Three hundred and seven years ago.

Vincent ran along the beach, laughing so hard he couldn’t reach full speed; Clarya was getting further and further away from him in the distance, the cheat. She was a cougar shifter - a breed rare in their lands, where lived so many bears and dragons. Her family had come from the West the previous season, after their land had been attacked by orcs in the Sands.

Never had Vincent been given cause to thank orcs before. Now he did, for their actions had permitted him to meet the girl he was going to marry.

Clarya was older than him, and she could already shift. It mattered not. They might be sixteen and nineteen years old now, but in a few decades, when they were all grown, she wouldn’t care; what did it matter, at fifty, that your man was forty-seven?

He knew he wished to wed her because she wasn’t the most beautiful woman he’d come across at all, yet, when he saw her, everyone else faded into oblivion. He loved her laugh and her smiles. He loved the way she wore her hair - a horizontal braid on one side, and the rest, down. But above all, he wished to marry her, because his beast responded to her, just like his parents’ beasts cared for each other.

Vincent couldn’t shift yet. He didn’t even know whether he’d be a bear or a dragon; what he knew was that when the girl was close, his animal pushed to the surface and wanted him to keep her at his side. Take care of her.

She’d said she’d accept his proposal, and wed him immediately when he was of age, as long as he could catch her, so he ran. Even after she’d shifted and dashed at full speed, he ran.

“You’ll never marry her, you know,” one of his father’s guests had said the previous evening.

Vincent had glanced at the mage and just rolled his eyes. What did the old man know?

“I looked into her eyes and I saw death. She won’t live to see another winter.”

That showed what the mage knew: Clarya was in great health, as she proved now, by taking an impossibly long jump, and beautifully landing on her feet like the magnificent creature she was.

He was still laughing when he saw them, coming out from the shadow of a cave. Orcs. Dozens of them.

“Clarya, run!”

But they were too close and he, too far to do anything about it. He’d never felt as helpless, as useless, as when he saw the horde come down on his woman that day.

But he wasn’t helpless. He wasn’t weak. Those orcs were nothing compared to him. Compared to them.

He’d been told what to expect on his first shift, but no speech could have prepared him for the excruciating, bone-breaking process as the beast crawled out of his skin. It was over quickly but it felt like it lasted an eternity. Then, it was finally over, and Vincent was locked inside the mind of a ruthless beast.

The dragon hadn’t been told how to fly - Vincent had heard that it could take time - yet he leaped into the air and extended his long, leathery wings, soaring through the skies.

He was on the orcs in an instant. To Vincent’s horror, he had to witness as his beast called fire to his breast and set the entire horde ablaze.

It took hours for the beast to deign to shift back to his human form. Hours of Vincent begging to let him go find Clarya, crying out, desperate for freedom. Finally the dragon relented, withdrawing back to the shadows.

They said that Clarya had been killed, pierced by an orc lance, long before he’d burned the horde, but it didn’t matter, not as he looked at what was left of her body: a black coal sculpture.

Vincent never told his dragon to leave. He didn’t need to. The beast had the sense to retreat of his own accord.

No one who knew ever talked of it. They didn’t need to. They knew Vincent lost his dragon. They also knew he didn’t want him to come back.

Vincent didn’t speak for days. Eventually, he became aware of the fact that everyone was looking at him with sorrow, and worry, so when his mother came that day, he opened his mouth.

“Would you show me how to braid hair?” he asked.

Clarya had had a thing for her silly hairstyle. One braid on the left side of her hair, the rest let down.

“Whose hair?” Mula asked, confused with good reason.

“Mine.” He bit his lip. “Is it too short?”

He had perhaps five inches of hair, styled fashionably for a young boy at the time.

“A little, but I’ll manage.”

She didn’t have any more questions. First, Mula braided his own hair just like Clarya’s, then she undid her sophisticated tresses and sat down right in front of her boy. “You’ll practice on me, first. Seeing what you’re doing will make things easier. Once you’re good, you can braid your own.”

He nodded, and listened carefully as she instructed him on how to move his fingers around her hair.

Clarya, a girl of nineteen, was dead, but she’d live forever in Vincent’s memory, and he would honor her by wearing his hair like she used to.

She’d shaped him into the man he was now. Suspicious. Hesitant to let anyone in. Ruthless to those who preyed on the innocent.

Dragonless.