What-The-Dragon-Keeps
The dragon was the colour of cooled iron, and it filled the cave the way water fills a cup — completely, and as though it had always been there. Its eyes opened as Eli came in from the cold, and they were not the eyes she had braced for. They were old and brown and tired, the eyes of something that had listened for a very long time.
"You climbed," it said. Its voice was not loud. It moved through the floor more than the air. "Most who can still speak don't bother. They have people to speak to."
"I came to give you mine." Eli's words came out frayed at the edges, each one costing her something she could feel being spent. "Before I can't. I'm a scribe. I've taken down everyone's last words but my own, and I — I won't have anyone in the room. I worked it out. There's no one left who'd sit with me." She had not meant to say that part. It had simply fallen out, the way the truest things do.
The dragon regarded her. Behind it, in the dark reaches of the cave, she became slowly aware of a sound she had taken at first for wind. It was not wind. It was words — thousands upon thousands of them, layered and overlapping, so faint that no single one could be made out, a soft unending murmur like a sea heard through a wall. Every sentence ever spoken into an empty room. The dragon was not sitting on a hoard. The dragon *was* the listening the dying had not had.
"You misunderstand what I