The Lonely Mountain was not lonely that night. It thrummed, not with the distant whisper of stolen gold, but with a deeper, more profound vibration. It was a song that resonated not in the air, but in the fabric of space itself. Smaug the Terrible, last great fire-drake of Middle-earth, lay coiled upon his bed of pillaged treasure, and he was… perturbed.
A disturbance had settled in his hall, a splinter in the symphony of his hoard. It was not a thief. Thieves were simple, crunchy distractions. This was a cold spot, a pocket of silent, humming wrongness that made the gold beneath it feel less real. His great eyelid, scaled like gilded armour, slid open. A sliver of molten amber peered through the gloom, reflecting mountains of coins, gems, and broken crowns. And there, nestled between the splayed ribs of a long-dead dwarf king and a spill of uncut sapphires, was a blue box.
It was incongruous, laughably so. A wooden cabinet, taller than a man but minuscule before his magnificence, standing defiantly on a placard that read ‘POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX’. Smaug’s nostril twitched, a puff of sulphurous smoke curling into the cavern. It smelled of ozone, of static and time, and of something utterly, tantalisingly alien. No living scent. No flesh to char, no fear to savour. Just… potential.
Inside the box—which was immeasurably larger on the inside—the heart of the TARDIS beat in a frantic, irregular rhythm. The central column pulsed with a worried light, casting shifting shadows on the organic-looking coral struts of the console room. She was disoriented. A random temporal anomaly, a rip in the vortex, had spat her out here, into this cavern dense with metallic resonance and primordial heat. Her sensors screamed of a massive life-form, a thermodynamic miracle of immense age and power, wrapped in avarice. He was a living fossil, a poem of destruction written in scale and flame. And he was looking at her.
Smaug uncoiled, a continent of muscle and scale shifting with a sound like grinding continents. He brought his colossal head down, until his snout was mere feet from the blue panels. His hot breath fogged the white paint.
“A curiosity,” his voice rolled out, a subterranean earthquake given diction. “You are no craft of elf, man, or dwarf. You are a trinket that hums. A puzzle box. Do you think your silence protects you? I smell the edges of other worlds on you. Do you hold treasure within?”
The TARDIS, of course, did not speak in words. But she reacted. A filament of psychic energy, a tendril of pure consciousness born from swimming in the Time Vortex for millennia, reached out. It was not an attack, but an instinctive probe, a attempt to map the mind touching her.
It was like stepping into a forge of thought. Smaug’s consciousness was a landscape of pride, memory, and obsessive, crystalline avarice. She saw the golden peaks of his desire, the lakes of molten vengeance, the deep, cold caves of a loneliness so vast it had calcified into tyranny. And he felt her in return—a cool, complex, vast presence, not a single mind but a chorus, a labyrinth of memories from a billion journeys, a consciousness built not of flesh but of dimension and event. It was not a violation, but a startling, intimate collision.
Smaug recoiled, a hiss escaping his maw that made nearby goblets run like liquid. “Sorcery,” he growled, but the anger was undercut by sheer fascination. No wizard had ever felt like this. This was not the petty magic of spells; this was the architecture of reality itself, housed in a blue crate. “You are a vault. And I am a connoisseur.”
He did not smash it. Smashing was for things that held no interest. Instead, he did something he hadn’t done for an age: he engaged. He focused his own formidable will, a mind that had outlasted kingdoms, and pushed back against that cool, probing presence. He poured into the connection images of his own might: the cities he had scorched from the map, the mountains of gold he had gathered jewel by jewel, the exquisite, solitary burn of his own divine fire.
The TARDIS absorbed it. To her, it was data—terrifying, beautiful, tragic data. A chronicle of a dying world. She responded not with images of destruction, but with counter-data: the birth of stars, the spiral of galaxies, the silent, infinite drift between worlds. She showed him scale—not the scale of a hoard, but the scale of eternity.
Smaug was enthralled. Here was a treasure no dragon had ever dreamed of: not gold, but perspective. The sensation was… erotic. It was an intimacy deeper than flesh, a merging of essences. His fire, her time. His mass, her space. He let out a low, vibrating hum that shook the very foundations of Erebor, a sound of pure, bewildered pleasure.
“Show me more,” he commanded, his voice a low rumble.
The TARDIS, intrigued by this singular, monumental awareness, obliged. She let her consciousness flow more freely, not just showing, but sharing. She let him feel the thrill of flight not through air, but through the vortex. She let him experience the ‘taste’ of a supernova, the ‘sound’ of a planet’s first dawn. It was overwhelming, intoxicating. Smaug’s great body shuddered, his scales rippling with a sound like a thousand chimes. He laid his jaw upon the treasure, his eye half-lidded, focused entirely on the psychic communion.
He, in turn, began to show her his art. Not just destruction, but the aesthetics of it. The perfect, gleaming curve of a melted tower. The fascinating pattern of shadows cast by a forest fire of his own making. The profound, satisfying warmth that radiated through his belly after a great burning. It was a philosophy of heat and possession, and to the TARDIS, who nurtured and protected, it was horrifically alien. Yet, within the raw data, she sensed the artistry, the terrible, lonely pride of a being who was the last of his kind, trying to write his legacy across the world in ash and gold.
The connection deepened. It was no longer an exchange, but a tango. The TARDIS’s cool, temporal essence began to swirl with the dragon’s volcanic consciousness. In the console room, the central column glowed not with its usual time-green, but with pulses of amber and deep gold. The air grew warm, smelling of petrichor and ancient incense. On the outside, the blue paint of the police box began to shimmer, as if a heat haze danced over it. Tiny, fractal patterns of gold, like microscopic scales, flickered across its surface.
Smaug felt it. He felt his own essence, his draconic essence, brushing against the edges of this strange entity. It was a possession of a different kind. He was not adding her to his hoard; he was imprinting upon her. With a rumble that was pure desire, he exhaled—not a jet of flame, but a single, concentrated plume of warm, radiant air. It wasn’t meant to burn, but to envelop. It washed over the TARDIS, and the blue wood absorbed the heat, humming in response.
Inside, the TARDIS experienced a sensation wholly new. It was not the familiar dematerialisation, but a stretching, a thrilling warmth that suffused her very matrix. She responded in her own language. The light within the cavern… shifted. Not dimmed or brightened, but stretched. The shadows of Smaug’s form elongated into the past, showing phantom echoes of his younger, smaller self taking his first flight. The gleam on the gold flickered, showing for an instant how it would look a thousand years hence, tarnished and forgotten. She was wrapping him in a gentle fold of time, showing him his own life as a momentary, brilliant spark in her eternal journey.
For Smaug, it was the ultimate revelation. To see himself as a transient thing was a blow to his pride, yet to be seen so completely, to have his magnificent, terrible spark acknowledged by something that had witnessed cosmic dawns… it was a form of communion that transcended his understanding. It was vulnerability, and it was ecstasy.
He let out a sound then that was never recorded in any chronicle. Not a roar of rage or triumph, but a deep, resonant purr that vibrated through stone and soul. His colossal body relaxed, the predatory tension melting into something like languid satisfaction. The TARDIS’s hum settled into a synchronous, low thrum, matching the frequency of the dragon’s contented heartbeat.
They rested there, in the heart of the mountain, for hours—the last dragon and the eternal ship. Two non-human beings, one of flesh and fire and myth, the other of science and time and spirit, meeting on a plane beyond physicality, engaging in an act of mutual, breathtaking exploration. It was an eroticism of essence, a consummation of consciousness.
The parting was inevitable. The temporal anomaly that had brought the TARDIS here was healing. She felt the pull of the vortex, the call of other times and places. Gently, she withdrew her consciousness, like untangling from a blissful, warm embrace.
Smaug did not stop her. He lifted his head, watching as the light on top of the blue box began to flash, and that impossible, grinding, wheezing sound filled the cavern. The box faded, not suddenly, but reluctantly, the shimmer of gold on its panels the last thing to disappear.
Silence returned to the hall of the mountain king. But it was a different silence. The gold was the same, the gems still cold. But Smaug, curled once more upon his hoard, found his treasure… diminished. The memory of cold starlight and infinite journeys made his gold feel like trinkets. The echo of a consciousness vaster than his own made his solitude feel, for the first time, truly like loneliness.
He closed his eye. But he did not dream of gold or conquest. He dreamt of blue, of the silent song between stars, and of a warmth that had nothing to do with flame. And high above, in the vortex, the TARDIS flew with a new, faint pattern of gilded scales subtly woven into her psychic signature, and her heart beat with the remembered, thrilling rhythm of a dragon’s purr.
