Aurel heard Lily before he saw her: three careful knocks against the temple’s outer stone, followed by the scrape of a boot searching for purchase.
He went to the doorway. She was halfway up the last broken stair, one hand gripping the wall and the other holding a small cloth bundle. Snow clung to her hem. When she saw him, she lifted the bundle in greeting.
“I came back,” she said.
Aurel looked from her to the mountain path below. “You did.”
“You said I could.” She climbed the final step and stood still a moment, catching her breath. “I brought bread. It’s a little hard.”
“I have teeth enough for hard bread.”
“Good. I don’t.”
Her smile came quickly, then went. Aurel stepped aside to let her into the shelter of the temple. The bundle held two pieces of bread, a stub of charcoal, and a folded scrap of cloth. She set them on the old stone ledge as if establishing the terms of a visit.
Aurel had spent the morning clearing a space near the hearth. The floor there was less uneven, and a flat slab could serve as a table. He had placed an old slate upon it, then removed the slate, then placed it back. He had not needed a table in centuries. He had decided, at last, that this was no reason to leave the floor scattered with grit.
Lily took in the slate. “You made room.”
“I thought a lesson might be easier with something to write on.”
“You can write?”
“Some things.” He glanced at the charcoal in her bundle. “The letters, at least.”
“Then we’ll have letters.” She sat on a fallen block and rubbed her hands together. “I thought you might teach me a word I can use.”
“Use where?”
“Here.” She looked around the temple. “With you.”
The answer was so plain he could not find a formal reply that fit. He settled onto the stone opposite her and drew one claw through the dust on the slate.
“Yesterday’s word was aesh,” he said. “Shelter. A place where one may rest without first being asked what they can do.”
“I remember.”
“Then say it.”
She shaped the first sound with care. Her tongue caught on the ending. Aurel corrected her once, and she tried again, listening to the small differences between the sounds. On the third attempt, the word came clean.
“Good,” he said.
She frowned at the slate. “That’s all?”
Next
Can Aurel teach Lily a word for home when the old word belongs to a world that no longer exists—and she has nowhere to go below the mountain?
“Language is mostly made of small things said often.”
Lily rested her chin on her hands. “What’s another small thing?”
Aurel reached for a word and found only the shape of its absence. He had known the language as a living thing once: spoken across halls, called from ledges, murmured over sleeping young. The memory of it had thinned along with the voices that used it. He could still recall formal phrases carved into stone. Their purpose was to remain after the speaker was gone.
He did not want to teach her a monument.
“Listen,” he said in the old language.
The word came out rougher than he expected. The sound had caught in his throat, unused for so long that it seemed to belong to some other creature.
Lily leaned toward him. “Again?”
He repeated it, slower. “Veth.”
She tried the word. The first time, she made the ending too soft. The second time, she gave it a hard edge.
“Veth,” she said.
“Yes.”
“What does it mean exactly?”
“To listen.”
“That’s what I thought. I mean—does it mean hearing, or paying attention?”
Aurel looked down at the slate. He drew the word in the old script: three angled marks, a hooked line. “The language gives the same word to both.”
“Then it’s a useful one.”
“Why?”
“People hear me all the time. They don’t always listen.” She said it without anger, as if naming a familiar piece of weather. Then she leaned closer to inspect his writing. “That mark looks like a fish.”
“It does not.”
“It has a tail.”
“The tail marks the sound.”
“So a fish that talks.”
Aurel considered the slate. “If it helps you remember.”
She laughed, and the echo wandered into the temple’s high, empty spaces. It did not fill them. It did reach corners that had not heard a child’s laughter in longer than he could count.
He showed her how the old script joined sounds together. Lily copied the word on a patch of cloth with her charcoal, making the hooked line too large. She leaned over the mark, tongue caught between her teeth as she worked. When she sat upright, her face had gone pale beneath the mountain flush.
Aurel watched her hands. The charcoal trembled once against the cloth.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“A little.” She tucked the cloth around the bread. “The climb was steeper than I remembered.”
“The path has not changed.”
“I have.”
She said it lightly. Her fingers stayed on the bundle, pressing the bread into a smaller shape. Aurel rose and brought the thickest of the old woven coverings from the corner. He placed it beside her without comment.
Lily glanced at it. “Thank you.” She wrapped it around her shoulders and sat straighter, as though the warmth had given her a task to finish.
Aurel returned to the slate. There was another word he could offer. He knew how it sounded, but its use had been hidden beneath ceremony for so long that he could not tell whether it would serve her.
Instead, the remembered phrase came back whole.
He spoke it softly.
Lily looked up. “What was that?”
“When a young one called from the dark, an older dragon answered with those words.” His voice had turned careful. “It means, ‘I hear you.’”
“Veth,” she said, then repeated the phrase as best she could manage.
The old sounds sat oddly in the ruined temple. They had once belonged to warm dens and crowded halls, to small voices demanding an answer because they expected one. Aurel had forgotten the occasions on which the words were used. He remembered now the patience required to say them slowly, to answer the same call again and again until a young dragon believed the answer would come.
Lily tried the phrase once more. She stumbled on the last sound and made a face.
“You can correct me,” she said.
“I did.”
“You corrected the sound. I mean the rest.” She held his gaze, direct as ever. “If I say something and you don’t understand, tell me. Don’t pretend you heard.”
“I will tell you.”
“And if I call?”
Aurel’s claws rested against the slate. “I will answer.”
She nodded, satisfied. Then she looked down at the charcoal marks on her cloth. “I want to keep this one.”
“Veth?”
“The whole phrase.” She folded the cloth, careful not to smudge it. “It’s good to have words for things you want people to know.”
He lowered his head. “It is.”
A little later, Lily stood to leave. She had eaten half a piece of bread and tucked the other half away. Aurel walked with her to the temple entrance, where the mountain path broke into a narrow line descending through the snow.
“You could stay until morning,” he said.
“I should go while there’s still light.” She adjusted the folded cloth inside her bundle. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”
Aurel looked at the path. It was steep, and the snow had begun to soften in the sun. “You may.”
“I know.” She took a few steps, then turned back. “Will you teach me the word for home?”
He had expected a question about another sound, another mark to copy. The answer he knew was old and precise. The word for home had been spoken by dragons who belonged to one another, in places whose stones had long since broken.
Lily waited, her hands tucked beneath the cloth at her shoulders.
“I will think on it,” he said.
She accepted that. Then she turned and began her descent, placing each foot carefully. Aurel stayed at the entrance until the path curved and took her from sight. On the slate behind him, the word for listening remained in charcoal, imperfect but legible.
Tomorrow, he would have to find a word she could take with her.