A Dragon Who Couldn't Roar

In the mountains above a sleeping valley, there lives a young dragon named Ember who has a problem. Every dragon in his family can roar, his mother's roar shakes the pine trees, his father's roar echoes off three mountains, and his older sister's roar once frightened a thunderstorm into going the other way. But when Ember opens his mouth and tries with everything he has, what comes out is a sound so soft, so small, so entirely un-dragonlike that the other young dragons simply stare. It is not quite a hum. It is not quite a sigh. It is the sound, one elder dragon says with a puzzled frown, of a candle being blown out by someone who doesn't really want it to go dark. Ember tries everything. He practices on mountaintops. He eats particularly spicy mushrooms. He reads every scroll in the dragon library about the proper mechanics of roaring. Nothing works. His sound remains what it is, soft, warm, and completely useless for frightening things. Then one autumn night, a small girl from the valley below climbs the mountain looking for her lost sheep, and becomes hopelessly lost herself. She is cold and frightened and too tired to cry anymore. Ember finds her sitting against a rock in the dark. He cannot roar to alert anyone. He cannot breathe fire brightly enough to signal for help. What he can do is fold his warm wings around her like a blanket, and make his sound, that soft, warm, gentle sound, until her eyes grow heavy and she falls into the deepest, safest sleep she has ever had. By morning, her family has followed her footprints up the mountain and found her sleeping peacefully, nestled against the side of a dragon who is, at that moment, very carefully not waking her up. Ember never does learn to roar. He doesn't mind anymore. The valley below his mountain sleeps more soundly than any valley for a hundred miles, and everyone there knows why.