CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1 · THE SLEEPING HEART
The Sleeping Heart
Long before the prairie hills were covered in grass, the world wore a great coat of ice.
Glaciers stretched across half the Earth. Mountains slept beneath frozen seas. Rivers lay silent under stone. Even the wind moved slowly in those days, as though the sky itself was beginning to freeze.
Deep beneath one of those glaciers was a cavern carved by ancient ice.
And in that cavern slept a dragon.
Stone pressed against scales dark as storm clouds. Wings large enough to shadow entire valleys were folded beneath the frozen mountain.
This dragon was so ancient that even the sky seemed young beside him.
In time, many dragons would come to shape storms and winds across the world.
But this one was the original elder.
Because of his great age, and because storms seemed to answer him more easily than others, he was held in the highest regard among dragons. The title "The Weatherdragon" was spoken with reverence, a mark of respect for his wisdom and power.
Inside the vast chest of the Weatherdragon beat a heart older than the storms themselves.
That heart beat only once every hundred years.
One deep sound. Boom.
The sound echoed through the frozen cavern walls, quietly but with tremendous force, rolling through tunnels of blue ice before fading slowly into silence.
Then the mountain would return to stillness.
A century would pass.
And again the cavern would tremble.
Boom. Echo. Stillness.
And so the ages passed beneath the ice.