Yara had guided travelers through the stone spires of Silverpeak for fifteen years and told every one of them the same thing before they set out: don’t look directly at the dragon, if you’re lucky enough to see it at all. Look at where it’s looking instead.
She’d never fully explained why, until the morning a merchant’s daughter refused to listen and looked the golden dragon dead in its ancient eye as it wound itself down through the misty pillars toward the temple at their base.
The dragon stopped. Every eagle circling the peak went suddenly, unnervingly silent.
“She’s not afraid,” the girl’s father whispered, horrified. “Why isn’t she afraid?”
Yara didn’t answer, because she was watching the dragon’s eyes — and for the first time in fifteen years of guiding, she understood what those unspoken instructions had always been protecting travelers from. It wasn’t the dragon’s anger. It was its grief. Whoever looked directly into those ancient eyes saw, unfiltered, every temple this dragon had watched crumble across centuries it had no way of measuring except in loss.
The merchant’s daughter didn’t flinch. She simply nodded, slow and solemn, and said quietly: “I’m sorry you’ve had to watch so many of them fall.”
The dragon lowered its head — not a bow, exactly, but close — and continued down toward the temple as if nothing at all had happened. Yara changed her instructions after that day. She still tells travelers not to look the dragon in the eye. But now she adds: unless you have something kind enough to say once you do.