My hands found the first text before my mind caught up with my body.
The First Dragon. The Broken Bond.
I opened it.
The story assembled itself in fragments, pieces scattered across different texts that I gathered like a woman possessed. Valdris—eldest of dragonkind, first to take human form, bridge between two races that should never have needed bridging. He had existed before the world took its current shape. Before mountains rose and seas filled their basins. Before any of the seven Dragon Lords were born.
He had been meant to lead. To unite.
To love.
I found Evara's name on the third page, and my breath stopped.
She was described as a healer, the text said. One gifted with an unusual ability—she could absorb the pain of others, transmute it through her own body, take into herself what would otherwise destroy.
The words blurred before my eyes.
I knew this gift. I carried this gift. My grandmother had carried it before me, and her mother before her, a line of wound-walkers stretching back through generations I had never thought to trace.
Back ten thousand years?
My hands trembled as I kept reading.
The bond between Valdris and Evara had been unprecedented. The text used words like "all-consuming" and "transcendent" and "the kind of love that reshapes reality." He had given her everything—his power, his protection, his devotion absolute and eternal. The other dragons had watched their union with something between awe and fear.
And she had rejected him.
The reasons have been lost, the text admitted. Fear, perhaps, of an intensity she could not match. Visions of catastrophe she could not prevent. An attempt to save him from something she foresaw—or an attempt to save herself from what his love would demand.
Whatever the reason, the rejection broke him.
I turned page after page with shaking fingers. Read about his transformation—love curdling to hatred, devotion twisting into destruction. How he'd become something the dragons could no longer name without inviting his attention. How they'd been forced to seal him away, lock him beneath the world in chains that had held for ten millennia.
How he'd been trying to break free ever since.
And Evara—
Evara had died.
The text didn't specify how. Didn't describe the circumstances of her ending or the disposition of her soul. It simply said: Her essence passed beyond the veil and did not return.
Until now.
I set the book down.
My cheeks were wet.
I raised my hand to my face, startled—I hadn't felt the tears start. They weren't the sharp salt of grief I recognized, the kind that accompanied death and loss and the patients Icouldn't save. These tears were different. Older. Borrowed from somewhere deeper than memory.
Grief sat in my chest like a stone.
Not mine, I thought. Except it felt like mine. It felt like something I'd been carrying forever, locked in the drawer where I kept all the impossible things, waiting to be acknowledged.
A woman who could absorb pain.
A woman who had loved a dragon so vast and ancient it had terrified her.
A woman who had run.
