They didn’t see him any more. Not fully. They saw the shape of him - the broad set of a warrior’s shoulders, the scarred face barely healed, the scrap of red plaid tied about his arm - but their gazes slid off him like rain on slate.

 

He understood - they did not wish to see too much. He’d never had the choice.

 

He’d returned home in name alone - to the barren island of his ancestors, more ash than soil, trees brittle and stunted, a slender band of civilisation clinging to the fraying edge. Nobody crossed the ridge into the black stone interior. There was nothing there for man or beast. It suited him just fine.

 

Not quite man and not quite beast, he wandered the ashen crags alone. Nobody tried to stop him. Nobody wanted the burden. It was easy enough to say he was touched, that he’d lost his wits to the fight.“I did this for you,” he wanted to shout. But it was better to be silent. Better to drift ghost-like over the fruitless plains, with only the whipping wind for company. He bared his teeth, tugged at the tartan around his arm, faded and torn, mottled with blood, red as an unhealing wound.

 

He didn’t know what he was searching for. Only that something was lost. Something too vast for words, too great for simple sorrow. But he noticed things: the scent of sulphur in the stream. Steam curling from cracks in the black earth. The way the island muttered in deep and creaking groans, as if in fitful slumber.

 

He was no stranger to such things. His own dreams were messes of memory, cries that could not escape, sheets soaked with sweat and ribs racked with sobs. And a wyrm coiled around trees of bone, impossibly still, impossibly sad.“I did this for you,” it breathed, in a tongue he did not know.

 

He woke up choking on road dust, heart pounding like hooves on hollow ground. And in time he understood.

 

There had been a serpent here. An Old One, the stuff of stories. Woven into the island’s bones, the keeper of flame and tide. A pact had been made with the people: it guarded them, gave them life. And when they had stopped believing, the dragon had withdrawn. It curled inward, grief-struck, forgotten. Once a thing of fire and fury, now empty as ash and bone.

 

So he sat with it, the dying land, the bleached white trees and burned black bracken. The standing stones that maybe meant something, millennia ago. He felt its ache beneath his skin - the heavy quiet, the isolation, the thrum of unspoken self-exile.

​

As the seasons turned, the nights grew long, and the sun was a slip of gold. Above, he saw bright ribbons of flame: green on pink on blue. Time had less meaning and cold drove him on, into the heart of the island, where wind howled like pain through bramble and thorn, through long abandoned dwellings.

​

 

He didn’t feel the scratch of briar against his skin. Only the breeze on his upper arm. He stopped dead, eyes wide, and whirled about on his heels. There the shred of tartan fluttered, caught on a thorn and torn from him.

​

 

He stared as if it were his own blood - and it was - the last of his kin. The sole remnant of a once mighty clan, which had fought and died at his side. Its threads stained the air with old anguish, and flowed into ashen soil.

​

 

And then the earth exhaled.

​

 

Not loud. Not enraged. Just a tremor, a shifting in its sleep. A low rumble through the soles of his feet. He dropped to his knees, pressed the cold stone. A steady throbbing answered: impossibly slow. Impossibly deep. There were no words to speak.

​

 

But a sound trembled up from him anyway, ripping through his ribs. A draconic roar of rage and pain, the memories he’d long held back. And as the tide of sorrow surged, his own and not his own, it gave way to a simple song, to syllables unknown.

​

 

A song that might have been sung here once, in these blackened husks of homes, when harvest still came to this barren land, and dragons filled the air.

​

 

The breeze tasted sweeter as he sang, and ribbons of green danced above him. Something turned beneath the hill. Not waking. Not yet. But hearing.

​

 

He left the tartan scrap behind, snagged and fluttering, a red flame of things lost and longed for, feeding the roots of the land.

​

 

In the weeks to come, moss began to creep green again across the standing stones. A single flower bloomed among the leafless heather.

​

 

The villagers still did not meet his eye.

​

 

But when the wind blew just right across the ridge, they sometimes heard a call, long and low and aching, from the island’s empty heart. And they felt, though none would say it aloud, that something was breathing again.