A Conversation With the Dragon

The mountain met them with neither fire nor roar, which Ash had, in some deep part of her, expected — it met them with a silence so complete that even the ordinary sounds of the march: the creak of tack, hooves on stone, began to feel improperly loud.

The entrance to the lair turned out not to be a cave in the ordinary sense but a wide cleft between two stone outcrops, their edges melted smooth so long ago that the melted rock had grown its own layer of moss. The guide stopped the company well short of the entrance, and beyond it, Roan explained, Ash alone was to go — without weapons, without escort, because any attempt to bring an armed party before the guardian, the chronicles said plainly, was a sure way to get a war instead of a conversation.

"I'll wait here," Roan said, and by how tightly he gripped his own sword belt, Ash understood the words had cost him more than he was letting show.

"If I don't come out in an hour…" she began.

"In an hour I go in myself," he answered shortly, "and we can discuss whether this was a good idea after."

She nodded and walked forward alone, feeling the air grow warmer with every step — not scorching, but steady, like a room long kept by a well-tended stove — and that warmth, more familiar to her than anything else in her life, calmed her, strangely, rather than frightening her.

Orvain was waiting deep in the cleft, where the ceiling rose high enough to hold him whole — and still he seemed too large for this space, for this mountain, for the world outside altogether. His scales, dark, nearly black at the base of his neck, shaded toward the color of cooling coals at his wingtips, and when he turned his head toward her, the single eye that opened held not the fury she'd imagined but something far more uncomfortable for her — simple, calm attention.

"You smell of ash," the dragon said, and his voice came out nothing like she'd expected: not a roar, not thunder, but a low, almost coaxing sound, as though stone were speaking after a thousand years of silence and had only just remembered how. "Not the ash left after a fire. The ash that remembers what it was to burn."

"I don't know what that means," Ash answered honestly, stopping at what seemed a safe distance, though distance hardly mattered for a creature of this size.

"You don't," Orvain agreed, and there was no mockery in the word, only a statement of fact. "That's good. Those who came here knowing too much usually came for the wrong things."

He lowered his head nearly level with her, and Ash forced herself not to step back, though every instinct demanded exactly that.

"The flame went out," she said, deciding that since he seemed to want questions rather than bowing, she'd best ask them plainly. "Everyone at the castle believes it's a curse. The end of the line that swore the oath."

"Everyone at the castle," the dragon repeated slowly, "believes what's convenient for them to believe, because the truth demands admitting something far more uncomfortable: the oath wasn't broken by death. It was broken by forgetting."

"Forgetting what?"

Orvain was silent for a long while, and in that silence Ash finally heard, clearly, the sound of water dripping somewhere deep in the cave — the only living sound in this ancient, motionless place.

"The pact struck between my kind and yours was never a pact of blood," he said at last. "It was a pact of choice. The Hearthkeepers swore not to rule through the fire but to serve it — and those it warmed. I swore to see that this choice remained a choice, and not a burden passed on against anyone's will."

"I don't understand," Ash said quietly.

"You will," the dragon answered, and for the first time his voice carried something like patience, the kind spoken to someone whose not-understanding he considered temporary rather than a permanent flaw. "But not here, and not from me alone. What you're looking for isn't in my cave. It's in what your line left behind, when it chose to vanish from the chronicles by its own will, rather than by fate's compulsion."

He shifted, and what Ash had taken at first glance for an ordinary rockfall behind him turned out, on closer look, to be a carefully hollowed niche — not natural, but cut by hands, very, very long ago.

"Take it," Orvain said. "And when you return to your castle, don't ask yourself who your line once was. Ask why it chose to stop being that.