In Haon Dor, an elder druid finds that the forest's worst tenant has gone missing without taking her presence with her.
The elder druid knew the forest by its complaints.
Young trees chattered in every wind. Old beeches groaned about roots, rain, and the modern carelessness of lumberjacks. Wargs complained with their teeth. The wolves complained with their stomachs. Shargugh the Forest Brownie complained as recreation, grinning through every grievance as if bad news were a practical joke he had arranged personally.
The green dragon never complained.
She made complaints unnecessary.
For as long as the druid had kept his uncomfortable little temple among the dark trees, her presence had been a boundary drawn in stink, claw marks, and common sense. There was the broad irregular path. There were the ancient grey trunks scored deeply enough to hold rainwater. There was the cave mouth breathing reptile rot into the woods. Travelers who ignored all three warnings became bones, and the dragon became no easier to live beside but slightly harder to surprise.
On the first quiet morning, the druid was grateful.
On the second, he was suspicious.
On the third, Shargugh arrived carrying a dead crow by the feet.
"Found it sitting up," the brownie said.
"Dead things do not sit."
"This one was making an effort."
Shargugh laid the crow on the wooden altar. Its feathers were clean. Its neck was unbroken. No blood marked the beak or claws. A faint yellow rim circled each black eye, the same tired color appearing at the edges of fern leaves along the western trail.
The druid prodded the bird with the end of his morning star.
"Where?"
Shargugh's grin widened, then failed.
That was answer enough.
They left the temple before noon. The druid carried his weapon. Shargugh carried the crow until they reached the dusty trail, where he placed it carefully in the fork of an old tree. Neither of them explained why.
The deep forest watched them pass. Grey wolves kept their distance. Black wolves did not show themselves at all. On the path east of the trail, the clawed trees stood in their usual wounded line, but amber sap had risen in every groove. It shone in the dark like rows of narrow eyes.
"Fresh?" Shargugh asked.
The druid touched one mark. The sap was warm.
"No."
"That's worse."
"Yes."
The cave smell met them before the cave did: old meat, damp stone, bitter potion, and the heavy reptile stench that had outlived several generations of brave fools. The druid stopped outside the opening and listened.
Nothing scraped stone. Nothing shifted its weight. No narrow yellow eyes opened in the dark.
The cave breathed out.
Shargugh's matted hair lifted away from his face.
Then the cave drew breath again.
"Caves don't," Shargugh began.
"I know."
They entered anyway, because wisdom and duty had been enemies long before either of them was born.
Bones covered the floor just as they always had. Human ribs. A horse skull. Small neat finger bones scattered between larger mistakes. Against one wall lay the shattered remains of clay bottles, their old strength draught dried into black varnish. In the center of the cave, the dragon's resting hollow remained pressed into the dust: colossal body, folded wings, long tail curved toward the southern exit.
The hollow was empty.
Shargugh walked around it once, counting under his breath.
"No tracks leaving," he said.
The druid had already seen that. The dusty floor held old boot marks, paw prints, drag marks, and the deep familiar trenches of claws. Every set entered the cave. None crossed the dragon-shaped hollow toward the exit.
Above it, the stone ceiling was unbroken.
The cave breathed out again.
This time the air smelled of burnt leaves.
The druid knelt beside the impression of the dragon's head. Two narrow grooves showed where the iron crown had rested between her horns. The grooves were crisp. The dust inside them was pale green.
Shargugh crouched opposite him.
"Maybe she got small."
"Dragons do not get small."
"People say that about consequences."
The druid ignored him and pressed one finger into the dust. It clung to his skin in a bright fleck, no larger than a grain of salt. For an instant he smelled coffee, river fog, and something sugary beneath ash.
Then the fleck darkened and vanished into the lines of his fingertip.
Far away, from the direction of Midgaard, something struck a drum once.
The sound traveled through earth instead of air. Every loose bone on the cave floor answered with a small dry click.
Shargugh stopped smiling.
The druid rose and examined the walls. Behind the dragon's hollow, where her folded body had hidden the stone, five fresh lines had been cut into the rock. Not claw marks. Too straight. Too shallow. They leaned together like tally marks written by a hand learning how hands worked.
Four were dark.
The fifth was green.
"Was that there?" Shargugh whispered.
"Nothing behind a dragon is there until the dragon moves."
It was an old druid answer, designed to sound wiser than it was. Usually that bought time. Here, it bought only another slow breath from the cave.
The green line brightened.
Outside, branches cracked in sequence along the irregular path: one near the cave, one at the dusty trail, one farther east, each break stepping toward the young forest and the West Gate beyond it. Nothing ran between them. Nothing flew above them. Still the path announced a departure it had apparently forgotten to witness.
The druid and the brownie backed toward daylight.
At the cave mouth, Shargugh looked north, south, and finally up.
"Do we tell the city?"
"Tell them what?"
"That their dragon is missing."
The elder druid watched a strip of fern turn yellow from tip to root. Beyond it, the claw-marked trees released beads of warm sap. Farther east, the forest opened by degrees toward Midgaard, where walls and guards gave people confidence without giving them safety.
"She was never their dragon," he said.
Behind them, deep in the empty hollow, something heavy settled against stone.
Neither turned around.
They walked east until the cave smell faded. At the edge of the young forest they found the crow waiting in another tree, still dead, still upright, facing the city.
That evening, the druid returned alone to his temple. He washed the green dust from his finger with protective brew, then water, then blood from a needle prick. The stain remained too faint to see and too cold to forget.
In his ledger he wrote three facts.
The dragon is absent.
The cave continues to breathe.
Something has begun counting.
He left the next line blank.
Before dawn, a fifth mark appeared there anyway.