The Last Dragon of Kaelmar

Chapter 1: The Warm Mountain

Every child in Kaelmar learned the same song: 'The dragon sleeps beneath the stone, the dragon keeps his dream alone.' They sang it at festivals. They sang it to scare each other at the edge of the woods. Nobody believed a word of it, because the mountain above the village had stood there for as long as anyone could remember, grey and patient and unquestionably a mountain.

Except for one thing. The mountain was warm.

It was not warm the way a sun-baked slope is warm. It was warm the way a sleeping animal is warm. The farmers knew it because their orchards, on the mountain's lower slopes, never froze — not in the coldest winter Kaelmar could remember, the year the river froze solid and the wolves came down to the village green. The apple trees kept their leaves. The spring that fed the village ran clear and warm all year, and the old people said the water tasted of iron and honey.

Elara, the mapmaker's apprentice, knew it because her teacher had sent her to map the mountain's eastern face, and she had pressed her palm flat against the rock at midday and felt a heartbeat.

She did not tell anyone. She was seventeen, and she had learned that the village smiled at girls who said such things. So she went back the next day with charcoal and paper, and she made the map the way she was supposed to, and then she climbed higher than the map required, because the heartbeat had been stronger above the treeline.

The climb took her three hours. Near the summit, in a cleft of grey stone, she found the entrance to a cave — and the cave was not empty. It was full of warm air, and the sound of slow breathing, and the smell of iron and honey.