Nadie se atrevía a acercarse al nido del dragón; ella dejaba flores silvestres cada mañana hasta que este la siguió a casa.

Emperor Kais withdrew from the imperial capital entirely and completely in the first difficult year of his reign, retreating to a remote nest in the province’s furthest mountain reaches after a council faction he had trusted completely orchestrated a betrayal that very nearly cost him both his throne and his life within months of his coronation.

The betrayal itself had been meticulously and patiently planned.

A coalition of senior ministers who had served his own father loyally and faithfully for decades, turning swiftly against the young emperor the moment his father’s death placed genuine, unquestioned authority in hands they privately judged too inexperienced to properly wield it.

They had moved against him through poisoned council and deliberately withheld information, steering critical decisions toward outcomes that served their own consolidated power rather than the empire’s actual interests and had very nearly succeeded in engineering a circumstance that would have justified his removal entirely had a loyal few not uncovered the scheme in time to warn him.

Kais survived the attempted coup.

But the survival cost him something the successful defense could not repair.

A fundamental corrosive inability to trust anyone claiming loyalty to him, having watched men he had known his whole life, smile pleasantly across council tables, while quietly working to destroy him.

The betrayal’s particular cruelty lay not in its violence, which had been contained before it could fully manifest, but in the sheer duration of the deception that preceded it.

years, in some cases, of careful counsel offered by ministers who had known from the outset that their advice served purposes entirely opposed to the young emperor’s genuine interests, delivered with a warmth and apparent loyalty that made the eventual reveal all the more devastating for how completely it had been concealed.

He had trusted in particular one minister above all others, a man named Vessel who had served as his father’s closest adviser and had in the transition following his father’s death positioned himself as Kais’s own primary council through the difficult early months of an inexperienced reign.

It was Vessel’s betrayal that cut deepest, the discovery that the very guidance he had leaned on most heavily through his most uncertain hours had been from the beginning calculated to weaken rather than strengthen his hold on the throne.

The other conspirators he could in time categorize as simple political opportunists.

Vessel’s betrayal defied that easy categorization, complicated by years of what had felt at the time like genuine mentorship and care.

The months following the coup’s exposure passed in a haze of necessary but exhausting action, trials, restructured councils, the whole painful business of rebuilding a government’s functional trust from a foundation that had proven considerably more compromised than anyone had previously understood.

Kais managed the crisis with a competence that surprised even his own most skeptical observers.

But the competence came at a cost that only became fully visible once the immediate emergency had passed and left him alone with the accumulated weight of everything the betrayal had actually taken from him.

He found himself in the quiet aftermath unable to sit through a single council session without cataloging every adviser’s smallest gesture for some hint of the same concealed opposition.

Vessel had spent years so successfully hiding.

Sleep became difficult, then nearly impossible.

His own mind working through every past interaction for signs he had missed.

Evidence he should have caught.

Warnings his own inexperience had apparently rendered him unable to properly read.

The physicians who examined him found nothing wrong that medicine could address because the wound was not in any meaningful sense a physical one.

He withdrew from the capital within the year, seeding day-to-day governance to a regency council of officials he trusted marginally more than the ones who had betrayed him, and retreated to a nest in the mountain provinces most remote reaches, where no delegation could reach him without weeks of difficult travel, and no false smile could catch him unprepared again.

The nest itself, carved into a cliff face accessible only by a narrow exposed mountain trail, became within a few short years a fixture of local legend.

The province’s residents giving the whole mountain side a wide birth after the first several delegations sent to recall the emperor returned.

when they returned at all with accounts of a creature whose hostility toward approach had escalated from cold dismissal into genuine firebacked warning.

Local farmers avoided the mountains lower slopes entirely, redirecting their own livestock routes around a wide perimeter that had over the years since Kais’s withdrawal become an unofficial but universally respected boundary, one that no local map ever formally recorded, but every resident understood without needing the recording.

Children in the nearby villages grew up on stories of the mountains dragon.

Tales that had transformed through years of retelling from an accurate account of a genuinely betrayed and grieving emperor into something considerably more monstrous and considerably less human in the popular imagination.

The stories varied from village to village, each community’s own retelling, adding fresh embellishment to a core account that had, by the time Ellen was old enough to hear it herself, drifted considerably from whatever the original circumstances of the emperor’s withdrawal had actually been.

Some versions claimed the creature had once been human and lost its humanity entirely to grief.

Others insisted it had never been human at all.

But some ancient beast, the young emperor’s coronation, had somehow accidentally awakened.

Willen, growing up on the terrace her parents had left her, had always found the wilder versions somewhat implausible, though she had never had particular reason to investigate the truth of the matter herself, content to leave the mountains mystery undisturbed, the same as every other sensible resident of the province.

It was only once her own terrace work began regularly bringing her close enough to the mountains lower slopes to notice the stark contrast between the wild rumors and the quiet, watchful stillness she actually observed from a careful distance that she began to suspect the popular account bore only a passing resemblance to whatever was actually happening up there.

The Regency Council, growing increasingly desperate as pressing matters of state accumulated without an emperor’s proper authority to resolve them, had sent no fewer than five formal delegations to the mountain across the years of Kais’s self-imposed exile.

each one composed of the council’s most respected and diplomatically skilled officials, and each one driven back with escalating hostility that left the delegates in question considerably more frightened than any of their careful diplomatic training had prepared them to be.

The most recent and considerably most disastrous of these delegations, sent scarcely two months before Ellen Ror’s own first quiet approach to the mountain, had returned in genuine disarray.

Its lead diplomat suffering minor burns from a warning blast that had come considerably closer to striking true than any of Kais’s previous demonstrations of hostility.

The council, having exhausted its own considerable resources of formal diplomatic approach, had begun quietly discussing options that ranged from a permanent regency to considerably more drastic measures.

None of which addressed the actual grief and betrayal driving the emperor’s continued withdrawal in the first place.

Ellen Ror knew nothing of the council’s mounting desperation, and cared, in truth, considerably less about the province’s political troubles than about the modest flower terraces she tended on the mountains lower slope.

Work she had done since childhood, and had inherited, along with very little else, from parents who had died when she was still young enough that the province’s collective charity had raised her the rest of the way to adulthood.

She had never had much of her own to give anyone.

in a life defined more by what she had received from others kindness than by what she had ever possessed to offer in return.

And it was this particular history perhaps that made the small gesture feel so natural to her.

The first morning she found herself walking closer to the forbidden mountain than her usual terrace work required.

She gathered a small bundle of the terrace’s least valuable blooms, the ones that would not be missed from the season’s proper harvest, and left them simply at the base of the trail leading up toward the nest, expecting nothing, asking nothing, moving on to her ordinary work, without waiting to see whether the gesture registered at all.

She could not afterward entirely explain to herself why the small impulse had struck her that particular quiet morning rather than any of the countless other ordinary mornings that had come before it.

though she suspected, turning the question over carefully during her own quiet terrace work that same afternoon, that it had something to do with the season’s own gradual turning, and a stray thought about how thoroughly alone the mountains occupant must feel, exiled from a court that had already failed him once, and unwilling, perhaps understandably, to risk trusting anyone close enough to fail him a second time.

She knew what it meant to feel alone in the world, having grown up with considerably more charity extended toward her than anything resembling genuine belonging, and something in that shared, if considerably different, isolation had moved her toward the small gesture before she had fully examined her own reasoning for it.

She returned the following morning with a fresh bundle, and the morning after that, and continued the small ritual through the whole of that season, without any particular plan beyond the simple, unexamined habit it had quickly become, a small kindness offered to a creature she had never seen, and did not expect to ever properly meet, performed with the same unhurried consistency she brought to her ordinary terrace work.

The village, when word of her strange new habit eventually spread, reacted with the particular mixture of alarm and disbelief that any deviation from the mountains respected boundary tended to produce.

You are tempting fate walking that close to the trail.

One of her neighbors warned her more than once.

Flowers or no flowers? That creature drove off armed delegations with fire.

I do not think a bundle of terrace blooms buys you any particular immunity from the same hostility.

I am not delivering anything the creature has any reason to view as a threat, Ellen said, unbothered by the warnings that had by then become a fairly regular feature of her mornings.

I leave the flowers and walk on to my own work.

I do not linger.

I do not call out.

I do not ask anything of it at all.

I do not see what fate I am tempting by that particular small habit.

Whatever the delegation’s own experience might suggest about the wisdom of closer approach, she kept the ritual through weeks that stretched into months, the flowers changing with the season’s own natural progression, the last of the summer blooms giving way eventually to autumn’s heartier varieties, and never once altered her own careful distance from the trails upper reaches, content to leave the small offering, and continue on without ever seeking anything resembling acknowledgement for the gesture, The village’s alarm at her continued habit gradually softened into a kind of beused resignation, most of her neighbors eventually accepting that whatever risk the mountain had once posed to visitors evidently did not extend to a young flower terrace keeper, delivering small, unremarkable bundles to its base.

A few of the more superstitious residents continued to voice their disapproval whenever the topic arose, but the warnings themselves grew increasingly prefuncter, more habit than genuine concern.

As month after month passed without any incident to justify the fear, Ellen herself gave the matter little conscious thought beyond the practical logistics of the ritual itself, which blooms could be spared from the terrace’s proper harvest, how early she needed to rise to fit the detour into her ordinary morning routine, whether the seasons changing weather required any adjustment to her usual path.

The habit had settled by autumn’s midpoint into something closer to simple routine than deliberate kindness.

The kind of small unexamined consistency that eventually becomes so thoroughly woven into a person’s days that its original purpose grows almost incidental to the doing of it.

The first sign that her small ritual had actually registered came nearly two months into the habit on an ordinary morning distinguished from all the others only by the presence at the trails upper bend of a dark shape watching her approach from a distance considerably greater than her own comfortable proximity to the forbidden ground.

She did not alter her routine at the sighting, continuing her approach at the same unhurried pace, setting down the morning’s flowers at the trails base exactly where she always left them, and continuing on toward her own terrace work, without acknowledging the watching presence beyond a simple, unbothered awareness of it.

She did not know in that moment whether the watching represented curiosity or a more serious warning that her rituals welcome had finally worn through.

But she found, considering the question honestly as she walked on, that she was not particularly frightened by the uncertainty either way.

I do not know if you can understand me, she said the next morning, addressing the watching shape directly for the first time since the sightings had begun.

But I am not here to trouble you, whatever the delegations that came before me were actually after.

I only wanted to leave something small and pleasant at your door, the way I would for any neighbor going through a difficult season.

I will keep doing that if you do not mind the doing for as long as you will let me.

The shape did not respond that morning or any of the several mornings that followed.

But it did not retreat either, maintaining its watchful distance with a consistency that Ellen found oddly more reassuring than alarming.

She began gradually to address it directly each morning as a matter of course, offering small updates on her own ordinary life with no particular expectation of response.

The terrace’s harvest yields a minor village dispute over a shared well, the increasingly cold mornings that made the walk up considerably less pleasant than it had been in high summer.

I do not need you to answer any of this, she told the watching shape.

one particularly frosty morning, her breath clouding thickly in the mountain air.

I have found over the years that I talk to myself rather more than most people probably consider entirely proper.

Tending the terrace alone, as I do most days, I do not mind if you are simply listening.

I find the listening, even silent, is rather better company than the terrace alone usually offers me.

The watching became a regular feature of her mornings across the following weeks.

the shape’s distance from the trails upper bend narrowing by careful incremental degrees each time until Kais had positioned himself by late autumn close enough that Ellen could make out the considerable scarring that marked one side of his face.

Old wounds, she understood without needing to ask from whatever violence had first driven him into this particular exile.

She never pushed the growing proximity faster than his own evident comfort allowed.

content to let each morning’s small advance happen entirely on his terms and found herself across those weeks developing something like an easy one-sided conversation with a creature who had not yet spoken a single word back to her.

narrating small details of her own ordinary life, the terrace’s harvest, the village’s minor gossip, whatever small observation had occupied her thoughts on the walk up, with no particular expectation that any of it mattered to him, beyond simple background noise to the morning’s flower delivery.

I do not actually know your name, she admitted one particularly cold morning, watching her own breath cloud in the mountain air.

The village only calls you the mountains dragon, which I have always thought a rather poor substitute for whatever you were actually called before all of this began.

I do not need you to tell me if the telling is not something you are ready for yet.

I only mention it because I have been leaving flowers at a stranger’s door for 2 months now, and I find I would like to know eventually whose door it actually is.

The first genuine breakthrough came on a morning in early winter when Ellen arrived at the trails base to find no watching shape at the upper bend at all and continued with a small worry she did not examine too closely toward her own terrace work only to find Kais himself waiting at the terrace gate itself considerably closer to the village than he had ventured in the whole of his self-imposed exile.

I did not want to startle you further up the trail, he said, his voice rough from evident disuse.

The first words she had heard him speak in the whole two months of her quiet ritual.

I thought the terrace gate in daylight with your own familiar work around you might feel less like an ambush than the mountain trails isolation would.

Ellen absorbed the sound of his voice, the plain evidence of the consideration behind his chosen approach with the same unhurried composure she brought to everything.

That was thoughtful of you, she said.

I confess I had begun to wonder whether you were ever going to actually speak, or whether I was destined to keep narrating my mornings to a silent audience indefinitely.

I did not know how to begin, he admitted.

I have not spoken to anyone beyond the barest necessity in considerably longer than 2 months.

Ellen Ror, I find the beginning is more difficult than I expected it to be.

After so long a silence.

You know my name already, she observed with a small measure of genuine surprise, setting down her gardening tools carefully to give him her full and undivided attention.

I do not believe I ever mentioned it in all my mornings of talking to what I assumed was an entirely uncomprehending audience.

I have known it for some weeks, he admitted, something that might have been the beginning of embarrassment coloring his rough voice.

I heard the villagers use it, calling to you as you passed through the lower terraces one morning.

I confess I found myself listening rather more closely than the ordinary caution of my exile should have permitted.

Curious about the woman who kept leaving flowers at a stranger’s door with no apparent expectation of anything in return.

I am glad you were curious enough to finally come down and ask about the flowers directly rather than simply continuing to watch from a distance indefinitely, Ellen said, returning to her work with the same easy, unhurried manner she brought to every task.

Though I confess I do not entirely know what to call you in return.

Majesty, beyond the mountains dragon, which I have always found a rather poor substitute for whatever name your own mother might once have used.

Kais, he told her, it has been a considerable while since anyone addressed me by it without the weight of rank attached.

Kais, she repeated, testing the sound of it carefully.

That is a considerably better name than the mountains dragon.

I think I am glad after all these weeks to finally know it properly.

He walked with her the remainder of that morning’s terrace work, keeping a respectful distance that gradually narrowed as her own easy conversation put him at increasing ease, and returned the following morning, and the morning after that, following her from the terrace gate, through the whole of her ordinary day, with the particular careful attentiveness of someone relearning slowly and deliberately how ordinary human company actually functioned, the pattern held through the whole of that early winter.

Kais arriving each morning at the terrace gate with a punctuality that soon became as reliable as Ellen’s own flower ritual had once been, and the two of them settling into a comfortable rhythm of shared mornings that neither one commented on directly, but both, in their own quiet way, had clearly come to depend on.

The village, observing the emperors regular presence at the terrace, with an astonishment that took considerably longer to fade than their earlier alarm at Ellen’s own habit had, gradually came to accept the new arrangement with the same eventual resignation they had once extended to her flower deliveries.

You have become something of a local fixture yourself, Majesty.

Ellen told him one morning, watching a group of village children peer curiously from a safe distance at the dragon who had over the preceding weeks transformed in their collective imagination from a feared legend into something considerably closer to a familiar, if still impressively large neighbor.

I do not know that the province’s stories about you will ever fully catch up to whatever this has actually become.

I find I do not mind the stories lagging behind the truth.

For once, Kais said, watching the children with an expression that carried more warmth than weariness.

I spent a great many years as the subject of stories considerably cruer than anything these children are likely imagining.

I think I can bear a little residual exaggeration in the other direction.

You have not asked me for anything, he observed.

some days into this new pattern, watching her tend the terrace’s winter hearty blooms with the same unhurried care she gave every small task.

Every delegation the council ever sent asked me for something, my return, my rule, my forgiveness of men who betrayed everything I trusted them with.

You have asked me for nothing at all.

In two months of flowers and however many days now of this considerably stranger arrangement, I did not leave the flowers hoping for anything in return, Ellen said.

I do not know that I am owed an explanation for a habit that was never meant to extract payment.

If you have decided the company is worth keeping, Majesty, I am glad of it.

But I did not do any of this expecting you to eventually decide anything at all.

That is precisely what unsettles me about the whole arrangement in the most welcome possible way.

Kais said, watching her continue her work with an attentiveness that had by then become entirely familiar to her.

I spent years learning to read every gesture for its hidden calculation, every kindness for the price eventually attached to it.

I have found across these weeks of your company that I genuinely cannot locate the calculation in anything you have done.

It has left me somewhat at a loss for how to properly respond to kindness that expects nothing back.

I do not think there is a proper response required.

Majesty, Ellen said, I think you have simply been keeping company with someone who does not particularly operate that way.

And the not operating that way does not require any special response beyond perhaps growing gradually more comfortable with it over time.

I find I am growing considerably more comfortable with it.

He admitted faster, if I am honest, than I expected to grow comfortable with anything again after Vessel and the whole council’s careful, patient, yearslong betrayal first taught me otherwise, back when I believed I had lost the capacity for trust entirely and for good.

She reached out in that quiet moment and rested a hand against his scarred flank with the same unhurried, unafraid ease she had always brought to their mournings together.

I am glad, whatever else this has cost either of us along the way, that the capacity turned out to be merely dormant rather than genuinely lost.

I do not think either of us fully expected a season of flowers to prove that particular point so thoroughly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, Kais told her some weeks later once the pattern of his daily visits had settled into something neither of them any longer questioned, that the only way to have a friend is to be one.

I have spent years surrounded by men who wanted my rule, my authority, my forgiveness, my return to a throne they had made considerably more dangerous than any mountain exile.

Not one of them, in all that careful courting, ever simply left flowers at my door and walked on without asking for anything in return.

I did not understand until your own quiet ritual taught me otherwise, that being a friend to someone required considerably less than I had always assumed it did.

It required, apparently, nothing more than showing up morning after morning expecting nothing back.

I am glad the flowers taught you something worth learning, Ellen said.

Though I confess I did not set out to teach you anything at all.

I only wanted to do something small and kind for a stranger going through what sounded like a genuinely difficult season.

I did not expect the small kindness to become quite so considerable a friendship.

He considered her plain, unadorned words for a long, quiet moment.

The mountain winds stirring the last of the seasons hearty blooms gently around them both.

I have been thinking these past weeks about what actually made the difference between your approach and every formal delegation’s failed attempt.

I believe I have finally settled on an answer, though I do not know that it flatters the council’s own considerable diplomatic training.

They came asking, you came giving.

I do not think I properly understood before this how fundamentally different those two postures actually are, or how much more readily the second earns trust than the first ever could.

I do not know that I thought about it in quite those terms, Ellen admitted.

But I think you have named something true regardless.

I have never had much to give anyone, majesty, in a life built more on what others gave me than on what I ever possessed to offer back.

Perhaps that is precisely why the giving mattered so much to me once I finally had something, however modest, that was genuinely mine to offer.

Whatever the reason, Ka said, I find myself considerably more grateful for it than I know how to properly express in words alone.

I do not think I would have found my way back to trusting anyone at all ever again, without those quiet mornings of flowers asking nothing whatsoever of me in return.

He returned to the capital the following spring.

The Regency Council’s mounting crises finally addressed by an emperor whose considerable grief had at last found somewhere safe and patient enough to properly heal, and brought Ellen with him, not merely as the woman who had drawn him back from a self-imposed exile that years of formal diplomacy and five failed delegations had utterly failed to end, but as the wife he married within the year, in a modest ceremony held at both their particular insistence on the terrace itself, surrounded by the same modest blooms that had first carried a stranger’s quiet, unasked for kindness, up a forbidden mountain trail.

The nest remained standing afterward, visited occasionally by the two of them together on quiet anniversaries, neither ever needed to formally mark on any calendar, a permanent reminder of exactly how far one small expectation-free gesture had eventually carried an empire’s grieving, betrayed emperor back toward the life he had once believed entirely and permanently lost to him.

The council restructured in the years following his return with safeguards Kais had personally insisted upon, never again allowed a single adviser the kind of unchecked influence Vessel had once wielded.

And Ellen herself, though she never sought any formal role at court, remained the one voice in the palace whose council Kais trusted without any hesitation at all, precisely because she had never once in all their years together asked him for anything beyond his own honest company.

Derechos de autor: DRAGON THRONE ROMANCE