The chain. It wasn’t heavy. The Keeper knew it didn’t need to be. The creature was broken the second it accepted its fate. The King and Queen knew it too.

The King let him choose it, searching through every smithy for a hundred miles. The Keeper found it twenty-three miles outside the realm, four days by carriage, the one he needed to carry it back. The Keeper walked the length of every piece of chain until he found it, the one that would hold the dragon without punishing the creature. Light enough that some days even the dragon forgot it was there. That was the point. That was what he told himself on the way home with it coiled in the back of the carriage.

Next to where the dragon was chained ran a stream from the high mountain, the base of the Kingdom. Access to fresh water, a corner blanketed with straw that the Keeper maintained daily, replacing as necessary. The overhead trees kept it isolated, in the shade during the hottest parts of the day, and kept the dragon dry during the rainiest of days. The dragon rarely ate. Every few days, the Keeper left six roasted chickens and wild herbs, and never once saw the creature touch them. But the straw told a different story. Some mornings it was pushed flat and stretched wide, like something large had been lying in it, turning over, reaching.

The dragon never growled. It stopped breathing fire a few weeks after its capture. The Keeper wondered if it was a sign that it was dying. He never trusted it. The King told him that peace came over the Kingdom after its capture.

“Let it go free? And let it roam over the entire realm? What a ridiculous notion! We’d lose the peace. The control. It’s blessed our lands and made us richer than ever. We will never let go of this beast. That would be foolish!” The Keeper thought it would have been easier if the dragon had growled.

Instead, the creature watched. Quiet and enormous. Patient. Something in the way it looked at the Keeper. After a while, even that look faded, hopelessness replacing it.

He spoke to the dragon on more than one occasion. It was a smart, intelligent, talking creature. The Keeper told the dragon there was a plan. A right time. “The chain is not permanent. Only necessary, for now. Trust me, the variables will align, and you will be free. Someday.” The Keeper wasn’t a soothsayer. He wasn’t making a prediction, but trusted that the dragon would be free. “When that day comes, I trust you will remember all the kindnesses I’ve shown you.” The dragon listened the way mountains listen, no argument, no agreement. Just solemn silence.

Some mornings, the Keeper arrived early, watching the beast sleep. He noticed its breathing. The rhythm of it. Slow. Deep. It didn’t match its scaly exterior because it was like a soft summer breeze.

He knew where the creature came from, and he knew all about the mountain’s foothills. He was not foolish enough to think the dragon forgot. No one lived in the foothills, the crags, and the rocky terrain would be tough to grow anything, not to mention the fact that it was populated with dragons, like the creature in captivity before him.

The Keeper did his best to reassure himself that the arrangement was mutual. He told himself a fed dragon was a safe dragon. A safe dragon was a living dragon. And a living dragon? It was better than what happened to the dragons who ran loose into the Kingdom. The Keeper had his own reasons to keep it alive. His reasons were real, and he kept them stacked in his mind like cordwood, as he walked up to the dragon, reviewing them at night just before he slept.

What he never repeated, not aloud anyway, was the question that came some evenings when the light hit the hills, and the chain caught the same light and both things, dragon and chain, glowed at once.

He did not ask. He was the Keeper. Keepers did not ask that question.

He did not look at the foothills on his way back to the carriage.

He seldom did anymore.

---

What chains are you fighting?

Let me know in the comments.