The cold was a fact of the world, like the stone beneath his bare feet or the iron around his neck. It had long since stopped being something the boy felt and had become something he simply was. A creature of frost and shivers, huddled in the lee of a stinking straw pile, waiting to be inventoried.
He didn't know his name. He knew the sound of his own hunger, a hollow gurgle that echoed in the silence of his ribs. He knew the color of dusk through the single, high window of the pen—a dull purple like a fading bruise. He knew the rasp of the manacle chain, a sound that had worn a groove in his hearing.
He was, near as anyone had ever guessed, thirteen. Life before the slaver's lockup was a series of blurred, gray images: a woman's cough, the smell of rotting fish, running. Always running. Now, there was nowhere to run. The pen held a dozen other hollow-eyed shadows, but the boy was a island of silence among them. He had perfected the art of stillness, of making his thin, rag-wrapped body just another piece of the cellar's refuse.
The door at the top of the steps groaned open. A wedge of lantern-light cut through the gloom, and with it came the smell of cheap tallow and stale beer.
"Up, maggots! Inspection."
Grend, the slaver, was a mountain of gristle and ill intent. His face seemed permanently clenched, a fist with eyes. He clattered down the steps, followed by a new man—a buyer. This one wore the drab, functional wool of a mine overseer from the Geossan frontier, his eyes calculating and cold as he swept them over the merchandise.
The boy watched from his corner, his deep blue eyes unblinking. The overseer's gaze passed over him, paused, and moved on. Too scrawny. Not enough meat for the ore-crushers. A flicker of something—not relief, just a shift in the inevitable—passed through the boy. He would not be bought today. He would stay in the cold and the dark a little longer.
But Grend had other ideas. "This one," the slaver grunted, stomping over and seizing the boy by the arm, yanking him upright. "Tough as old roots. Don't eat much. Perfect for the narrow seams."
The overseer stepped closer, his nose wrinkling at the smell of filth and despair. He peered into the boy's face. The boy stared back, his mind a perfect, frozen lake. He felt nothing. Not fear, not anger. Just the cold.
"He looks half-dead already," the overseer said, his voice flat.
"Hard to kill, this one," Grend insisted, shaking the boy like a sack. "Walked here from the northern wastes, he did. Survivor."
The lie was so grand it almost touched something in the boy. Northern wastes. The words conjured an image of endless, clean white. A nothingness that was not this damp, close darkness. The frozen lake of his mind rippled, once.
The overseer shrugged, the transaction already a foregone conclusion in his ledger of lives. "Fine. Throw him in with the others."
As Grend turned to drag him toward the door, the boy's body moved before his mind could form a thought. It was the pure, distilled instinct of a cornered thing. As the slaver's grip shifted, the boy dropped his weight, becoming a dead weight for one crucial second, then twisted. It was a move born of a thousand dodged kicks, a lifetime of slipping through cracks. He slithered from Grend's grease-slick grasp like an eel.
For a heartbeat, all three men were frozen: Grend in surprise, the overseer in disdain, the boy in the open space between them.
Then he ran.
He took the stone steps two at a time, his bare feet slapping on the cold rock. Grend's roar of fury chased him up into the alley. The night air hit him like a slap, but it was air that moved, air that didn't smell of despair. He didn't choose a direction. He simply followed the path of least resistance, which was away. Away from the shouts, away from the light, away from the future that had just tried to close its jaws around him.
His legs, thin and corded with the muscle of deprivation, carried him through a maze of reeking alleys, past startled drunks and yowling cats. He heard pursuit, but it was clumsy and loud. He was a ghost, a whisper of pain and motion. He ran until the town's lights were a dim glow at his back and the only sound was the frantic hammering of his own heart and the rush of wind in his ears.
He collapsed at the treeline, vomiting bile into the frost-hardened mud. The chain around his neck was gone, lost in the struggle. For the first time in memory, his throat was bare. He touched the skin there, raw and cold. He stood, his breath pluming in the moonlight, and looked north. The road ended here. Beyond was a rumble of dark hills, and beyond that, the maps in men's minds went blank.
He began to walk.
The first day was a fugue of motion. He found a frozen creek and sucked on shards of ice. He chewed on the leathery inner bark of a pine tree. The cold was a sharp companion, but it was a clean cold, scouring and empty. It was better than the cellar.
On the second day, the hills rose into proper mountains, their peaks sheathed in white. The trees grew stunted, then disappeared entirely. The world simplified into a palette of rock, sky, and snow. He found a dead hare, frozen stiff, and gnawed on it until his gums bled. He didn't feel the blood. He was beginning to not feel much of anything. The cold was seeping inward, filling the hollow places.
On the third day, the snow began. It wasn't a gentle fall. It was the sky turning itself inside out, a furious, silent white obliteration. It covered his light brown hair in white, prestine snow, It swallowed sound, it swallowed landmarks, it swallowed up the boy's meager trail behind him. He was a single, dark stitch in an endless white sheet, being slowly unpicked.
He should have died that night. His body, a bundle of rags and brittle bone, had no defense against such cold. His mind knew this in a distant, academic way. Yet, his legs kept moving. One foot in front of the other. A strange, stubborn fire, no bigger than a pinprick, glowed somewhere behind his breastbone. It did not warm him. It simply was. And as long as it was, his feet would fall.
Time lost meaning. The white world was a loop of agony. His lips cracked and bled, the blood freezing instantly. His skin turned the color of old parchment, stretched tight over his skull. He stopped shivering. The deep, systemic cold was complete. He was becoming a thing of ice.
He walked. He didn't think of the cellar, or Grend, or the overseer. He didn't think of food or warmth. He didn't think of stopping. There was only the next step, and the next, and the faint, unwavering pinprick that demanded he take it.
A week. It must have been a week. He was a hallucination in his own life. The snow beneath his feet felt different—softer, giving way with a faint, hollow sigh. He didn't notice. He was a machine of bone and will, grinding toward a destination that did not exist.
His foot broke through.
There was no sound, just a sudden, shocking absence. The world vanished. He fell through a crust of snow and into a deeper, warmer dark.
The fall was longer than he expected. He landed not with a bone-breaking crash, but in a soft, sighing cradle. It was dry, and fragrant—a smell of ancient sun, cinnamon, and something like the air after a lightning strike. Dust, golden and fine, plumed around him.
For a long time, he lay there, waiting for the pain, the end. Neither came. There was only a profound, enveloping warmth seeping up from below, melting the permafrost that had claimed his body.
Slowly, he pushed himself up on arms that felt like foreign things. He blinked, his vision swimming.
Gold.
It was the first coherent thought that had formed in days. The cavern was lit by a faint, phosphorescent glow from veins in the rock high above. And by that glow, he saw mountains. Not of stone, but of metal. Coins, in uncountable billions, formed slopes and drifts. Goblets, swords, crowns, and bars were tangled together like the roots of a metallic forest. Jewels were scattered with casual extravagance, glinting with inner fire. It was the ransom of a hundred kingdoms, forgotten by time.
It meant nothing to him. It was just another landscape, strange but no more or less real than the white hell above.
He looked down to see what had broken his fall.
He was sitting in a vast nest of golden threads, dried reeds of impossible colors, and tufts of something soft as cloud. It was warm and deep.
His gaze followed the curve of the nest. It rested not on the cavern floor, but on a surface of deep, metallic crimson. A scale. A single scale, larger than the door of any house he'd ever seen. It was a plate of living armor, its edges overlapping with another, and another, in a pattern of immense, slumbering power.
His numb mind processed it with glacial slowness. Dragon. The word floated up from some half-remembered tavern tale, a story told to scare children. Dragons were the size of a lord's manor, the stories said. Great, fire-breathing lizards.
This was not a lizard.
This was a continent. A sleeping, scaled landmass.
He traced the curve of its side, a sloping hill of blood-red plate that rose to the vast, folded arch of a wing—a leathery vault fringed with spines like the spears of giants. He followed the line of its spine, a ridged highway that led to a neck thicker than an ancient oak, and finally to the head.
It rested on foreclaws as big as carts. The skull was a fortress of horn and bone. A single, closed eyelid could have roofed a cottage. Its long, elegant muzzle, lined with teeth like ivory daggers, lay still. From its nostrils, with each slow, seismic breath, curled twin plumes of smoke that smelled of deep earth and far-off storms.
He should have felt terror. He should have screamed. He felt only a distant, watery surprise. A faint, detached 'oh.'
The walking, the cold, the white silence—it had scoured him clean. It had hollowed him out. There was no room inside him for awe or fear. The monumental reality of the dragon could not fill the void; it could only sit there, a fact as simple and undeniable as the snow had been white.
He was on a dragon. A creature from a myth he'd never fully believed. It was not the size of a manor. It was the size of the mountain that contained it. He was a fleck of dust on a slumbering god.
With a sigh that seemed to come from the bottom of his empty self, he lay back down in the soft, fragrant golden hay. The dragon's scaled side rose and fell beneath him, a steady, planetary rhythm. The heat from its body soaked into his frozen marrow, a deep, penetrating kindness he had not known the world could possess.
He closed his deep blue eyes. The last things in his awareness were the scent of storm and cinnamon, and the slow, mighty pulse of the giant heart beating beneath him.