Kivith wants his work to be just perfect, when he shows off for Ryn.
But what if practicing together is even better than perfect?
.
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 Small Storm
Ryn had learned, in the months since the bonding, that knowing where Kivith was and finding Kivith were not the same thing.
The sense came through like a bearing — a directional warmth, a pull slightly left of wherever Ryn happened to be standing. It was reliable the way weather was reliable: mostly accurate, occasionally wrong. Right now it was saying down and east, which, in this part of the Holding, meant into one of the old service corridors that nobody used anymore.
Ryn took a lamp from the wall bracket and went.
The corridor narrowed after two turns. The stonework changed — from the smooth-dressed walls of the inhabited Holding to something rougher, the marks of interrupted work still visible in the rock. Chisels had been here. Hands had planned this passage into something larger, lived in. And then hadn’t. Unfinished corridors were common enough— the kind of place children turned into kingdoms and teachers bemoaned. Ryn had played in half a dozen just like this one.
The bearing pulled them through a low arch into a chamber that had never been finished.
It was smaller than a training room, larger than a storeroom, with the damp-stone smell of a space that hadn’t moved air in years. The walls were raw on three sides. On the fourth, someone had been clearing the stone away — chipping away at the outer layer to expose the vein of humming crystals running beneath. They’d gotten halfway. The exposed section caught the lamplight and sent it back, warmer, with a faint internal buzz Ryn could feel more than hear. The unworked half remained sealed.
Kivith was in the center of the room.
He was still small for a dragon, the way young things are—a small that has long limbs and poor coordination, and is gone from one day to the next. Silver-blue scales threw the lamp’s light back in fragments that blinded Ryn for a moment. He was sitting very still, wings folded tight, head low, every line of him aimed at something in the air two feet from his snout.
It was barely a handspan across. A tight column of air screwing in on itself, pulling grit from the chamber floor up into slow spiraling loops — a miniature tornado, a thumb-sized thing, turning and turning on itself, with no wind to seed it. Kivith’s chest was moving in a steady rhythm, in and out, in, and out.
Through the bond came the sensation of effort, focus. Perfectly aimed. Careful. The feeling of a hand cupped around a flame in wind.
Ryn had spent enough time hiding practice from teachers to know what that looked like.
They did not move. Did not call out.
The tornado stuttered at intervals, the column thinning, the grit beginning to drop — and then Kivith would adjust something in that steady internal rhythm, in, and out, and it would recover. Each recovery a little cleaner than the last. Residues of grit had settled and resettled across the floor in concentric rings, testament to his previous effort.
One of the pebbles in the tornado was larger than the rest — a chip of unworked stone making the whole system work harder than it needed to. Ryn watched Kivith try to compensate for it. Watched the calculation happen somewhere in the rhythm of his breathing, the invisible negotiation between the thing I can do and the thing I want to do.
The funnel lurched.
The pebble hit Kivith on the end of his snout with a small, flat, entirely undignified tckt.
The tornado collapsed. Grit pattered to the floor.
A breath escaped Rin then.A small thing, barely a huff — and Kivith’s head came up.
The bond carried an embarassed stillness.
“It was good,” Ryn said.
Doubt.
“The recovery on the third loop. That was actually good.”
Kivith’s tail moved against the stone floor — a single flat beat.
He looked back at the scattered grit for a moment. Then at Ryn. Then he took one deliberate shuffle sideways. Making room.
“Very well.”
Ryn crossed the chamber and crouched beside him. The exposed vein blinking in the darkness as they found a space next to their dragon. The grit lay still on the floor, waiting to be lifted again.
Ryn found the rhythm Kivith had been working in and matched it.
In. And out.
The air between them began, slowly, to move.
The Mountain Bond series begins with The Severance, 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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Thank you,
— Morgan
© 2026 E.M.V writing as Morgan A. Drake. All rights reserved.
Your writing conveys a strong sense of imagery while weaving in lore details that make the world feel so much more real, under such a small word count budget. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for writing.