Fifteen centuries ago, in an age when kingdoms were forged in iron and bound by superstition, the Winter realm of Oakhaven was gripped by a frost so severe it turned the Great Forest into a graveyard of ice.

Princess Isolde, sixteen and headstrong, rode her horse through the shadowed pines, far beyond the safety of the castle walls. She was seeking escape from her father’s court, where lords plotted war and spoke of dragons only as foul beasts to be slain.

Then, she heard it—a whimpering sound, paper-thin, carrying over the whistling wind.

Isolde dismounted, stepping through snow that reached her knees. Beneath the tangled roots of a dead oak, half-buried in a drift, lay a tiny creature. It was no larger than a hound, its scales a pale, translucent sapphire, trembling violently. A iron-tipped crossbow bolt was lodged deep in its left wing, pooling dark, shimmering blood onto the white snow.

The baby dragon looked up at Isolde with eyes like liquid gold. In them, she saw no monster—only sheer, unadulterated terror.

Hearing the distant baying of hunting hounds, Isolde knew the king’s dragon-slayers were close. Without hesitation, she knelt in the snow. “Hush now,” she whispered, her breath blooming in the frigid air. Carefully, she wrapped the freezing hatchling in her heavy fur cloak, pulling the bolt free with a swift, painful tug. The little dragon let out a sharp squeak and nuzzled its wet snout into the crook of her neck, seeking her warmth.

Isolde hid the creature inside a abandoned stone chapel deep within the forest. For three days, as blizzard winds howled, she snuck out into the freezing nights to tend to its wound, feeding it raw meat and warming its pale scales beside small, shielded fires. She named the hatchling Glace. A fragile, unspoken bond bloomed between the royal girl and the wild beast—a quiet promise of protection in a world determined to destroy it.

On the fourth night, the forest fell unnaturally silent. The wind died down, and even the wolves ceased their howling.

Isolde sat beside Glace in the ruined chapel as the little dragon rested its head on her lap. Suddenly, the earth beneath them began to tremble. Loose dust fell from the stone arches. Glace’s ears perked up, and its golden eyes widened with an emotion Isolde had never seen before: not fear, but profound recognition.

From the snow-capped peaks of the Frostfang Mountains miles away, a sound shattered the quiet.

It was a roar—a deep, resonant sound that vibrated not just through the air, but through the very stone beneath her feet and the marrow in her bones. It carried a grief so ancient and a fury so immense that the glass in the chapel’s stained windows shattered into a thousand pieces.

Glace scrambled to his feet, letting out a high-pitched, answering call that pierced the night.

Isolde rushed to the chapel’s arched doorway. Above the treeline, the clouds parted. A shadow bigger than the king’s castle glided across the full moon. A colossal dragon—her scales dark as the midnight sky, her wings spanning the width of the valley—descended through the blizzard. Her eyes burned like twin suns in the dark.

The baby dragon had never been abandoned. Its mother had been searching for it across the frozen continent, burning down every mountain pass in her desperate quest.

As the massive beast landed, the ground shook violently, snow tumbling from the canopy. Her fiery gaze swept over the ruined chapel, locking onto the human princess standing in the snow, holding her wounded child.

Isolde held her breath, facing the legend of the ancient world.