Chapter 1 – The Firestorm
The sky burned first.
Not with dragonfire—at least, not yet—but with the sickly orange glow of signal flares streaking across the clouds. Three in quick succession. The pattern for target located. The pattern for no turning back.
I crouched on the ridge and watched them stain the night. The wind tore at my braids and tugged cold fingers through the seams in my armor, but my palms were hot, tingling with the itch of magic that wanted out.
“Knight.”
My name—my rank—snapped like a command. I glanced back. Captain Rourke ducked behind the rock beside me, visor up, scarred mouth pulled into a thin line. His eyes were on the valley below, not on me.
“Visual confirmation?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “I can feel him, though.”
The whole canyon hummed, like the moment before a storm breaks. Magic prickled under my skin, responding to something vast and old moving just out of sight.
Rourke snorted. “Witch intuition. I’ll take steel and coordinates.”
“You’ll get both if you stop talking and let me listen.”
He grunted, which in Captain Rourke language meant begrudging approval. I tuned him out and let my senses go slack, the way my instructors had drilled into me until it was muscle memory.
Breathe in. Let the world in with it. Find the wrongness.
The Syndicate called it “attunement.” My grandmother had just called it “trouble.”
Ash and cold stone, smoke from the campfires below, the sharp tang of metal and oil. Beneath all that—fainter, older—heat. Not the simple heat of flame, but something living. Hot enough that it had a flavor—copper and ozone and the barest hint of something wild.
My fingers curled against the rock. “He’s here,” I whispered. “He’s close.”
Rourke’s visor snapped down. “Then this is it, Knight. You bind the bastard, we drag him back in chains, and the war ends before winter. You screw it up…”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. I’d seen what dragonfire did to flesh. To cities. To children who hadn’t realized yet that the monster overhead wasn’t just a story.
“I won’t screw it up,” I said. “You’ll have your dragon, Captain.”
He clapped my shoulder, heavy gauntlet rattling my bones. “That’s why they made you a Knight, Christine. Don’t make me regret defending you in those briefings.”
He pulled back from the ridge, heading toward the line of Syndicate soldiers hunkered down behind makeshift barricades. Rifles glinted faintly. Spellcasters muttered over talismans. The air stank of fear trying very hard to pretend it was courage.
I stayed there a moment longer, watching. The valley floor below was a scar carved through black rock, a narrow river snaking through it like a strip of tarnished silver. Our forces were dug in along the far side, floodlights mounted on trucks pointed at the canyon mouth.
Waiting for a god to walk through.
No, not a god. I swallowed hard. A beast. That’s what the Syndicate drilled into us from the first day: dragons aren’t people. Not anymore. Not after what they did.
I touched the thin, twisted scar that curled along my left forearm, the ghost of heat there. Dragonfire caught me once, when I was twelve and too slow to pull a boy out of a burning house. If I closed my eyes, I could still hear him screaming.
I opened my eyes instead and slid down the ridge.
As I dropped into the shallow trench behind our front line, the murmur of voices surged around me—snatches of prayers, curses, someone laughing too loud. A young soldier glanced at my sigil-marked gauntlets and quickly looked away, like my magic might leak if he met my eyes.
Christine Knight, witch-soldier. Asset. Weapon.
“That her?” someone whispered as I passed. “The Binder?”
“If she gets him, they’ll pin medals on her bones,” another voice muttered back. “If she doesn’t, there won’t be bones to pin them on.”
I ignored them and walked to the circle I’d drawn earlier; a rough ring of chalk and crushed bone etched into the rock, symbols scrawled along the inner rim. It looked flimsy, sitting there like a harmless pattern. It could unmake a god if I did it right.
Or unmake me if I didn’t.
No pressure.
I stepped into the center of the circle. The runes warmed under my boots, responding to my presence. I lifted my hands and felt the air shift, weightless and heavy all at once.
“Positions!” Rourke’s voice carried over the hum of generators. “Eyes on that canyon mouth! When he shows, we give the witch her opening. Do not fire once she initiates the bind—unless you want to die choking on your own lungs.”
They quieted. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
The world narrowed to a single black cut in the rock. The canyon mouth yawned like a wound.
And then I heard it.
A low, distant rumble, too deep to be thunder, too steady to be rockfall. It rolled through the ground and climbed up my bones.
Someone swore under their breath. Another soldier whispered, “Saints have mercy…”
The rumble became a roar.
The dragon stepped out of the darkness.
For a heartbeat, all I saw was motion—a blur of shadow and molten gold, wings half-furled, scales catching the floodlights in jagged flares of copper and crimson. He was huge, even crouched low, claws digging into rock, tail lashing.
The air around him wavered with heat. Not simple warmth—this was furnace-heat, forge-heat, the kind that made metal glow and bone go soft.
“Hold!” Rourke bellowed. “Hold your—”
Someone fired too early.
The crack of the rifle shot shattered the spell of silence. The bullet sparked harmlessly off a scale. The dragon’s head snapped toward the line, eyes flaring like twin suns.
He roared again, and this time it wasn’t distant. It was right there. It tore through the air, through my chest, through the circle. Ancient rage, pure and bright.
Then the fire came.
He exhaled, and the world went white-gold.
Flame washed over the barricades, over trucks, over men scrambling for cover. Shields flared to life, wards blazing blue where the fire struck. Some held. Some didn’t.
I felt the heat slap against the invisible wall of my circle, felt my sigils drink it in, turning it into fuel. The runes at my feet pulsed, lines brightening from chalk-white to angry red.
“Now, Knight!” Rourke’s voice, hoarse and too close to panic.
I lifted my hands. Power surged up my spine, down my arms, pouring into the circle. The runes responded, lines twisting, joining, reaching outward like grasping roots.
“By ash and bone,” I intoned, voice low, the words older than the Syndicate that had weaponized them. “By oath and chain. By blood freely spilled and flame freely given—”
The dragon swept fire across our ranks again, but his gaze flicked to me. To the circle. To the glow at my feet.
He recognized the trap.
His wings snapped open, throwing shockwaves through the air. He lunged—not away, but toward me, toward the circle.
Of course he did. Dragons didn’t run from spells; they broke them.
“Christine!” Rourke shouted. “Finish it!”
“I am trying,” I gritted out.
Power coiled around my fingers, hot and heavy. I pushed it into the earth, into the sigils, forcing the binding lines outward, reaching for him. Invisible chains seeking a soul.
The circle’s light stretched, a net of red threads lashing out like lightning. They touched his front claws, his chest, the underside of his throat—
The world hiccuped.
For a split second, I saw him with terrifying clarity: not as a monster, but as something fierce and alive. Scars along his muzzle. A notch missing from one horn. Oily black blood dripping from a wound in his side that we hadn’t given him.
Then he roared, and everything exploded.
His fire met my binding at the exact same heartbeat. He barreled into the circle instead of stopping at its edge, claws slamming into my sigils and smearing them with blood and flame. The runes twisted, lines breaking and reforming in patterns I didn’t recognize.
“Wait—” I tried to cut the spell, tried to pull back the power—
Too late.
The magic snapped.
It didn’t lash around him the way it was supposed to. It turned inward, folding like a collapsing star, claws closing over both of us.
I felt something tear, not in my body but deeper. A hot hook sank into my chest, through my sternum, into my heart. Another hook dug into something else just beyond my skin—another heartbeat, another presence.
The world vanished in white fire.
I didn’t hear my own scream over the roar. I didn’t feel it when my knees hit the ground, or when I slammed into scaled muscle, or when stone shattered under us.
For a long time, there was only burning. Not on my skin—inside me. In my blood. In my bones. My heart pounded so hard it hurt, like it was trying to hammer its way out of my ribs.
Mine—not mine. Mine—not mine. Two pulses, overlapping, stumbling over each other.
Then darkness rushed in, swallowing the fire whole.
🔥🔥🔥
