A Mage, His Seagull, and a Serpent with a Broken Heart.

'You keep going like that,' the seagull says to me, 'and you'll be jumping off this island when the smokes run out.'

I nod and ignite the pipe anyway. The leaves fail to light. 'This stuff is getting worse somehow.'

The seagull pauses his search for a butter knife, 'Almost enough to quit?'

Saying ancient words, I jam a bright flame suspended from my index finger into the pipe. Earthy tastes of awful leaves envelop me. 'Not enough.'

Outside, a wave almost topples our island. A hard slab of water slammed against an improbable spire our cottage rests upon. For a moment, the cobbles tremble and there's a sickening feeling in my stomach's pit, telling me it's about to be death.

'Huh,' the seagull says.

Pretending my hand isn't trembling, I puff out the pipe's smoke.

The seagull strains for a moment, becomes a blonde, blue-eyed boy adorned in a fable's idea of a sailor. I'm used to it.

Seagull reaches for the jam in the cupboard, places a rickety stool to reach the highest shelf. Then – another wave.

Utter destruction – total death – a wave collapses against the island's spire. Seagull, tumbling from the stool, spurts wings, lands on the table.

'Where do your clothes go when you do that?' I stuff more leaves into my pipe.

Seagull stares out the window. 'The sea serpent's still there.'

He stares down at an eighty-foot drop which ends in sharp crags. The island we're on – the shape of an almost-eaten apple, a thin spire of the apple's core, and atop it – our house. A house on the brink of collapse.

Seagull, still a seagull, grabs the wrought-iron handle in his beak, pulls open the cellar door.

'If the core is broken,' says Seagull, 'the next wave it sends our way will probably destroy the island.'

I peer out of the cottage's windows. Closer than I'd like, it's there. The sea serpent's coiling body like so many slithering arches rising and falling out of the water – a lace pattern woven in hell.

Like having the skin stripped off my body, just my bones against the cold wind, I feel the serpent's gaze upon me.

'Whoever used to feed it must have stopped,' Seagull puts the jam jar back onto the shelf. Bites into the jam-spread bread carefully, holding it with his hands.

'And so you think it wants to eat us?' I say.

'I think it wants to eat the core.'

I stare back at the sea serpent. Knowing that it used to be my lover makes its hunger more terrifying, somehow. The sea serpent ducks into the waves. Gone.

'He's probably going to crush the island himself,' Seagull says.

'It's a she,' I say, my memory struggling against the smoke-induced fugue.

Stuffing leaves into my pockets, past the cellar door, we descend.

Beneath the island, it's glowing with grottos. In the grotto's centre – it's the core. And there's something wrong with it.

I cough. My eyes burn from the pipe smoke. They say if you think a substance sets you free, you should see what happens when you try to stop.

'I don't think the pipe is setting me free.'

'You think?' says Seagull, 'I can throw it out for you right now.'

On instinct, I clasp the oakwood pipe with both hands, hide it in my chest pocket. 'Let's not.'

Seagull shrugs. He lands on the core, a bright orb on a Greek marble column. Between the ridge I'm standing on and the column with the orb – a stretch of big empty air and, below it, just enough space for a plummeting death.

'Do you think I should jump it?' I say.

Seagull pecks at the core. 'Maybe you could change like I can, if you gave it up with that pipe of yours.'

'And maybe this island will crawl onto land.'

Inhaling like a good mage should, I say some very old words I learned in a castle which has since been reduced to a crag where nothing ever grows. The work of the serpent, when she was still a woman.

The smoke I exhale turns blue like a berry, or pigment – anything but the ocean. The cloud settling in the air, I walk onto it. The core's heat against my skin makes me wince.

'What's wrong with it?' says Seagull.

'What do you think?'

I throw the pipe into the ocean. Immediately, the withdrawals. It's all I can do not to collapse. And apparently that isn't enough.

Half-squawking, half-screaming, I feel the tug of Seagull's hands and then his beak – not enough to support my weight as I collapse into the waves.

Ahead of me, I'm seeing one thing and it's this – a colossal eye, the snake-slitted pupil the size of a small home – pure darkness staring at me.

'Why have you come here?' I say to the serpent.

'I HUNGER.' The sound pressure shears through me, blood trickles from punctures in my skin.

The serpent coils itself around the island. Now – both eyes staring at me. Twin planets of red murder.

Of the spells they had taught me, there isn't one for this. There never was. That was the academy's hubris.

The ocean absorbs my cold sweat. I wonder if this is it. And then I see it beside me, floating in a small bubble of its own – a bubble enveloped in smoke.

By now, it's moist inside. A dank jungle of reptilian breath, inside the serpent's shut mouth. The rippling muscles on its too-warm tongue try to swallow me, and down in the darkness of its throat chasm, into the long up-and-down arches of its body, I see the crow's nest of a ship.

Digging my boots into thick knobs of tongue matter, I clasp the pipe in both hands, say the spell, enlarge it. Creaking against reality's impositions, the oakwood pipe takes the size of a wheelbarrow, then the size of a dinghy.

Standing in the base of it, I cast the spell my uncle used to call 'Em-biggening' onto the leaves, too. The quality of my leaves has been getting poorer these past few months, but this is all I have left at hand.

The serpent's stomach rumbles. Outside, I hear it crushing the island's base, its muscles pulverising stone.

The serpent lifts her mouth to swallow me – pipe-home and all. Leaping out of the pipe, digging my hands into soft flesh, I look down at the tumbling pipe and cast fireball. It doesn't ignite.

These terrible leaves I've been smoking, too awful to even catch a flame. There's no igniting it.

The world – a constant earthquake, like a child on monkey bars, I leap to the serpent's dangling uvula.

I pull on the fleshy bag. I try to make it retch. Instead, I slip. Enveloping me – a chasm of swallowed-water ocean inside the serpent's belly.

Reeling from the fall – the deck of a swallowed ship. The crew are aboard, and they're dead. Soon, I think, I will be, too.

Far above, in the swallowed ocean's sky, the serpent opens its mouth. Like a ray of light pouring in. I wish it didn't. I see the island toppling. My last refuge from the world. My hermit spire. The retreat falls apart. And the cottage, slipping off the spire's top, topples. The cottage falls into the serpent's mouth in great big somersaults of real estate.

I grasp the deck of the swallowed ship. I cry.

This is it.

And then it isn't. Tumbling out of the cottage's burst-open door, a seagull, and then a boy, parachuting into the serpent's mouth on a great big leaf.

'So that's where the good leaves are! You've been hiding them!' The tears stream down my face, they crest the curl of my great big smile.

'Well!' shouts Seagull, his voice echoing across the swallowed ocean, 'It seems you had settled for second-grade stuff anyway.'

Overboard, I see it. The pipe, the size of an oar-drawn Viking ship, laden with second-grade leaves. Seagull tosses the bundle to me, the great big heap of unstoppable, un-put-downable nicotine. The whole reason I had escaped to my hermit addict-hole in the first place and forsaken the woman I loved.

It didn't occur to me that forsaking a woman with incredible magical powers would turn her into a sea serpent. I was too busy in my obsession with the nicotine – and the spells, yes, the incredible spells it gave to me.

As I set the Viking funeral of tobacco tonnage ablaze, something that doesn't occur to the serpent is that nicotine poisoning elicits nausea. Seagull and I, we scramble to the hold. I tell him to hold his breath. Preferably, to plug his nostrils.

At a distance, I say the incantation's other half. There's a fwoosh and the sound of boiling ocean. The pipe ignites.

For a moment, the scent of it, bleeding through the cracks of the hull in thick tendrils. The pipe smoke almost lures me back to building another spire. Almost. Instead, I realise that the young man in my arms needs me – and he needs more than just a man who puffs and coughs and agonises over devising new spells in his yellow-fingered seclusion.

The two of us, wheezing in thick fog, we retch. The serpent retches, too. Somewhere in its stomach, a great big wave of gastric fluid builds up. And then – and then the sun.

Clambering onto the deck's surface, an armada of ships. The ships further behind, further into the stomach – half-digested.

For the first time in decades, wind caresses their half-digested masts. A dead armada. Galleons and triremes and great big castles with sails – all once swallowed by the serpent, their decks slowly corroded away by the salt water-dilution of stomach acid.

Behind them, the pipe has stopped growing. It's large enough for the serpent. She grasps it with her mouth and puffs. Already, her pupils dilate. And then, the colossal tower of scaled sinew, she rises in her full length – a ramrod pillar of serpent, reaching up to the clouds – the nicotine-poisoned rings of her stomach muscles contorting her into a tower of Babel. A spear piercing the sky.

As the serpent vomits, black tar pours from her mouth, seeps from between her scales.

'I HATE YOU,' she says to me. Her voice violates the clouds into shreds.

Seagull and I climbing to meet her on a cloud of blue bridge-smoke, I fly up to her and stare her down.

I say it. I say what I had been meaning to say to her for decades. I say, 'I'm sorry. I didn't love you like I ought to have. And you are the only woman to have ever loved me truly.'

The great big planets of murder stare me down, then evaporate. All that's left is the shape of a woman in a flowing dress, suspended in the empty space where the serpent's head was. For a moment, the woman stays suspended in the air, great big gobs of black hatred falling to the ocean far beneath us – the goop of the exoskeleton she had forgotten was there.

Fast asleep, the woman – she starts to fall.

Amongst the goop, Seagull sees it, too.

'The core!' he shouts, 'If you don't grasp it now, it's going to shatter!'

'I can't,' I say to Seagull, 'I have to catch her.'

Seagull stares at me, 'But what about your powers?'

The sea blackening from the tar and the shattered spire and the gigantic pipe now the size of a tropical volcano, I say to him, 'I think my powers have done enough.'

Just as the core's glass shape shatters against the waves, I catch her. Her emerald eyes, twin windows into a half-shattered cathedral, the cathedral walls already healing.

The three of us stand on a great big plain of frozen waves – the remnants of the orb's magic – the three of us stand there, the cottage held in place by the ice.

She's still asleep. I carry her into the bed. Seagull, now a boy, his wings gone forever, he retrieves the now-ordinary pipe and gives it to me.

With the last of my magic, I cast the spell my uncle used to call, 'En-small-ify'. The pipe withers, smaller and smaller, shrinking into a mote, caught by the sea breeze and gone.

The cottage, suspended by the drifting ice, the cottage catches a stone platform at speed. The cottage slips over the ridge of it, comes to a halt. At the corners of this new island, from a time long ago, a small shoot of green – the beginnings of a garden.

From the impact of a cottage sliding onto dry land, she wakes up. Rubbing her eyes, she asks me, 'Where are we?'

I throw a log into the fireplace, ignite it – with a match this time. I hand her a slice of bread with the jam on it. She sees me, she sees the absence of the pipe, and then she embraces me.

Whispering into her ear, I say to her, 'We're home.'