The wind clawed across the mountain pass, carrying with it the thin bite of old snow and the metallic tang of blood. My boots sank into the frozen crust; the earth beneath my feet felt like a heart grown cold. A single, plain cross marked the place where my brother had been laid to rest. I stared at it until my vision narrowed to the small, iron nameplate — a name that used to mean everything.
He was a genius, some said a mind out of time. He learned, taught, and wandered; he carried maps and languages and a language of his own that bent people's thinking like light through glass. He traveled the world to give his knowledge away. And he went east one autumn and never came back whole.
I came for justice, for answers, and for retribution. I spoke words into the wind that tasted like fire. I swore to hunt down every living thing that had a hand in burying him here. I said, aloud, that I would not rest until whoever had done this suffered. The oath felt good in my mouth — hot and satisfying — and then it soured, because vows have a way of pulling the world toward extremes.
That is when the sky opened.
A shadow passed over the ridge, larger than a storm cloud but moving with intent. Metal clinked in my pack and the rope in my hand trembled. I had never seen a dragon, not truly. Stories taught children to fear the sound of beating wings; city poets painted dragons as gods of fortune; scholars argued they were metaphors for floods and fires. But the shadow that passed above me could not be squeezed into any lesson.
She landed like a mountain folding into itself. Scales as dark as midnight rain and eyes like lanterns, she breathed a scent of ash and jasmine. When she lowered her head, I saw the holes in her wings — ragged not from battle but from something like sorrow. She was the last of her kind, they said. A blessing and a curse.
"You carry grief," she said, not with voice but with the slow pressure of thought against my skull. She did not speak my name. Dragons did not need names for people; names were fragile things, and they had seen them break.
"I carry revenge," I answered. "And a rope."
She cocked her head. "Revenge has weight," she murmured. "But it changes its bearer. It burns first the hands that wield it, if they do not know where to aim."
I tightened my grip, tasting the old promise again. "Who are you to stop me?"
"I am what remains when thunder forgets its roar," she said. "I am the last thing you should bargain with." Then, quieter, as if remembering a language she had not used for a long time, she added: "I knew your brother."
That was a crack in the winter. I should have been ready to throw the rope then, to demand the truth, to rip any hint of comfort from a beast whose ancestors might have known the old world. Instead I heard a story.