Start here · dark fantasy romance
The Keeper of Parnitha
Eleven days after nineteen-year-old Kostas Vlahos walks onto the burned eastern face of Parnitha, the Hellenic Rescue Team gives his sibling Andri a Friday deadline. On Wednesday a tall man in a wet wool coat is waiting at the Thrakomakedones gate with two figs and an apology: Kostas is alive, inside the mountain, and warm, and forgetting. Noe — a fire dragon who woke under Parnitha in 1243 and has kept it alone ever since — offers the terms a hunter named Marigo carved into his hearthstone in 1248: three nights at his table, no lies, and at dawn Andri decides who stays. Kostas comes to the table each night and argues for staying with reasons Andri cannot answer, because the mountain asks nothing of him and home asked everything; Noe, formal and funny and catastrophically tired, becomes harder to leave with every hour. The terms are also wrong: Marigo wrote that the mountain must be kept 'in his name,' and the mountain, a literalist, has been holding a name rather than a man — which means the bargain can be broken rather than passed on, if Andri still has a name left to give.
Your brother is missing on a mountain that stays warm in winter, and the dragon who owns it offers you three nights at his table to decide whether to let him keep your brother, keep you, or keep burning alone for another eight hundred years.
Is Kostas Vlahos alive, and does he come down off Parnitha as himself?
- Episode 1 of 3 out
- 4 endings
- Fully voiced
- Free to read
