The Price of Fire

Nobody ever told Caela that blood burns different when it isn’t yours.

The parchment trembled on the obsidian altar, throbbing like an open wound. Caela held the ceremonial stylus with the steadiness of one who does not forget. Beside her, the draconic priest murmured ancient prayers, but she heard only the screams. The ones still buzzing in her memory. Her sister’s, when the sky turned red and no one came down to save her.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Caela did not answer. She pricked her finger and let the drop fall. The blood touched the center of the symbol and the ink of the contract stirred to life, twisting as if waking from a long, hungry dream.

The air split. The dragon was born.

—

The first days were strangely silent. Drokour barely breathed, curled up like a memory. Caela fed him warm milk, but also words. She told him about the mountains, the seasons, the voices that were gone.

In dreams, he answered with images: a boiling sea, wings crossing eclipses, the shudder of a falling sword.

He grew fast.

His shadow now filled the sacred stable. His fire did more than warm: it listened. Every emotion Caela felt found a translation in his flames. Her rage was dry wind. Her fear, salty vapor. Her silence, a dense hum, like a storm held back.

“Why do you cry when you dream?” Drokour asked one night, his voice made of soft embers.

“Because I wasn’t always this,” she whispered, not looking at him.

“What were you?”

“Someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister.”

Drokour tilted his head. In his eyes, the reflection of an ancient fire.

After that, for weeks, they did not speak again. But they listened to each other.

He learned from the way Caela paused before touching the broken scale on his back, as if afraid of waking him completely. She, in turn, began to tell apart the variations of his breathing. She knew when he dreamed of volcanoes, and when of silence. Sometimes, while he slept, Caela drew close and whispered words she did not fully understand. Words inherited from her mother, perhaps, or from a time she no longer remembered.

One night, Drokour spoke without opening his eyes.

“You say you don’t remember, but your words are not your own. They belong to a voice that still lives in you.”

Caela looked at him for a long while.

“Then am I just a box that resonates?”

“No. You are the echo… and also what caused it.”

Caela smiled for the first time in weeks. A clumsy gesture, a forgotten muscle daring to move again.

And from then on, they traded secrets.

She told him about fear: the kind that screams and the kind that stays silent. He told her what he remembered of fire before it had shape. The language of mountains. How stones also think, only very slowly.

Without meaning to, they learned to love each other in that strange way the soul has of seeking home even in what consumes it.

—

Every bond with a dragon demanded a payment: memory for fire, life for bond. Caela learned it one morning, when she realized she could no longer remember the color of her mother’s dress. Then, her laughter. Then, her name.

She had done it so she would not forget, but what remained was only fire and a face that burned nameless in her dreams.

The worst part was realizing it no longer hurt.

“How many others did you train before me?” Drokour asked her.

“None.”

“Then… why is there ash in your soul?”

Caela fell silent. But that night, asleep, she dreamed of smoke shaped like hands, of a tower made of white bones, of a broken promise beneath a trembling moon. She woke not knowing what it meant.

—

When the first red moon came, the bond was complete. The altar, blackened by flames, seemed to have breathed. Drokour no longer fit in it: his wings brushed the sky; his chest, the earth.

“Today I set you free,” he said, without ceremony. Only with certainty.

“I don’t want you to.”

“You won’t remember who you are when I leave.”

She lowered her gaze. The words of her people were dust now. Only the echo of a scream remained, a forgotten song… and the dragon’s name.

“Then… tell me. Tell me who I was.”

Drokour touched her forehead with his snout. A soft, protective warmth. And he began to speak.

—

Every night, from the top of the world, above the valleys burning with his breath, Drokour descended to the same clearing. An old woman waited for him there, seated beside a charred oak. She did not know why she came. She only felt something pushing her to go.

He spoke.

“You were fire. Not the kind that burns, but the kind that guides. You gave me shape, you gave me voice. In exchange, I took your names. But not your essence.”

She listened, without fully understanding. But she smiled.

On her wrist, still visible beneath the wrinkled skin, a spiral scar gleamed: a mark no one could explain.

—

One day, the dragon stopped coming. She no longer waited for him. But every dusk, she touched the scar with two fingers, the way one intones a wordless prayer. And among the charred trees, in the silence where fire once had been, a sentence seemed to float in the air:

You were mine. And I was your fire. Neither of us was forgotten.