Soren had served as Draketh Temple’s sworn guardian for nine years without once seeing the dragon carved into its gates move, and had begun, quietly, to suspect the old stories calling it a “living guardian” were simply a temple’s flattering description of very good stonework.
He was wrong, as it turned out, on the one night it actually mattered.
The raiders came at moonrise, more of them than Soren’s sword alone could answer for, and he’d already resigned himself to a defense that would end in failure when the silver-scaled shape above the temple gates finally, impossibly, unfolded.
“Nine years,” the dragon said, uncoiling with a sound like a thousand years of dust finally shifting, “and you never once asked me to help.”
“I didn’t know you could,” Soren said, too startled by the flames now licking around the dragon’s jaw to manage anything more eloquent.
“Few do. I only wake for guardians who’d have fought alone rather than ask — the temple has learned, over a very long memory, that the ones who ask for help too easily rarely deserve the kind of help I offer.” The dragon’s fire scattered the raiders before Soren had even finished raising his sword, more mercy in the warning blast than in any killing one. “You held this gate alone for nine years believing you had to. That is precisely why the gate was worth holding.”
When the raiders had fled and the temple’s silence had settled back into place, Soren looked up at the dragon curling itself once more around the gate’s ancient stone. “Will you sleep again now?”
“Until you need me next,” it said, eyes already dimming back to carved silver. “Which, I suspect, given how stubbornly you guard this place alone — will not be nearly as long as nine years.”