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Kael never expected to survive the Cull.
Every child in the Thornwall Mountains knew the stories — how once a generation, the elders conducted the Cull, cutting the rider class down to exactly twelve. Twelve riders. Twelve dragons. The mountains could sustain no more, the priests claimed, and so the excess children were sent into the Red Zone before their sixteenth birthday with nothing but a knife and a prayer.
Kael was fourteen when they sent him. He carried the knife. He did not pray.
The Red Zone was a hundred miles of volcanic glass and sulfur vents, home to nothing that lived and nothing that let live. Kael survived thirty-one days. On the thirty-second, he found a dragon.
Not a full-grown one — this creature was barely larger than a horse, its scales a patchwork of copper and ash, one wing permanently bent from some ancient injury. It was dying. Kael could see that immediately. Whatever had reduced it to this state had been ongoing for a long time, and the dragon was finished with fighting it.
He did the only thing he could think of. He sat down next to it, pulled out his knife, and began to carve a channel in the volcanic rock beneath them to redirect the flow of magma that was slowly cooking the creature alive.
The dragon watched him for six hours. Then it spoke.
“You are building the wrong channel,” it said, in a voice like tectonic plates grinding together. “The lava will find yours in seventeen minutes. It will not save me. You have wasted your effort.”
Kael kept carving. “I know. But it’s something to do while I wait to die.”
“You will not die in the Red Zone.” The dragon’s eyes — one golden, one pale silver — moved to track him. “I find this irritating.”
“Good,” said Kael. “Be irritated. It’s better than being dead.”
The dragon made a sound that might have been laughter, or might have been a volcanic rumble from deep below. “I am Verath. Once I was of the First Flight. Now I am what you see.” A pause. “What are you, child of the mountains?”
“Kael. And I am nothing. A failed rider. The Cull sent me here to die.”
Verath’s broken wing twitched. “The Cull sends the wrong children. It has always been so. The strongest children go to the Red Zone, and the weakest remain on the mountains to bond with dragons who deserve better.” The great head lowered until one silver eye was level with Kael’s face. “I cannot fly. I cannot hunt. I cannot do anything a dragon is supposed to do. But I can speak, and I can think, and I can wait. The question is — can you do anything more than carve rocks and wait for lava?”
Kael met the dragon’s gaze. “I can learn.”
“Then we have an accord.” Verath closed both eyes. “Stay alive for the next seven months. When the next naming comes, return here. If you survive, I will teach you what the mountain elders will not — how to ride a dragon that has no desire to burn the world, because it has already been burned itself.”
Kael looked at the copper-and-ash scales, the crooked wing, the ancient tiredness in both mismatched eyes.
“Why me?””
“Because you sat with me for six hours and tried to save something that was already dead. No mountain child has ever done that.” Verath breathed out — a long, slow exhalation that smelled of old embers and something sweeter, like smoke and cedar. “Also because I am dying, and I would prefer to die knowing that one human in this world understands that survival is not the same as living.”
Kael carved the last few inches of channel, redirected the lava, and stayed with the dragon until the sun rose. Then he began the walk back through the Red Zone, seven months of survival ahead of him, and something he had never expected to have: a reason to make it.
Above him, unseen, something vast and ancient moved between the volcanic peaks, tracking his progress. It was not Verath. It was something older, and it was very, very interested in the boy who had chosen to save a dying dragon instead of running.