Soultether

If I’d known that morning would be the day my life split clean in two, I might have run. Or maybe I wouldn’t have. Maybe I’d still have walked through those marble doors, just slower, like walking into a dream you already know ends badly.

But that’s the thing about stories, isn’t it? You never realize you’re in one until it’s too late to change how it ends. And this, this is where mine begins.

The throne room of Nebel smelled of dust and rain, the air heavy with the cold breath of the sea that always crept in from the cliffs below. Morning light fractured through the glass ceiling, scattered across the floor by the carved dragons that spiralled through the panes. Once, that light had made this room glow. When my mother was alive, it even felt warm. Now, it felt like a tomb.

My father sat upon his throne; shoulders slumped beneath the weight of his crown. He used to hum when he worked, soft tunes only Doctors knew. These days, he hummed nothing.

“Madi,” he said, his voice echoing against the stone, “you’ve been drafted into Eldrex.”

The words didn’t make sense at first. They just floated there, thin and cold. Eldrex. The dragon riders’ academy. The place where seventy-eight percent of students never return. I got drafted? only 1 person from each island is picked at random but no Krade has ever being draw. Well until me

I laughed, sharp and nervous. “That’s not funny.”

His eyes, once bright as Nebel’s seas, were dull as stormwater. “It’s not a joke. You leave in three months.”

“I leave when?” I don’t want to go to Eldrex, I have already applied to every other school including Crestbourne even if I knew my fragile body would ultimately stop me from being able to enter

“you were the lucky one picked to represent Nebel as a drafted rider it’s an honour,” he said simply, as though he were reading a weather report. “You’re a Hagans, you’re a Krade. You’ll serve Nebel.”

He said it was an honour. I heard it as a death sentence. Serve Nebel. Serve. The word cut deeper than any knife I’d ever held

“Dad please, can’t you pull some string get me out,” I said, my voice shaking. “You know medicine is my drea…”

He cut me off with a single flick of his hand. “Enough, you can’t study medicine any more you need to move on, and this was a blessing that you got picked to prove us to the other Krades.”

And that was his real motive he didn’t care about me or if I lived, he cared about ensuring we stayed at the top of the food chain Because in Pandamonia, the Krades aren’t just families. They are the spine of power itself.

Six islands, five for us, one for the dragons. And from each of those five islands, one family is chosen, to rule. Together, they form the Council of Krades: the highest power in all of Pandamonia. But even within that circle, there’s a hierarchy. At the top stands Nebel’s Krades, my family, the Doctors, known for compassion and empathy, the heart of Pandamonia’s peace. Below us, Vaelyon’s Krades, the Principes, brilliant strategists who could turn a loss into a legacy. Then come the Draveth Krades, the Verric’s, feared for their brutality and ruthless control. Their rule is built on fear, their strength unquestioned. Fourth are the Tidral Krades, masters of intellect and innovation. And last, though no less dangerous, the Mallick Krades, whose wealth can buy nearly anything, even loyalty.

The Krades are meant to lead together, but power doesn’t share well. It devours quietly.

We all grew up in each other’s shadows, every Krade child raised alongside the others, like siblings in a gilded cage. Some of us closer than others.

The Vaelyon’s Krades family the Principes’ children, Eva and Layel, were practically family. Layel was my brother Luca’s age; the two went through the Riders’ Academy together and somehow managed to both be stationed at the East Branch. Eva was my age, my mirror in everything that wasn’t blood. She had a mind for strategy, but a heart too big for her own good. We were inseparable.

We used to be a trio actually. Me, Eva, and Kia Verric, the only child of the Draveth Krades.

We’d been inseparable once. Eva and I were ten, Kia was twelve, and we were the kind of friends who built forts out of driftwood and dared each other to climb higher, run faster, reach farther.

Eva was the sensible one back then. She always talked us out of doing anything too dangerous. But that day, she was away on a family trip, and without her, there was no voice of reason. Just me and Kia, and his stupid grin that always made me follow.

It happened by the creek that cut through the Nebel woods, the one our parents had warned us about a hundred times after the rains. The current was faster than it looked, the stones slick and dark.

Kia wanted to jump from one side to the other, prove we could do it. He made it easily, of course he did, and then turned back, calling for me to follow. I hesitated. He teased me, that light, easy teasing that used to make me brave.

So, I jumped. And I missed. The water wasn’t deep, but the fall was brutal. My arm twisted beneath me, my shoulder slammed into a rock, and something cracked. I remember the pain blooming fast, hot, white, and endless.

Kia was the one who pulled me out, shaking and crying, promising I’d be fine, that he’d get help. And he did. But by the time they found me, the damage was done.

The Doctors said I was lucky. That I’d live. But I didn’t feel lucky.

My shoulder never healed right. The ligaments stretched thin, the bone weak, nerves frayed. I couldn’t lift my arm without pain for years after that. The strength I’d once taken for granted was gone, and with it, my dream of becoming a surgeon, the one thing I’d wanted more than anything.

Everyone said it was an accident. That kids make mistakes. That Kia was just trying to have fun. And I believed that. I really did.

But every time my shoulder burned after training, or my head spined when I stood for too long, I remembered his laugh echoing over the creek, the way he’d said, “Come on, Madi, don’t be scared.”

He didn’t mean to hurt me. But he did. And no apology could ever stitch that kind of wound closed.

I look up to the man who once sat beside me in quiet study, who taught me the rhythm of stitching, who had already decided who I would become. I didn’t recognise him, I haven’t since my mother died, she took the best of him with her. And in her place, he gave me this, a death sentence wrapped in duty.

He turned his gaze to the sapphire-eyed dragon carved above his throne; the talisman dedicated to mum. “You will make our family proud,” Proud. He meant obedient. He always did

I didn’t cry not until I was alone. Because crying in front of a Krade, even if he’s your father, feels like asking the storm for mercy.

My mother once told me dragons never bow, not to Krades, not to riders, not even to each other. They follow the Loom: a thread that binds soul to soul. A human connect to a dragon is a Soult, their essence entwined with a dragon in ways no blade can sever. But when she died, something in Nebel died too.

The Slithern had come from the deep, bursting through the waves between Nebel and Tridal. A serpent with wings too small and hunger too large. It tore her dragon open midair, pulling both into the sea. She survived the fall. For three weeks, she fought to live. But since her dragon’s heart had stopped, so did hers.

That’s the price of connection. Dragons can survive us, wounded, yes, but alive. Humans, though? We fade. Sometimes slow, sometimes instant, but always inevitable.

And still, people line up to join Eldrex. They call it the Riders’ Forge. But it’s more graveyard than forge. They tell you it’s about courage and honour. What they don’t tell you is that before you ever see a dragon, you’ll be broken down, climbing cliffs without ropes, leaping into pits where you can’t see the bottom, all in the name of honour.

It’s not just a test of strength. It’s a test of how long it takes to shatter.

Dragons are marked by their colours, born into them like bloodlines, and each one holds a different kind of power.

Blues are the cunning ones. Tricky. Elusive. They can wield shadows like armour, disappear in lightning, slip through space with teleportation, and project their consciousness across the astral plane. My brother used to call them the ghosts of the sky.

Browns are brutal. They don’t care for subtlety. They trade in raw strength, superhuman, monstrous. They’re fast, faster than you’d expect, and some say they see fragments of the future when they fight. Like they already know how you’ll die.

Reds are born to lead, or so they say. Fire-breathers, metal-benders, nearly impossible to injure. Some call them indestructible, but that’s a lie. Nothing here is truly indestructible, just harder to kill.

Greens are the thinkers. Smart, manipulative, calm. They can read minds, twist them, lift objects with a glance, even copy themselves mid-air. They’re the strategists, the ones who win wars before the first blade is drawn.

Oranges… gods, the oranges. They’re unpredictable. Playful like children one second, unrecognizably terrifying the next. Their power bends toward imagination, shapeshifting, memory-wiping, phasing through matter. You can’t plan for an orange dragon. You just survive it.

And then there are the black and grey dragons. The Ancients. Most people never see them. Some claim they’ve already vanished; others say they’re just waiting, watching. They’re older than the oldest myths and carry power most of us can’t even comprehend time, matter, reality itself. The ability to warp it, rewrite it. Absorb the magic of others and make it their own.

They don’t bow. They don’t obey. And if one rejects you, it doesn’t fly away. It burns you.

That’s the truth behind Eldrex. You walk in chasing glory. Most walk out as smoke.

The next months passed like sand slipping through cracked glass. I tried to prepare, gods, I tried.

Eva would visit after classes, still smelling like books and ink, talking about ancient wars and the riders who became myths. She believed I’d find a way through it. She always did. I wanted to believe her. So, I trained.

I threw myself into hand-to-hand combat lessons until my arms shook and my bones screamed. Every bruise reminded me of that creek, of the fall that ruined everything. Every strike I made came back with twice the pain.

By the end of the second month, I could barely lift my arm.

The instructors told me to rest. I told them to mind their own business. But I knew. I’d never be strong enough to fight bare-handed.

So, I turned to what I was good at. Knives. Small, precise, fast, like the cuts in a surgeon’s hand before the blood. Knives made sense to me. They were controlled. Predictable. I have been practicing with them since I was 7 but I practices surgical way but that is the bases of using them in a lethal way.

By the final week, I could hit the centre of a moving target at fifty paces. It wasn’t power. But it was something.

The morning, I left Nebel, the world was impossibly calm. The sea lay flat as glass, pale light spilling across its surface like a secret it refused to share. Even the wind had stilled, as if the island itself was holding its breath. For weeks, everything had been noise, training, bruises, blades, sleepless nights, but now there was only silence. It felt wrong. Or maybe merciful.

My father didn’t come to see me off. I hadn’t expected him to. His absence was almost a tradition by now, a silence louder than any goodbye.

Eva did. She always did. She hugged me so tightly I could feel her heartbeat against mine, steady and human in a world that was about to stop being either. “Write me,” she whispered, though we both knew letters never reached Eldrex. They said it built resilience. I always thought it was just another way to make us disappear quietly.

When the airship rose, the sea slipped away beneath us, the cliffs shrinking into pale silver veins against the green. That was where my mother’s dragon used to fly, where I used to stand waiting for the shadow to pass overhead, wings cutting the sunlight in two.

From above, Pandamonia unfolded like a story written in water. Five islands curved protectively around the sixth, the Dragon Isle, Ashara, wrapped in mist like a crown of ghosts. And there, beyond the shimmering waves, Tidral waited, its cliffs jagged, forests dense, and atop it, Eldrex: a dark silhouette against the morning light, cold and unyielding, the academy of dragon riders.

As Nebel faded behind me, I felt the weight of everything I’d ever been pressing against my chest, the daughter, the Krade, the failure, the unwilling offering. I didn’t believe I’d survive Eldrex. Not really. But for the first time in months, I felt something close to peace.

Maybe it was the stillness. Maybe it was the beauty of it all, how the morning light painted the sea in gold, how the mist caught and shimmered like dragon fire, how Tidral rose from the horizon like a promise I wasn’t ready for. Or maybe it was the quiet certainty that even if I was meant to break, I’d break fighting.

And if my story was going to end in ash, at least, this once, the sky was mine.