Eskarith is just out for an easy meal when the mountain itself tells him something is wrong. Following the disturbance leads him somewhere he swore he'd never go again.
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Part of a weekly series of flash fiction and short stories from across the world of Dimidium â the mountains, the coast, the desert, and the places between.
Find the other stories set in the Dragonâs Spine Mountains.
Read part 1 of the Mountain Bond series
A Choice
The mountain goats had no idea he was there.
This was, as far as Eskarith was concerned, the appropriate state of affairs. He had flattened himself against the northern face of the Thornback Ridge with a precision that had taken decades to perfect. Four contact points, weight distributed evenly; crystal formations along his spine angled to catch no light; wings tucked so close to his body that from below he was simply another outcropping of grey rock. An implausible outcropping. One that breathed. But the goats were not philosophers, and from a hundred feet below, grey scale read as grey stone.
Eleven of them grazed on the shelf, picking their way through highland scrub with the easy confidence of creatures that had no natural predators this high.
They had one now.
Eskarith watched the lead male â heavy with summer grazing, entirely content â and felt the satisfaction of patience about to pay out. Forty-something years alone, and he had refined his hunting into something close to art. No rider whose restlessness bled through the bond and startled him at a critical moment. No Circle-mates whose downwind positioning he had to account for. Just himself, the mountain, and the stillness that made him, for all his size, invisible.
He gathered himself to jump. Began to shift his weight forward onto his front legs.
Then something moved through the air to the southwest, and his attention snapped to it.
A storm â and not the usual kind. He felt it along the crystal ridges of his spine first, each formation catching the change in the magicâs currents the way stone catches a temperature shift, long before the skin around it does. A discharge pattern he found almost familiar: lightning unnaturally redirected. Partially unabsorbed.
Somewhere in the far south. Hours from this ridge, and its goats. And talking about goatsâ
His full weight went to his back leg.
Scree that had been accumulating on the Thornbackâs northern face for the better part of a decade offered no resistance to his sliding talons.
What followed had no dignity in it whatsoever. Pebbles first. Then stones. Then a full section of ridge face that had apparently been waiting for exactly this crumbled into the valley below.
All eleven goats had left the shelf before the echo reached him.
He stood on the mangled face of the Thornback and regarded the space where his dinner had been. A single pebble, unaware that events had concluded, bounced past his left forelimb and continued its journey toward the valley floor with a jaunty pic, pic-pic, pic.
Eskarith exhaled slowly, audibly. Counted back from ten.
In the cottony silence he could still feel it. Southwest. Something very wrong was happening at Seventh Formation.
A storm severed from its grounding, lashing at anythingâanyoneâin its path. He had felt this before, once, long ago: he could still taste crimson sand and raging power. That wrongness had run through the whole magical current of the known world, and everyone old enough to feel in deep registers had felt it.
This was smaller. Localized. But the same kind of wrong.
He was still cataloguing it when the deep current itself shuddered.
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Eskarithâs only Memory Bond had been with Thessa of Mistmantle â an entrepreneurial young woman whoâd followed weather-anomaly reports, Elder testimony and secondhand sightings to narrow his location down to a specific valley system, then had spent months spelunking and exploring the forest only to track him down and sell him into a second bond, when he had been too hurt by the end of his first to even consider it.
She had been a perfect companion, her mind one in a generation, and time and time again in the fifty-plus years of their bond she had made him aware of processes heâd only ever performed instinctively. Through her, he had learned what that deep current felt like from the inside â its texture, its weight, the way it carried information too diffuse to be called memory and too persistent to be called anything else.
With her, through their bond, he had been able to access and explore that vast historical memory his own Self would return to, eventually.
He knew what it felt like when something was added to it, at the time of every dragonâs passing, and when something was taken from it. Never had he experienced both at the same time.
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Eskarith could feel him, a young too young bonded dragon, dying. A dragon who had somehow latched onto the deep current on his way out. With no training, no Memory Bond, no understanding at all of what he was touching â just the desperation of someone falling and reaching, reaching for anything at all.
He had pulled a thread loose, stretched it taut, and given it to someone.
Eskarith followed it.
-
He had followed bond-threads before in his long life. He had never followed one into the dying itself.
It was a day of firsts.
The thread led him predictably southwest â past Stormcrest with its storm-crystal smell and forge smoke, past the watching ridges and patrol routes, into the valley where the wrongness pooled, where the air still tasted of shattered magic and spent lightning and dread.
He found the young dragon on the valley floor.
Silver-blue. Small even for his age â still becoming himself, still a season or two from his full size â lying where he had crashed.
Nearby, he could feel a bonded pair â a dragon and his rider, both dazed into stillness. Alive because of the dragon on the ground. And past him, through the valley floor and up a ridge, ran the thread â toward a consciousness that was still â barely â present.
Eskarith followed.
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Severance.
The young riderâs bond-paths were not folding cleanly. The stumps of the connection were still bleeding energy out, throwing it into the flesh of the bond itself in bright irregular pulses, the way a severed branch still carries pressure from the root for a while before it accepts what has happened. Through those failing channels ran the thread â the thing the young dragon had pulled from the deep current â lodged firmly somewhere in the riderâs dying consciousness like a burning coal.
The thread was there and not there, almost dying away at times. Old knowledge then. Older than he was. The young dragon shouldnât have been able to access it at all, but then howâ
Eskarithâs mind stumbled upon the remains of the fraying bond.
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A summer afternoon somewhere south of the main Holding where the peaks were lower and the air went thick and warm, the two of them having abandoned the afternoonâs duties without discussion â a pass inspection that would wait, theyâd decided. They had found a lake ringed with trees so low-growing they trailed their branches in the water. Kivith had gone in immediately.
Kivith, so that is your name, young one.
The rider had sat at the bank for a while watching him, then gone in too, and theyâd spent hours there, suspended in warm shallow water, doing nothing of use. Sensation came through: heat on stone, the lake bottom soft and squishy underfoot, one of those afternoons that felt endless.
A different season. Late autumn, the pass-checking run that had turned into three days when a hailstorm drove them into a cave mouth above the ice line and wouldnât release them. The cave was too small for Kivith to fully extend his wings; heâd spent the first hour rearranging himself with considerable complaint. Then theyâd settled â the rider wedged against his flank for warmth, both of them watching the hail come down in curtains across the valley below â and talked. What they wanted to do when the bond was deep enough to brave the big formations. What it would feel like to hold a whole storm corridor between them. Whether anything they built with weather could last, an invisible memory, and whether that was important.
Kivith thought temporary was the point. Ryn wasnât sure yet.
Ah. Ryn.
Theyâd flown out when the weather broke, finished the pass inspection and filed the report on time.
The memories faded around Eskarith, chased by a voice.
We were realâ
The words broke apart as they reached him, scattered through the thread like light through cracked crystal. Not a sentence anymore. The were arriving separately from the real, each fragment trailing images behind it â valleys rushing past at speed, a ridge at dawn with fog pooling in the hollows below, once the red shimmer of the Crimson Desert glimpsed from high altitude, something neither of them should have had time for and had found time for anyway.
We flew arriving last, fractured into the sensation of it: wind rushing past, the stretch of young wings at full extension, the thrill of the fall.
We fly, the human, Ryn, already dissolving. Present tense. Weâ
What remained of the sentence was swallowed by darkness.
Eskarith, who had buried seven riders and spent fifty years making certain he would not bury an eighth, felt something shifting inside him.
This is wrong.
The bond-paths were still bleeding out. The thread still lodged in a mind that could not hold it much longer. He had followed it this far out of curiosity, out of outrage and hunger. And the only thing that would satisfy that curiosity, knowing what was behind that thread, demanded the only thing he was reluctant to give. A bond. A new bond. His bond.
After Tavis, he had told himself, he was finished. Seven riders. Seven bonds formed and ended. Seven lives shared.
Seven was a good number, and in truth he had bonded more than others. But the losses accrued, and weighted on him. Each one carrying not just its own weight but the weight of all the ones before it, until the sum of what he had loved and outlived was so large it had become the full landscape of his mind. He had walked in memories and remembrance for half a century. He did not know if he could make space for someone again.
-
The thread was still warm, but the window was closing. The dragonâsâKivithâsâ mind fully gone. The humanâsâRynâsâfollowing.
He registered the location of that fading mindâ Sacred Caverns, Stormcrest Holding â and pulled back from the thread.
When he came back to himself the ridge was still there â rubble, cold air, the altered face of the Thornback where the scree had let go. The goats long gone. The afternoon light had not moved much. He had been somewhere else for what felt like no time at all and far too long simultaneously, and his body had made its own arrangements while he was away: wings already spreading, weight already shifting, the thermal off the ridge already taking him before heâd caught up with what he was doing.
Fifty years, and the shape of the absence had long since become the shape of him. He had not found anything, in all that time, that made him want to change it.
And yet.
The thread was still warm.
Kivith. Ryn.
He flew southwest, and as he flew he felt the deep current running alongside him.
This was what Thessa had tried to describe, in the early years of their bond, when she was still mapping the experience into language precise enough to be useful.
Sheâd had that near-perfect recall and a scholarâs need to document everything. Every dragon contributed to it, sheâd said. Eventually. By being what they were and moving the direction they moved â the current didnât ask, and they didnât choose. Every bond formed, every bond ended, every day lived, every experience of single or shared consciousness added its residue. Most dragons never felt it directly. And only a Memory Bond opened the access.
-
The Dragonâs Spine unrolled beneath him in peaks and valleys he had known for centuries, the stone familiar the way his own scales were familiar â present, unremarkable, simply what the world was made of. The stormâs aftermath still tasted wrong in the air. The crystals along his spine rang faintly with each residual pulse from the Seventh Formation, the wrongness dissipating but not gone â still present in the registers, still circling on itself.
The thread ran south ahead of him, thinning.
He flew faster.
-
An hour south of the Thornback, where the altitude dropped and the Dragonâs Spine opened briefly into a broader shelf before climbing again, he saw goats.
A smaller group than the one before â seven or eight, picking their way along a lower ledge in the late-afternoon light, entirely unaware of anything moving above them. He was flying too fast and too purposefully to hunt properly.
He turned his head, just slightly, and breathed on the way past.
Two of them did not finish crossing the ledge.
He caught them one in each rear claw without breaking his stride, dinner.
-
Below him the terrain was flattening toward Stormcrest territory, the Holdingâs boundaries already visible.
Somewhere in the distance, deep into the mountainâs heart, a thread was cooling.
Eskarith dived and poured as much of his power as he could into the fading mind he could still sense flailing for somethingâanything.
The word hit like lightning finding groundâ
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The Mountain Bond series begins with The Severance (vol 1) , available now for purchase in its edited form (but still free as a serial).
More vignettes from the world of Dimidium every week (publishing schedule allowing) on this publication.
âA Choiceâ takes place just before the events of volume 2 of The Severance.
Grab it below before the launch price ends.
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Š 2026 E.M.V writing as Morgan A. Drake. All rights reserved.