Sophia pressed her palms against her ears and still the noise found her. It came from everywhere at once: traffic two ridges over, a generator humming behind someone's shed, planes she could not see, a radio left on inside a parked truck. Under all of it ran the song she had been chasing since she was seven years old, the song she believed would wake every sleeping dragon left in the world. She had felt it first during a storm that killed the power, when the house went quiet enough for her to hear it tuning through her like a station finally locking in. Now she could barely catch three notes before the world swallowed them again. She climbed the slope behind her cabin to the place she always went when the song thinned out. A cluster of violet crystals pushed up through moss and bramble there, half-buried in a cracked gray stone. She knelt beside it and laid her ear close to the facets, the way another person might listen to a shell. The crystals held a kind of stillness inside them. For a few seconds she heard the opening phrase clearly. Then a chainsaw started somewhere below the ridge, and the phrase tore in half. She bit the inside of her cheek and did not cry. She had promised herself she would never measure how close she was, because measuring it was how you lost it. But she could feel it losing her anyway. She walked further up, past the tree line, to the old stone nest that nobody in the valley talked about. It sat in a clearing: a ring of curved gray slabs taller than she was, fanged with horn-shaped stones, woven through with bramble and pale blue crystal at its base. A dragon slept inside it. She had known since she was a child. She had never climbed in. Today she did. She lowered herself onto the dark moss at the center, put her back against the warm scaled curve of the sleeping thing, and the noise of the world dropped away. The stone walls cut it. For the first time in years she heard the song without interference. The opening held. The ending held. The middle was still missing, but she could hear the shape of the hole it needed to fill. She let herself listen until her hands stopped shaking, and then she wrote down every fragment she caught, fast, before the quiet could end. When she climbed back out, she had four pages. She also had a problem she had not had that morning. The dragon under her had shifted in its sleep when she stood up. Not woken. Shifted. Something in the song, even unfinished, had reached it. She had wanted shelter from the noise and found a listener instead, and now she knew the next thing she wrote would be heard whether she was ready or not.