He did not think she had ever given it, and that disappointed him.
Names had power once. In the old days, when dragons ruled the skies, to know a name was to know the soul. Names were carved into the hatchling’s shells as they emerged.
But the last dragon could not remember his.
He could not remember the strength in the name his mother had given him. Those memories were fog and fire, wings and blood.
Hehad forgotten it, and the thought hollowed him.
To have no name was to be void of a part of himself. To be nothing. To drift through life without meaning.
Perhaps this is another reason why he hoarded things—to fill the emptiness his own name could not.
But now…he wantedhers. He wanted to shape her name in his mouth to see if the sound could warm him in the cave’s endless cold. He wanted to see if it was as gentle as she was.
He wanted to keep it as one of his treasures, not to own, but to cherish.
He growled softly to himself, shaking the thought away. This was madness. Sentiment. Weakness. Stupid human things.
He rose slowly, stretching his wings until they scraped the cavern roof. Gold and bone glimmered in the half-light. The flower crown still hung crookedly from his horn, wilted now, yet he could not bring himself to remove it.
He turned toward the mouth of the cave and looked down the long slope of the mountain toward the forest below. She would be there again. Heknewshe would.
And when she came, he would continue to ache for the sound of her name. If he ever learned it, he would keep it in his fireheart where it could not be stolen or forgotten.
And maybe then he would finally know his own.
The sun dippedbehind the trees, casting gold across the lake’s surface. The girl stood at the edge of the water, and he was already there, waiting for her.
He sat near the treeline with coiled limbs tucked under him like a cat, his great wings folded neatly at his sides. She stepped closer to him, her eyes catching on the flower crown still dangling from his horn.
“Hello again,” she said, but he did not understand it.
His golden eyes followed her carefully and curiously, but he did nothing. He remained so still that if not for the rise and fall of his chest, one might mistake him for a creature carved from stone.
“I wish I knew what you were thinking,” she said between them.
She turned away for a moment, kneeling to collect roots from the bank. She glanced back to find the dragon had shifted, his massive head tilted a little farther down.
He was trying to listen. A low and rumbling sound came from him, resonating in her bones, and he subtly nudged his head forward, bidding her to keep talking. He could hear her heart hammering in her chest, but she did not seem afraid.
She lifted the handful of roots and pointed to them. “We use these when a child gets a rash,” she said.
The dragon gave no answer, but he made that sound again, and she continued on. He didn’t know the words she spoke, not in the strange, sharp tongue of humans. Her sounds twisted in ways no dragon's throat could mimic.
But still, helistened.
And though he did not understand her words,something in her voice pierced the old, scarred part of him that remembered what warmth felt like.
He did not have a name, but if he did, he would have given it to her, if only to hear her say it back.
Her voice carriedon the wind, soft, uneven, and strangely comforting. She talked, but never expected an answer. When she paused, the dragon made gentle sounds to get her to continue, and she always did. That alone made her different, because she somehow had learned to listen where others would have ignored. Humans always demanded, but she never took what he was not willing to give.
She was a small creature, in the way all humans were, but there was something so beautifully odd about her. She did not carry weapons, nor did she cast frightened glances over her shoulder at him, nor did she reek of false courage or deceit.
Because of these things, he always followed her, from a safe distance of course. He curled low against the earth, but the ground did not tremble with fear, and neither did she. The forest knew him now, and so did she.
Though he could not understand all of her words, he understood her voice; the tone of it, the cadence. He had managed to collect a small vocabulary of the human tongue. The worst of them, he had learned, washome.
