"Khairos: On Contentment"

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He was five thousand years old, and he lacked for nothing. That was the problem. Khairos didn't hoard treasure — he had his mountain, his sun-warmed rocks, and enough time in his possession to make the word itself feel small. He called that contentment. He had no idea what it would cost him to find out what the word actually meant. Then a man named Owain ap Gruffydd climbed his mountain, sat down thirty feet from his cave, and didn't leave. What started as one conversation became forty years of them: arguments about the nature of time, firm agreement on the stupidity of sheep, a friendship neither of them had a name for until Owain said it out loud. And when a breach tore open between this world and the Otherworld, threatening to unmake everything below them, Khairos made a choice that cost him the only life he had ever known. This is the story of how a dragon became something else entirely — bound into the very object at the heart of The Man with the Dragon-Head Cane. It's about what contentment actually requires, what it costs to lose it, and what three centuries of silence can teach a creature who once thought all he needed was a warm rock and an empty sky. Three hundred years after Owain's death, a different hand finally closed around the cane — steadier, more certain, carrying not just weight but purpose. This free prequel is the reason that moment matters: how a dragon became the artifact at the center of The Man with the Dragon-Head Cane, and what waited inside it all along.