In the last winter before the world remembered how to be kind, the dragon came down from the mountains with grief in his throat.
He wore the shape of a man when he crossed the snowfieldsâtall and dark as old pine bark, with gold caught beneath his skin like banked fire. In another age, the people of TalâDorei would have named him for what he was and fled. They would have seen the ruin in him. The patient violence. The terrible divinity of teeth and flame. But winter makes beggars of all creatures, and he came not as conqueror, only as mourner.
He came to the valley of Syngorn where the boughs bent silver with frost, where the air sang with old magic and the dead were remembered by name.
He came because of the elf.
Aelar Vessar had once laughed beneath these trees, bright and sharp as starlight on a drawn blade. He had been a son of Syngorn, all moonlit grace and impossible sorrow, with clever hands and a cruel mouth and the kind of beauty that made priests forget their gods. He was the first thing the dragon had ever loved enough to fear.
They met in the years after the Chroma Conclave had burned the world raw, when ruins still smoked and the sky had not yet forgiven fire. Aelar had been a ranger then, exiled by his own people for loving too much of what could die. The dragonâcalled Vaereth in the tongue of men, though his truest name was older than mortal mouthsâfound him bloodied in the black roots of the Parchwood, one arrow through his side, another in his lung, dying slowly and with extraordinary profanity.
Vaereth had laughed, because it had been centuries since anything mortal had spoken to him without reverence.
Aelar had opened one silver eye, spat blood into the moss, and said, âIf youâre going to eat me, at least have the decency to be handsome first.â
So Vaereth became handsome.
It was, in the beginning, a cruel sort of courtship. The dragon wore a manâs body like a joke told for one listener. He learned the architecture of tenderness by accident. He learned Aelarâs every expression: the way his mouth curved when he lied, the way silence changed shape around him when he was afraid. He learned how the elf slept with one hand near the knife beneath his pillow, how he softened only in darkness, how loveâwhen it cameâarrived in him like grief with nowhere else to go.
And Aelar loved him in the way elves love doomed things: completely, and with full knowledge of the cost.
He loved the dragonâs hunger. The oldness of him. The monstrous, patient ache. He loved the way Vaereth looked at ruined things as if ruin were not an ending but a language. He loved the fire in him, even knowing what fire does.
For a time, they made a small and sacred life of each other.
They wandered Exandria like a half-forgotten song. Through the lantern-lit excess of Emon. Through the velvet rot of AnkâHarel, where they drank too much and kissed in alleyways fragrant with myrrh and blood-orange peel. Through Whitestone in the first spring after the Briarwoods, where the gardens grew over old graves and the air still tasted faintly of vengeance.
They were ridiculous in love.
Aelar stole books he did not need and read them aloud in bed with all the gravity of prophecy. Vaereth collected absurd treasures for himâsea glass, cursed rings, the jawbone of a saint, a flower that only bloomed in the shadow of a lichâs tower. They fought with operatic savagery and made peace like men being forgiven for the world.
And because all beautiful things in Exandria are sharpened toward tragedy, it could not last.
The wound came small.
Not in battle. Not by blade. Not in some noble, blood-bright act of sacrifice sung by bards who had never held a dying man.
It came as a cough in early autumn.
Aelar bent over in the amber light of evening, one hand braced against a windowsill in their rooms above a wine-sellerâs shop in Jrusar, and blood jeweled suddenly at his lips.
Vaereth knew.
Dragons know the language of endings. They smell death long before it enters the room.
There was rot in Aelarâs lungs, strange and blooming, some old magic taken root where a lesser wound had once healed wrong. Perhaps from a haunted blade. Perhaps from a sorcererâs curse left sleeping in his blood. Perhaps simply because fate had grown bored of waiting.
They sought clerics. Temples. Saints. They climbed the steps to Vasselheim and knelt beneath the gaze of gods who had watched empires die and offered up gold enough to ransom kingdoms. Divine hands reached into Aelarâs chest and returned empty.
Some things, even in Exandria, are beyond resurrection while they still live.
So Aelar began to die.
Slowly. Beautifully. Horribly.
Winter silvered his hair at the temples. His laughter grew thin. His sharp hands trembled when they fastened buttons. Vaereth, who had survived cataclysm and conquest and centuries of his own monstrous becoming, discovered there was no terror in all the planes like watching someone you love diminish by inches.
He became gentle in his despair.
He carried Aelar when the stairs became too steep. Learned which teas soothed the pain. Sat awake through every blood-wet night with one hand spread over the elfâs sternum as if he could hold the failing breath inside him by force alone.
Once, in the dark, Aelar touched his face and said, very softly, âYou are looking at me like I am already gone.â
Vaereth could not answer.
Because dragons do not weep as men do. Their grief is geologic. It is pressure. It is heat. It remakes the earth around it.
When the end came, it came in spring.
Of course it did.
The first thaw had softened the ground beyond their window. Somewhere below, the city was full of bells and market-song and the vulgar miracle of ordinary life continuing.
Aelar lay in white linen, thin as a prayer, his bones made delicate beneath his skin. Morning painted him gold. He looked unbearably young. Unbearably ancient. Like something holy left too long in mortal hands.
Vaereth knelt beside him in the body of a man because Aelar had once confessed he feared dying beneath the gaze of dragon eyes.
âStay,â Aelar whispered, and his voice was scarcely more than breath.
âI am here.â
âNo.â A faint smile. Blood at the corner of his mouth. âStay after.â
Vaereth went still.
The room seemed to narrow around the words.
Aelarâs fingersâcold, beloved, tremblingâfound his and closed there with what little strength remained.
âDo not make a cathedral of this,â he murmured. âDo not become a ruin in my name.â
But grief was already opening its jaws.
Aelar smiled anyway, because he had always been cruelest when he was kind.
âI loved you,â he said, as if it were an apology. As if it were a blade laid gently in the hand.
Then he exhaled.
And did not inhale again.
The world did not end.
That was the cruelest part.
No god split the sky. No choir of the damned sang. The city below went on laughing. Somewhere, someone bought figs. Somewhere, a child was born. The light remained golden on the floorboards, obscene in its tenderness.
And in that bright and indifferent morning, the dragon learned what it was to survive the death of a god.
He burned the room by accident.
Not in rage. Not quite.
Grief slipped its leash.
Flame climbed the curtains in one hungry breath. Wood split. Glass screamed. By the time the fire died, the bed was ash and the walls blackened and Vaereth knelt in the ruin with Aelarâs body cradled against his chest, untouched by flame, as if even fire knew better than to take what death already had.
He carried him north.
Past the stone roads. Past the green. Past the reach of bells and men and mercy. He carried him to Syngorn, to the silver woods of his first name, where the trees remembered the shape of his laughter.
There, beneath the white boughs, the dragon dug the grave himself.
Not with claw.
With mortal hands.
When it was done, he laid Aelar into the earth wrapped in linen and moonlight and all the tenderness he had never learned how to say aloud.
No pyre. No gold. No treasure.
Only the body of the man he had loved, and the silence after.
The dragon remained there until spring became summer and summer soured into autumn. Snow gathered in his hair. Moss climbed his knees. Travelers who passed that part of the wood spoke in frightened whispers of a dark-haired man kneeling beside an elven grave, so still the birds nested in his shoulders.
Some said he was praying.
Some said he was waiting.
But old creatures know the difference between devotion and haunting.
And when at last Vaereth rose, the valley had changed around him.
There are ruins in Wildemount no map records. Temples no god will claim. In the far places of Exandria, they say there is a dragon who keeps no hoard of gold, only relics of one dead elf: a silver ring, a foxglove pressed in amber, a hundred letters tied in blue ribbon, the memory of a laugh sharp enough to cut eternity.
He is seen sometimes in winter, walking in the shape of a man through falling snow.
Beautiful still.
Terrible still.
And so heartbreakingly alone that even ghosts step softly in his presence.
If you ask what became of the dragon, the oldest stories will tell you this:
He did not die of grief.
That would have been kinder.
He lived.
And because he loved an elf once in the brief and brutal way mortals do, he remained long afterâancient and burning and impossibleâhaunted not by the loss itself, but by the unbearable miracle that for a little while, against all reason and nature and fate, he had been loved by something destined to vanish.
And in all the ages after, that was the wound that never healed.
