The Heartwood the wolf and the lion

The skeletal relic of the fire was all but forgotten by the enraptured boy in his attention to the diviner's stories. In fact, most things for him had become a distant afterthought now facing the thought of a vast array of now-possible impossibilities. Rickon had his own Trench-legends, but most of those tales involved mystical, glowing creatures, coming down to rescue the wolves from their self-imposed ruins. They did not dream of things that were destruction incarnate. A strange difference between the lives of the secure and the lives of the strained. 

Flaming rocks. Exploding mountains. It was all so terrifyingly fascinating! "And a dragon?" he began to ask.

Rickon had drawn closer to her— magnetized by her existence— and the dark wolf inhaled deeply, through his nose, and his mouth, wanting to know as much of her as he could in that moment. He had come close enough to touch now, and his voice lowered politely to accommodate his almost sudden closeness. "Have you seen one before?" But even in the quiet his excitement did not dissipate.