Maleren was the last of the Wyrmward's great riders, bonded to the war-dragon Ardomos when Adron still warded the eastern Middle Sea from the air. He flew the length of the Drakespine when the watchtowers below it kept no garrison and needed none, and the songs that survive of the riders are mostly songs about him, because he was the one still flying when the rest had grown old or grounded. By the end he and Ardomos were the realm's whole memory of what it had been, and Adron knew it.
The Severing took Ardomos from Maleren in the same hour it took every bond in the kingdom. The dragon did not die. Killing a dragon was unthinkable then as now. Ardomos simply left, bond gone, the way the others left, and Maleren reached for the other mind and found nothing reaching back. He spent what was left of his life walking the Drakespine after the dragon, certain a bond that deep could not have been cut clean, never finding so much as a track in the snow. He died old, still half-turned toward a thread that no longer answered. Adron buried him as the last rider and has never quite forgiven the order that made the title true.