Torvald had climbed to the overlook above Ember Vale every evening for a year, ever since the dragon first appeared on the far cliff — a great green shape, wings folded, watching the same river Torvald watched, at the same hour, without ever once crossing the gorge between them.
His men had stopped asking why he didn’t simply attack while it was still. His grandfather, the village’s last dragon-slayer, would have. But Torvald had noticed something his grandfather’s stories never mentioned: the dragon never so much as glanced toward the castle. It watched the river. Only the river.
Tonight, for the first time, it turned its head and looked directly across the gorge at him.
“You’ve been watching me watch you,” it said, its voice low, rough as stones grinding, carrying easily across the empty air. “A year, and you never once raised that axe.”
“You never gave me a reason to.”
“No,” it agreed. “I lost something in this river, a very long time ago, before your castle’s first stone was laid. I have been waiting to see if it would come back with the current. It won’t. I think I’ve known that for some time and simply didn’t want to stop looking.”
Torvald lowered the axe he hadn’t realized he was still holding ready. The dragon spread its wings — slow, deliberate, final — and rose from the cliff for the first time in a year, circling once above the river before turning north, away from the vale, away from whatever it had spent a year failing to let go of. Torvald watched until the green shape vanished into the clouds, and found, to his own surprise, that he missed it already.