The night my village burned, I didn't cry.
I didn't scream.
I walked.
The air reeked of roasted flesh and old milk. My mother had braided a ribbon into my hair the day before, red and yellow like a harvest sunrise. I remember it because the ends were still tied when I stood at the edge of the ash heap that used to be our home.
She was in there. All of them were.
So I walked to the Night Market.
Past the trees that whispered my name.
Past the bones of birds too small to matter.
At the crossroads, beneath a canopy of flickering lanterns and teeth strung like pearls, I found the Bone Merchant. Her eyes were made of glass. Her smile was too kind.
"I want the White Dragoness dead," I said.
She gestured toward her shelves—rows of weapons, armor, maps inked in rust, spells bottled like perfume.
"You'll need a weapon for that," she said. "What will you trade?"
I didn't understand, not fully. But I knew that nothing sharp came free.
So I reached into my chest and tore something loose.
It hurt. Not like a wound—more like forgetting a lullaby you'd once clung to. The kind you hum without realizing, when the rain sounds like home.
It was my mercy.
She cradled it like a hummingbird. "You'll want it back someday," she said.
I shook my head. "No," I whispered. "I won't."
She gave me a sword forged from a meteorite's heart. I remember the way it hummed in my hand. Like it already knew whose blood it would drink.
I came back, again and again.
The laughter of children made me flinch. I traded that for armor that sang when I moved.
I used to hum lullabies in the dark. I gave them up for a map of the dragon's lair, drawn on the skin of something that begged.
I dreamt of my brother's death—his eyes open, his mouth filled with smoke. I sold the last nightmare for a vial of dragon's blood.
Each trade took something I'd once clung to. Something soft.
But softness was a burden, and I was building a name.
They called me Dragonkiller before I ever earned it. As if naming me would make it true.
And then—on the eve of my final battle—I stood once more beneath the lanterns of the Night Market, my hands empty.
"I need nothing," I told her. "I'm ready."
The Bone Merchant only tilted her head. "You've forgotten," she said.
I frowned. "Forgotten what?"
She opened a lacquered box lined with silk and shadow. Inside, something pulsed. Faint, but alive.
I stared at it like it was a ghost.
"Oh," I said. "That."
When I found the White Dragoness, she didn't roar.
She wept.
Great silver tears spilled down her scales, sizzling as they struck the scorched earth. She looked at me like she knew me—like she recognized something that even I no longer could.
I killed her anyway.
And in that moment, I felt nothing.
Not victory.
Not rage.
Not peace.
Just silence, ringing louder than any scream.
Afterward, I returned to the Bone Merchant.
She didn't speak. She only opened the box.
Inside, my mercy still pulsed. Small. Fragile. Mine.
I touched it, and the weight of all I had traded came flooding back.
The lullabies.
The laughter.
My brother's eyes.
It hit me like drowning, all at once.
I wept then—not for the dragon, not even for my family—but for the girl who had once believed that vengeance would fill the hole.
It doesn't.
It never did.
But mercy—
Mercy remembers the shape of who you were, even when you forget.
And so I held it in my hands and wept with the dragon's ghost.