In the Cinderpeak Mountains, where the rocks were always warm and the sky smelled of pine smoke, there lived a small purple dragon named Ember.

Ember could do almost everything a dragon was supposed to do. She could fly — wonkily, but genuinely. She could roar — softly, but it counted. And she could breathe fire: a small, stubborn, surprisingly cheerful flame that flickered from her nostrils whenever she was happy or brave or excited.

The one thing Ember absolutely, completely, deeply could not do was the dark.

Not the dusky-dark of early evening, nor the cosy-dark of her sleeping cave with its crackle of embers. She meant the real dark — the sudden, no-moon, everything-gone dark that happened when the mountain storms rolled in and swallowed the sky whole.

On those nights, Ember breathed fire constantly, lighting up every corner of her cave, humming loudly to herself, refusing to let a single shadow get comfortable.

The other dragons thought this was very funny. “A fire-breathing dragon,” they chuckled, “afraid of the dark!”

Ember pretended she couldn’t hear them. But she could.

One autumn evening, the biggest storm in ten years came rolling over the Cinderpeak Mountains.

The wind was enormous. The thunder shook the mountain. And the rain — the cold, heavy, relentless rain — poured straight into Ember’s cave and put out every last ember, every flame, every glowing coal she had carefully arranged.

The cave went completely dark.

Ember tried to breathe fire. Nothing. She was too cold, too wet, too frightened — the flame wouldn’t come. She pressed herself against the cave wall and squeezed her eyes shut, which didn’t help because dark looks the same either way.

Outside, the storm howled. Something skittered across the cave floor — probably just a pebble, probably definitely just a pebble — and Ember made a sound that was not a roar but was adjacent to a whimper.

“Hello?” said a very small voice from somewhere in the dark.

Ember opened one eye. On the floor of the cave, no bigger than her smallest claw, was a glowworm. It glowed a soft, steady, sea-green — the most unbothered light Ember had ever seen, burning away in the complete dark as if dark were simply a perfectly reasonable place to be.

“Hello,” Ember said, trying to sound like a dragon who was absolutely not pressed against a cave wall shaking.

“Hello,” said the glowworm pleasantly. Its name, it turned out, was Fig. “Are you alright? You seem a bit flat against the rock.”

“I’m fine,” said Ember. Then, because glowworms have a way of making you honest: “I’m a little bit not fine. The dark — I don’t like it. My flame went out.”

Fig considered this. “My flame never goes out,” it said. “But I’ve never had a very big one to begin with. Just enough to see by. Just enough to be found.”

Ember looked at the tiny green light. It lit up maybe half a metre of cave floor — hardly anything, really. And yet it had found her in the dark. She had seen it. It was more than enough to not be alone.

She took a slow breath. She thought about her flame — not the roaring torchfire she usually produced, but the very first flame, the one she’d breathed as a hatchling: small, warm, made entirely of trying.

She breathed.

A tiny flame appeared — no bigger than a coin of sunlight, trembling at the tip of her nose. But warm. Real. Hers.

The little flame grew. Not dramatically — not the cave-filling blaze Ember usually used to push the dark away, but a small, steady, patient warmth that lit the walls close around her and made the shadows merely shadows, not monsters.

Fig settled near Ember’s front paw. The green glow and the orange glow mixed on the cave floor into something rather lovely — a colour that had no name but felt like safety found in unexpected company.

Outside, the storm had begun to slow. The rain quieted. The thunder moved away across the mountains, grumbling as it went.

Ember watched the shadows. They didn’t bother her now. Something about having company in the dark — someone to say goodnight to, someone who glowed without fuss — made the dark feel entirely different. Not empty. Just quiet.

“Fig,” said Ember, already half asleep, the way you get after being brave, “will you stay until morning?”

“I was going to anyway,” said Fig.

Ember closed her eyes. Her small flame burned on. The cave was warm, and the dark was nothing to be afraid of, and Ember the dragon — who had always been afraid of the dark — slept better than she ever had in her life.