder to intimidate people when you were not a thousand times bigger than them and no one treated him with quite the same amount of respect and fear as they would if they could see his true form. But at the same time he had to grudgingly admire the courage some of these humans were capable of even in the most hopeless of situations and he also got to experience something he had almost forgotten about. Love. Not romatic love obviously, but the love of a parent to a child and even the love between siblings, twisted as that love may be in this particular case. Sherlock (or Smaug) felt … content. It was a feeling he couldn't remember ever having felt.

})i({

He was tall with dark curly hair and pale blue eyes. The piercing quality of his eyes gave John a sense of déja vu.

"Afganistan or Iraq?"