The boy slept a sleep without dreams, a perfect void of rest. The warmth of the dragon's scaled hide was a sun against his back, the slow, tidal rhythm of its breath a lullaby that smoothed the last frozen kinks from his soul. He slept for a day, and then another, while the mountain of treasure held its breath around them.
Then, the world moved.
It began as a deep, subterranean grumble, a vibration that traveled up through the gold and into the boy's bones. The crimson hill beneath him shifted, rising in a slow, colossal stretch. Joints the size of city gates sighed and popped. The boy slid, a tiny, rag-clad pebble in an avalanche of fragrant golden hay, tumbling gently from the dragon's sloping back to land with a soft thump on the stone below.
He made a small, instinctive sound—not a scream, just a squawk of surprise. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, his pale, deep blue eyes blinking slowly in the cavern's dim light, and looked up.
The dragon was arching its spine, wings still furled tight against its body. Then, as if it had registered the tiny puff of sound, the great head swung down.
The boy stared. The dragon's eye, now open, was a vertical-slit abyss of molten gold, holding an intelligence as vast and ancient as the mountain itself. It regarded him, this bony, half-frozen creature that had appeared on its back. The gaze swept from his matted, light-brown hair, still threaded with hay, down to his frost-stiffened rags. It was an assessment, not of threat, but of anomaly.
The dragon did not roar. It did not sniff. It simply acknowledged. Then, with a liquid grace that defied its monumental size, it turned and moved across the cavern. Its passage was a river of wealth, coins and gems whispering and clinking as they parted before its claws. It headed towards an arched opening in the cavern wall—a larder made for a giant.
The boy, driven by a numb curiosity that was the first sprout of his waking mind, shuffled to his feet and followed. He peered inside.
The side chamber was a place of profound cold. The walls were not stone, but a deep, glacial blue ice, radiating a chill that made the main cave feel like a summer meadow. Suspended within, like insects in amber, were shadowy, massive shapes—haunches and sides of creatures beyond his imagination.
The dragon reached in with a single, hooked claw, precise as a surgeon's tool. It withdrew a haunch of meat, frozen solid and as large as a merchant's wagon. Carrying it effortlessly, it returned to the main cavern and dropped it with a ground-shaking thud right beside the boy.
The dragon then lowered its head, bringing its muzzle close. The boy didn't flinch. He just watched, his head tilted like a curious sparrow.
The dragon's jaws parted slightly. There was no great roar, just a focused, resonant huff. A jet of flame, white-hot at its core and ringed with blinding blue, erupted. It was not a wild inferno, but a controlled, culinary blast. It washed over the frozen meat for three precise seconds with a sound like a tearing sky.
Then, it was over. The ice sheath vanished in a cloud of fragrant steam. The outer layer of meat was seared a perfect, crispy brown, and the smell that rose—rich, savory, fatty—was the most profoundly good thing the boy had ever encountered. His stomach, a forgotten pit of ache, clenched so hard it hurt.
The dragon settled, its haunches resting on the stone, its tail curling around to form a great, warm wall. It brought its head down again, level with the boy though still towering over him. Its great golden eye didn't blink.
Then, it cocked its head. The motion was almost birdlike. Its eye flicked from the boy's face, down to the steaming mountain of food, and back up.
The message was absurdly, perfectly clear. Eat.
The boy looked at the food. He looked at the dragon. The last of the numbness didn't crack; it simply made room for this new, simple reality. He was hungry. There was food.
He walked forward, placed his small, dirty hands on the seared crust, and tore off a piece. It was hot, juicy, and more flavorful than anything in his memory. He began to eat. Slowly at first, then with the desperate, single-minded focus of a starving creature. He ate until his stomach felt stretched and strange, until he could barely move, collapsing back into the hay, his body humming with unaccustomed warmth and sustenance.
The dragon watched, its head still tilted, smoke from its nostrils forming gentle, thoughtful curls.
---
Days bled into a routine. The dragon would wake. It would retrieve frozen meat and cook it. The boy would eat. He would sleep, his body healing, the deep cold finally banished. He began to explore the edges of the hoard, finding a small, slightly-too-large tunic of fine wool that he put on over his rags, and a discarded belt he used to cinch it. He found a pool of meltwater from the ice room to drink from.
He was a guest in a god's house, and the god was a quiet, incomprehensible host.
Then, a week after his arrival, the routine changed.
After the boy had eaten, the dragon did not settle to rest. Instead, it looked at him. Then, it extended a single, claw-tipped forefinger, as long as the boy was tall, and pointed to a clear, flat space of stone floor between mounds of gold.
Puzzled, the boy walked to the spot. He stood there, looking up at the dragon.
The dragon's molten eye seemed to sharpen. The boy felt it then—not a sound, but a pressure. It was in the air, a thickening of the warm, ozone-scented atmosphere. It was mana, but denser than he'd ever imagined, heavy and old as the bedrock.
The pressure wrapped around him. It did not touch his skin; it sank through it, into his muscles, his sinews, his very bones.
And then, it moved him.
His right leg jerked backward into a deep, precise lunge without his consent. His arms came up, one shielding, the other extended as if holding a sword. A grunt was forced from his lungs. It was not painful, not yet. It was shocking. He was a puppet, his strings pulled by an invisible, overwhelming will.
He held the stance. His muscles, still weak from starvation, began to tremble violently. Sweat broke out on his brow. The dragon's eye watched, unblinking. The pressure held him firm, not allowing the slightest waver in the perfect, aggressive geometry of the stance.
This was not a knight's noble posture. It was something lower, dirtier. The stance of a sellsword in a back-alley brawl, all unbalanced weight and exposed-line trickery. The dragon held him there until his legs gave out and he collapsed, gasping, onto the stone.
Before he could even process the exhaustion, the pressure seized him again. It rolled him over and forced him up into another stance. This one was different—wide-legged, rooted, hands open and ready to grapple. A pit-fighter's crouch. He was held again, for an eternity of fire in his thighs.
Stance after stance. The dragon's memory was a library of violence. A duelist's elegant en garde. A spearman's coiled thrust. A woodsman's axe-ready chop. A sorcerer's wide-armed, chest-open posture for channeling power, fingers splayed in specific, arcane configurations. The boy's body was marched through a millennium of combat forms, each held until failure.
There was no instruction. No encouragement. No mercy. Just the relentless, perfect pressure, and the ancient, observing eye.
When it finally stopped, the boy lay on the stone, a boneless heap, every fiber shrieking. He could not move. He could only breathe in ragged, wet gasps.
The dragon observed him for a long moment. Then, it did something new. It exhaled, not flame, but a wide, gentle plume of warm, shimmering air that settled over the boy like a blanket. Where it touched, the screaming in his muscles dulled to an ache. The deep fatigue remained, but the edge of the pain was smoothed away. It was not kindness, the boy sensed. It was maintenance. A tool was being kept functional.
The dragon then turned and retrieved more food. It was not a grand haunch this time, but a smaller, denser cut. It cooked it with the same focused breath and nudged it toward the boy with its snout.
The message was now a complete cycle: Learn. Break. Heal. Eat.
As the boy forced himself to eat, his body trembling with spent effort, he looked at the dragon, this immense, red-scaled mystery. He had no word for what had just happened. But in the deep, silent core of him, where the pinprick of will still burned, he understood the new law of his world.
This was not a sanctuary. It was a forge.
And he was the metal.