The world called him the Breathing Disaster.
They had given him dozens of names to mark his existence—Sky Demon, Continental Scourge, and even Eternal Sinner. Yet not one of those grand titles truly represented the reason he had crossed the horizon for hundreds of thousands of years. He was not seeking a throne atop the corpses of civilizations. He did not yearn for the fear that drove kings to their knees inside their stone throne rooms.
He wanted only one simple thing, something even the smallest insect beneath a crack in the rocks possessed: “happiness.”
Yet the world was far too small a place for an enormous dragon.
Whenever he descended into a green valley simply to listen to the song of a flowing river, humans brought thousands of poisoned arrows. Whenever he flapped his wings above the ocean to feel the night breeze, sailors screamed hysterically, offering poetic prayers filled with fear before leaping into the black waves.
Every time he opened his eyes, all he found were arrowheads aimed at his golden scales, vengeful screams, and insults hurled by weak creatures that could not even survive a single breath from him.
“Why?”
The voice echoed inside his chest cavity, never emerging as words but as a vibration that cracked the mountains beneath him.
CRACK!
He had once tried destroying a royal city. When the stone fortress collapsed into ash and the screams of thousands of souls were snuffed out in a sea of his sacred fire, he stood atop the ruins, waiting for the satisfaction promised by his beastly instincts. Yet all that remained in his chest was a widening emptiness. Destroying a city had not given him happiness. Only regret burned from within.
He had also tried to make things right. With his limitless power, he stopped volcanic eruptions, calmed storms that devastated the coast, and brought water to barren soil. Yet when humans emerged from the gaps in their settlements and saw the colossal form that had saved them, they did not smile. They threw spears. They cursed him as a magic dragon plotting some scheme.
Trying to make things right only gave him suffocating boredom and endless dissatisfaction.
“This world doesn’t want me,” he thought. “And I have no place in it.”
With a single beat of his wings that split the clouds across a radius of hundreds of miles, the dragon soared into the sky. He crossed oceans and passed over frozen lands until he reached the highest pillar of the earth—a mountain peak that rose so high its summit pierced the cloud layer and touched the darkness at the edge of the atmosphere, where the air was thin and silent.
There, there were no human screams. No arrows could reach him. No river songs, no fertile soil—nothing but bare rock and the cold wind howling without end.
The dragon began to move. Using claws capable of cleaving steel, he brought down the surrounding stone peaks. He leveled the highest peak, shaping a vast, colossal basin. With measured breaths of fire, he melted the hard stone, forming the walls of a lair that were smooth, sturdy, and perfectly curved to hold his exhausted colossal form.
He spent years simply making sure the stone lair was positioned as comfortably as possible. A refuge where he would never again have to see false smiles or eyes filled with hatred.
When everything was finished, the enormous dragon coiled his massive body inside the stone lair. His great head rested atop the folds of his thick tail. His golden eyes—which had once witnessed the birth and destruction of more than a dozen civilizations—slowly closed.
Silence embraced him like a thick blanket.
“If I can’t find happiness in this world,” he whispered inwardly as his consciousness began sinking into the deep darkness, “then at least let me find peace in endless sleep.”
Time no longer held meaning for a creature living atop the world.
A decade passed like a single breath. A century passed like one heartbeat. Pearls of snow piled atop his scales, freezing into a thick layer of ice that disguised his body as part of the mountain itself. The wind blew, the seasons changed, and the name of the enormous dragon atop the highest mountain slowly faded from human memory, becoming nothing more than an ancient myth told to children before bed.
He slept deeply, longing for oblivion.
Until one day, thousands of years later…
TAP. TAP. TAP.
A strange, almost imperceptible vibration pierced the layer of ice covering his body.
It was not the vibration of an army stomping its feet. Nor was it the scrape of arrowheads against stone scales. The vibration was so light, so fragile, as if it were merely a feather falling onto a blanket of deep snow.
The dragon did not fully awaken. His consciousness merely drifted thinly between dream and reality. Yet amid the silence of the mountaintop, normally filled only by the roar of the wind, there was something new.
Footsteps.
Small. Weak. And stumbling.
The dragon’s eyelids opened the slightest bit, revealing a narrow glimpse of his dim golden eye. Beyond the curtain of snow and ice coating his eye, he saw a small shadow standing at the edge of his stone lair.
A human girl.
Her body was tiny compared to the dragon’s largest claw. From her appearance, she was probably only in her early teens—a young girl who should have been in a warm settlement far below. Her face was clean, her cheeks reddened by the freezing cold wind. Her clothes looked simple and heavily patched, soaked by melting snow.
The girl stood there, panting, her breath forming thick white mist in the cold air.
The dragon did not move. He did not growl or breathe fire. Thousands of years of experience had taught him that interacting with humans would only end in pain or regret. He regarded the girl’s presence as nothing more than a meaningless little anomaly—perhaps a foolish child who had gotten lost or was seeking shelter from the storm.
“Do whatever you want,” the dragon thought coldly. “Curse me, throw your little stones, then die in the cold of this mountain.”
The dragon closed his eyes again, deciding to ignore the girl’s presence and return to his interrupted sleep.
Yet the terrified scream he expected never came. Neither did the insults that had once been his daily fare.
SCRAPE.
The only sound that followed was the soft scrape of wood against stone.
The girl placed something on the floor of his lair. Only a few yards from the enormous dragon’s closed snout.
The dragon held his breath for a moment. He sensed the girl standing still for several seconds, gazing at his massive face veiled in ice. There was no hostility. No panicked heartbeat that usually signaled the profound fear of a living creature facing an (apex predator).
There was only a strange, tranquil silence.
SCRAPE… SCRAPE…
Then those fragile footsteps sounded again. Slowly, moving away from the lair and descending the treacherous path on the storm-shrouded mountaintop.
CRACK!
When the echo of the footsteps had truly vanished into the roar of the wind, the dragon’s eyelids opened again. A curiosity that had been dead for thousands of years suddenly gave a faint pinch deep within him.
He lifted his head slightly, creating great cracks in the ice coating his neck. His golden eye lowered, staring toward the place where the girl had stood.
There, on the cold stone floor, lay a simple woven bamboo basket.
And from inside the basket, the aroma of still-warm, smoky roasted meat slowly spread, cleaving through the cold air atop the mountain beneath the sky.