The forge-days became the rhythm of his world. Awaken to the dragon's stirring. Eat the meat it provided. Then, the pressure would descend.
At first, it was pure, brutal puppetry. His body was a thing of clay, twisted into shapes of violence by an unseen sculptor. He would collapse, the dragon would breathe its healing warmth over him, he would eat, and he would sleep, his mind a blank slate of exhaustion.
But slowly, over weeks that bled into months, a change began. The numbness that had shielded him from the cold and the fear began to thaw, burned away by the constant, demanding fire in his muscles and the steady, wondrous heat of the cave. His mind, long silenced, began to whisper again.
The first sign was in the training itself. He stopped fighting the pressure. Instead, during a long-held stance—a swordsman's poised guard—he tried to feel where the force was guiding him. He focused on the tension in his back leg, the alignment of his shoulder, the balance point in his hips. When the pressure shifted him minutely to correct a flaw, he didn't just yield; he tried to understand the correction.
One day, as the pressure forced him through a complex, flowing series of steps—a dancelike pattern of evasion and repositioning he would later recognize as a duelist's footwork—his own leg twitched a half-second before the mana-pressure moved it. It was a guess, an intuition. The pressure paused, as if surprised, then gently reinforced the motion. It was the faintest hint of collaboration.
After that session, he didn't collapse immediately. He stood, panting, in the center of the stone floor, his body humming. He looked at the dragon, who watched him with its eternal, golden gaze.
"That one was… harder," he said.
His own voice, raspy from disuse, echoed faintly in the cavern. He hadn't meant to speak. The words had just fallen out, a simple observation to the only other being in his universe. The dragon gave no response, but the boy felt the silence was different now. It was a silence that could be filled.
The talking began quietly, a trickle that soon became a stream. He would comment on the training. "My legs feel like water." He would name the stances in his head. "The Rooted Oak," for the wide, immovable one. "The Darting Snake," for the quick lunge. He spoke to the dragon as if it could answer, narrating his existence.
"I think I found a better way to hold 'The Leaning Tower.' It hurts my knee less."
No answer. Just the slow blink of a great eye, or the soft rumble of breath.
He began to use his hands. He salvaged a sliver of obsidian from a shattered decorative plate and, using a coin as a hammer, painstakingly knapped it into a crude but sharp knife. He gathered the driest, finest strands from the golden nest and small, resinous chunks of wood from ancient broken chests. One evening, after eating and before the deep sleep of recovery claimed him, he sat by a small, carefully banked fire he'd lit with a spark struck from flint and steel he'd fashioned. In his hands was a block of pale, soft wood from a forgotten carving.
He worked quietly at first, the shush-shush of his knife the only sound. Then, as the form began to emerge—a long, sinuous body, a wedge-shaped head, wings folded along a back—he started to talk.
"They called me 'rat,' you know. Before 'little slave.' 'Rat' because I was good at finding scraps in the trash heaps." He smoothed a rough edge. "Grend, the slaver… he had a laugh like stones grinding. I used to dream about that laugh. It's quiet here. I don't miss it."
He glanced up. The dragon was a dark, red mountain against the cavern wall, its eyes closed. He kept carving.
"The walking… I don't remember most of it. Just white. And the feeling that if I stopped, I'd become part of the white forever." He shivered, though not from cold. "I think I was dying. I should have died. But I didn't. I fell… and I found you."
He held up the carving, squinting at it in the firelight. It was crude, lumpy, but unmistakably a dragon. He gave a soft, self-deprecating chuckle.
"Doesn't look much like you, does it? You're… bigger."
He fell silent for a while, the fire crackling, the dragon breathing its slow, sleeping breath. The words were bubbling up now from a place that had been frozen solid, and they carried the weight of a lifetime of silence.
"You know," he said, his voice barely above a whisper, "I never had a name. Nobody cared enough to give me one. I was 'boy' or 'rat' or 'slave.'" He looked directly at the slumbering giant, his deep blue eyes reflecting the small flame. "What's your name, dragon?"
He waited, as if expecting an answer. None came.
"Should I just call you 'dragon'? That doesn't sound right. It's what you are, not who you are." He tilted his head, studying the great form. He saw the slow plume of smoke, a gray-white ribbon, curl from a nostril with each exhalation. It was a peaceful, familiar sight.
"How about… Puff?" A small, genuine smile touched his lips for the first time in his living memory. "Puff. Does that sound nice?" He giggled, a soft, rusty sound that seemed to startle even him. "Hehe. Yeah. Puff."
The name hung in the warm air, absurd and affectionate. It felt right. He had named the sun in his sky.
"Puff it is," he said, with a sense of finality and secret delight.
He went back to his carving, the conversation shifting to lighter things—the way the gold felt underfoot, the strange, sweet taste of a particular type of dried berry he'd found in a rotted pouch. He talked about the stances, giving them increasingly silly names. "The Wobbly Stork." "The Angry Crab."
He talked until his eyelids grew heavy, until the fire burned low. He was placing the finished, clumsy dragon-statue beside his sleeping area when a slow, grinding sound made him turn.
Puff had shifted. One great foreclaw, with a delicacy that always astonished him, extended across the stone floor until its tip rested near him. The dragon wasn't looking at him; its eyes were still lidded. With a single, pointed talon, it began to scratch into the smooth stone.
The boy watched, mesmerized. The sound was like a giant's chalk on a slate. Lines appeared, deep and sure, forming curves and angles. It was not a picture. It was writing. A language of powerful, elegant strokes he had never seen.
When it was done, seven characters stood engraved in the stone, shimmering faintly in the residual heat of the dragon's touch:
K A I R O S
Puff's claw lifted. Then, with a motion that was unmistakable, it pointed the talon first at the boy, then directly at the word carved into the earth.
The boy stared. He looked from the ancient, fiery script to the immense, impassive face of the dragon. Puff's golden eye was open now, watching him.
A name. It was a name.
He mouthed the shapes silently. "Kai… ros." The syllables felt strange and solid on his tongue. They didn't sound like 'rat' or 'slave.' They sounded like a cliff, or a distant thunderclap. They sounded like something that belonged.
He looked back at Puff, his eyes wide. A feeling, vast and warm and terrifying, welled up in his chest, something far more profound than the simple gratitude for food or warmth.
He had named the dragon.
And the dragon had named him.
"Kairos," he said aloud, testing the weight of it. It fit. It fit the new, un-breaking thing he was becoming.
He didn't say thank you. Words were insufficient for a gift this fundamental. Instead, he simply nodded, once, a slow, serious dip of his head to the colossal being who was no longer just a dragon, or just Puff, but the architect of his very self.