Eskarith has made himself very hard to find, but when destiny comes calling ( in the shape of a very harried, sleep-deprived redhead) he finds being found is easier than he thought.
.
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 Proposal
The caves had been his for twenty years at least.
They ran deep into the northeast face — old formations, dry, large enough for a dragon his size to move through without scraping his wings — and the wide ledge outside caught the morning light and the afternoon thermals and gave him an unobstructed view of three valleys and the approach from the south.
Not that anybody would come this way. The nearest holding was four days’ flight west, and the forests surrounding the mountains he had elected as temporary home quite impenetrable.
The more trafficked convergence grounds were all to the south, clustered around the warmer holdings where Keth’s power ran strongest this season, and any human who might have sought a companion out would probably be standing there, nose upward, waiting for dragons who wanted to be found.
He could not remember the last time he had wanted to be found.
The Wanderer had been rising for about six days now, and bonding season was at its peak. He could feel it in the stone of the ledge under him, in the pressure systems stacking upon one another, in the low crystalline hum that - like every convergence season - moved through the peaks.
He sat in the morning light, the hum running through him, and thought about Eral. About their convergence.
How she had walked straight toward him without hesitation, like the decision had already been made somewhere upstream and meeting was simply completing a formality.
Her hand on his scales, her forehead pressed against his foreleg — and then everything, all at once, her joy arriving in him so bright it had been nearly unbearable. He had been younger then, much smaller than his current size, less careful in his movements. He had shared twenty-two years in that brightness. And then the fall, and the long silence after.
A silence that was now being interrupted by the noise of gravel sliding on the rock face, and huffs, and muttered curses.
She came over the southern ridge slowly — breath short, boots unsteady on the loose shale, clearly unprepared for the trek. She held a map open with both hands and was looking at it rather than where she was going. Frizzy red hair, half-escaped from its binding, stuck to the side of her face. On her shoulder satchel so full it listed her to one side. She smelled, even from this distance, of long travel — sweat and effort and somewhere underneath it, dried blood, a scrape that had opened and closed on the way up.
She did not look up.
He watched her pick her way down from the ridge, consult the map, correct her angle slightly, consult the map again. She walked directly toward the base of the ledge without once looking up to him. At some point she tucked the map under her arm and began working something loose from the satchel — a rolled document, which she transferred to her other hand while continuing to walk.
She was close enough now that he could hear her words distinctly. My, he had never heard someone so young express themselves in so colorful a way.
She walked into his shadow.
She stopped. Looked down at the ground. Looked at the shadow’s edge, which was very large. Looked up.
He looked back at her. Blinked.
The poor thing was clearly shortsighted — he could tell from the way she had been squinting against the light since the ridge, from the slight unfocus in her eyes as she tried to resolve what she was seeing.
Up close and with adequate shadow, she managed. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth slack. She took two rapid steps backward, caught her heel on a rock, and stumbled, landing on her bag with an omphf of pain and surprise, rolled document spasmodically clutched to her chest.
Then, before he had formed a single impression of her beyond sweaty and red and tiny, she smiled.
A wide, guileless smile that seemed almost too big for her face, and showed a gap in her front teeth.
“I found you.” She said. “You’re bigger than I expected, Ancient.”
He said nothing. Couldn’t. really, what with not being bonded to this human. Or any human, for that matter. And he was big, he supposed, even by dragon standard.
He was also very curious to know what this tiny human would do next.
A great deal of talking was the answer to that.
She informed him, with increasing enthusiasm and the occasional dip in her notes, that he was extraordinarily difficult to locate — an understatement —that she had spent four months cross-referencing Elders’ testimony, weather pattern anomalies, and secondhand accounts of sightings to narrow his range to this valley system — enterprising — that she was aware this was unorthodox — very — that the convergence grounds were full of perfectly reasonable dragons and she meant no disrespect to any of them — debatable — and that she was not here because she couldn’t manage a conventional bonding.
She was here, she said, because of her work.
She held up the documents in her hands, as if to have him read them.
Her own research — he caught that much, and that it concerned something she needed consistent and ancient power to pursue, and that what she required was not just strength but knowledge, the kind that only accumulated over centuries. She had been looking, she said, for the right partner. Someone who had seen enough of the world to understand what she was trying to understand.
He turned away from her.
She kept talking.
He presented her with his flank, then the full indifference of his back. She adjusted her angle and continued. He turned further. She moved with him.
“You’ve been alone for thirty years,” she said. “Deliberately, I know. I’m asking you to make a different choice now.” She was torturing the papers in her hands now. “Not only for my sake. Though partly for my sake. But because I think we would build something that hasn’t existed before, and I think that you would have stopped listening long ago if you really were not interested.”
He had not stopped listening.
He side-eyed her.
She was watching him with a small smug smile, a gleam of victory in her eyes as if she had run this scenario many times in her mind and remained uncertain of the outcome until this very moment. The scrape on her chin dripped sluggishly, reopened by her excited monologue. Her boot sole flapped when she shifted her weight. The shadows under her eyes spoke of too little sleep and too much storm-brew.
A researcher through and through.
The Wanderer’s pull moved through the stone, through the air, through the thin place that convergence season always opened — the membrane between minds worn fine by the season, by the hum in the crystal. And suddenly her mind was there. Bright. Open — this far from a convergence ground, this far from any amplifying formation, and still this present, this available.
Curious. Careful. Running very fast underneath the thin veneer of composure.
He felt the shape of what they could be. Not Eral’s bright wild resonance. Something slower, sharper. A bond that would involve, he suspected, a great deal of talking.
And indeed she was still talking. Still making her case. She had not noticed that he had already decided, that he was already reaching for her mind, that the bond was already forming in the warm open channel of the convergence air between them.
You are very chatty for a human, he said.
She stopped mid-sentence. Her eyes went wide again with the shock of words arriving inside her, clear and complete. Her documents fell to the ground, unnoticed.
Why me?
“Because—” She steadied. “Because we can do something amazing together. And I think you’ve earned that.”
In his mind, she was spring.
Nothing like Eral’s warmth, her reckless joy — this was the light before warmth, the first morning that smells green in the year, a mind young and excitable. Curious from the roots to the top. Already, even now in the staggering shock of the bond forming, beginning to observe.
No, nothing like Eral. He was glad about that.
He was also, in some smaller way he did not want to examine, a little sad.
Eral would have liked her.
Thessa straightened, breathed, blinked several times in rapid succession, and looked up at him with glee.
“Oh,” she said, with a wide smile. “I have so many questions.”
-
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.