Story: "Two Dragons Walk into a Writing Retreat"

If you’ve never seen a dragon try to hold a quill, you’ve missed one of the quiet tragedies of the post-clause era.

Thundros Cloudbelch—a name that sounded like a weather complaint and lived up to it—was hunched over a wrought-stone desk at the Smokevault Retreat Hall, scowling at a blank sheet of flame-inscribed parchment as if it had personally insulted his lineage.

“‘Memoir,’” he muttered, jaw tight. “‘Mandatory for archival integrity and generational transmission.’ Sounds like execution by ink.”

The desk creaked under him. He shifted uncomfortably, trying not to crush the spindly mortal-sized chair beneath his considerable weight. His wings twitched—he kept forgetting they weren’t welcome indoors anymore.

Smokevault protocol. Post-clause era. Everyone was very into rules now.

Glintleap Flutterbeam—a copper-scaled dragon with the perkiness of a motivational poster and the teeth of an overpriced tutor—bounced into the room. She chirped:

“Good morning, flame-crafters! Today’s prompt is ‘Describe your defining moment using only scents and regrets!’”

Thundros made a noise that sounded like thunder trapped in a jar.

From across the workshop ring came a slow, familiar laugh.

“Only scents and regrets? That’s my entire dating history.”

Thundros froze.

Vexlith the Mumble. Archivist. Pyromancer. Flame-hacker. Chronic disruptor. Former co-conspirator.

She looked the same. Mismatched horns, unreadable eyes, half a grin that made you wonder if she’d just pocketed your wallet or rewritten your will.

“You,” he said, flatly.

“Me,” she said brightly. “We’re critique partners now. Apparently fate has a sense of humor and I’m its punchline.”

* * *

Thundros had once held the western flank of the Skyfire Rebellion with nothing but his left wing in a sling and an oath he barely remembered swearing.

This? This was worse.

He sat in a semi-circle of sullen dragons—some old, some ancient, all made to feel like awkward schoolhatchlings—while Glintleap Flutterbeam pranced in front of a scrollboard decorated with scented oils and a flame-font poem about emotional temperature.

“Now,” Glintleap chirped, “write a scene from your past using at least three sensory triggers and one suppressed emotion. Be bold! Be burningly honest!”

Vexlith leaned over. “Does disgust count as suppressed?”

“I’d say so,” Thundros grunted, already regretting not faking a molt to get out of this session.

He dipped his claw into the flame-ink and scratched three words on the parchment:

Thundros scribbled:
The Room Sealed.

And the ink pulled—like something inside him had been waiting to open.

The room.

Stone walls, lined with gold-inlaid flame channels. Seven dragons seated in a circle of authority, among them Brightscale and the Flamebroker. The air smelled of scorched metal and damp parchment. Memory threads spun in a lazy spiral over the center flame-pool, whispering secrets they weren’t supposed to.

And in the center: him.

Younger. Angrier. Still in full armor from the siege two days before.

And beside him—also younger, somehow more dangerous despite being seated on a coil of bureaucratic boredom—Vexlith.

“Speak the clause,” said the Flamebroker, voice low and heavy with exhaustion.

Thundros and Vexlith spoke the clause in unison.

“In matters where memory threatens peace, the Vault may be permitted to seal those memories, and all parties shall forfeit knowledge of the act.”

Brightscale spoke.

“The fire must forget… so the world can move forward.”

Thundros’s claw froze.

The parchment had drawn the memory out. Not imagined. Not dramatized.

Recalled.

He looked over at Vex.

She was staring at her own parchment.

Reading something she hadn’t written.

Her face shifted from amused to confused to cold.

She turned to him.

“You remember that room?”

He hesitated.

“I remember… we testified. About the clause.”

She shook her head.

“No. We wrote it.”

“What?”

“We drafted the first language. In that room. Together.”

He blinked.

“No, that can’t—”

“I didn’t remember it either,” she said, voice low now. “Not until just now.”

They stared at their pages.

Both flame-etched.

Both radiating the same scent.

Black quartz and stormwind.

The old Vault ink used only for oath-level authorship.

Across the circle, Glintleap was still chirping about “evoking sensation through vulnerability.”

Vex leaned in.

“Either we forged a clause that changed the world and forgot… or someone made us forget.”

Thundros looked down at his writing.

It glowed faintly.

SEALING MEMORY PROTOCOL VERIFIED.

“Son of a salamander,” he whispered.

* * *

They met in the “Quiet Ember Lounge,” which, despite the name, was neither quiet nor especially embrous. It mostly contained lumpy cushions, lukewarm tea, and passive-aggressive scrolls about proper flame etiquette.

Thundros sat hunched over his latest draft, a fresh quill tucked awkwardly behind one horn like he’d forgotten how writing implements worked since the Concord. Vexlith sprawled on a cushion across from him, sipping ash-root wine from a cracked chalice and watching him with the bored look of a cat anticipating blood.

“Read yours,” she said.

“No.”

“You want me to go first?”

“I’d rather eat a frozen goblin.”

“Fine,” she said, and flipped open her notebook.

Chapter Four: How We Didn’t Write the Clause

“I remember the chairs. Uncomfortable. Ritual-grade. The kind that make your tail question your career choices. Seven dragons, one flame-dais, too many opinions. Thundros was there. Storm-scorched. Still bleeding from the wing. He looked like a statue that had recently insulted a volcano.

He argued against the clause. Loudly. Persuasively. And when they ignored him, he—”

Here the ink smeared.

“—and then it was sealed. But I don’t remember writing it. Not the words. Not the glyphs. Just the scent. Burnt iron and old rain.”

Thundros stared.

“That’s not what happened.”

She arched an eye ridge. “You remember it differently?”

“I remember writing a clause that would prevent memory erasure. Not enable it.”

He flipped open his scroll.

Entry 7: The Storm Clause

“We were supposed to close the loophole. Stop the Vaults from rewriting history to protect the elite. Mireth sent me. Vexlith was already there. We argued. Drafted. Tried to restrict the clause’s use. Limited access. But someone altered the final flame-binding.

It passed.

And then we forgot.”

She read it twice.

Then she asked the question neither wanted to answer:

“If we didn’t seal that clause the way it ended up…”

“Who did?”

They sat in silence, interrupted only by the distant sound of Glintleap conducting a performance poetry session on “the color of trauma.”

Then Vex said quietly, “You ever wonder why they sent us here?”

“I figured they wanted our memoirs before we croaked.”

She looked at him.

“I think they want to control the version that gets recorded.”

That was when the scroll in Thundros’s bag shivered.

He pulled it out.

A new flame-thread had been attached.

No sender. No source.

It simply said:

“You both forgot the part where you said yes.”

Vex stared.

“I think we’re being edited.”

* * *

There were only two ways to retrieve a sealed flame-thread:

1. Request formal access through three layers of bureaucratic security and flame-law.

2. Let Vexlith the Mumble pick the lock like a drunk locksmith in a fireworks shop.

Guess which option they picked.

They broke into the restricted ember-vault beneath the retreat library after curfew, bypassing an arcane lock with a flame-disruptor disguised as a cinnamon bun. (Don’t ask.)

“This is deeply illegal,” Thundros grumbled as the vault doors groaned open.

“Don’t pretend that’s not why you’re here,” Vex shot back. “You used to stage coups with fewer permits.”

They stepped inside.

It wasn’t grand. Just shelves and memory-vials—dozens of them. Each one glowing with the soft shimmer of unspoken truth.

Vex found theirs by scent.

“Burnt thunder and binding wax,” she murmured. “Yours smells like wet treason.”

She plucked the vial marked SEALING PROTOCOL—CONCORD-CLASS, its flame flickering erratically.

“No glyph of authorship,” Thundros said. “That’s not regulation.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Someone wanted it to vanish beneath the archive noise.”

She cracked the seal.

The room dimmed.

Then the flame spoke.

“This is the final revision. Clause 9, Concord Addendum. Memory of certain decisions may be sealed for the preservation of inter-Vault stability. Activation by majority vote.”

“Signatories: Vexlith. Thundros. Damaeth.”

“Consent given under sealed duress. Flame compliance confirmed.”

Thundros stepped back. His heart thundered.

“I signed it,” he said, more to the floor than to Vex.

“So did I,” she whispered.

They stood in silence as the final line ignited:

“Memory suppression authorized. Remorse deemed counterproductive.”

Thundros ran a claw down his face.

“We knew. We didn’t just witness it. We enabled it. And then…”

“We made ourselves forget,” Vex finished.

He turned slowly, facing her.

“You remember what the Clause was supposed to do?”

She nodded, lips tight.

“Yeah. Stop history from being rewritten to serve the powerful. Vaults were trimming memories—scrubbing things that made highborn dragons look… mortal.”

Thundros snorted. “We wanted a failsafe. Something narrow. Rare. Memory suppression by unanimous vote. Only in catastrophic cases.”

“Except the wording got bent,” she said.

“Bent?” He laughed bitterly. “It got melted, reshaped, and filed down into a scalpel. They used it to erase war crimes. Political losses. Rebels. Lovers.”

She looked away. “One scared council vote, and you disappear. Not killed—unremembered.”

“And we built the door they walked through.”

Not funny now.

Not clever.

Just true.

He sank down beside the archive wall.

Vex sat next to him, their shoulders just brushing.

“No one forced us,” he said.

“No,” she replied. “But they didn’t stop us either.”

A long silence.

Then she added, softly: “You still going to finish your memoir?”

He looked at her.

Then nodded.

“But I’m going to write it different this time.”

* * *

The memoir chamber was simple.

Stone, ash, and the flame-pit at the center. No banners. No audience. Just the fire, waiting to read.

Two parchment scrolls lay side by side. One scrawled in thunderous block-script. The other covered in wild loops and sarcastic margin notes.

Vexlith glanced sideways at Thundros.

“Ready to tell the fire who we were?”

He grunted. “Ready to tell it who we actually were.”

They stepped forward together and fed their scrolls into the flame.

The fire didn’t roar.

It blinked.

Once.

Twice.

And then it glowed—gold-white.

The rarest flame-response.

Not judgment. Not rejection.

Reckoning.

A recordkeeper nearby gasped. “It’s… accepting contradictory truth.”

Vex smirked. “Guess it learned that from us.”

The room brightened as their words were absorbed—not as ash, but as light.

The past, re-written honestly. Not to protect their names.

But to own their choices.

They stepped back, shoulder to shoulder.

“You still think it was all a mistake?” Vex asked.

Thundros looked at the flame.

“No,” he said. “Just an expensive education.”

She chuckled.

He grinned.

And together, they walked out of the chamber.

Not as heroes.

Not as villains.

Just two dragons with a finished story.

Finally told right.

* * *

The next morning, the sky hadn’t changed.

Still overcast. Still smelled like wet parchment and smoldering rules.

Vexlith sat on the edge of a stone overlook, legs dangling into nothing, wings half-furled like a forgotten promise. Thundros joined her without asking, carrying two mugs of scorched-root tea—one black, one somehow insulted by honey.

She took the wrong one and drank like she meant it.

“So,” she said. “The flame accepted our memoirs. Gold-white flare. Vault archivist practically wet his tail.”

“Yeah,” Thundros said. “Wasn't expecting that.”

“Neither was I,” she said. “Doesn’t mean anything, though.”

“Doesn’t it?” he asked.

She looked at him sideways. “You think our little truth bomb undid anything?”

“No.”

Pause.

“But I think it anchored something.”

She arched a brow.

“Until yesterday,” he said, “the Clause was just… flame-gossip. A weapon in legal robes. Nobody remembered how it started. Nobody wanted to.”

“And now?”

“Now the fire does.”

She mulled that.

“So you’re saying we didn’t fix anything, but we stopped it from getting worse.”

“That’s the best kind of win,” he said. “The kind that just… holds the line.”

She smiled. “That’s the most Thundros thing I’ve ever heard.”

He sipped his tea.

She looked back out at the clouded sky.

“So,” she said. “What do you think happens next?”

He shrugged. “Someone reads what we wrote. Maybe it saves a younger fool from repeating it.”

“And if no one reads it?”

He grinned.

“Then at least we got the last word.”

— THE END —

The story was inspired by this Reedsy.com writing prompt:

Set your story in a writing class, workshop, or retreat.

https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts