Caillha has been waiting to be chosen since she was eighteen, but this is her year. It has to be.
.
Part of a weekly series of flash fiction and short stories from across the world of Dimidium — the mountains, the coast, the desert, and the places between.
Find the other stories set in the Dragon’s Spine Mountains.
Read part 1 of the Mountain Bond series
A Long Wait
The braid wasn’t working.
Caillha undid it for the third time. Fingers pulling at her hair, starting over, again. The lamp was still low — first grey light only beginning to appear through the shaft overhead, not enough to see properly, which was not the problem. She knew how to do this braid. She had done it every convergence morning for the past two years.
She started again.
This time it held.
She sat for a moment with her hands in her lap, looking at the wall. Her chamber was quiet — she could hear the whispers and hums of young people sleeping close by, and small sounds further away: a dragon shifting somewhere in the upper aeries, dust and gravel sliding down the mountain wall, the irrigation channels running. She had grown up hearing those sounds. They were as much a part of morning as the cold.
She was almost twenty now. She’d had a full year to understand what she’d felt at her first convergence ceremonies, what it had meant and what to do differently. Her resonance scores were strong — had been strong since testing, which hadn’t surprised anyone including her. She’d spent the year on the advanced weather-reading work and the researcher supervising her had remarked on her excellent attunement, directly, which he never did. She’d stood on the practice grounds last autumn and felt the pressure drop before anybody else did.
And yet, nothing.
But this time it was different. This time she had worked even harder, learned even more. The dragons would feel that. They would feel her and they would know, and one of them would choose her.
This time.
The knock came as she was pulling on her outer layer.
Fen. Caillha knew Fen’s knock — three fast, and then the door was already opening on the fourth.
“I knew you’d be up.” They came in carrying Veth against their chest, one hand cupped under the dragon’s belly, the other holding a roll of flatbread pilfered from the kitchens. Veth was the size of a cat at present, silver-green, eyes fixed on the flatbread. “Did you get any sleep? I thought you might not.”
“I slept.”
“Sure you did.” Fen made themselves comfortable at the small table. “ You look like death.”
Caillha wound the strap of her pack through its buckle and checked it was closed. “How long have you been up anyway?”
“Since the fifth bell. She was scratching at the door.” Fen tore a piece of flatbread and ate it, motioning for Caillha to sit and take some as well. Veth tracked the movement with total commitment. “Someone needs to talk to the older children about the dried fish. I found three pieces in her sleeping corner.”
“They’re feeding her from the stores again.”
“She encourages it. She has a face she makes.” Fen frowned down at Veth, who licked her own snout glancing pointedly at t he food. “I’ve told Cousin Herath. She said she’d speak to them at the morning gathering.”
Veth made a sound — small, insistent — and butted her head against Fen’s chin.
“No,” Fen said. “That’s not for you.”
Veth subsided for all of ten seconds, then her tail still waving again, eyes pleading. Fen sighed and fed her a piece, apparently equally as powerless as the kids against the face.
Caillha liked Fen, in the way you like someone you grew up with, whose rhythms you knew without choosing to learn them.
It was just, Veth had chosen them. Funny, simple Fen. Had looked at them with those small silver-green eyes at the convergence grounds a year ago and decided — yes, this one — and Fen had come home with their hair still wild from the ceremony, Veth gnawing cheerfully on their collar, and moved on with their life as if nothing momentous had happened. And sometimes Caillha resented that.
“Are you coming to watch?” Caillha asked.
“For a bit. I have the morning beds once the seedlings are showing — Veth helps with the warmth in the lower chambers. I thought it would be boring and slow work, but it’s actually really interesting, the germination rate has been—” Fen stopped. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You did a thing with your mouth.”
“I didn’t.”
Fen looked at her for a moment, frowning. “It’s going to be your year,” they said. “You’re the strongest resonant in our cohort. Everyone knows that.”
Caillha pulled on her cloak. “Come on. The grounds will be filling.”
The air felt heavy on the path up.
A drop in pressure that hummed first in the back of her throat, then behind her eyes, then through her whole chest like a chord resolving into something too large for the space available. The crystals in the rock face alongside the path were faintly audible this morning.
Her feet knew this path. She had walked it in every season after graduating. Had stood on the grounds in the autumn rains and the spring cold and once in full darkness, when in a freak summer convergence the pressure had stacked overnight and the Elders had roused everyone at the third bell and sent the candidates up still half-asleep, and none of those times had been hers.
But this time.
Fen was still talking about the seedlings. About a variety that hadn’t taken in the lower chamber, and whether the warmth gradient was wrong or whether the seed stock was old, and how Veth had been sitting with the frost-prone beds in the early mornings before anyone else was up which was sweet and also slightly alarming because no one had asked her to do it, and how was she even getting there by herself, that was the question—
Veth, riding in the crook of Fen’s arm, sneezed and looked deeply innocent.
Caillha smiled.
Ahead, the path opened.
The grounds were already charged — pressure pulling at her sternum, humming in her back teeth. The candidates were taking their positions in a loose grouping at the center, the Elders ranged along the stone rim. The first light catching the peaks to the east and running gold along the ridge lines. Somewhere above, beyond the visible — dragons, circling.
She stopped at the edge.
“Go on,” Fen said. “We’ll wait for you here.”
Caillha smiled, and took a step forward.
She found her place among the others and lifted her face to the sky, and the cold came down, and the hum moved through her. She opened up, and waited.
-
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 on this publication.
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© 2026 E.M.V writing as Morgan A. Drake. All rights reserved.