Chapter 12
Twelve
The last dragon hated the humans.
The sound of their voices still haunted him in sleep. Their laughter. Their screams. Their hymns to false gods while they wiped out his kind. He remembered all of it. Every cruel thing that fell from their lips, even if he did not have the knowledge to understand the language.
He had seen them rip scales from dying dragons and wear them as armor. He had watched them hammer bones into weapons, boasting of their power. He had seen them light fires in the nests of unhatched eggs and heard the hatchlings shriek as fear stole air from their tiny lungs.
He had hated the humans for so long, that hate had become him. It was in the marrow of his bones, in the flames behind his teeth, in the sharpness of his claws. He lived on that hate. He thrived on it. It constantly reminded him that he still existed, and that something of his kind still remained.
And yet…that human girl defied it all. She looked at him as if he were something equal, not a monster to be feared. She spoke to him softly, brushed his scales with her equally soft fingers.
She should have run, or called for her kind to strike him down. Nothing about her made sense, which made her the most dangerous human of all, and it terrified him.
Because he began to wait for her. He began to hope she would return. He began listening for her footsteps near the lake in the early morning and paced as he waited for her to emerge from the tree line.
His thoughts wandered when they shouldn’t. Even now, resting among his hoard, surrounded by glittering things, he was not thinking of gold.
He was thinking of her. Of her voice. Of her tenderness when she dared touch him, and her thoughtfulness of making him a crown of flowers. How small the little gift was, and yet how immense it felt to be given it.
The dragon shifted, the piles of gold sliding against themselves like sand. He stared into the shadows of his cave as he tried to recall the sound of her voice saying anything that might have been her name.
He did not think she had ever given it, and that disappointed him.
Names had power once. In the old days, when dragons ruled the skies, to know a name was to know the soul. Names were carved into the hatchling’s shells as they emerged.
But the last dragon could not remember his.
He could not remember the strength in the name his mother had given him. Those memories were fog and fire, wings and blood.
He had forgotten it, and the thought hollowed him.
To have no name was to be void of a part of himself. To be nothing. To drift through life without meaning.
Perhaps this is another reason why he hoarded things—to fill the emptiness his own name could not.
But now…he wanted hers. He wanted to shape her name in his mouth to see if the sound could warm him in the cave’s endless cold. He wanted to see if it was as gentle as she was.
He wanted to keep it as one of his treasures, not to own, but to cherish.
He growled softly to himself, shaking the thought away. This was madness. Sentiment. Weakness. Stupid human things.
He rose slowly, stretching his wings until they scraped the cavern roof. Gold and bone glimmered in the half-light. The flower crown still hung crookedly from his horn, wilted now, yet he could not bring himself to remove it.
He turned toward the mouth of the cave and looked down the long slope of the mountain toward the forest below. She would be there again. He knew she would.
And when she came, he would continue to ache for the sound of her name. If he ever learned it, he would keep it in his fireheart where it could not be stolen or forgotten.
And maybe then he would finally know his own.
The sun dipped behind the trees, casting gold across the lake’s surface. The girl stood at the edge of the water, and he was already there, waiting for her.
He sat near the treeline with coiled limbs tucked under him like a cat, his great wings folded neatly at his sides. She stepped closer to him, her eyes catching on the flower crown still dangling from his horn.
“Hello again,” she said, but he did not understand it.
His golden eyes followed her carefully and curiously, but he did nothing. He remained so still that if not for the rise and fall of his chest, one might mistake him for a creature carved from stone.
“I wish I knew what you were thinking,” she said between them.
She turned away for a moment, kneeling to collect roots from the bank. She glanced back to find the dragon had shifted, his massive head tilted a little farther down.
He was trying to listen. A low and rumbling sound came from him, resonating in her bones, and he subtly nudged his head forward, bidding her to keep talking. He could hear her heart hammering in her chest, but she did not seem afraid.
She lifted the handful of roots and pointed to them. “We use these when a child gets a rash,” she said.
The dragon gave no answer, but he made that sound again, and she continued on. He didn’t know the words she spoke, not in the strange, sharp tongue of humans. Her sounds twisted in ways no dragon's throat could mimic.
But still, he listened.
And though he did not understand her words, something in her voice pierced the old, scarred part of him that remembered what warmth felt like.
He did not have a name, but if he did, he would have given it to her, if only to hear her say it back.
Her voice carried on the wind, soft, uneven, and strangely comforting.
She talked, but never expected an answer.
When she paused, the dragon made gentle sounds to get her to continue, and she always did.
That alone made her different, because she somehow had learned to listen where others would have ignored.
Humans always demanded, but she never took what he was not willing to give.
She was a small creature, in the way all humans were, but there was something so beautifully odd about her. She did not carry weapons, nor did she cast frightened glances over her shoulder at him, nor did she reek of false courage or deceit.
Because of these things, he always followed her, from a safe distance of course. He curled low against the earth, but the ground did not tremble with fear, and neither did she. The forest knew him now, and so did she.
Though he could not understand all of her words, he understood her voice; the tone of it, the cadence. He had managed to collect a small vocabulary of the human tongue. The worst of them, he had learned, was home.
Because when she said home, she left. It always happened before the sun dipped behind the horizon, and he felt himself dreading those moments, for it meant he was alone again, if only for the night.
As that time approached, she knelt by the lake’s edge, her hands wet and red from pulling herbs. Her brow was smudged with dirt, and the hem of her dress was soiled with mud. The wind stirred her hair as she looked up at him in quiet acknowledgement.
He let out a low rumble back. Not a warning, no, never with her. It was a sound closer to…need. A way of asking her to stay without words. His golden eyes narrowed in concentration as he watched her gather her things, trying his best to form words his beastly throat were incapable of.
“You know,” she said, rising to her feet with her satchel on her shoulder, “I can’t keep calling you you. Or dragon. It doesn’t feel right.”
Dragon. He understood that word.
She took a tentative step forward, and though he could hear her heart quicken, she didn’t look afraid. His breath warmed the air between them like a hearth, and his eyes, the color of molten precious metal, locked on hers.
“I think I should give you a name.”
Name. He understood that word too. His head tilted in curiosity. What is it? What is she saying?
“A name is…” she drifted off, “well, it’s important, I think. It makes you unique. Like me,” she lifted her hand to her chest. “My name is Elowen.”
Name. Elowen.
The dragon lowered his head, slowly, and exhaled deep, misting over the soft grass. She smiled at him, like she knew he was listening intently.
“You like to hoard things, like the crown I gave you. It’s wilted now, but you haven’t shaken it off.
You’re greedy in your own way, for meaning, aren’t you?
” The dragon blinked once. “Midas,” she finally said.
“Like the king with the golden touch. But I don’t mean it like a curse, not in the way the old stories tell it.
To me…it means you see value where others don’t. You…treasure things. Even me.”
There was a stillness between them, and then she lifted her hands to her chest again. “Elowen,” she said, then gently touched the end of his snout. “Midas.”
He moved then, not away, but closer. He curled his massive body around her as if she were something fragile and precious. He kept one golden eye trained on her, like he was guarding his most beloved possession. She stood in the curve of his body, awed and quiet, and rested her temple to his jaw.
And though he could not say her name, he etched it into his soul, alongside the one she had given him.