Velynx, the last of the Great White Dragons, lay impaled by a shard of black obsidian—a weapon forged by a long-vanished order of warlocks. His once-blinding white hide was cracked and grey, and his breath, which could freeze rivers, was now a weak, rattling gasp. As Elara approached, a single, enormous opal eye opened.
For three hundred years, Elara kept the Watch. She became a ghost story to the mountain villages—a pale figure in white, seen only during the fiercest blizzards, pressing back the unnatural dark. She watched empires rise and fall, watched lovers grow old and die, watched her own name fade from every record. The frost hand crept ever forward; the ash hand sank ever lower. legend of the white dragon watch
“As long as you wear this watch, you are my Warden,” Velynx whispered. “You will feel the cold. You will feel my pain. You will walk the boundary and turn back the worst of the black frost. In return, I will not descend and eat your village. And you will not age a single day.” Velynx, the last of the Great White Dragons,
Instead of incinerating her, Velynx offered a bargain. The black shard was slowly spreading a curse of eternal winter down the mountainside. In a decade, it would reach the valleys, killing all life. To stop it, someone had to watch —to stand at the boundary where the curse met the dragon’s fading life-force, and keep the balance from tipping. For three hundred years, Elara kept the Watch
The watch had no numbers. Its face was a disc of captured moonlight, and it had three hands: one of frost, one of ash, and one of a single, white dragon scale. The frost hand ticked with the advance of the curse. The ash hand marked the fading life of Velynx. And the scale hand… never moved. That hand, the dragon said, marked the moment the last true heart would break the pact.
And on the darkest nights, when the black shard pulses with malice, the scale hand finally twitches. For the legend concludes that no one can watch forever. When the last Warden’s heart finally breaks—from loneliness, from love, or from hope—the scale hand will move. The dragon will rise one last time. And the true winter will begin.