The Fire Within (the Last Dragon Chronicles, #1)

Chris d'Lacey's The Fire Within follows David Rain, a 20-year-old geography student who rents a room at 42 Wayward Crescent in the town of Scrubbley. His landlady, Elizabeth "Liz" Pennykettle, is a potter who makes and sells small clay dragons through her business, Pennykettle Pots and Crafts. Liz's 11-year-old daughter, Lucy, is spirited and deeply attached to the local wildlife. The household also includes a brown tabby cat called Bonnington. From his first evening, David senses something unusual about the Pennykettles: The clay dragons feel warm to the touch, an upstairs studio called the Dragons' Den is off-limits, and both Liz and Lucy speak about the dragons as though they are alive.

Lucy quickly steers conversation to her favorite subject: squirrels. An oak tree in the Crescent was cut down months ago, scattering the five gray squirrels she had named and tracked: Conker, Ringtail, Cherrylea, Shooter, and Birchwood. Only Conker remains, identifiable by one shut eye and his tendency to run in disoriented circles when startled. Lucy begs David to help rescue Conker, but he declines, saying it is wrong to interfere with nature. He does promise to help if Conker is ever in real danger.

Liz crafts David a special dragon that holds a pencil and notepad, as though poised to write. She instructs him to name it to light its inner spark, love it to keep the spark lit, and never make it cry. David names it Gadzooks. Leaving the Scrubbley Library after a fruitless search for squirrel books, David briefly visualizes Gadzooks scribbling on his notepad, the dragon's first mental communication with him. In the library gardens, the gruff gardener George Digwell suggests Conker's eye injury was caused by a larger animal. At a wishing fountain, David encounters a squirrel that appears to smile at him. Back home, Liz guides David through a visualization exercise in which Gadzooks scribbles a name for the smiling squirrel: "Snigger."

David discovers that Henry Bacon, the Pennykettles' cantankerous neighbor and a librarian, is building a trap in his garage to catch what he believes is a rat. David had told Henry he saw a rat in the garden when it was actually a squirrel. Alarmed, David and Lucy set their own trap, an old rabbit hutch rigged with a string and peanut, to catch Conker before Henry can. David also neutralizes Henry's trap by secretly getting Bonnington stuck inside it. When Liz discovers her cat in the device, she demands Henry destroy it, eliminating the threat.

Their trap catches Snigger instead of Conker. They release the squirrel, but Snigger bolts into the house and leads David on a chaotic chase before leaping out a window. Liz arrives home to find the kitchen in disarray and, upon learning about the secret trap and the Bonnington scheme, confines David to his room for a week.

During this enforced isolation, David writes a story called Snigger and the Nutbeast as a birthday present for Lucy. He reimagines events from the squirrels' perspective, casting himself as the "nutbeast," a mysterious creature stealing acorns from the library gardens. Gadzooks serves as creative inspiration: When David pictures the dragon, ideas flow. At Lucy's birthday party, David reads the first chapters aloud, and Lucy is thrilled.

The celebration turns when Lucy trips and shatters Gawain, a fierce special dragon. From the bathroom window, she spots Henry Bacon spraying a hose at Conker in his garden. David races next door. In the ensuing chaos, Henry's unattended lawnmower rolls toward his pond with Conker clinging to it, but Snigger leaps onto the mower and knocks Conker to safety. David spots a large black crow on a fencepost, and Gadzooks flashes into his mind, scribbling the name "Caractacus." David realizes this crow, which nests in the sycamore near the Pennykettles' roof, injured Conker's eye.

While Liz repairs Gawain behind a locked door, she tells Lucy the legend of Gawain, the last dragon in the world, and Guinevere, a red-haired girl who sang the dying dragon a lullaby instead of fleeing. David eavesdrops from the staircase and begins to suspect the Pennykettle dragons are genuinely alive, though he cannot prove it.

A young wildlife volunteer named Sophie Prentice visits the house collecting donations for the Scrubbley Wildlife Hospital and offers to help if they catch Conker. David is drawn to her quiet confidence. He soon struggles with severe writer's block and, in frustration, banishes Gadzooks to the bookcase. Liz scolds him, insisting a dragon cannot help someone who does not love him. David apologizes and returns Gadzooks to the windowsill, and ideas begin flowing again.

Fiction and reality then converge. As David types a scene in which Snigger and Conker cross the lawn toward the trap, two real squirrels do exactly that in the garden. Caractacus swoops down and attacks Snigger, mirroring the scene David is writing. In the melee, Bonnington claws at the crow, which becomes tangled in a sweater on the clothesline. Lucy frees the bird and discovers its shortened toe, the one Conker bit off, confirming that David's fictional account matched reality. Both squirrels are captured and taken to the Wildlife Hospital, where Sophie arranges for them to be housed together.

Days later, Sophie reports that Conker's eye wound is healing, but blood tests reveal kidney failure. He will eventually die, though the timeline is uncertain. Sophie engineers the squirrels' "escape" from the aviary to skirt regulations against releasing captured gray squirrels into the wild. The group takes them to the library gardens, where Birchwood, the large bully squirrel, unexpectedly protects Conker. David realizes Birchwood is Conker's father.

Weeks later, during a return visit to the gardens, George tells them he found a dead squirrel that morning. David discovers Conker's body, and they bury him beneath a horse chestnut tree. George offers consolation: "What you take from the earth, you must give back" (298).

Devastated, David rejects the dragons and storms into the rain. He returns soaked and ill. Liz explains that Gadzooks is crying because David rejected him: Without love, the dragon's fire tear, a teardrop containing a violet flame, will fall and extinguish his spark permanently. Liz tells David the rest of the legend: A crone named Gwilanna, an outcast with mystical powers, instructed Guinevere to catch Gawain's fire tear at the moment of his death. Guinevere obeyed, preserving dragonkind's fire within herself.

David drifts into a dreamlike state and finds himself on the landing, where Gruffen, a small guard dragon that has been mysteriously moving around the house, is alive with glowing violet eyes. Gruffen guides David to the den, where every dragon is alive. Gadzooks sits limp on the potter's wheel, a fire tear forming in his eye. Gruffen instructs David to catch the tear. Recalling Gwilanna's instruction that the dragon must be joined in water, David lets his own tear, which contains an image of Conker, merge with the dragon's fire tear. The combined tears release a flame that David blows into Gadzooks's nostrils. The dragon's eyes shift from gray through green to violet as his spark relights. Guinevere, Liz's special dragon, opens her eyes and breathes fire over Gadzooks, and the repaired Gawain adds his own flame. This reveals Liz's secret: She fires her dragons not with a kiln but through the dragons' own breath. Gadzooks writes "wuzzle," a word meaning to drift off contentedly to sleep, giving David the inspiration to finish the story.

David reflects that the legendary Guinevere kept the dragon's fire rather than returning it, and that Liz and Lucy are her descendants, carrying dragon fire within them. Lucy plants a horse chestnut beside the rock garden as a memorial for Conker. David reads aloud the rewritten ending: Snigger tells Ringtail, one of the original five squirrels, that Conker "wuzzled off" peacefully, and the nutbeast and the little girl buried him beneath the horse chestnut tree. The family gathers around the planted seed in quiet closure. As David glances at his window, Gadzooks scribbles a new word, "Spikey," signaling that a new adventure is beginning.