Prologue: The Burning Sky
For a thousand years, mankind looked at the sky and saw only fire.
Dragons were not beasts of burden; they were storms of raw, elemental fury clad in scales of iron and ash. To ride one was a fool’s dream. To link with one—to forge the psychic bond known as the Neural Tether—was a death sentence.
When ordinary men attempted the Tether, the draconic energy flooded their nervous system. The Dragon-Burn, the scholars called it. It cooked a human from the inside out, turning blood to steam and bone to ash in a matter of seconds. The Empire, in its infinite, ruthless ambition to conquer the heavens, spent thousands of lives trying to break the dragons.
Then, they found the loophole.
They looked to the monsters they had been hunting in the dark. Lycans. Werewolves. Cursed beings of the deep wastes, possessing cellular regeneration so incredibly fast that they defied death itself. The Empire’s inquisitors realized that a Lycan could survive the Neural Tether. Barely.
When a Lycan linked with a dragon, they did not burn to ash. Instead, they existed in a perpetual, agonizing state of destruction and rebirth. The dragon’s magic incinerated them from within, and their curse healed them just as fast. It was an endless cycle of burning and stitching, a hellish equilibrium achieved only in the saddle.
But there was an unexpected side effect: the Dragon’s Sedative. The immense physical toll of fighting the Dragon-Burn suppressed the Lycan’s feral, bloodthirsty urges. The dragon became a symbiotic anchor, tethering the beast’s mind and keeping them sane, turning uncontrollable monsters into the most elite, disciplined, and disposable shock-troops the world had ever seen.
And so, the Dragon Corps was born. Not of noble knights, but of conscripted slaves. Hunted, collared in alchemical silver, and forced into the sky.
This is the story of one such slave. And the empire that made the mistake of giving him wings.
