A free story by TL Mercer
Part One: The Fall
Jonah Keller had been falling for eleven seconds when he started to get bored of screaming.
That sounds like a joke. It wasn’t. It was just that the human throat has a limited capacity for terror, and somewhere around second six his voice had given out and left him with nothing to do but watch the impossible happen: the walls of the cave he’d been exploring — a perfectly ordinary limestone cave in the perfectly ordinary foothills outside Bend, Oregon — had simply opened, like a curtain being drawn back, and behind the curtain there had been sky.
Not cave-sky. Real sky. Blue and enormous and below him, because the floor had gone with the curtain.
He’d had time to think, with the crisp clarity of a man whose brain has decided that since death is certain it might as well take notes: This is not how caves work.
Then the wind took him.
It wasn’t a fall so much as a claiming. The sky reached up with both hands and pulled. Jonah tumbled, limbs windmilling, his headlamp arcing wild circles of light across clouds that were far too close, and he understood — the way you understand things in dreams, all at once and without evidence — that he was no longer in Oregon. The air smelled wrong. It smelled like ozone and hot stone and something sweet, like rain on a forge.
Eleven seconds. Twelve. The ground — when had there gotten to be a ground? — was a green valley floor rushing up at him with tremendous enthusiasm, and Jonah did the only sensible thing left to him. He closed his eyes.
The impact never came.
Instead there was a sound like the world’s largest sail catching the world’s largest wind, a jolt that rearranged his skeleton, and then — warmth. Enormous, living warmth, and a heartbeat like a war drum played very far away, and the smell of ozone and hot stone so strong it was like being inside a thunderstorm.
Jonah opened his eyes.
He was cradled in a claw. That was the only word for it. A claw the size of a bathtub, scaled in overlapping plates of deep bronze-green, each scale edged with a tracery of gold that caught the light like circuitry. Above the claw, rising and rising, was a leg, and above the leg was a body that blotted out a third of the sky, and above the body, on a neck longer than a city bus, was a head the size of a small car, and the head had eyes.
The eyes were the worst part. Or the best part. Jonah’s brain, still taking notes, couldn’t decide. They were huge and amber and slit-pupiled, and they were looking at him — not the way an animal looks at something, but the way a person looks at something. With attention. With curiosity.
“Well,” said the dragon. Her voice was like a cello being played inside a cathedral. “You’re new.”
Jonah said, “Buh.”
It was not his finest moment. In his defense, his finest moments had all occurred at altitudes significantly lower than this one, and none of them had involved being held several hundred feet in the air by a mythological creature.
The dragon banked, and the valley wheeled below them — green and gold, stitched with rivers, ringed by mountains that wore snow like ermine — and Jonah’s stomach performed a maneuver he’d previously only read about in fighter-pilot memoirs.
“Easy,” the dragon said, and her claw tightened just slightly, with exquisite care, the way you might hold a soap bubble you didn’t want to pop. “I’ve got you, sky-fallen. I always catch the things that fall. It’s what I do.”
“You — you talk,” Jonah managed.
“I do a great many things. Talking is among the less impressive.” She tilted her massive head, and one amber eye fixed on him with an intensity that made his skin prickle. “You’re not a bird. You’re not a star. The stars fall sometimes, you know. Little ones. They burn out before I can reach them.” A pause. A sound like distant thunder, which he realized after a moment was a sigh. “You didn’t burn.”
“Give me a minute,” Jonah said faintly. “I’m still working on the part where you’re real.”
“Take two minutes. I can spare them. I’m between errands.”
She flew him to a cliff.
It was not a cliff the way Oregon had cliffs. It was a towering basalt column that rose out of the valley like a fist, its top flattened into a broad ledge, and on the ledge was — Jonah stared — a nest. A nest built of entire trees, woven together with what looked like anchor chain, lined with something soft and red that might have been moss and might have been something else entirely. And around the nest, arranged with the loving care of a museum curator, was the strangest collection Jonah had ever seen.
A weather vane, green with age, shaped like a rooster. A kite, its paper torn, its string trailing. A hubcap. Half a satellite dish. A child’s red umbrella, inside out. A biplane propeller, lovingly polished.
Things that had fallen from the sky.
“Oh,” Jonah said, understanding flooding through him like sunrise. “Oh, you’re that kind of dragon.”
“What kind is that?”
“The kind with a — ” He gestured weakly at the umbrella. “A collection.”
“They’re sky-fallen,” she said, with dignity. “Everything that falls belongs to the one who catches it. That’s the law. Older than mountains.” She set him down on the ledge with a gentleness that belied her size, folding her wings — vast, membranous, veined like leaves — against her sides. “Which makes you, little unburned star, mine.”
Jonah sat down very suddenly on the warm stone. His legs had filed a formal resignation.
“I’m Jonah,” he said. “Jonah Keller. I’m — I’m a paramedic. From Oregon. Which is — ” He looked at the twin suns hanging low over the mountains — two of them, small and amber — and laughed, a little wildly. “Which is not here. Wherever here is.”
“Here is the Vale of Theros,” the dragon said. “I am Veyra of the Storm Line, Third Daughter of the Warden’s Brood, Keeper of the High Ledge.” She settled herself onto the nest with a sound like a landslide deciding to be comfortable, and curled her tail around the ledge’s edge. The tip of it, he noticed, was barbed like an arrowhead. “And you, Jonah Keller of Oregon, fell through the Tear.”
“The Tear?”
“The wound in the sky. It opens when the moons quarrel.” She glanced up, and he followed her gaze: two moons, one bone-white and one the color of a bruise, hanging in the blue like mismatched earrings. “Things fall through. Usually rocks. Sometimes stars. Once, a boat.” She said this with the particular satisfaction of a collector recalling a prize piece. “Never a man. Men don’t fall well. You’re fragile.”
“Thanks,” Jonah said. “I think.”
“You’ll want to go back.” It wasn’t a question.
Jonah thought about his apartment with the leaky faucet. His sister Maya’s voicemails, which he’d been meaning to return for three weeks. His ambulance, his partner Des, the night shifts that had been grinding him down to a nub for two years. He thought about all of it the way you think about a house you’ve already moved out of.
“Eventually,” he said. “Yes. Can I? Go back, I mean.”
Veyra was quiet for a long moment. The wind moved through the valley below, bending the grass in waves, and somewhere far off something roared — a sound like a glacier calving, answered by another, fainter.
“The Tear opens and closes,” she said at last. “It will open again at the sky-moot, when the greater moon eats the lesser. Ninety days from now.” She looked at him, and there was something in those amber eyes he couldn’t read. “Until then, sky-fallen, you are mine to keep. The law is clear.”
“Ninety days,” Jonah repeated.
“Ninety days,” Veyra agreed, and settled her great head onto her forelegs, and watched him the way the sea watches the shore — patient, and constant, and not at all as indifferent as it pretends to be.
Jonah’s first night in the Vale of Theros, he slept in the nest.
It was, objectively, the most comfortable bed he’d ever slept in. The red moss-lining was warm from Veyra’s body heat — she slept curled around the nest’s edge, an enormous scaled wall between him and the drop — and it smelled like cinnamon and rain. He lay there staring up at unfamiliar constellations, his headlamp long dead, his phone showing NO SIGNAL in the corner like a tiny obituary, and he laughed until his ribs hurt, and then he cried a little, and then he slept harder than he’d slept in years.
He woke to the smell of cooking meat and the sight of Veyra in a shape he had not seen before.
She was, unmistakably, still Veyra — the amber eyes gave her away, and the way she held herself, like someone accustomed to being the largest thing in any room. But she was woman-shaped now. Tall — absurdly tall, six and a half feet if she was an inch — with skin the color of hammered bronze and hair like spun copper that moved in a wind he couldn’t feel, and when she smiled at his expression, her teeth were very white and very sharp.
“You’re staring, sky-fallen.”
“You — you can do that?”
“The changing? Most of us learn it, if we bother. It’s useful for — ” she gestured vaguely, “— small tasks. Delicate work. Not burning the cutlery.” She turned a spit over a fire that burned in a shallow stone bowl — a fire with no wood, he realized; the flames came from a vent in the stone, and they were blue. “You were cold in the night. In this shape I can tend a fire without setting the whole ledge alight. Consider it hospitality.”
“Consider me,” Jonah said, sitting up and trying not to stare at the way the firelight moved across her shoulders, “extremely hospitable-toward.”
She laughed — the cello-in-a-cathedral sound, scaled down to something that didn’t rattle his teeth — and handed him a strip of meat on a skewer of bone. It tasted like pork and lightning.
“So,” she said, settling across the fire from him with a grace that suggested the woman-shape was not as new to her as she pretended, “tell me about Oregon.”
And because there was nothing else to do, and because her eyes were amber and attentive in the firelight, Jonah told her.
He told her about the ambulance, about the 3 a.m. calls and the drunks and the overdoses and the one time he’d delivered a baby in a Taco Bell parking lot. He told her about Maya, his little sister, who was finishing her residency in Portland and called him every Sunday whether he picked up or not. He told her about the hiking — how after the bad shifts he’d drive out to the Cascades and walk until his legs gave out, because the trees didn’t need anything from him.
Veyra listened the way the mountains listened: completely, without fidgeting, without checking some invisible clock. When he finished, she was quiet for a while, feeding the blue fire with her fingertips — literally, he saw, pinching the flame and moving it where she wanted it.
“Your world sounds loud,” she said.
“It is. Yours sounds — ” He looked out over the valley, where the twin suns were rising and the mist was burning off the rivers in ribbons. “Yours sounds like the morning after the loud stops.”
She smiled at that, a real smile, unguarded. “Stay ninety days, Jonah Keller. I will show you the quiet.”
The ninety days began.
Veyra set him tasks, at first. Small ones. Sort the sky-fallen collection — “the umbrella goes with the weather things, sky-fallen, not the flying things, are you hopeless?” — carry water from the spring that bubbled up halfway down the cliff (she flew him down and back, because the alternative was a climb that would have killed him), learn the names of the winds.
He learned that the Vale was home to forty-odd dragons of the Storm Line, that the Warden — Veyra’s father — ruled from the Thunderhead, the tallest peak, and that Veyra was his third daughter and therefore, in her words, “exempt from importance, which is the best kind of exempt.”
He learned that dragons didn’t eat people (“Too salty. Also the talking puts one off.”), that they did eat storm-clouds — literally, he watched Veyra rise into a thunderhead and come back crackling with St. Elmo’s fire dancing along her horns, looking smug — and that the blue fire in the stone bowl was aerthflame, which burned without fuel and could be coaxed, but never commanded.
And Veyra learned about him.
She learned that he could set a broken bone with two sticks and a strip of his own shirt — demonstrated when a young drake, all elbows and bravado, misjudged a landing and came down hard on the lower ledge, and Jonah splinted the sprained wing-joint while Veyra held the terrified adolescent still with one claw and murmured to it in the low thrumming language dragons used among themselves. The drake’s mother, a vast slate-grey matron, had regarded Jonah for a long moment afterward and then, to Veyra’s obvious astonishment, inclined her head. Just slightly. Just enough.
She learned that he told stories. At night, by the blue fire, with the unfamiliar stars wheeling overhead, Jonah told her about his world — not the ambulance this time, but the stories of his world. He told her the myth of Icarus (“He flew too close to the sun,” Veyra said, horrified and delighted. “What an amateur.”), and the story of the Titanic (“The boat was unsinkable?” “That’s what they said.” “Sky-fallen, your people are hilarious.”), and he sang her the songs he knew, his voice rough and untrained, and she listened with her chin on her hands and her amber eyes reflecting the flames, and he tried not to notice how beautiful she was, and failed, nightly.
His phone died on the twenty-third day. He’d been rationing it — a photo of Maya here, a voice memo there — but the battery finally gave out, and he sat holding the dead black rectangle for a long time, feeling the last thread to his world go slack.
Veyra found him like that at dusk. She didn’t ask what was wrong. She simply changed — the air shimmering around her like heat haze — and sat beside him in her woman-shape, shoulder to shoulder, and said, “Tell me about her. The sister.”
So he told her about Maya. About how she’d been seven when their mother died and he’d been nineteen, and how he’d learned to braid hair from YouTube videos, and how she’d gotten into medical school and called him crying, and how he hadn’t called her back in three weeks because the night shifts had been eating him alive.
“She’ll think I’m dead,” Jonah said quietly. “When I don’t — when ninety days go by. She’ll think I fell in that cave and nobody found me.”
Veyra was silent. Then, gently, she took the dead phone from his hands and turned it over, studying it the way she’d studied him on that first day — with total, curious attention.
“When the Tear opens,” she said, “I will fly you to it myself. And if — ” She stopped. Started again. “You will go back to her, Jonah Keller. That is what the keeping is for. To keep you safe until you can go home.”
It was the first time she’d said it that plainly. It sat between them like a stone.
“Yeah,” Jonah said. “Home.”
Neither of them said anything else for a long time.
Part Two: The Sky-Moot Approaches
On the fortieth day, Veyra took him flying.
Not carried — flying. She’d spent a week on the preparations, and Jonah had watched with growing suspicion as she wove a harness out of anchor chain and sailcloth salvaged from her collection, muttering to herself in draconic, rejecting three designs before the fourth met her standards.
“You’ll wear this,” she announced, holding up the harness. “You’ll clip here, and here, and if you fall out I will be extremely disappointed in you.”
“Reassuring.”
“I don’t waste reassurance on the already-doomed.” But her eyes were bright. “Hold on, sky-fallen.”
She launched off the ledge like a thunderclap, and Jonah’s stomach attempted to emigrate, and then — then the wind took them, and Veyra spread her wings to their full impossible span, and they soared.
It was nothing like being carried in her claw. That had been transport. This was flight. The valley fell away below them in green and gold, the rivers flashing like thrown coins, and Veyra rode the thermals with the lazy mastery of a creature born to exactly this, banking and wheeling, and Jonah laughed — great whooping helpless laughs torn straight out of his chest by the wind — and Veyra heard him, and did a barrel roll.
“Show-off!” he shrieked.
“Skilled,” she corrected, rolling again, and he could hear the grin in her voice.
She took him up, up, until the air went thin and cold and the twin suns were fierce white coins and the curve of the world showed at the edges of everything. Below them a storm was building over the far mountains — a towering anvil of cloud, black-bellied and lit from within by silent lightning.
“Watch,” Veyra said, and dove straight at it.
Jonah had time for one abbreviated scream before they punched into the cloud and the world went grey and electric. The air hummed. St. Elmo’s fire crawled along Veyra’s horns and the leading edges of her wings, blue and crackling, and the lightning — the lightning walked around them, curious, like a pack of bright hounds sniffing at something new. Veyra laughed, a sound like joy made audible, and breathed in, deep, and Jonah felt the storm’s charge flow into her the way a drink flows into a thirsty throat.
They burst out of the far side of the cloud into clean blue air, Veyra glowing faintly at the edges, and Jonah was laughing and crying at the same time, and he didn’t care.
“Again,” he gasped.
“Again,” she agreed, and wheeled them around.
They flew until the suns touched the mountains. When they landed back on the High Ledge, Jonah’s legs wouldn’t hold him, and Veyra — in her woman-shape before he’d even unclipped the harness — caught him, laughing, and held him upright with an arm around his waist.
“You’re shaking, sky-fallen.”
“That was — ” He looked at her. The sunset was behind her, copper hair lit like a halo, amber eyes bright with shared exhilaration, and something in his chest did a barrel roll of its own. “That was the best thing I’ve ever done.”
“Wait until I show you the aurora.” She didn’t let go of his waist. “On the night of the sky-moot, when the greater moon eats the lesser, the sky bleeds light. It’s the most beautiful thing in the Vale.”
“Fifty days,” Jonah said quietly.
“Fifty days,” she agreed. And neither of them moved, and the sunset burned, and her arm was warm around him, and he thought about the Tear and Maya and Oregon, and he thought about here, and the two thoughts wouldn’t sit in the same room together anymore.
On the fifty-first day, the Warden came.
Jonah knew him before Veyra said a word. He was enormous — half again Veyra’s size, scaled in iron-grey and storm-purple, his horns branching like a stag’s, lightning moving under his scales in slow pulses. He landed on the High Ledge like a falling mountain deciding, at the last moment, to be polite about it, and the whole cliff shuddered.
“Third Daughter,” the Warden said. His voice made Veyra’s sound like a whisper. The air itself seemed to lean away from it.
“Father.” Veyra had gone very still. In her dragon-shape — she’d changed the moment his shadow crossed the ledge — she looked suddenly young. A daughter, not a keeper. “You honor my ledge.”
“I honor nothing. I inspect.” Those vast eyes, the color of a thunderhead at midnight, found Jonah. “So. The sky-fallen lives.”
Jonah’s paramedic training kicked in — the part about staying calm when something huge and dangerous is happening. He stepped forward, which took more courage than anything he’d done in the ambulance, and said, “Sir. Jonah Keller. Thank you for — for the Vale’s hospitality.”
The Warden stared at him for a long, long moment. Then, to Jonah’s utter astonishment, the great head dipped. A fraction. An acknowledgment.
“It speaks well,” the Warden said to Veyra. “Pity.”
“Pity, Father?”
“The law is the law, Third Daughter. No sky-fallen may be kept.” He said the word the way one might say infected. “You were to shelter it until the Tear opens. Shelter, not — ” His gaze swept the ledge: the sorted collection, the water jars Jonah had arranged, the second sleeping-roll of woven grass beside the nest. The domesticity of it. “— nest with it.”
Veyra’s tail-tip twitched — the barbed arrowhead lashing once against the stone. “I have broken no law. I have kept him safe, as the law requires. When the Tear opens at the sky-moot, I will deliver him to it.”
“See that you do.” The Warden spread his wings — the shadow swallowed the ledge whole — and then he was gone, a storm going where storms go. His parting words fell like hailstones: “Forty days, Daughter. The Vale will be watching.”
Silence, except for the wind.
Jonah let out a breath he felt like he’d been holding for a year. “He seems nice.”
Veyra made a sound like a kettle coming to a boil. “He’s afraid.”
“Of me? I’m five-ten and I bruise if you look at me.”
“Of what you mean.” She was pacing now, claws clicking on stone. “Three hundred years ago, a sky-fallen came through the Tear — a woman, a queen from some world of iron and smoke. A dragon of the Ash Line took her as lifemate. When she died — seventy years later, a blink — he flew into the sun. They say you can still see the scorch-mark.” She stopped pacing. “The law isn’t cruelty, Jonah. It’s grief, wearing armor.”
Jonah was quiet. Then: “Is that what this is? Grief, wearing armor?”
She looked at him — really looked at him — and for a moment the fierce bronze-green dragon was just Veyra, and her eyes were amber and young and frightened.
“I don’t know what this is,” she said softly. “That’s what frightens me.”
On the fifty-second day, Jonah got sick.
It started as a fever — shaking chills by the blue fire, his teeth rattling — and by nightfall he was delirious, muttering about IV lines and dosages, trying to start an IV on his own arm with a hollow reed. Veyra held him down with one claw, gentle as ever, and did something he’d never seen her do: she sang.
It wasn’t a song with words. It was a low thrumming that he felt in his molars and his marrow, a resonance that seemed to reach into his body and tune it, the way you’d tune a string. The fever broke just before dawn, sweat pouring off him, and he woke to find her in her woman-shape, asleep sitting up against the nest’s edge, one hand still resting on his forehead.
“The air,” she said when she woke and found him watching her. She looked exhausted — the copper hair lank, the bronze skin pale. “The Vale’s air. It’s richer than your world’s. Your lungs — your blood — it took exception.” A weak smile. “You’ll acclimate. Most sky-things do. The umbrella never complained once.”
Jonah laughed, which turned into a cough, which she soothed with water from the spring, held to his lips in a cupped hand.
“You sang to me,” he said.
“I thrummed. It’s — it’s what mothers do for hatchlings. The resonance aligns the humors.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Don’t make it significant, sky-fallen.”
“Too late,” Jonah said. “It was the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in years.”
She looked at him then, and the firelight caught the gold tracery at her temples — he realized, suddenly, that the tracery on her scales continued onto her skin in this shape, delicate as filigree — and he reached up, slowly, giving her time to pull away, and tucked a strand of copper hair behind her ear.
She didn’t pull away.
“Veyra,” he said.
“Don’t,” she whispered. But she leaned into his hand, just barely, like a cat pretending not to want to be petted. “Don’t say it, Jonah. If you say it, I’ll have to — ” She stopped. “Forty days.”
“I know.”
“The law — “
“I know.”
She turned her face into his palm, and her skin was warm, so warm, and her breath hitched, once, like a sob swallowed whole. “When you go through the Tear,” she said, very quietly, “don’t look back. Promise me.”
“Veyra — “
“Promise me.“
He looked at her — at the amber eyes bright with tears she was too proud to shed, at the filigree gold at her temples, at the woman who collected fallen things because someone had to catch them — and he lied through his teeth.
“I promise.”
Part Three: The Falling
On the sixtieth day, Jonah taught Veyra to dance.
It started as a joke. He’d been humming while he worked — some half-remembered song from a wedding he’d worked as a standby medic, years ago — and Veyra, in her woman-shape, mending a tear in the sailcloth harness with bone needles, had said, “What is that noise?”
“It’s called music. Well. It’s called me mangling music. It’s a waltz. You go one-two-three, one-two-three — ” He demonstrated, alone, feeling ridiculous, shuffling in a circle on the ledge with an imaginary partner.
Veyra watched him for a full circuit. Then she stood — six and a half feet of bronze and copper and amusement — and said, “Show me. Properly.”
“You have four — in this shape you have two left feet, probably.”
“I have excellent feet. All of my feet are excellent.” She held out her hands. “One-two-three, sky-fallen.”
He put one hand on her waist — carefully, the way you’d handle something precious and possibly explosive — and took her hand with the other, and counted, “One-two-three, one-two-three,” and they moved.
She was terrible at first. She kept trying to lead, which in a waltz is the man’s job, and in Veyra’s case meant she kept attempting to lift him off the ground entirely.
“You’re supposed to follow,” Jonah laughed, as his feet left the stone for the third time.
“I don’t follow. I am a daughter of the Storm Line. Storms don’t follow.”
“Then pretend you’re the breeze. Breezes follow.”
She considered this. “Breezes are underrated,” she conceded, and let him lead, and they turned in slow circles on the High Ledge with the valley spread below them and the twin suns sinking, one-two-three, one-two-three, and her hand was warm in his, and her waist was warm under his palm, and when the song in his head ended they kept dancing anyway, in silence, because neither of them wanted to be the one to stop.
“Jonah,” she said quietly, as they turned.
“Mm?”
“Nothing. I just — wanted to say it. Your name. In the quiet.”
His heart did something complicated. “Say it again.”
“Jonah.” She smiled. “There. Now it’s said twice. It can’t be unsaid.”
On the sixty-fifth day, Veyra took him to the starfield.
Not stars in the sky — stars in the ground. A high meadow on the Vale’s far rim, where the grass grew around dozens of small blackened craters, each one holding a lump of twisted metal-stone that still shimmered faintly with heat, even years after falling.
“They come down a few times a year,” Veyra said, nudging one with her snout. It chimed, faintly, like a struck bell. “Little ones. They burn all the way down. By the time I reach them there’s nothing left to catch — just the bones.”
Jonah picked up a fragment no bigger than his thumb. It was warm. It hummed, very faintly, against his palm — or maybe that was his imagination.
“You said the stars burn out before you can reach them,” he said quietly. “Day one. You said it like — like it was a personal failure.”
Veyra didn’t answer. She lay down in the cratered meadow, folding her wings, and looked up at the daylight sky as if she could see the night’s stars through it.
“My mother,” she said at last, “was Keeper before me. She taught me the catching. She said: everything that falls is a message, Veyra. Our job is to read it. And then one year a star fell — a big one, the biggest I’ve ever seen — and she went up for it, and it burst, right in front of her. The fire took her wing.” A pause. “She never flew again. She died the next winter. Dragons aren’t supposed to die of sadness, but she did.”
Jonah sat beside her in the strange warm grass, and didn’t say anything, because there wasn’t anything to say. He just leaned against her side, and she curled her tail around him, carefully, the barbed tip resting nowhere near him.
“I keep trying to catch them anyway,” she whispered. “Every time. Maybe this time I’ll be fast enough.”
Jonah held up the humming fragment. “You caught this much.”
“It’s bones, Jonah.”
“It’s proof.” He pressed it into the ground at the crater’s edge, standing it upright like a tiny monument. “The message got through. That’s the job, right? Reading it.”
Veyra looked at the fragment for a long moment. Then, slowly, she smiled — and reached out with one claw-tip, and scratched three lines in the dirt beneath it. In draconic. Jonah couldn’t read it.
“What does it say?”
“Someone was here,” she translated. “Someone noticed.“
They sat in the starfield until the suns went down, and Jonah told her about the constellations of his world — Orion, Cassiopeia, the dippers — and Veyra gave them all draconic names, and the fallen stars hummed their faint bell-notes in the cooling air, and it was, Jonah thought, the most peaceful hour of his entire life.
On the seventieth day, the aurora came early.
Veyra woke him just after midnight, a claw-tip gentle against his shoulder. “Come. Quickly.”
She flew him — no harness this time, just her claw, careful as ever — to the highest spire of the Thunderhead’s foothills, a needle of rock that overlooked the whole Vale. And there, across the entire sky, the aurora was bleeding.
It wasn’t like the pictures Jonah had seen of the northern lights. This was violent — great curtains of green and violet and a red like the inside of a heart, rippling and tearing and reforming, and the two moons hung in the middle of it, the greater moon already taking its first bite out of the lesser.
“Twenty days,” Veyra said softly. “The sky-moot. The Tear will open where the moons join.”
They sat on the cold stone, her woman-shape beside him, a blanket of her wing sheltering them both from the wind. The aurora painted her bronze skin in shifting colors.
“Tell me something true,” she said.
Jonah thought. “I’m scared to go back.”
She turned to look at him.
“Not of the Tear. Of — ” He gestured helplessly. “Of the ambulance. The night shifts. Maya’s fine, she doesn’t need me anymore, she’s got her residency and her life and I’m just — I’m the guy who calls on Sundays. I was disappearing before I fell, Veyra. A little more every year. Here — ” He looked at the aurora, at the valley, at her. “Here I’m visible.”
“You’re visible to me,” she said, very quietly.
And then she kissed him.
It wasn’t graceful. Her teeth were sharp and she clearly had no idea what she was doing, and Jonah’s nose got in the way, and they both pulled back laughing — and then she kissed him again, slower, learning, her hands framing his face with exquisite care, and the aurora burned green and violet above them, and the moons leaned toward each other, and Jonah thought, this is the moment. This is the one I’ll measure everything against.
When they finally broke apart, Veyra rested her forehead against his, and her breath was warm, and she said, “I’ve caught a thousand falling things, Jonah Keller. Stars and stones and one very confused boat. You’re the first one that ever caught me.”
On the seventy-second day, Veyra showed him the boat.
They’d been sorting the collection — a rainstorm had scattered the lighter sky-fallen across the ledge, and Jonah was re-hanging the kite while Veyra polished the biplane propeller with a cloth and a tenderness most people reserved for newborns — when he asked the question he’d been holding for weeks.
“Tell me about the boat.”
Veyra went still. “What boat?”
“The one that fell through the Tear. You mentioned it. Day one.” He tied off the kite string. “You’ve told me about the umbrella and the weather vane and the hubcap — the hubcap got a full biography, Veyra — but not the boat.”
She was quiet for a long moment, turning the propeller in her hands. Then she stood, and changed — the shimmer in the air — and launched herself off the ledge without a word.
“Wait — ” Jonah ran to the edge. “Veyra!”
She circled back, sweeping low, and extended her claw. “Come on, then. If you’re going to ask about the boat, you’re going to see the boat.”
She flew him to the far side of the Vale, to a box canyon walled in red stone, and there — Jonah’s jaw dropped — was a ship. A honest-to-god sailing ship, a three-masted barque, lying on its side in the canyon like a beached whale, its hull weathered silver-grey, its masts snapped but its rigging still trailing.
“It came through fifty years ago,” Veyra said, landing beside it. In her dragon-shape, she was dwarfed by it — the ship had been big. “In a storm. The Tear opened over the ocean of some world, and this fell through. With its crew.”
Jonah’s blood went cold. “With its — “
“They didn’t survive the fall. The sea caught them, not me — the ship came down in the canyon lake, back when the lake was here.” She nudged a half-buried anchor with her snout. “I buried them. All fourteen. Under the red stones, there.” She nodded toward a row of cairns at the canyon’s head, each marked with a ship’s fitting — a belaying pin, a brass compass, a ship’s bell, green with age.
Jonah walked to the cairns slowly. Someone had tended them — the stones were straight, the brass polished.
“You come here,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Every year. On the day it fell.” Veyra settled onto her haunches, suddenly looking very young. “I tell them about the Vale. About the winds. I think — I think they’d want to know where they are.”
Jonah sat beside her in the red dust, looking up at the dead ship. “You never told me this story.”
“It’s not a happy story.”
“It’s a kind story.” He leaned against her foreleg — warm, solid, real. “You know what I think, Veyra of the Storm Line, Keeper of the High Ledge? I think you don’t collect falling things because of the law. I think you collect them because you’re afraid of being the only one who notices when something falls.”
She didn’t answer for a long time. Then, very quietly: “The stars burn out before I can reach them, Jonah. They fall, and they burn, and nobody knows. I know. That’s — that’s the job. Knowing.”
Jonah reached up and laid his hand against her jaw — the great scaled curve of it, warm as bread from an oven. “I notice you,” he said.
She turned her head then, and her amber eye was very close, and very bright, and very wet. “I know,” she whispered. “That’s the problem, sky-fallen. That’s the whole problem.”
They flew home in silence, and that night Jonah cooked for her — the last of his emergency rations, rehydrated beef stew doctored with Vale herbs, eaten by the blue fire — and Veyra declared it “adequate, for dirt-food,” which from her was practically a marriage proposal, and they didn’t talk about the boat again.
But Jonah thought about those cairns for days afterward. About a dragon who buried fourteen strangers and visited them every year. About what it meant to be known by someone like that.
He was starting to understand what the ninety days were really counting down to. And it wasn’t the Tear.
On the seventy-fifth day, Jonah met the clutch.
Veyra had been cagey about it for weeks — “The nesting caverns are private, sky-fallen” — but the matron whose son he’d splinted had apparently talked, and an invitation arrived via a young drake who landed on the ledge, announced “The Broodmother requests the sky-fallen’s presence,” and looked profoundly embarrassed about the whole thing.
The nesting caverns were deep in the Thunderhead’s heart — a vast warm chamber lit by aerthflame vents, the air thick and sweet. And there, in nests of woven stone-wool, were the eggs.
Dozens of them. Each the size of a beach ball, mottled in greens and bronzes and storm-purples, and each one humming — a low collective thrum that Jonah felt in his bones, like standing next to a great sleeping engine.
“They sing to each other,” Veyra murmured. She’d been quiet since they arrived, her hand — in her woman-shape — tight around his. “Before they hatch. It’s how they know they’re not alone.”
The Broodmother was waiting: ancient, vast, her scales gone silver-white at the edges, her eyes milky with age but sharp as ever. She regarded Jonah for a long moment.
“So,” she said. “The sky-fallen who mends wings.” A pause. “Touch one.”
Jonah glanced at Veyra, who nodded — carefully, she mouthed. He knelt beside the nearest nest and laid his palm against an egg. It was warm — living warm — and the humming resolved, under his hand, into something almost like a purr.
“It’s happy,” he whispered.
“They like you,” the Broodmother said, and there was wonder in her ancient voice. “The unhatched do not like strangers. They know things, in there.” She leaned closer, and her milky eyes fixed on him. “What are you, sky-fallen?”
“Just a paramedic,” Jonah said.
“Just,” the Broodmother repeated, tasting the word. She looked at Veyra — a long, considering look — and then back at Jonah. “Fifteen days, sky-fallen. Make them count.”
Walking back through the tunnels, Veyra was silent. Then: “She likes you. The Broodmother doesn’t like anyone. She once set my brother’s tail on fire for tracking mud into the cavern.”
“High praise.”
“Jonah.” She stopped, turning to face him in the blue-lit dark. “If — when the Tear opens — if you wanted to stay — “
His breath caught. “The law — “
“The law says no sky-fallen may be kept.” Her amber eyes held his. “It doesn’t say a sky-fallen can’t choose.”
“Veyra — “
“Don’t answer.” She pressed a finger to his lips. “Fifteen days. Don’t answer yet.”
On the eightieth day, the storm came.
It wasn’t a normal storm. Jonah knew storms — Oregon had them — but this was something else: a sky-wound, Veyra called it, a tear in the weather itself, and it hit the Thunderhead like a hammer. The wind screamed. Lightning walked the peaks. And deep in the mountain, in the nesting caverns, something cracked.
Veyra felt it before she heard it — her head snapping around, her eyes going wide. “The cavern,” she breathed. “The eggs.”
She flew — no harness, no warning, just her claw closing around him and launch — into the teeth of the storm. The nesting cavern was chaos: a rockfall had breached the outer wall, wind and rain lashing in, and the Broodmother was there, ancient wings spread over the nests, shielding them with her body as stones fell — but she was old, and the fall was still coming, a whole section of ceiling groaning, shifting, about to go.
Jonah didn’t think. He moved.
“Veyra — your spear! The anchor chain from the collection — the long one!” He was already running toward the groaning section, paramedic brain in full triage mode: load-bearing, fulcrum, leverage. “I need a lever and I need it now!”
What happened next, he would never fully remember. He remembered Veyra’s chain, remembered wedging the spear-shaft under the great slab, remembered screaming “PUSH!” in draconic — he’d learned the word, somehow, from seventy days of Veyra’s muttering — and the whole Storm Line pushing together, dragons and one ridiculous human, and the slab moving, grinding, settling into a new position that held.
He remembered the silence afterward. The rain. The eggs, still humming.
He remembered the Broodmother lowering her great ancient head to him, rain streaming off her silver scales, and saying, in a voice that shook: “The sky-fallen chose.”
And he remembered Veyra looking at him across the cavern — soaked, mud-splattered, grinning like an idiot — with an expression he’d never seen on her face before.
It looked like hope.
Part Four: The Choosing
The Warden summoned them at dawn on the eighty-fifth day.
The Thunderhead’s summit was a natural amphitheater of black glass — lightning-struck sand, Veyra told him, fused over ten thousand years — and the whole Storm Line was there. Forty dragons, arrayed in a great circle, their scales catching the morning light in waves of bronze and green and iron-grey. In the center stood the Warden, and beside him, ancient and silver, the Broodmother.
Jonah stood between them in his hiking boots and his torn flannel, feeling very small and very human, and Veyra stood beside him in her woman-shape, her chin up, her hand in his.
“Third Daughter,” the Warden said. His voice rolled around the amphitheater like thunder looking for somewhere to land. “You were charged to shelter the sky-fallen until the Tear opens. Five days remain. The Vale has watched.” A pause. “The Vale has seen.”
A murmur ran around the circle — not hostile, Jonah thought, with a flicker of hope. Considering.
“The law is clear,” the Warden continued. “No sky-fallen may be kept. At the sky-moot, the Tear will open, and the sky-fallen will be delivered through it. This is the law. This has always been the law.” His midnight eyes fixed on Veyra. “Do you dispute it, Daughter?”
Veyra stepped forward. Her hand slipped from Jonah’s — he felt the loss like a physical thing — and she stood alone in the center of the circle, bronze and copper and utterly unafraid.
“I don’t dispute the law, Father. I invoke it.” Her voice carried, clear as a bell. “The law says no sky-fallen may be kept. Kept — sheltered, held, owned.” She turned, slowly, meeting the eyes of the circle. “Jonah Keller is not kept. Ask the Broodmother, who watched him choose to stand under falling stone for our unhatched. Ask the drake whose wing he mended. Ask — ” her voice caught, just slightly, “— ask me, who has spent ninety days learning that keeping was never what this was.”
She turned back to the Warden. “The law forbids keeping. It doesn’t forbid choosing. And I — ” She looked at Jonah then, and her amber eyes were bright. “I choose him. If he’ll have me.”
The silence was absolute. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
The Warden looked at his daughter for a long, long moment. Then, slowly, his great head turned to Jonah.
“And you, sky-fallen? The Tear opens in five days. Your world waits. Your sister waits.” The word landed like a stone in still water. “What do you choose?”
Jonah’s mouth was dry. He thought about Maya — her voice on the voicemails, bright and busy: Hey, it’s me, call me back, you big jerk. He thought about the ambulance, the night shifts, the apartment with the leaky faucet. He thought about disappearing, a little more every year.
And he thought about Veyra — catching him out of the sky. Teaching him the names of the winds. Dancing, one-two-three, on the High Ledge. The aurora. The eggs humming under his hand.
“I choose — ” he started, and stopped.
Because it wasn’t simple. It wasn’t. Maya would think he was dead. She’d grieve. She’d stand over an empty grave and cry, and he’d never — he could never tell her. The Tear didn’t do round trips. It opened, it closed, and that was that.
“May I — ” His voice cracked. He started again. “May I speak? Not as sky-fallen. As — as a man.”
The Warden inclined his head. A fraction.
“My sister,” Jonah said, “is the best person I know. And if I stay, she’ll never know what happened to me. She’ll spend the rest of her life wondering. That’s — that’s a real cost. I won’t pretend it isn’t.” He looked at Veyra. “But I spent thirty-three years in my world learning how to disappear. I was good at it. Here — ” He laughed, a little wetly. “Here I mended a dragon’s wing. I danced. I flew. Veyra didn’t keep me. She found me. There’s a difference.”
He turned back to the Warden. “I choose to stay. If the Vale will have me.”
The murmur ran around the circle again — louder this time, and Jonah caught words in the draconic: chose… the eggs… sky-fallen…
The Warden was silent for a very long time. Then he looked at the Broodmother.
“Well, Mother? You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet.”
The ancient silver dragon stepped forward — slowly, her joints creaking like old rigging — and stood beside Veyra. “Three hundred years ago,” she said, “the Ash Line lost a son to grief, because we gave a lifemate no choice but parting. The law was written in fear, my son. Fear is a poor architect.” She looked at Jonah, and her milky eyes were kind. “This one chose. Let the law make room for choosing.”
The Warden closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was looking at Veyra — and Jonah saw, with a shock, that the great iron-grey dragon looked tired. And sad. And, underneath it all, something that might have been relief.
“The Oath of Embers,” the Warden said quietly. “If you are determined, Daughter — if you are both determined — there is a rite. Older than the law. The lifemate’s oath.” He looked at Jonah. “You understand what it means? A dragon’s life is long, sky-fallen. A thousand years. Two. Your kind — “
“I know,” Jonah said. “Seventy years. A blink.”
“The Oath doesn’t just bind,” the Warden said. “It shares. The flame, the years. It will make you — not dragon, never dragon. But enough. Enough to walk beside her.” A pause. “It’s irreversible. And it’s agonizing. I won’t soften that truth.”
Jonah looked at Veyra. She was crying — silent tears tracking down her bronze cheeks, evaporating almost as they fell.
“Five days,” she whispered. “Don’t answer yet.”
“I’m done waiting to answer,” Jonah said, and took her hand, and turned to the Warden. “I’ll take the Oath.”
The circle erupted — not in anger, in something like a cheer, forty dragons voicing at once, a sound like a storm deciding to celebrate — and Veyra threw her arms around him, laughing and crying, and the Warden, the great iron-grey Warden, did something Jonah would remember for the rest of his very long life:
He smiled. Just slightly. Just enough.
“Five days, sky-fallen,” the Warden said. “Make them count.”
The five days were the best of Jonah’s life.
He spent them memorizing. The exact green of the valley at dawn. The way Veyra’s hair moved in no wind. The taste of storm-pork and lightning. The names of the winds — sarith, the morning wind; kello, the evening wind; vess, the wind that comes before rain. He told Veyra everything he could think of about his world, so she’d have it, so some part of Oregon would live in the Vale even if he never went back.
And he wrote a letter.
He wrote it on vellum Veyra traded for — three sky-fallen buttons and a promise — in ink made from aerthflame soot, in his neatest paramedic’s handwriting. He wrote to Maya. He told her he was alive. He told her he was happy — the word looked strange in his handwriting, like a word in a foreign language he’d finally learned to pronounce. He told her about Veyra, about the Vale, about the choice. He told her he was sorry. He told her he loved her.
“Will it reach her?” he asked Veyra, sealing the letter with wax.
“The Tear opens onto your world, at the place you fell. I’ll fly it there myself and drop it through.” She was quiet for a moment. “It’ll fall from the sky, Jonah. Someone will find it. Maybe her. Maybe a hiker.” A small smile. “Falling things get found. That’s the whole point of catching.”
On the last night, they danced on the High Ledge — one-two-three, one-two-three — under the wheeling stars, and Veyra sang to him, a real song this time, with words in the draconic, and he didn’t need to understand the words.
He understood the tune.
Part Five: The Sky-Moot
The night of the sky-moot, the whole Vale climbed.
Jonah had never seen anything like it. Every dragon of the Storm Line, and visitors besides — Ash Line dragons, deep bronze and ember-red; a delegation of Sea Line, blue-scaled and sleek, who’d flown three days for the spectacle — all spiraling up toward the high desert where the Tear would open. Veyra carried Jonah in her claw, and he watched the sky fill with wings until it seemed the stars were being crowded out by something better.
They landed on a plateau of white stone. Above them, the greater moon was already sliding across the lesser — the eclipse beginning, the sky bleeding light in those violent beautiful curtains. And in the center of the plateau, the air was… wrong. Bent. Like looking through old glass.
“The Tear,” Veyra breathed. “It’s opening.”
It opened the way a wound opens — slowly, then all at once. A slit of elsewhere in the night air, and through it Jonah could see — his heart stopped — Oregon. The limestone cave. His headlamp, still lying where he’d dropped it, its light long dead. The foothills. Home.
He could see it. He could smell it — pine and dust, so familiar it hurt.
“Jonah.” Veyra’s voice, in his ear. She’d changed — woman-shape, her hand in his. “It’s time.”
The letter first. Veyra took the sealed vellum, changed — the air shimmering — and launched herself at the Tear with it clutched in her claw. She didn’t cross through — none of them did, it was too unstable for dragon-mass — but she dove at the slit, and at the last possible moment released the letter, and it tumbled through the wound in the world, fluttering down toward the cave floor like a falling leaf.
Falling things get found.
Then the Oath.
The Warden performed it. The whole Storm Line formed the circle — forty dragons, wings spread, humming that low resonance Veyra had used to break his fever, the sound building until the white stone vibrated under Jonah’s boots. The Broodmother stood at the circle’s heart with them, ancient and silver, her milky eyes closed in concentration.
“Kneel, sky-fallen,” the Warden said — not unkindly.
Jonah knelt. Veyra knelt facing him, in her woman-shape, and took both his hands in hers. Her hands were shaking.
“The Oath of Embers,” the Warden intoned, his voice rolling around the plateau like the storm itself had come to witness. “Older than law. Older than grief. By flame shared, by years divided, by sky and stone and storm — “
Veyra began to glow. Not metaphorically — literally, the gold filigree at her temples brightening, light moving under her bronze skin like sunrise under water. And the humming of the circle rose, and rose, and Jonah felt it in his molars and his marrow, the way he’d felt it that fever-night —
” — do you, Veyra of the Storm Line, take this ember into your flame?”
“I do,” Veyra said, and her voice was steady as stone.
“Do you, Jonah Keller of Oregon, take this flame into your ember?”
Jonah looked at her — at the amber eyes, the copper hair lifting in the wind of the opening Tear, the woman who’d caught him out of the sky and taught him to be visible — and said, “I do.”
She breathed on him.
It wasn’t fire — not the way he’d feared. It was warmth, a warmth that started in his chest and spread outward like ink in water, down his arms and legs, into his fingertips, behind his eyes. It didn’t burn. It tuned — the way her thrum had tuned him through the fever, but deeper, permanent. He felt his heartbeat sync with hers — the war-drum he’d heard on that first day, impossibly far away, now right here, in his own chest, beating in double-time with his own.
The Warden had said it would be agonizing. Maybe it was. Jonah wouldn’t have known. He was too busy feeling — really feeling, for the first time in years — the grief and the joy and the terror and the love, all of it, all at once, undimmed and unmuted, the way life is supposed to feel when you’re actually living it.
When it ended — minutes or hours later, time had become negotiable — he was lying on the white stone with his head in Veyra’s lap, and the eclipse was at totality, and the Tear was at its widest, showing Oregon in heartbreaking clarity.
“Look,” Veyra whispered.
Through the Tear, in the cave — movement. A figure with a flashlight. Small, determined. A woman’s voice, tinny through the wound in the world, calling: “Jonah? JONAH!“
Maya. It was Maya, in the cave, three months of grief in her voice — and at her feet, fluttering where it had fallen —
“The letter,” Jonah breathed. “She found the letter.”
They watched her pick it up. Watched her break the wax seal with shaking hands. Watched her read — and stop — and read again — and then, slowly, sink to the cave floor, the letter clutched to her chest, laughing and crying at the same time.
“She knows,” Veyra said softly. “She knows.”
The Tear began to close. The slit of Oregon narrowed — Maya, the cave, the foothills, all of it drawing together like a curtain. Jonah’s last sight of his world was his sister, holding his letter, looking up — straight at him, or straight at the sky, he couldn’t tell — and smiling through her tears.
Then the sky was whole again, and the eclipse was passing, and the aurora was fading, and Jonah Keller of Oregon — Jonah Keller of the Vale of Theros — lay with his head in his lifemate’s lap and cried like a child, and laughed like a man reprieved.
Veyra held him, and thrummed, low and sweet, and the Storm Line kept the circle until dawn.
Epilogue: One Year Later
The letter came back on the first sky-moot of the new year.
Veyra caught it herself — of course she did; it fell through the Tear at the eclipse’s peak, a small white rectangle tumbling end over end, and she plucked it from the air with the casual mastery of a being who’d had a thousand years of practice, more or less.
They read it together on the High Ledge, by the blue fire, her wing around his shoulders.
Dear Jonah,
I don’t know if you’ll ever read this. I don’t know if the woman who dropped it — a HIKER saw her, Jonah, a woman with COPPER HAIR who FLEW AWAY, the rangers think he’s crazy but I believe him — I don’t know if she’ll come back. But I’m writing it anyway, and I’m going to fold it into a paper airplane (remember? Dad taught us?) and throw it into the cave on the anniversary, and if your dragon girlfriend is as good at catching things as you say, she’ll get it.
I’m not crying writing this. I’m not. Okay, I’m crying a little.
Your letter broke my heart and put it back together in the same paragraph, which is a neat trick. I’m angry at you — I want that on the record, I’m FURIOUS — and I’m also so happy I could fly. Is that what it feels like? The flying? You described it three times and I still can’t picture it.
I finished my residency. I’m Dr. Maya Keller now, say it with respect. I tell my patients about my brother the dragon guy and they think I’m making it up to distract them from their stitches. It’s excellent bedside manner.
Mom would have loved her. I know that the way I know my own name.
Be happy, you big jerk. Be so happy it embarrasses you. And if you ever figure out how to send more than letters, I want DETAILS. What does dragonfire smell like? Is the food good? Does she snore? (She’s a dragon, she definitely snores.)
All my love, always,
Maya
P.S. — I kept the umbrella story for last because it’s my favorite. You told me she collects things that fall from the sky. Well. Now she’s got you. Take care of my brother, Veyra. He’s fragile. He bruises if you look at him.
Jonah was crying by the second paragraph. Veyra pretended not to notice, which was kind of her, and handed him the letter’s postscript — a photograph, creased from the fall. Maya in her white coat, stethoscope around her neck, grinning, holding up a hand-lettered sign:
TELL VEYRA I SAID HI
“She’s — ” Jonah had to stop. Started again. “She’s good. She’s good.”
“She’s your sister,” Veyra said simply. “Of course she’s good.” She was quiet for a moment, studying the photograph. Then: “We should reply.”
“We can’t. The Tear only opens at the sky-moot, and — “
“The Tear only opens at the sky-moot.” Veyra smiled — the sharp-toothed, copper-haired, utterly unrepentant smile he’d fallen in love with somewhere around day sixty. “But I don’t need the Tear. I’m going to learn to make one.”
Jonah stared at her. “You can do that?”
“No.” She stood, stretching, the firelight playing across her bronze shoulders. “But I caught a falling star once, and everyone said that was impossible too.” She looked down at him, amber eyes bright. “Give me ten years. Twenty. What’s time to us?”
What’s time to us. The Oath had held — he could feel it, the double heartbeat, hers and his, steady as the turning world. He was thirty-four years old, and he had a thousand years ahead of him, and every single one of them had her in it.
“Twenty years,” Jonah agreed, standing, taking her hand. “I’ll wait.”
“Liar,” Veyra said fondly. “You’ll help. Starting tomorrow, you’re learning aerth-manipulation. If I’m going to tear holes in the sky, I’m going to need someone to do the math.”
“The math,” Jonah repeated. “You want the paramedic to do interdimensional math.”
“I want my lifemate to do interdimensional math.” She pulled him close, and the valley spread below them, green and gold in the morning light, and the twin suns were rising, and somewhere a young drake was shrieking with laughter as it attempted its first barrel roll. “One-two-three, sky-fallen.”
“What?”
“Dance with me.”
And so, on the High Ledge, with the wind in the wires of her collection and the whole Vale waking below them, Jonah Keller — paramedic, sky-fallen, lifemate, found — danced with his dragon in the morning light.
One-two-three. One-two-three.
The end.
Thanks for reading! This story is free to share — if you enjoyed it, check out my Articles for essays on writing and storytelling, and keep an eye out for the I Was Married to a Monster Girl trilogy, coming mid-2027. — TL Mercer