The wind carried the stench of burnt timber across the blackened hills. Where there had once been a village—children's laughter, market stalls, the clang of a blacksmith's hammer—there was now only ruin. The ground crunched beneath Kaelen's boots, layers of ash swirling with each step like the restless ghosts of the dead.
He kept his sword loose in his grip, though he knew the dragon was gone. The beast never lingered. It would come, destroy, feed, and vanish into the night sky like a curse riding the wind. Still, Kaelen had learned the hard way that absence didn't mean safety.
A sound broke the silence—a low creak from the half-collapsed remains of a barn. He turned sharply, scanning the shadows. Through the gaps in the charred boards, something moved. Too small to be a dragon. Too quiet to be human.
"Who's there?" His voice was steady, though his heart had begun to pound.
No answer. Only the sighing wind.
He stepped inside, the air thick with the smell of smoke and wet earth. The faint glow of dying embers lit the wreckage in flickering orange, casting strange shapes along the walls. In the corner, beneath a heap of scorched hay, a pair of eyes glimmered—golden, slit-pupiled.
Kaelen froze.
Not a full-grown dragon. A hatchling. Its scales shimmered faintly in the firelight, not yet hardened into armor, but its gaze was full of raw, feral hunger.
For a heartbeat, they stared at each other—hunter and hunted. Kaelen's mind screamed to draw his blade. Yet something in the way the creature trembled, wings tucked tight against its body, made him hesitate.
Then, from somewhere deep in the shadows, came another sound. A whisper.
Not human. Not dragon. Something else.
And Kaelen realized, with a cold twist in his gut, that the hatchling wasn't what he should be afraid of.