Yuen had swept the steps of the mountain shrine every morning for eleven years and had long since stopped expecting the golden statue at its peak to be anything but stone. Then, on the twelfth year’s first light, the statue’s eyes opened, and its dragon — carved from the same gold, coiled beneath its rider’s seat since before Yuen’s grandmother was born — unfolded wings that had never once been carved to fold.
“You’ve kept this place clean,” the rider said, voice like a temple bell struck once, gently. “Longer than anyone else who’s held the broom.”
Yuen, to his own surprise, didn’t drop it. “It seemed disrespectful not to. Even if you were only ever stone.”
“I was never only stone. I was waiting.” The dragon shifted beneath him, gold scales catching the sunrise like struck flint. “Cloudspire only wakes its guardian when something below is worth guarding again. Has something changed in the valley?”
Yuen thought of the merchants who’d stopped coming through the eastern pass, the smoke he’d seen rising three nights running from a direction no farmer’s fire should rise from. He told the rider everything, plainly.
When he finished, the golden figure inclined its head — not quite a bow, but close to one. “Then I am well-woken. Keep sweeping these steps, caretaker. Someone should be here when I return.”
The dragon rose without sound, gold against gold sky, and was gone toward the smoke before Yuen had finished blinking. He picked the broom back up. His hands were shaking, but the steps still needed sweeping — and some part of him found that steadying, that the smallest job in the world hadn’t changed while everything else just had.