The big dragons stomp the clearing's center, belching cracks of blue-white fire that split the valley mist into jagged shards. Sparks hiss against the damp earth. The biggest one shakes its great head, and the mist parts like a curtain tearing.
Emberly puffs her turn. A slow tumble of round golden sparkles rolls out, ticking down against her own tail scales like tiny warm bells. Tck-tck-tck. She watches them scatter across the dirt, each one glowing faint, faint, then gone.
The biggest dragon swings past without a glance. Its shadow swallows the whole clearing for one long second, then lifts. One by one, the others clatter away into the mist. Only Emberly's sparkles still fall, one by one, into the cold dirt.
Emberly pads to the forest edge where the ancient luminous trees lean low, their bark-pulsing light flickering thin. Every flower in the enchanted garden hangs limp and grey, petals curling inward like closed fists. She stops. The garden smells of nothing.
She nudges a drooping lily with her snout. It crumbles into her claw in a soft grey sigh. Emberly puffs a handful of sparkles over the row. The lilies shiver open — one petal each — then sag shut, the golden light dissolving before it can soak in.
Emberly squints. She puffs angry, trying to wring a jet of fire from her tiny throat. But softer, rounder sparkles tumble out instead. They land in a puddle, and the water glows gold for one flickering second. Then dark again.
She curls under a wilted sunflower. It tilts down, brushing dry petals against her scattered sparkles, then stretches up — tall, blazing, drinking the light like rain. The row ripples awake. She thought: the fierce fire would have scorched these. Her quiet glow is the only thing that fits.
Emberly moves through the garden row by row, puffing gently now. Each bloom that catches the gold makes the luminous trees flare a little brighter, a little louder. She puffs. The trees hum. The whole garden wakes up around her little footsteps.
The last row sits in a shadowy hollow where the tree-light dies. Her sparkles thin to nothing, the glow reaching only two flowers ahead of her tiny snout. She stops. Then she puffs one more time, steady, and walks forward into the black. The hollow swallows the light behind her.
The last flower blooms, and the garden detonates in rings of gold and violet. Up on the village path, the big dragons stop mid-stomp. The biggest one says, 'Who did that?' But Emberly is already asleep in the last row, a single golden sparkle still ticking on her snout, the flowers leaning close to hold the light around her.