The brass scales had lost their luster decades ago, but Mira could still see the dragon’s former glory in the intricate gears that made up its wingspan. She pressed her palm against the creature’s cooling chest, feeling the last weak vibrations of its mechanical heart.
“Please,” she whispered, though she knew the townspeople had already made their decision. The dragon would be dismantled tomorrow, sold for scrap to fund the new railway station. Progress, they called it. Efficiency over wonder.
Mira had been the dragon’s keeper since childhood, the last in a line of dreamweavers who understood the ancient art of breathing life into metal and steam. Her grandmother had taught her the secret: clockwork dragons didn’t run on coal or electricity, but on human dreams, carefully cultivated and fed to the mechanical beast through touch and intention.
But dreams had become a scarce commodity in Millbrook. The factory work left people too exhausted for anything but dreamless sleep. The few dreams that remained were gray things, heavy with worry about wages and weather, unsuitable food for a creature that once soared on fantasies of distant lands and impossible love.
The dragon’s amber glass eyes flickered once, recognizing her touch. Mira closed her own eyes and reached deep into her mind, gathering every vibrant dream she’d hoarded over the years. The dream of becoming a painter, abandoned when her parents died. The dream of traveling to the floating gardens of Byzantia, dismissed as foolish when the factory opened. The dream of love that bloomed and withered with each season, never quite taking root.
She fed them all to the dragon, feeling each one drain from her consciousness like water from a broken vessel. The mechanical beast shuddered, its gears grinding to life with renewed purpose. Steam hissed from the joints in its neck as it raised its great head, wings spreading wide enough to cast shadows across the entire workshop.
“Fly,” Mira breathed, though she knew she had given the dragon everything and would never dream again. “Fly before they wake.”
The dragon looked at her with something that might have been gratitude, then burst through the workshop doors in an explosion of brass and possibility. Mira watched it climb into the starless sky until it disappeared beyond the horizon, carrying her dreams to a place where they might bloom in someone else’s sleep.
She was found the next morning, sitting peacefully in her chair, eyes open but empty of everything except contentment. The townspeople searched for days, but the dragon was never seen again, though children in distant villages sometimes reported dreams of a magnificent brass creature that whispered stories of a woman who loved wonder more than her own happiness.
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