The dragon rose from the castle’s highest tower, wings glinting in the morning light. It soared over the pond, scattering sunlight like shards of glass. And then it was gone, leaving only two boys standing in the field, staring at the sky.
“Did you see that?” Luke whispered.
Marcus wasn’t sure. Maybe it was the heat mirage over the grass, or maybe - just maybe - the dragon had been real.
They called the field *the Borderlands*: a wild, uneven stretch between their backyards where imagination had rights of its own. Here, cardboard boxes became airships, tree branches became lances, and every summer the air trembled with the hum of their make-believe engines.
Luke was the dreamer - small, blond, and restless, his eyes forever tilted toward the horizon. Marcus, taller, darker, and steadier, was the builder who tried to give Luke’s visions shape. Luke imagined; Marcus engineered. Together, they ruled their secret kingdom between the worlds of wonder and waking.
One afternoon, while thunderclouds gathered on the rim of the sky, Luke told him a story about a girl who could walk among the stars.
“She listens to them,” Luke said, eyes bright, “like they’re singing to her - maps made of light.”
Marcus smiled, shaking his head. “You can’t chart songs, Luke. Stars drift. They fade.”
Luke looked up, the reflection of clouds moving through his eyes. “Only if you stop believing you can reach them. “
Then came the move. Luke’s family left without warning - boxes piled overnight, curtains gone from windows. Their last meeting was by the pond at dusk, dragonflies skimming the water like sparks. Luke pressed a folded paper into Marcus’s hand: a sketch of a tower reaching into constellations. In the corner, one line of writing:
“Follow the tower to the stars. I’ll meet you there.”
Years passed. The Borderlands were paved into a shopping mall, the pond drained into a retention basin. Marcus studied engineering, then astrophysics, then the mathematics of interstellar navigation. He stopped naming the clouds; he learned to measure them instead.
As a scientist, Marcus helped design prototype star vessels - fragile equations made metal. Yet every design collapsed on itself, each launch a failure of something unseen. The models were precise, but sterile, missing a spark he couldn’t define.
One sleepless night, surrounded by humming monitors, Marcus slumped over his desk. The glow of his screens blurred into darkness.
He was standing again in the Borderlands. Twilight stretched forever. The air shimmered, and dragons wheeled through rose-colored clouds. From the mist rose the girl from Luke’s story, curls like starlight, her bare feet leaving no marks in the grass.
“He found the stars,” she said softly. “He left you a path.”
Marcus woke - and froze. On the edge of his desk sat a small brown parcel, the paper faded and corners soft with age. The return label was nearly illegible, marked only with the initials *L.S.*
Inside, wrapped in yellowed parchment, lay their childhood map - dragons, towers, constellations - now scrawled over with unfamiliar symbols and mathematical equations. He blinked. The formulas were brilliant, elegant, impossible — yet they solved the instability in his flight model perfectly.
His hands trembled.
The postal record showed the package had surfaced during the renovation of an old mountaintop observatory, sealed in a crate marked “Do Not Discard.”
Postmark date: fifteen years ago.
Sender: Luke Sutherland.
Marcus searched the name online.
He found it - an obituary.
Luke Sutherland, artist and amateur astronomer, died fifteen years ago while photographing the night sky from the summit of Mount Solara.
The date matched the postmark.
Marcus couldn’t rest. He drove through the night toward the mountain. The road climbed in darkness until the treeline fell away and stars spilled across the sky. At the summit stood a weathered wooden observatory, half-collapsed, its dome open like a broken eyelid.
Inside, drawings littered the floor - dragons, constellations, and the tower from their childhood sketch. Moonlight traced the lines like silver ink.
Through the opening in the roof, the constellations gleamed - exactly as drawn on the map. Marcus held up the parchment, aligning its edges with the heavens. The equations fit the stars with impossible precision, as if the sky itself were a machine completing its design.
“You walked on clouds first,” Marcus whispered. “Didn’t you, Luke?”
Then - a sound.
A faint hum came from his pocket. His portable AI interface - long dormant - flickered to life. On its screen appeared a series of coordinates, forming the same trajectory as the equations on the map. Then, a final line of code scrolled across the display:
“Dream first. Build later.”
Marcus smiled through tears. “I missed you, Luke.”
He drove back before dawn, stars fading one by one in the mirror. In the weeks that followed, he rewrote his algorithms, integrating Luke’s impossible equations. Something in the code - some rhythm, some heartbeat - felt alive.
Months later, under the same aurora that once bridged the sky above Mount Solara, the prototype launched. It rose silently, gleaming like a dragon unfurling its wings.
For a moment, before the transmission cut out, the onboard sensors captured an image - two figures standing on a bridge of mist and light, waving.
Marcus watched the feed flicker away, heart steady, eyes bright.
He whispered, “I’m coming, Luke”
And for the first time in decades, he believed again.
