A boy's frozen fingers slipped on the icy rock, and he nearly fell off the mountain. He caught himself and kept climbing. At the top he crawled into a black cave that smelled of old smoke. Deep inside, one huge yellow eye slid open. "Go away, child," the dragon rumbled. "Please," the boy gasped. "The Ashen Legion is coming. They burn my village at sunrise. You're the last dragon. You have to fight them." The eye narrowed. "I don't fight. Not anymore."

"I won't fight," the dragon said. "But fighting isn't the only way to win." It rose up, enormous, scales scraping the stone. "The Ashen Legion fears two things. Old magic, and the dark. Lucky for your village, I am both." It crawled toward the gray morning light. "Come, boy. We have until sunrise to be clever."

They reached the village at dawn. The dragon coiled itself around the whole town like a wall, scales facing out, and went very still. From the ridge, the Legion saw only a sleeping monster the size of a hill. Their commander raised a fist. The soldiers stopped cold. Nobody wanted to be the first to wake it.

But a clever commander grew suspicious. He threw a torch to test the beast. The flame bounced off the scales, and the dragon flinched. "It's only sleeping!" he shouted. "Forward!" The boy, hidden in the village, saw the trick failing. He grabbed a horn and blew it loud, the signal he and the dragon had agreed on for when things went wrong.

The horn's blast rolled across the valley, and something in the dragon answered it. Three hundred years of hiding cracked open at once. It rose over the village, no longer pretending, and looked down at the men who had come to burn the only person who'd ever sat and talked with it. "You should have run," it said, and then it stopped being afraid.