Sweet Romance16 min read
The Night the Dragon Opened Its Eyes
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I woke because someone was crying.
It was a low sound, kept close to the throat like a bird trying to hide a broken wing. I lay in the dark and listened. The quilt at my side carried warmth, but my bed was empty. Maxine Frank was not beside me.
I did not move at first. The room was thick with fog that seemed to have slipped in through the shutters. No moon. No wind. Only the soft, cut-off sobs that tried to be silent and failed.
I rose on bare feet and found her curled at the foot of the bed. She had folded her knees to her chest and buried her face in her arms. From the dark I could see the small rise and fall of her shoulders and the glint of her black hair under the lamplight. She looked smaller than she ought to be — as though she had folded herself to fit inside a regret.
I stepped closer. "Maxine?" I said, meaning to coax her, to shelter her, to say, "Don't cry, baby."
The words were raw and wrong when they came out. "Why are you crying?" I asked instead. My voice sounded distant to my own ear, as if someone else had found it in my mouth.
She did not answer at once. She lifted her head. Those eyes were empty, like a well with the water gone, gone so long it had turned to shadow. She looked at me and then let two lines of red travel down her face.
"Can you wipe that away, Wesley?" she asked softly.
Her mouth shaped my name wrong. The softness had a blade.
I held out my hand to brush at the wet tracks. My fingers stopped in the air when I saw them under the light — my hands. Blood. Fresh and dark on the knuckles, old and brown on the palm. It was as if the world had decided to cast the guilt on skin that did not belong to anyone else.
"Maxine…" I whispered.
She was not Maxine then. She called me by another voice, other words that unknotted my heart. "You hurt me so badly, Wesley," she said. "You hurt me until I stopped knowing my own name."
It was Leon Schumacher's voice laughing behind everything: a thin, cold echo that had the taste of iron. I turned, finding him leaning in the doorway the way someone settles into a chair before a show.
"You are emperor now," he said. "How does it feel?"
"Leon," I breathed. "Where is Maxine? Where is she?"
He smiled, a slow thing that didn't touch his eyes. "You really don't know?" he asked. "You put on the robe. You sat on the throne. You chose the tower. Do you think your choices leave no trace?"
The world tilted. I stared at the gold dragons carved into the bedframe — their mouths frozen in mid-roar, their eyes inlaid with little chips of jade. I woke more fully when I realized the dragons watched me back. Their eyes were empty, then red.
"Give her back," I cried. "Give Maxine back to me."
Leon shrugged like a man who had been asked for a favor inconvenient enough to be funny. "Give her back? I took nothing. You gave her away."
The floor became soft as paper, then solid. The candles around the room burned like eyes. When Maxine stepped forward it was like watching someone emerge from glass. She stood in front of me in a phoenix-stitched robe, pale and too delicate, and then she began to age under my gaze. Her skin wrinkled by the breath, as if years had been folded into the room by a cruel hand.
"Why?" I asked. "Why would I do this to you? Tell me how to undo it."
She touched my chest where a phantom pain hovered and said, "You named me your life, Wesley, and then you made choices like a coin toss. You made me a caution."
"There is a dream," I told her. "There is this dream where you... where you draw a knife—"
"Yes," she said. "I cut you open."
The scene broke into shards: my chest torn, the dragon embroidery soaked red, Maxine's hands thin as branches, the blade between us as certain as a promise. I had once joked with her in youth: "If I must die, let me die at your hand." I had said it like a dare, like someone flinging light into a cave and daring the dark to reply. But dreams are literal. The blade found me, and the thing I feared most — losing her — had been shaped into a threat.
I woke from the nightmare with my body sweating and my heart wild. Maxine was awake beside me at last, wrapped into my arms. Her sobs came again in breathless waves, but she allowed me to hold her. Her hand found my waist. She was warm. She smelled of sleep.
"Bad dream?" she asked, hiccupping.
"Bad dream," I said. "I dreamed I was dead."
She grunted and kissed my forehead. "You poor dog emperor," she said, the words barely a whisper.
We settled back. I watched her cry until the sobs slowed to shivers. She tugged at my sleeve and asked, "Do I make you suffer, Wesley? Did I ruin you?"
"No," I answered. "If anything, you are the only thing that saved me from myself."
She looked up at me with eyes reddened and said, "But I feel like I have hurt you. I feel like I took your life."
"You are talking nonsense." I tried to sound angry and failed. "If you were not here, then maybe I would be wrapped in robes I never wanted. I would be what I once feared—thoughtless, cruel for the sake of power. You made me choose a different way."
She was quiet. The room held our breaths like a fragile glass. In the dark, her voice came again, fragile and sharp. "You said once you wanted to die by my hand."
"I did," I said, forgetting the gravity of the confession.
She huffed. "Why would you say such a thing?"
"Because I thought it would show how serious I was," I answered. "Because I thought death at your hand would mean we had something real enough to cut for."
She reached to the back of my neck and pulled me close. "Promise me," she said, "you won't make choices like that."
"Maxine," I murmured. "I don't promise like a child flings a stone. I tell you this: I will live because of you, not because of the crown."
We lay like that until the light grew thin and the room seemed less like a cage and more like a place where two tired people could be honest.
But daylight could not keep the dream from following me. Leon's voice clung to corners. The accusations in the dream — "You have ruined me" — echoed louder when I met the court. Faces wore the same hollow, accusing look.
"Your Majesty," said Julio Dominguez, bowing with an expression that tried to be practical. "There are petitions at the gate. The village at Riverbend complains of taxes."
"Handle them," I told him. "Find a solution."
He nodded, and his eyes were sharp. "Yes, Majesty."
Kennedy Coleman — the dowager's steward — touched my sleeve with a softness that had learned the art of persuasion. "We must be careful," she advised. "There are men who watch for your slip."
"Are there men who watch me when I do no wrong?" I asked, the old pride rising.
She said nothing for a moment. "There are always watchers. There are those who can turn sorrow into rumor, Wesley."
"Then let them watch." I tried to make my voice steady. "I will not be a ghost in my own house."
That night, however, the court felt like a stage set designed for my humiliation. Leon smiled at every slip I made. His laughter was a dry leaf. Once, as I passed, he whispered, "You are very sweet with her, aren't you? So tender to your pawn."
"Pawn?" I snapped. "You forget who helped you find your way."
"How generous of you to think so," he murmured. "But do you not see hearts can be used as maps? You loved, and that love made you weak."
"My love makes me whole," I answered too loudly.
He tilted his head and said, "You will learn. For now, enjoy the warmth. Warm days end."
Rumors start like little fires. You may stomp at one, and feel pleased at your hand, but another spark is already carried on gossip's breath. Rumors grew. Men who had once smiled at me now whispered. Women who had once laughed at our table averted their eyes.
"Is there truth to what they say?" Maxine asked once, chin trembling.
"What say they?" I asked.
She took my hand and looked into me. "They say you have blood on your hands, Wesley. They say you have made choices that cost lives."
I realized with a coldness that made my knees go slack that the dream had not been only a dream. It was a warning. It lined up with the court's murmurs. My past decisions — cold, sharp, necessary in my mind — had consequences that clung like cobwebs.
It was Leon who made the accusations public. He did it not with a single dagger but with a long, patient parade of small things. A letter placed in a wrong hand. A witness rearranged. A child's testimony coaxed by honey and pressure. He was a craftsman of shame.
"Majesty," he said in court as many watched, "will you answer for the Riverbend families whose houses burned? For the household whose son was pressed into service? For all the lives altered under your watch?"
I stood, and the hall stilled. Leon's lips were thin.
"I made difficult choices," I said. "Those choices were meant to keep the peace."
"Your peace," Leon said softly, and the hall leaned forward to hear, "was built on other people's ruin. You called it law, you called it order, but we have names we still whisper in alleys. We have faces that beg to be recognized."
"It is true that law has teeth," Julio said. "But teeth must be kept clean."
Leon laughed then, loud and full. "You are a philosopher now, Julio? How charming."
The accusation lodged like a stone in my throat. I had never considered myself above blame. I had thought I had traded one cage for another, but it was clearest then: choices do not float away by themselves.
Maxine's hand found mine under the bench. Her grip was small and fierce. "Stand," she whispered.
I did.
Before I could speak, Leon turned the court into a stage. "We will speak names tonight," he said, "so that we may unbind the past. Let those who were wronged speak."
The room groaned. I felt as if the dragons' carved eyes watched me with an intent that had nothing to do with the wood.
One by one they came. They were simple, ordinary people with ordinary pain. A widow who had lost her child in forced conscription. A trader who said his stock had been seized in the name of the crown. A woman with two empty arms speaking of promise and stillborn children. They all told stories that, when strung together, made a net that tightened.
"Why?" I asked each time. "Who gave the orders? Who directed the writs?"
"Your throne," someone said. "Your name is on the letterhead."
"You will blame the scribe," Leon suggested. "Blame the clerk. Blame the wind. But the emperor is not a weather vane."
I opened my mouth to reply and found no smooth phrase. I had defended decisions in private councils. I had chosen mercy in one case and cruelty in another, trying to balance scales with hands that trembled. Being called to account with names and faces was a different calculus.
"Enough," I said at last. "If I must stand accused, then let me hear the source. Bring forward who engineered this."
Leon stepped forward with a face entirely polite. "I engineered the light," he said. "You engineered the dark. Two partners."
He smiled in a way that I had seen before — the smile of a man who had pulled a thread at a seam and watched the whole garment come apart.
"Leon," I said quietly. "If you have evidence, show it. If you are simply loud, then you will be remembered as loud."
He bowed slightly. "I have witnesses." He flicked his wrist, and a man stepped forward carrying a ledger. "Records."
I listened. The ledger told of edicts signed, of lists compiled, of deliveries diverted. The ledger was a small, mundane thing, and yet it spoke of consequence. I felt the room shift, like a great animal moving in sleep.
I realized then that I had to do something that would either free me or break me. I could not simply deny. I could not simply hide. There was a method left to me: truth, however costly.
"Open the archive," I said. "Let the registry be read aloud. Let every signature, every order be laid bare."
Leon smiled and for a second I thought he was beaten. "Very well," he said. "But I will ask that those responsible for misdeeds be brought forth and punished."
That last sentence was a snare. The court wanted blood. The people wanted heads. Wherever there is sorrow, there will be thirst — for answers, for apology, or for retribution.
When the registry was opened, names spilled like coins across the floor. Some bore my seal. Some bore other marks. Some bore names now unfamiliar.
"Why did you let this happen?" Maxine asked softly.
"I thought I was saving more than I cost," I said.
"And were you right?" she asked.
The registry did not answer compassion. It offered proof. In years past, I had allowed certain officials great latitude because their methods were effective at holding order. Leon used that latitude as a loom.
When the hour of judgment came, Leon brought forward a man I had once trusted: Foster Avery, a steward who had handled logistics. Foster stood before the court, and his face showed something I had seen before in younger men — a mix of fear and a clinging to who he thought he could be.
"Foster," I said. "Tell the truth. Was it you who arranged the diversions?"
He stared at the ledger in Leon's hands. "I was asked," he said. "I did what I was told."
"Who told you?" I pressed.
He swallowed. "I was told by Leon."
I felt the room hold its breath.
"Is that true?" Leon asked, voice honeyed.
Foster nodded.
It was a lie. I saw it. I had used Foster's fear, his need for bread and coin, to keep certain operations running. I had signed certain orders that I thought were necessary. The guilt in me flared. To let Foster stand was to let a lesser man take the fall.
The court turned from one man to another. Men who had been shadows stepped forward to tell how Leon had bribed them, cajoled them, placed them in the narrow corridors between duty and desire. The ledger did not simply show my mistakes; it started to show Leon's hand.
There it was: the pattern. Leon had been siphoning blame and offering salvation in the same breath. He would point at a wound and then hold out a salve he sold. He had used my appetite for order as a wheel, turning misery into profit.
"Why?" I asked him later, in a corridor with tassels. "Why make others suffer for your game?"
He shrugged. "Because the world is a ledger, Wesley. Some write credits, some write debts. I prefer to index it myself."
"You will pay," I said. The court was hungry for spectacle. They wanted someone to take a fall.
Leon only smiled. "You always were dramatic. Make them watch then."
The punishment had to be public. Leon was a man who had wielded rumor and ledger to his purpose. His crime was not just profit; it was betrayal. He had betrayed trust and used faces for his art.
So I planned the punishment in a way befitting the sin: an unsparing, public unmasking that left no room for the old maneuvers. It had to be a scene where the court could see him stripped of his tools and where the people could feel that retribution was not merely spectacle but a reordering.
The Sun Court gathered at midday. The hall was full. Candles were extinguished to make the sun the sole witness. Dresses rustled. Men crossed their arms. Eyes were knives.
"Leon Schumacher," I said aloud, and my voice filled the hall. "You have been accused of taking advantage of my name and the people's grief. You have been accused of fabricating trials, of diverting goods for your gain, and of placing blame on others to keep the mechanism of power turning in your favor. How do you plead?"
He lifted his chin, with the old, precise charm. "I plead not guilty," he said. "I plead to have clear evidence."
"Then listen," I said. "Foster Avery will tell his whole truth. He will tell how you offered him money to falsify registers. He will tell how you pressured him when he refused. Then Julio Dominguez will recount how you blackmailed him with letters you forged. Then others will speak."
The testimonies began, a stream that would not be dammed. Each voice supplied a shard of the whole. Leon tried to bluster and to cut in, but the hall bled his lies away with patient fact.
When the tide turned, I had to choose how to punish. A private execution would be tidy; public banishment would be forgetful. I wanted a punishment that would be a lesson both for him and for any who would emulate his art: a trial of exposure.
"Leon," I said, "step forward."
He did. He stood at the dais beneath the carved dragon. The people leaned in.
"You took bread from mouths," I said. "You made some families hungry and then smiled as if you carved fine wood for a craftsman. You convinced them that the crown required sacrifice and then you profited from selling the knives. You made men like Foster stand in the dark and die by a hundred small cuts."
Leon smiled. "You speak as if you are both judge and victim," he said.
"I am both," I answered. "And that is the point. I am the one who allowed this to happen. But you are the one who used me to make profit. For your crimes, you shall be punished where all can see. You shall be stripped of your titles. You shall stand publicly and admit each lie, each trade, each bribe you brokered. You shall return the ill-gotten coin to the families. You shall name those you colluded with. And you shall be sent to the work dorms — to serve those you hurt for a full year under the supervision of those you wronged."
A murmur rippled.
Leon laughed short and bitter. "A year of work, Wesley? Do you think you punish a man who knows the market by giving him a shovel?"
"It is not the shovel," I said. "It is the exposure. You will be watched. The ledger will be opened. Every household you harmed will hear from you. You will not be jailed alone in silence; you will be placed where the faces you wronged can see the man who said their sorrow was collateral."
He spat. "You will make me a spectacle."
"Yes," I said. "A spectacle."
That day in the court the punishment played out like a play that no one wanted to end. Leon was brought forward and compelled to recount each lie. He had to say the names of men he had bribed, confess how he had written letters in others' hands, show receipts, and place the coins back into open hands. The people shouted, they cried, some slapped his cheeks. I watched his expression crumble in stages: amused, annoyed, then vexed, then shocked at each new ledger entry, then pale as the realization that his maneuvers had been traced to the ledger.
He tried to deny. "These notes could be forged," he said at first.
A woman who had lost a child stepped forward and raised her voice. "You promised me food for the soldiers in exchange," she said. "You promised Foster would see payment. He did not."
"Show me proof," Leon snapped. "I demand—"
"Here," Foster said, handing the damnable ledger to the speaker. "This is your handwriting on those bills."
The court gasped. Leon's smirk thinned into something like panic. He scanned the room as if searching for an escape rope.
People who had stood silent now came forward. An old merchant spat on his boots. "You burned my barns and sold the timber yourself," he cried.
"It's not true!" Leon said, his voice cracking. "I never—"
He tried to deflect, to point at others. He named a clerk, then a scribe. He called for the Empress Dowager's steward, Kennedy Coleman, to vouch for him.
Kennedy stepped forward, her face set like a blade. "I knew of discrepancies," she said. "I asked for audits. He obstructed them."
"I did not," Leon babbled. "I only—"
The crowd's anger made him smaller with each word. He started to plead to faces he had once paid to look away.
"Do you remember when you whispered in my ear about moving the Riverbend grain?" one of the men asked, voice low. "Do you remember the coin with the notch you gave me to keep loyalty?"
Leon floundered. He tried to laugh, and the sound was thin. "You owe me excuse," he said.
At last his composure shattered. He fell to knees, hands clasped in a gesture that had once been so effective: supplication. People captured the moment in the way that the world learned cruelty — with eyes and voice and memory.
"I did it to survive," he whimpered. "I did what I had to."
"Then live with what you have to now," the widow said. "Serve those you made poor."
For a long time he pleaded. He begged, called names, recited the old charm of excuses. The crowd watched as one who had orchestrated so much attempted to bargain for mercy. Children pointed. Women spat. Men recorded it with their mouths.
When he was finally led away to the workhouses, his head hung. He had been a man of many masks; all were stripped. The crowd had witnessed not only his fall but the truth that deception is a fragile house. Seeing him go did not erase my own guilt, but it turned a corner: the court had seen the ledger and chosen to act. It would not be perfect, but it would be remembered.
Afterward, the court felt drained, like a body that had cried until there were no tears left. Maxine took my hand and squeezed. "You did the right thing," she said.
"Did I?" I asked.
"You faced it," she said. "You didn't hide behind parchment or men. You opened the ledger. That is rare."
We walked out into the sun. The carved dragons at the gate seemed quieter. There was still much to mend. Families waited for coin and apology. Foster would labor to patch what he had broken. Leon would learn the taste of honest toil, or at least what the public thought of it.
That night, I slept without dream at first. I slept wrapped around Maxine, and when I woke it was to the feeling of her forehead on my chest and the quiet steady rhythm of breath. The dream had taught me nothing I had not known in the marrow: choices matter, names matter, the small cruelties add.
In the week that followed, petitions were answered, coins returned, and the ledger's entries traced back to where the hands had written them. People came to the court and collected apologies — awkward words, offered without the softening of wealth, but offered nonetheless.
Maxine and I spent evenings in the little courtyard, where the moon finally came back to visit. She would knit small things for the children in the work dorms. She would stitch letters into pockets, little tokens of warmth to return to those from whom Leon had stolen comfort.
Sometimes, late, when she thought I slept, she would whisper, "You are not the man in the dream, Wesley."
I would hold her and feel a line in my chest trying to heal. "I am," I would say. "And also not."
"Promise me one thing," she said on a night when the wind smelled like rain. "If a dream ever tries to tell you who you are, remember the ledger. Remember the names."
"I promise," I said. It was a promise made to bind me to a memory.
The carved dragon over our bed — the one whose eyes had first seemed empty — watched us quietly. Once, in the dream, it had turned red. Now it sat like wood and paint but with a weight we both felt. It felt like a witness.
"Do you still want to be emperor?" Maxine asked me one dawn, as we gathered the tea leaves.
"I don't know what I want," I said honestly. "I want to be a man you can sleep beside without nightmares."
She smiled, small and real. "Then be that man."
I looked at the dragon, at the gold lacquer and the tiny chips of green in its eye, and told it, "If the dragon ever opens its eyes again, it will find me awake."
And when the light cut along the corridor and I looked at Maxine's face, I thought of the ledger and the court and how truth had been a hard kind of mercy. The dragons' eyes didn't move. But the world had changed enough that the carved mouth didn't seem to breathe dust anymore.
We had been soaked by rain and wind; we had been beaten by choices. The polished floor still held the marks of a long night. But when she laughed, even once, the sound washed clean the worst of the dream's stain.
"Don't go thinking you won't have to work," she murmured.
"I won't," I said.
She kissed me, quick and fierce, like a small rebellion.
"Good," she said. "I like your face when you are stubborn."
I closed my eyes and, for once, did not see a blade. I saw the ledger's pages being burned, not in fury but to make light. I saw the people who had suffered getting the weight of the world eased from their shoulders, small coin by small coin, name by name. I saw Leon walking, maybe leaning on his shame, learning a new and bitter craft.
"Sleep," she whispered.
I did. And when I woke again, the dragons were still carved, the eyes still set. But the bed felt like a place made for two, not for a throne. The world outside remained as messy as ever. Men still counted coins and traded favors. Rumors still found ears eager for scandal.
But there was one small thing: when I touched Maxine's hand, it felt less like proof and more like belonging.
The night the dragon opened its eyes had been a dream, yet it had forced a truth. We faced that truth together. The ledger lay open in the archive now, and the names it bore were no longer ghosts but a record of debt and restitution.
"Do you think the dream is gone?" Maxine asked one dusk.
"I think it has changed," I said.
"And the dragon?"
"It watched," I replied. "And now it watches me as a man who will not hide."
She laughed softly, and the sound chased the last of the night's cold from my bones.
I took her hand and, for the first time in a long time, I believed it when she said, "You are my home."
I do not know whether an emperor's robe will tempt me again. I only know the ledger is heavier than a robe, and truth heavier than both. The carved dragon sleeps with its eyes open, and when the night comes again I will remember the sound of a woman crying in the dark and the way a ledger can peel away lies.
If I ever dream again that the blade finds me, I will wake and read the registry instead.
The End
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