You got your first dragon when you was four years old, a beautiful Common Welsh Green. It was covered in flocked felt and roared melodiously as it sat in your palm. Your auntie had brought it back as a present with her from her summer holidays in Snowdonia. She promised you that she'd seen the real thing there and you sat rapt as she told you how magnificent it was, how very green and how very big (bigger than all the Burrow, your mum, dad, uncle, aunt and brother combined). You slept with it near your head for weeks and cried when your mum took it away because your little brother was being kept awake.

You'd always been a tough little boy and so it broke your mum's heart to see you cry. She gave you a picture book the next day--The Young Wizard's Field Guide to the Dragons Of Greater Europe. You brought it with you everywhere you went --which as mostly outside and almost as far away as you could get on two feet.

One day you were especially far away and it started to rain, thick droplets hitting over the yellow pages, dark spots spreading over the beautiful drawings of graceful Antipodean Opaleyes and the fierce Peruvian Vipertooths. You panicked and slipped on a sodden patch of grass, the book opening and falling page-wise into a mud puddle. Panic made way to despair and frustration. Your book was surely ruined and all the dragons in the pictures that had become some of your best friends would-- and then the book began to warm up, warmer and warmer until it felt like that time you'd had a fever and puked your guts out except books don't get fevers and puke their guts out. They just get warm until they dry off, the mud falling away like a week's worth of dust.

You brought your book back clean, though the same couldn't be said for you. Your mother nearly punished you that day, until you told her what happened, then she hugged you and kissed you and fetched the good firewhisky out of the cellar. "Arthur! Charlie's found his magic!"