The first time Elara saw him, he was singing beneath the silver-bloomed trees of the Vale. His voice wove through the air like golden thread, wrapping around her in a melody that felt older than the stars.

She had spent her life chasing songs—hunting the echoes of forgotten ballads, spinning sorrow into sound. But his voice was something different. It did not chase the past. It created something new.

“Who taught you to sing like that?” she asked when he finished.

He smiled, the kind of smile that felt like the beginning of a story. “No one,” he said. “The music was always inside me.”

She believed him.

They spent the next season wandering together, their harmonies intertwining, their laughter filling the spaces between the notes. They played in taverns where the air smelled of honeyed mead, in the halls of noble courts where lords and ladies wept at their songs. But the best nights were the quiet ones—under the stars, where music was the only language they needed.

He called her his light. She called him her melody.

She had never believed in forever. But she had believed in him.

The dragon came before dawn.

A storm in the shape of wings, a shadow blacker than the night. Its eyes burned with a hunger deeper than fire, its claws cutting through the earth as if the land itself had betrayed it.

Elara woke to the sound of his scream.

She reached for her lute, for a weapon, for anything—but it was far too late. The beast’s maw closed around him, its talons curling as if claiming a prize long owed.

“Elara—”

His voice was lost to the wind.

She ran until her lungs burned, until her legs gave way beneath her. But the dragon was gone, vanished into the sky like a cruel verse of a forgotten song.

She screamed his name into the void.

Only silence answered.

She searched for him.

Through the ruined towers of the Old Kingdom, where the bones of heroes lay forgotten. Across the blackened marshes, where the dead whispered secrets to the wind. She followed the dragon’s shadow through every tale and legend, through every whisper in the dark.

But the beast was older than memory, and its hunger was never-ending.

One night, in the remains of a once-great city, she met an old woman who had seen the dragon before.

“It takes what it covets,” the woman said. “And it never lets go.”

Elara clenched her fists. “Then I will take him back.”

The woman only shook her head. “Love cannot undo what has already been devoured.”

The seasons changed. The world moved forward.

She did not.

Her songs grew hollow, the music stripped from her bones. People still listened when she played, but no one danced anymore.

One evening, beneath a starless sky, she returned to the silver-bloomed trees. She pressed her palm against the bark, as if she could still feel the warmth of the last night they spent there.

A breath escaped her lips. It should have been a melody.

Instead, it was a sob.

She sank to her knees, her body trembling, her heart an open wound. She had sung for kings and beggars, for lovers and warriors. But now, there was no one left to sing for.

The dragon had stolen more than his life.

It had stolen her music.

And without it, she was nothing.

The wind carried the last note of her song into the night.

And then there was silence.