Chapter 22 Dralgor
DRALGOR
Morning comes slower in the ridge than it ever does in the city.
In Silverpine, the sun drags itself over the mountains like a beast that doesn’t want to wake, throwing light across the snow with a grudging sort of beauty.
I rise with it now, not because I have contracts to sign or meetings to dominate, but because Clara is already awake, and I’ve learned she does not wait on anyone.
She has a rhythm: stoking the stove, carrying kindling in her arms, moving through the lodge with a stubborn determination that would shame a full crew of men.
At first I stood aside, watching the way she shoulders her own weight like she was born for war, but then she shoved a broom at me one morning with a look that’s sharp enough to cut leather and said, “If you’re going to hover, you’re going to work.
” I took the broom, and I haven’t put it down since.
Now the days move in a strange cadence. I stack wood, mend rails, tighten bolts that have long since grown loose, all while she runs the lodge with the steel backbone her grandmother clearly hammered into her.
Sometimes we argue over the smallest details—how much wood the stove needs, whether the roof can hold another snowfall, whether my knots are as good as hers—but it’s not the kind of argument that ends with slammed doors.
It ends with her muttering under her breath while I grin into my collar, knowing she’ll do the same to me tomorrow.
We fall into this uneasy rhythm, two forces circling one another without naming what holds us here.
It’s late afternoon when she catches me stripping off my coat after hauling wood in from the shed. My shirt clings with sweat, and the air inside is warmer than outside, so I pull it over my head. I don’t think twice about it, but her eyes stop on me, fixed on the marks across my chest and arms.
Clan tattoos, deep ink carved in the old way, spiral patterns that tell the story of my bloodline, the shape of the mountains we once claimed, the wolves we once ran with, the hearthfires we swore to guard.
And then the scars, pale lines that cut through the ink, some shallow, some deep, some left by blade, some by exile itself.
She stands in the doorway, dish towel in her hand, still as stone. “You never said,” she murmurs, not accusation, not pity, something quieter.
“I don’t talk about them,” I say simply.
“But you carry them,” she answers, stepping closer, eyes fixed on the marks like she’s reading a map. “What do they mean?”
“They mean I belonged once,” I tell her, voice low. “And then I didn’t.”
Her hand hovers before she lets it fall against my shoulder, her fingers tracing one of the spiral lines where it breaks under a scar. Her touch is light, almost reverent, and it steals the air from my lungs in a way no battle ever could.
“This one?” she asks, brushing along a ragged line near my ribs.
“A fight I should’ve lost,” I say. “But didn’t.”
“And this?” she asks, fingertips pausing at a mark across my collarbone where the ink is almost gone.
“Exile,” I answer, my jaw tightening. “The night they carved me out of my own blood.”
Her hand stills, and I feel her breath more than hear it. “They carved it into you.”
“They wanted me to remember,” I say, bitter and steady. “So I wouldn’t forget what I’d lost.”
She looks up at me then, eyes wide, not with fear but with something I don’t deserve. “And do you?”
“Every day,” I tell her.
Her hand slips lower, tracing another scar, softer this time. The silence stretches, filled with the crackle of the stove, the muffled creak of the lodge as snow shifts on the roof. I stand still under her touch, letting her read the marks like a book no one else has ever been allowed to open.
She steps back, cheeks flushed. “I should finish supper.”
I let her go, but my chest feels like she’s set fire to it with nothing more than her hand.
That night the power flickers again, but we don’t light lanterns.
We sit by the fire, bowls of stew in our hands, silence stretching between us not because we have nothing to say, but because the quiet feels safe.
I tell her small pieces of my clan—my mother’s laugh, the way she used to flour my hands when I tried to steal dough before it was ready, the first time I was trusted to stand guard at the hearth.
Clara listens without interruption, her eyes soft, her lips pressed tight like she’s holding the words carefully so they don’t break.
She doesn’t tell me everything about herself, not yet, but she does tell me about her grandmother, about summers when the lodge was full of hikers and laughter, about winters when the pipes froze and they had to heat water on the stove for days.
She talks about losing her, the way the silence afterward hurt worse than the cold.
I don’t tell her I know that silence. She already knows.
Later, when the fire burns low and the lodge groans again, she looks at me across the room and says, “It’s too cold upstairs. You should stay down here tonight.”
“I’ll take the couch,” I answer.
“There’s one bed,” she says, her voice even but her eyes locked on mine. “We’ll manage.”
The bed is narrow, old quilts piled high, the mattress soft with years. I stretch out on one side, careful to leave space, and she slides in on the other, her back to me, shoulders tense at first. The quilts are heavy, warm, and the sound of her breath fills the room.
We don’t speak. We don’t touch. Not at first.
But sometime in the night, she shifts, and I feel the brush of her hand against my arm, the faint heat of her body closer now. My instinct is to pull her in, to claim what every bone in me screams for, but I don’t. I stay still, and I let her make the move.
When she curls back against me, tucking herself into the hollow of my chest, I breathe in the scent of her hair—woodsmoke and snow and something I’ll never name without sounding like a fool.
My arm finds its place around her waist, not pulling, just resting there, and finally, sleep comes without a fight.
In the morning, light filters through the frost-rimed window, pale and cold. She’s still in my arms, her hair tangled, her breathing steady. I don’t move, afraid that if I do, she’ll vanish, and I’ll wake to find the bed empty, the lodge cold again.
She stirs eventually, blinking up at me with a half-smile that doesn’t belong to anyone else. “You’re warm,” she mutters.
“You steal blankets,” I counter.
She laughs, soft, almost shy, and the sound cracks something deep in my chest that I didn’t know was still sealed shut.
We don’t speak of love. We don’t speak of tomorrow. But in the quiet of that morning, with her pressed against me and the snow beginning to melt on the eaves, I know we’ve built something fragile and real, something that doesn’t need contracts or signatures.
For once, I don’t fear that it will break. I only fear that I’ll wake and find it was a dream.