Aldric was the last king of a kingdom that no longer existed, riding a dragon whose ice-blue scales had outlived every wall he’d once sworn to defend, and he had made his peace, mostly, with the fact that his footsteps now left fire in sand where his crown had once left frost on stone.
“You’re going the wrong way,” the dragon said. It rarely spoke, and when it did, Aldric had learned to listen closely. “Frostmere lies north. You’re riding south, into desert, away from everything left of your people.”
“There’s nothing left of my people to ride toward,” Aldric said. “The wall fell. The keep fell. I am the only piece of Frostmere that didn’t.”
“Then you are still Frostmere,” the dragon said simply, “wherever you ride. A kingdom was never the wall. It was the keeping of something worth keeping. What would you do, old king, if I told you that you could simply stop?”
Aldric looked down at the fire his own footprints left in sand that had never known frost, and understood, with the particular clarity old men sometimes find right before the end of something, that he had been running not from grief but from the fear that stopping meant admitting Frostmere was truly gone.
“Then I’ll stop,” he said, and meant it for the first time in a year. “Not because it’s easier. Because a king who never stops running was never really a king at all — just a man refusing to bury what he loved.”
The dragon banked, slow and deliberate, and turned them both, finally, toward home.