Princess Mira lived in a meadow castle at the edge of the wildflower fields, where the stones smelled like rain and the window boxes were always full of yellow blooms. She had one very good friend: a dragon named Ember, who was green as new leaves and had wings the colour of autumn oranges. Every year, on the morning of the Meadow Festival, Ember let out one magnificent roar — and every single flower in the meadow burst open at once. It was the finest sound in the whole kingdom. Mira had been looking forward to it for months.
But tonight, something was wrong. Ember opened his mouth in the castle courtyard, wide as a barn door — and nothing came out. Not a roar. Not a rumble. Not even one small smoke ring. And the flowers nearest to him snapped tight shut, like little fists. *Nothing came out. Nothing came out at all.*
"Hmm," said Mira. She knelt on the cold stone and looked very closely at the flowers. They weren't curling away from Ember. They were curling toward him, as if something were going *in* instead of coming out. She tapped her chin twice. "Your voice didn't disappear," she said. "It went somewhere." Ember's wings drooped. His big green tail dragged on the grass as they set off together down the meadow path. The night air was cool and smelled of clover. Mira's boots left dark prints in the dew.
They had not gone far when Mira heard something extraordinary. A tiny voice — or rather, an enormous voice coming from something tiny — booming out from a buttercup beside the path. *Boom. Boom. BOOM.* Three beetles shot out of the grass and fled in different directions. Mira crouched down. There, sitting inside a buttercup, was a very small field mouse. The mouse opened her mouth and out came a sound like a thunderstorm wrapped in fire. Then she clapped both paws over her face, clearly mortified.
"I'm so sorry," the mouse tried to squeak, but it came out as a low, rolling RUMBLE that flattened the grass in a circle around her. She thought carefully. Ember had breathed out. The mouse had breathed in. So Ember needed to breathe back in — but gently. Like a sip of warm soup. Not a gulp. She turned to Ember. "Slowly," she said. "Like you're breathing in the smell of something very good." Ember leaned down, his big nose almost touching the buttercup. He breathed in — slowly, carefully — one long, golden inhale. The mouse let out a tiny squeak. A real one, small and bright as a pin.
And then Ember lifted his head, opened his mouth, and out came one perfect smoke ring, gold as a buttercup petal, floating up into the darkening sky. Around them, every wildflower in the meadow opened at once. Petals unfurled in the blue evening air. The mouse sat up very straight and smoothed her ears. Mira sat down in the grass beside Ember's warm, scaled foot. The festival had begun, one whole night early, with no crowd and no fanfare — just a princess, a dragon, and a very relieved mouse, sitting in a meadow full of open flowers as the first stars came out above them.
