I couldn’t stay.

  No matter how many days I spent walking the cliffs or whispering my brother’s name into the wind, I knew. My family was gone. My horde was gone. And the dragons who did this might come back.

  If they did, they would find nothing but ash and stone. I didn’t want to be here when that happened.

  So I left.

  Before I went, I said goodbye to each cairn—Kaelen’s first. I brushed my wing against the stone I had carved for him and whispered, “I’ll come back someday. I’ll bring others to remember you.”

  Then to my mother. I pressed my forehead to hers one last time and told her, “I remembered what you taught me.”

  And to my father. “I’m not strong enough,” I admitted. “But I’ll try to be.”

  I spread my wings, stiff and aching but steady. The wind caught beneath them, cool and familiar, lifting me into the sky one last time. Below, the cliffs stretched out in jagged silence, broken only by the cairns I had built—three stone markers that held my whole world. My breath caught as I rose, higher and higher, until the sea shimmered like glass and the wind roared in my ears. I didn’t look down again. I couldn’t. With one final beat of my wings, I turned my back on Whispervale and leapt into the sky, carrying only memory behind me.

  The closest dragon horde wasn’t far—at least by sky. My family had visited them once when I was young. The leader was a friend of my father’s, I remembered that much. A firm dragon, but fair. Maybe they would welcome me.

  And if not… maybe I could still warn them.

  The fire and poison dragons could come for them next.

  The closer I got, the more careful I became. Dragons were fiercely territorial. Uninvited guests were seen as threats, especially if they were strangers. Borders were marked not just by scent, but by claw. Long gouges in trees, stones, or cliff faces—freshly scored, they meant the territory was still claimed and watched.

  Normally, I would have smelled the boundary before I saw it. The sharp edge of dominance layered with dragon musk, so strong it could drive back even the boldest predator.

  But I couldn’t smell anything.

  So I flew low and slow, scanning every surface for the claw marks. I finally spotted some carved into a line of trees. Fresh. Deep.

  I landed just beyond them and folded my wings.

  This was it.

  I looked back once, over the distant sea and cliffs, a faint gray smudge barely visible behind me. Whispervale.

  My home.

  I didn’t know if I’d ever return.

  I turned toward the trees and stepped into the unknown.

  But before I crossed the final line, I stopped.

  I tilted my head back, opened my mouth, and released a sound that clawed its way up from my chest.

  It wasn’t a roar. It wasn’t a call.

  It was a cry—sharp and low, tangled with grief and loss. I forced it outward, shaping the sound to carry far and wide. I pushed it into the wind, pouring every ache, every wound, every hollow echo of what I had endured into the air.

  Please hear me. Please don’t take me for a threat.

  I hoped they would understand. That someone, somewhere beyond these trees, would hear and know this was not a challenge—it was a plea.

  Then I stepped over the border.

  And waited for them to come.

  The wait wasn’t long.

  The wind shifted—subtle, but I felt it in the vibrations through the trees. Wingbeats. More than one. Heavy, practiced. They weren’t hiding their approach.

  I lowered myself slightly, wings tucked tight, head bowed to show I wasn’t a threat. I might have been small, injured—but I was still a strange dragon. And territorial dragons didn’t like surprises.

  They landed in a semicircle around me—three of them, armored in the sheen of readiness, their scales catching the light in flashes of blue and gold. One stepped forward. A female, taller than I remembered being. Her eyes narrowed on me.

  “You’re from Whispervale,” she said.

  I nodded. “I was.”

  They exchanged glances.

  “What happened?” the lead dragon asked, voice sharper now, tense.

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  I swallowed hard, forced the words out. “We were attacked. Fire and poison. They destroyed everything. My horde is gone.”

  Silence fell. Even the wind held still.

  She stepped closer, eyes scanning me—not with suspicion now, but something like grief. “Come with us,” she said finally. “Our leader, Mithadoss, will want to hear this himself.”

  I followed. My wing still ached. My breath came shallow.

  But for the first time since the caves collapsed, someone walked beside me.

  I stayed with their horde for a few days. They gave me space, but not silence. Questions came gently—how I escaped, how long I’d been alone, what I remembered. I answered what I could. And when I couldn’t speak, they didn’t push. But their pity was a weight I couldn’t bear. The way they looked at me—too gently, too carefully—like I was fragile or broken. Maybe I was.

  Every morning, I woke up hoping the world would return to me. I pressed my nose to warm stone, to the sea wind, to fresh food and the scales of the dragons who passed by. Nothing. I inhaled until it hurt, until my nose throbbed and my lungs burned. Still nothing.

  I watched young dragons curl together in sleep, breathing each other in with soft, unconscious comfort. I saw a mother greet her son with a touch of her snout to his, the scent between them glowing like invisible gold. It should’ve been comforting. Instead, it carved me open.

  Each breath reminded me of what I’d lost—not just my family, not just my home. But the bond. The way dragons connected, felt each other, knew each other. Without scent, I was a shadow. A ghost drifting through a world that could no longer reach me.

  One evening, as I sat alone on the cliffside, staring into a horizon I could not read, the leader’s mate, Semme, approached. She was quiet for a long time before she spoke.

  “There’s a dragon,” she said. “A Water Dragon. Far across the country, near the eastern sea cliffs. They say her healing magic goes deeper than flesh. If anyone can help your nose—truly help—it’s her.”

  I didn’t speak right away. My chest tightened. A part of me didn’t want to believe it—because if even she couldn’t fix me, what then?

  But I had to try.

  I nodded, my voice raw. “Thank you.”

  That night, I didn’t pack anything. I had nothing to take. Nothing that mattered. My memories weren’t in things—they were in voices I could no longer hear, in scents I could no longer reach.

  So I just stood at the edge of the cliffs and watched the sea one final time, wind brushing against my scales like a goodbye I couldn’t feel.

  When I left at dawn, I didn’t look back.

  I couldn’t. If I did, I might fall apart.

  If there was even a chance to get my scent back, I had to take it.

  Because without it… I didn’t know who I was anymore.

  I flew east.

  To avoid trespassing into dragon territory, I climbed high—above the peaks, above the wind currents, sometimes even above the clouds. Dragons didn’t claim the sky up here. Their scent markers clung to the land: to lakes, forests, cliffs. Grounded places. No dragon staked a claim to the open sky.

  And I needed to pass unseen.

  The wind at my back carried no scent, no signal of what lay ahead—only the rhythm of my wings and the aching pulse in my chest. I didn’t know exactly where the Water Dragon lived. Just “the eastern sea cliffs.” It sounded impossibly far, impossibly vague. But I had nothing else to chase. So I chased it.

  The first few days were brutal. I didn’t know how to hunt without scent. I missed prey again and again, failing to notice them until they were already gone. Hunger gnawed at me like teeth. I grew weak. Light-headed. Clumsy.

  But I refused to turn back.

  So I adapted.

  I began to listen.

  Not passively, the way I had before. I listened.

  I clicked my teeth together—softly at first—and waited. Then again, sharper. I tilted my head and listened to the echo. The way it bounced. The distance it traveled. The way trees absorbed it, or stone bounced it back. I clicked once and heard the flutter of something small behind a bush. Clicked again and heard breath from beneath the underbrush.

  It became a map. A language. A world I could read not with scent, but with sound.

  By the end of the first week, I caught a rabbit using nothing but echoes.

  By the end of the second, I could count deer around me without seeing them.

  On the ground, I learned to follow the predators. Being grounded came with its own risks—without scent to guide me, I could easily stumble into another dragon’s territory. And that was something I had to avoid at all costs. A trespassing dragon was a threat, and threats were not tolerated.

  So I watched the predators instead.

  Wolves. Cats. Vultures. I watched them move through the wild, their instincts sharp and cautious. Wherever they walked, I watched where they didn’t.

  One day, a pack of wolves circled a wide river—but didn’t cross it. There was no threat I could see. No scent I could detect.

  But they knew.

  The river was claimed. Marked. Somewhere nearby, a dragon still ruled.

  Even the fiercest predators wouldn’t cross into a dragon’s territory. Not unless they had a death wish. I tracked their footsteps in the soft earth. I tracked the hush of their breath, the change in wind as they shifted their weight. I couldn’t smell them—but I could hear them living.

  I began to understand what my mother had meant. That sound didn’t just tell you where something was.

  Food became another reminder of my new disability.

  Everything I caught tasted like ash and water. I hadn’t realized before how much scent was part of taste. Now, every bite was dull—flat and lifeless. I ate because I had to. Not because I wanted to. Not because it brought comfort. Even the rabbit I caught on the fifth night, fat and fresh, might as well have been stone in my mouth.

  But it wasn’t just food. Everything was different. I began to notice small things—things I hadn’t thought of at first. The scent of rain before a storm. The way I used to recognize different landscapes or seasons. Even the comfort of knowing my own scent, the subtle reassurance that I was me, was gone. There was no way to track myself through the world anymore. I didn’t even know if I smelled like fear or blood or loss.

  And that unsettled me in a way I couldn’t name.

  But sound… sound was waking up inside me.

  My clicks grew more purposeful. Sharper. I began to understand how they curved around surfaces, how the echoes returned differently based on the shape and density of what surrounded me. A hollow log sounded different than a branch. A sleeping creature different than a rock.

  And then I pushed further.

  I started to focus. Narrowing my hearing to a single space. A single target.

  One night, crouched in the grass, I zeroed in on a clearing. I clicked once, softly. A rabbit sat motionless beneath a bush, but I didn’t need sight to know. I could hear the rhythm of its breath. The twitch of muscle under fur. And then—

  I heard its heartbeat.

  Soft, steady. A tempo I didn’t know I could reach.

  I held my breath and listened longer, tracking that beat until I could move without needing to see. One strike—clean, fast. The rabbit didn’t even have time to run.

  It wasn’t just survival anymore. It was instinct, reshaped.

  I still missed scent like a phantom limb. But I no longer feared the silence.

  Sound was something I could grow into.

  And I would. If this Water Dragon couldn’t fix me, I had to believe I could still be something.

  Even if I was different now.

  Even if I would never be the same.