Legacies
Seanan McGuire
Finding your story
“Legacies” is Seanan McGuire’s February 2026 Patreon reward. She introduces it as follows
(Image: Two bead bracelets atop a box of letter beads. One is red and orange and says “Run away with me.” The other, in shades of green, says “Get wiggly.”)
Standalone time!...for now. This feels like it might be the beginning of a series of sorts, similar to Indexing but working with a different set of mythological/folkloric options. We shall see.
In a world very like our own, a reclusive woman with a bird and a houseplant tries to take care of a really big lizard. Or something like that.
As she indicates, the idea behind this story is broadly similar to her Indexing series, in the sense that people find themselves in the roles of characters in well-known stories. Some (perhaps all?) of the people in this world have a legacy—meaning a role they can take on in a story. How exactly this works and how it is different from Indexing is, it seems to me, something that McGuire has not worked out in any detail yet.
The story begins when our unnamed first-person narrator sees a teenage kid attacking a dragon, under the impression that he (the kid) has a dragon-slayer legacy. The dragon knocks the kid down. But our narrator takes pity on the kid and persuades the dragon not to eat it.
And so on. You get the idea. It was a fun story, with a rather charming end [spoiler1].
“Legacies,” on Patreon.
The plot twist at the end was familiar from a scene in Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. If you’ve read that, you’ll recognize it immediately. I don’t want to be more specific than that, but if you think about scenes in Dawn Treader that involve a dragon, you may guess it.