Dragons Don’t Dream Anymore

I. The Hollow Sky

The sky had forgotten fire.

Once, it had blazed with wings of molten gold, dragons streaking like comets across the firmament. Now, only wind whispered where thunder used to follow.

In the high valley of Eiros, where the bones of dragons were used to prop up temples and their scales tiled the roofs of noble halls, a girl named Kaelin wandered alone. She was a relic in her own right, the daughter of a dragonspeaker—those born with the ancient ability to sense the minds of dragons in dreams.

But there had been no dreams in years. Not since the Burnfall War, when the last of the dreaming dragons had vanished.

Kaelin had never seen one herself. Not in waking. Not in sleep.

And yet, she still listened.

II. The Ash-Wind

The people of Eiros scoffed at her. They called her sky-touched, meaning mad, lost in myths. Her father, dead these five winters, had died mad too, they said—still climbing to the high peaks at night, waiting for wings that never came.

But Kaelin had found something her father never did.

A dream.

It came like smoke—soft, curling, half-formed—but in it, she saw a mountain that bled light through cracks, and beneath it, a single golden eye, staring.

She awoke with ash on her hands.

It was not possible. Dreams had ended with the dragons. But this dream—this one—smelled of fire.

III. The Climb

Kaelin packed lightly: a skin of water, dried meat, a rusted blade, and the dragonspeaker’s shard—a fragment of crystal passed down through generations. It pulsed when she dreamed. Tonight, it had glowed faintly like coal.

The climb to the Bleeding Crag was treacherous. No one went there anymore, not since the earth had split during the war. It was said to be cursed, still burning deep beneath the rock. But Kaelin followed the scent in her head—sulfur, wind, and old warmth.

Three days she climbed. The higher she went, the colder the air became, but the shard at her neck grew warmer.

On the fourth day, the dream became real.

She found the cave just as she’d seen it: veined with red stone, its mouth wide enough for giants. Inside, the air trembled.

Something was breathing.

IV. The Sleeper Beneath

He lay coiled in darkness, half-buried in molten glass and forgotten time. A dragon, old as sky itself. His scales were blackened with soot and dulled with age. But his eye—the one she had seen—opened slowly, and it saw her.

“Who comes?”

The voice rumbled not in her ears, but in her soul. It was like standing in a storm that spoke.

Kaelin fell to her knees, trembling. “I am Kaelin, daughter of Andros. Dragonspeaker. I dreamed you.”

“Dreams,” the dragon rasped. “Dreams are dead.”

“No,” she whispered, holding up the shard. It pulsed now, brightly. “They still live. In me.”

The dragon shifted, groaning as crystal cracked beneath his weight. His body was scarred, wings frayed like burned parchment. He was dying. But something flared behind his eyes now—something that had not lived in centuries.

Hope.

V. The Last Flame

His name was Vaeronth, once called the Dreamfire, last of the mindborne. He had buried himself here after the war, to escape the poison of the world above. Humans had betrayed the pact. Hunted his kind. Broken the dreaming bond.

Kaelin sat beside him for hours, for days, learning. She fed him stories. He fed her memories.

Vaeronth told of the First Flame, of sky-palaces that burned above the clouds, of dragons who sang to stars. He showed her what it was to fly in dream—not through sky, but soul.

And Kaelin, for the first time, dreamed with him.

Together, they remembered.

VI. Rekindling

“I am dying,” Vaeronth said, one night when the stars wept. “But not all ends are endings.”

He offered her his final fire—not the blaze of death, but a seed of dream. A fragment of the First Flame, hidden in his soul. If she took it, she could carry dragonfire forward—not as flame, but as song. A new kind of dreaming.

But it would change her. She would no longer be only human.

Kaelin wept. She had climbed seeking dragons, not to become one. But she could not let the last ember fade.

She took the flame.

VII. The Sky Remembered

Years later, they would speak of the girl with ember-eyes and voice like thunder. Of how she walked among villages and taught children to dream again—of soaring, of flying, of listening to the sky.

They said her presence warmed the air. That ash no longer fell when she passed, but petals. That in her shadow, sometimes wings unfurled.

She never returned to Eiros. She built no kingdom. But stories followed her, like smoke.

And once, just once, a boy in the southern isles claimed to have seen a dragon—massive, bright-eyed, not flying, but walking, with a girl on its back and a song on her lips.

VIII. Dreams Return

And in the highest mountains, where the wind still howled and the stones still remembered, a single voice sometimes echoed.

Not roar.

Not fire.

But dream.