Chapter 1: The Cough That Started It All
The day I was supposed to die started with a cough.
Not a delicate one—the kind that rattles your ribs and tastes like copper and ash. I doubled over on the cobblestones, one hand pressed to the iron gate of Drakemoor Citadel, and let my lungs tear themselves apart for thirty long seconds.
Around me, three hundred other conscripts pretended not to notice. Some sneered. Most just looked relieved—one less competitor for the forty slots in the Rider cadre this year.
I straightened. Wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my too-large tunic. Felt the familiar burn settle back into my chest, a lodestone I'd carried since I was twelve.
"You're early," said a voice behind me.
I didn't turn. I knew that voice—dry, amused, the kind of tone that meant someone was about to be very unimpressed with me.
"Malachi," I said.
"Seraphina." He came to stand beside me, his dark hair already wind-tousled from the climb up the volcano road. At six-foot-two, broad-shouldered and healthy, he looked like he'd been born to ride a dragon. I looked like I'd been born to blow away in a strong breeze. "Your grandmother knows you're here?"
"Grandmother thinks I'm at the healing libraries in Thornhaven."
"She's going to kill you."
"Probably less painfully than this place will." I nodded at the gate. The iron was blackened, pitted with centuries of dragonfire. Beyond it, the Citadel rose in jagged tiers carved into the caldera of an extinct volcano—stone spires and glass domes and training yards where distant figures shouted and dragons roared. "Is it true? Forty slots this year?"
"Thirty-eight now." Malachi's smile faded. "Two didn't make the climb. One had a heart attack halfway up. The other slipped on the obsidian path. Fell four hundred feet."
I didn't flinch. I'd read the mortality rates. Drakemoor had a sixty-two percent attrition rate in the first year alone. Most conscripts didn't survive the first week.
"Then I'd better not waste time," I said, and pushed through the gate.
The Yard of Embers was exactly as the histories described—a natural amphitheater of black volcanic rock, open to the sky, with a raised dais at one end where the Wing Commanders sat on stone thrones. Above them, dragons perched on the caldera rim: enormous shapes of scaled muscle and leathery wing, their breath sending occasional plumes of smoke into the gray morning.
I counted seven. Seven fully grown dragons, each bonded to a Wing Commander. There were supposed to be nine.
"Two empty thrones," Malachi murmured, falling into step beside me. "Voss and Riven. Voss's dragon is still recovering from the border skirmish last winter. Riven…" He trailed off.
"Riven died in the Ashfall three months ago," I finished. I'd read every report. Every casualty list. Every scrap of information about Drakemoor I could get my hands on in the five years since my mother died. "They haven't found a replacement."
"Nobody replaces a Shade rider." Malachi's voice was quiet now. "Especially not Kaelen Voss."
I looked up at the empty throne on the far left of the dais. The stone was blacker than the others, veined with silver, and a single cloak of deepest indigo was draped over its back—unoccupied, but not forgotten.
Kaelen Voss. The youngest Wing Commander in Drakemoor's four-hundred-year history. Bonded to a Shade dragon—one of the rarest, most volatile breeds in existence. Shadow-wielder. Survivor of the Ashfall. The man who'd held the northern border alone for three days while the rest of the cadre retreated.
And the man whose father my mother had been accused of poisoning.
I pushed that thought away. Not today. Today was about surviving.
"Conscripts!" The voice boomed across the yard, amplified by dragonfire in the speaker's throat—Commander Yara Solis, Ember rider, head of the Rider cadre. She stood on the dais, a woman of fifty with skin like weathered leather and eyes the color of molten gold. "You stand before Drakemoor Citadel. You have survived the road. That is the easiest thing you will ever do here."
A murmur rippled through the crowd.
"Each year, we take forty of you into the Rider cadre. This year, we take thirty-eight." She paused, letting that sink in. "The rest will be assigned to infantry, healing, or scribe work. If you are lucky."
"If you are unlucky," she continued, "you will die on the Scorch Stairs."
She gestured to the far side of the yard, where a staircase of black obsidian rose into the caldera wall—two hundred steps, each one wide enough for three people, each one glistening with heat. At the top, I could see the dark mouth of a cave.
"The first trial," Solis said. "Climb the Scorch Stairs. Reach the Hatching Cavern. The first thirty-eight to arrive are Riders. Everyone else…" She smiled, and it was not a kind smile. "Well. The dragons eat well on Conscription Day."
I looked at Malachi. He looked at me.
"Your lungs—" he started.
"Will either hold or they won't." I started walking toward the stairs. "I didn't come all this way to quit before the first step."
The Scorch Stairs were worse than I'd imagined.
The obsidian was hot enough to burn through the soles of my boots by the tenth step. The air shimmered with heat, and with every breath I drew, my lungs protested—sharp, stabbing pain that made me see stars. Around me, conscripts jostled and shoved, climbing over each other in a desperate scramble. Someone fell, screaming, and was trampled before I could turn around.
I kept my eyes on the steps. One. Two. Three.
By the fiftieth step, my tunic was soaked through with sweat. My legs burned. My chest felt like someone had reached inside and squeezed my heart in a fist.
"Ninety-eight," I whispered to myself, counting down. "Ninety-seven. Ninety-six."
A roar shook the stairs.
I looked up. A dragon—an Ember, scales the color of burnt orange—was perched on the caldera wall above the stairs, its mouth open. Dragonfire poured down in a sheet of orange-white flame, and the conscripts on the upper stairs screamed.
"Move!" someone shouted. "It's the gauntlet! They fire every fifty steps!"
Of course they did. I'd read about the gauntlet. Reading about it and living it were two very different things.
I pressed myself against the caldera wall as the fire swept past. The heat was incredible—my hair singed at the ends, my exposed skin reddened. But the wall itself was cooler, sheltered by an overhang. I'd noticed it on the way in. A small detail. The kind of detail that kept people like me alive.
When the fire passed, I kept climbing. Faster now, because the pause had let a dozen people pass me, and I couldn't afford to lose ground.
One hundred and twenty steps. One hundred and thirty.
My vision was blurring at the edges. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, loud and desperate. My lungs were on fire—not metaphorically, but literally, like the dragonfire had gotten inside me and was burning me from within.
"Come on," I gasped. "Come on, Sera. Just a little more."
A hand grabbed my arm.
I looked up. A conscript—big, broad, male, with a face like a fist—was pulling me backward. "Out of my way, weakling," he snarled, and shoved me hard in the chest.
I fell backward. My hands slipped on the hot obsidian. I felt myself tipping, tipping, over the edge of the stairs—
And then something caught me.
Not a hand. A shadow.
It wrapped around my wrist like a living thing—cold, solid, impossibly strong—and yanked me back onto the stairs. I landed hard on my knees, palms burning, gasping.
The big conscript was staring. Staring past me, at something on the caldera rim.
I followed his gaze.
A dragon sat there. Not an Ember. Not a Tempest. This one was black—blacker than the obsidian, blacker than the space between stars—with scales that seemed to drink the light. Its wings were folded, but I could see the membrane was the color of a bruise, deep purple at the edges. Its eyes were silver, slitted, and fixed directly on me.
A Shade dragon.
And on its back, sitting straight and still as a statue, was a man.
He was tall, even hunched over the dragon's neck. Black hair pulled back from a face that looked like it had been carved from obsidian itself—high cheekbones, a jaw sharp enough to cut, eyes the same silver as the dragon's. He wore a black leather riding suit with silver thread at the cuffs, and a cloak of deepest indigo that matched the empty throne in the yard.
Kaelen Voss.
He was looking at me. Not at the stairs, not at the other conscripts—at me. His expression was unreadable, but there was something in his silver eyes… curiosity, maybe. Or recognition.
The shadow around my wrist dissolved. I flexed my fingers, feeling the cold linger.
Voss said something to his dragon. The dragon rumbled, a deep sound that I felt in my bones, and then—impossibly—I heard words. Not in the Common tongue. In the old language. Draconic.
*She smells like ash and sorrow, Kaelen. Like the one who healed you.*
I froze. I'd heard Draconic before—in books, in fragments, in the old recordings my mother had kept. But never this clearly. Never like the dragon was speaking directly into my mind.
Voss's head snapped toward me. His silver eyes widened, just slightly. Just enough to tell me he'd felt it too—the resonance, the connection, the impossible fact that I'd understood his dragon.
Then the moment broke. The big conscript, recovered from his shock, snarled and lunged past me, shoving me again as he went.
This time I was ready. I grabbed the edge of his tunic as he passed, used his momentum to pull myself upright, and kept climbing.
Behind me, I felt Voss's eyes on my back.
I reached the Hatching Cavern at position thirty-six.
Thirty-six. Two slots to spare. I collapsed on the stone floor of the cavern mouth, gasping, my lungs screaming, my hands raw and bleeding from the obsidian. Around me, other survivors panted and wept and hugged each other.
Malachi found me a minute later, position twenty-one. He dropped to his knees beside me. "Sera. Sera, are you alright? I saw you fall—"
"I'm fine," I coughed. "I'm fine. Someone caught me."
"Who?"
I looked toward the cavern entrance, where the caldera rim was visible against the sky. The Shade dragon was gone. Voss was gone. But I could still feel the cold of that shadow around my wrist, like a brand.
"Nobody," I said. "It doesn't matter."
But it did matter. It mattered because Kaelen Voss had saved my life. It mattered because his dragon had spoken to me, and I had understood. It mattered because in that moment, when our eyes had met across the Scorch Stairs, I'd felt something shift in my chest—not my lungs, not my heart, but something deeper. Older.
Something that had been sleeping since the day my mother died.
Something that was waking up.
"Thirty-sixth," Malachi said, offering me a waterskin. "You did it, Sera. You're a Rider."
I took the waterskin. Drank. Felt the cool water soothe my raw throat.
"I'm a Rider," I repeated, and the words tasted like ash and possibility.
Outside the cavern, a dragon roared. Not an Ember. Not a Tempest.
A Shade.
And somewhere in the dark of the caldera, Kaelen Voss was listening.
*— End of Chapter One —*
Not a delicate one—the kind that rattles your ribs and tastes like copper and ash. I doubled over on the cobblestones, one hand pressed to the iron gate of Drakemoor Citadel, and let my lungs tear themselves apart for thirty long seconds.
Around me, three hundred other conscripts pretended not to notice. Some sneered. Most just looked relieved—one less competitor for the forty slots in the Rider cadre this year.
I straightened. Wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my too-large tunic. Felt the familiar burn settle back into my chest, a lodestone I'd carried since I was twelve.
"You're early," said a voice behind me.
I didn't turn. I knew that voice—dry, amused, the kind of tone that meant someone was about to be very unimpressed with me.
"Malachi," I said.
"Seraphina." He came to stand beside me, his dark hair already wind-tousled from the climb up the volcano road. At six-foot-two, broad-shouldered and healthy, he looked like he'd been born to ride a dragon. I looked like I'd been born to blow away in a strong breeze. "Your grandmother knows you're here?"
"Grandmother thinks I'm at the healing libraries in Thornhaven."
"She's going to kill you."
"Probably less painfully than this place will." I nodded at the gate. The iron was blackened, pitted with centuries of dragonfire. Beyond it, the Citadel rose in jagged tiers carved into the caldera of an extinct volcano—stone spires and glass domes and training yards where distant figures shouted and dragons roared. "Is it true? Forty slots this year?"
"Thirty-eight now." Malachi's smile faded. "Two didn't make the climb. One had a heart attack halfway up. The other slipped on the obsidian path. Fell four hundred feet."
I didn't flinch. I'd read the mortality rates. Drakemoor had a sixty-two percent attrition rate in the first year alone. Most conscripts didn't survive the first week.
"Then I'd better not waste time," I said, and pushed through the gate.
The Yard of Embers was exactly as the histories described—a natural amphitheater of black volcanic rock, open to the sky, with a raised dais at one end where the Wing Commanders sat on stone thrones. Above them, dragons perched on the caldera rim: enormous shapes of scaled muscle and leathery wing, their breath sending occasional plumes of smoke into the gray morning.
I counted seven. Seven fully grown dragons, each bonded to a Wing Commander. There were supposed to be nine.
"Two empty thrones," Malachi murmured, falling into step beside me. "Voss and Riven. Voss's dragon is still recovering from the border skirmish last winter. Riven…" He trailed off.
"Riven died in the Ashfall three months ago," I finished. I'd read every report. Every casualty list. Every scrap of information about Drakemoor I could get my hands on in the five years since my mother died. "They haven't found a replacement."
"Nobody replaces a Shade rider." Malachi's voice was quiet now. "Especially not Kaelen Voss."
I looked up at the empty throne on the far left of the dais. The stone was blacker than the others, veined with silver, and a single cloak of deepest indigo was draped over its back—unoccupied, but not forgotten.
Kaelen Voss. The youngest Wing Commander in Drakemoor's four-hundred-year history. Bonded to a Shade dragon—one of the rarest, most volatile breeds in existence. Shadow-wielder. Survivor of the Ashfall. The man who'd held the northern border alone for three days while the rest of the cadre retreated.
And the man whose father my mother had been accused of poisoning.
I pushed that thought away. Not today. Today was about surviving.
"Conscripts!" The voice boomed across the yard, amplified by dragonfire in the speaker's throat—Commander Yara Solis, Ember rider, head of the Rider cadre. She stood on the dais, a woman of fifty with skin like weathered leather and eyes the color of molten gold. "You stand before Drakemoor Citadel. You have survived the road. That is the easiest thing you will ever do here."
A murmur rippled through the crowd.
"Each year, we take forty of you into the Rider cadre. This year, we take thirty-eight." She paused, letting that sink in. "The rest will be assigned to infantry, healing, or scribe work. If you are lucky."
"If you are unlucky," she continued, "you will die on the Scorch Stairs."
She gestured to the far side of the yard, where a staircase of black obsidian rose into the caldera wall—two hundred steps, each one wide enough for three people, each one glistening with heat. At the top, I could see the dark mouth of a cave.
"The first trial," Solis said. "Climb the Scorch Stairs. Reach the Hatching Cavern. The first thirty-eight to arrive are Riders. Everyone else…" She smiled, and it was not a kind smile. "Well. The dragons eat well on Conscription Day."
I looked at Malachi. He looked at me.
"Your lungs—" he started.
"Will either hold or they won't." I started walking toward the stairs. "I didn't come all this way to quit before the first step."
The Scorch Stairs were worse than I'd imagined.
The obsidian was hot enough to burn through the soles of my boots by the tenth step. The air shimmered with heat, and with every breath I drew, my lungs protested—sharp, stabbing pain that made me see stars. Around me, conscripts jostled and shoved, climbing over each other in a desperate scramble. Someone fell, screaming, and was trampled before I could turn around.
I kept my eyes on the steps. One. Two. Three.
By the fiftieth step, my tunic was soaked through with sweat. My legs burned. My chest felt like someone had reached inside and squeezed my heart in a fist.
"Ninety-eight," I whispered to myself, counting down. "Ninety-seven. Ninety-six."
A roar shook the stairs.
I looked up. A dragon—an Ember, scales the color of burnt orange—was perched on the caldera wall above the stairs, its mouth open. Dragonfire poured down in a sheet of orange-white flame, and the conscripts on the upper stairs screamed.
"Move!" someone shouted. "It's the gauntlet! They fire every fifty steps!"
Of course they did. I'd read about the gauntlet. Reading about it and living it were two very different things.
I pressed myself against the caldera wall as the fire swept past. The heat was incredible—my hair singed at the ends, my exposed skin reddened. But the wall itself was cooler, sheltered by an overhang. I'd noticed it on the way in. A small detail. The kind of detail that kept people like me alive.
When the fire passed, I kept climbing. Faster now, because the pause had let a dozen people pass me, and I couldn't afford to lose ground.
One hundred and twenty steps. One hundred and thirty.
My vision was blurring at the edges. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, loud and desperate. My lungs were on fire—not metaphorically, but literally, like the dragonfire had gotten inside me and was burning me from within.
"Come on," I gasped. "Come on, Sera. Just a little more."
A hand grabbed my arm.
I looked up. A conscript—big, broad, male, with a face like a fist—was pulling me backward. "Out of my way, weakling," he snarled, and shoved me hard in the chest.
I fell backward. My hands slipped on the hot obsidian. I felt myself tipping, tipping, over the edge of the stairs—
And then something caught me.
Not a hand. A shadow.
It wrapped around my wrist like a living thing—cold, solid, impossibly strong—and yanked me back onto the stairs. I landed hard on my knees, palms burning, gasping.
The big conscript was staring. Staring past me, at something on the caldera rim.
I followed his gaze.
A dragon sat there. Not an Ember. Not a Tempest. This one was black—blacker than the obsidian, blacker than the space between stars—with scales that seemed to drink the light. Its wings were folded, but I could see the membrane was the color of a bruise, deep purple at the edges. Its eyes were silver, slitted, and fixed directly on me.
A Shade dragon.
And on its back, sitting straight and still as a statue, was a man.
He was tall, even hunched over the dragon's neck. Black hair pulled back from a face that looked like it had been carved from obsidian itself—high cheekbones, a jaw sharp enough to cut, eyes the same silver as the dragon's. He wore a black leather riding suit with silver thread at the cuffs, and a cloak of deepest indigo that matched the empty throne in the yard.
Kaelen Voss.
He was looking at me. Not at the stairs, not at the other conscripts—at me. His expression was unreadable, but there was something in his silver eyes… curiosity, maybe. Or recognition.
The shadow around my wrist dissolved. I flexed my fingers, feeling the cold linger.
Voss said something to his dragon. The dragon rumbled, a deep sound that I felt in my bones, and then—impossibly—I heard words. Not in the Common tongue. In the old language. Draconic.
*She smells like ash and sorrow, Kaelen. Like the one who healed you.*
I froze. I'd heard Draconic before—in books, in fragments, in the old recordings my mother had kept. But never this clearly. Never like the dragon was speaking directly into my mind.
Voss's head snapped toward me. His silver eyes widened, just slightly. Just enough to tell me he'd felt it too—the resonance, the connection, the impossible fact that I'd understood his dragon.
Then the moment broke. The big conscript, recovered from his shock, snarled and lunged past me, shoving me again as he went.
This time I was ready. I grabbed the edge of his tunic as he passed, used his momentum to pull myself upright, and kept climbing.
Behind me, I felt Voss's eyes on my back.
I reached the Hatching Cavern at position thirty-six.
Thirty-six. Two slots to spare. I collapsed on the stone floor of the cavern mouth, gasping, my lungs screaming, my hands raw and bleeding from the obsidian. Around me, other survivors panted and wept and hugged each other.
Malachi found me a minute later, position twenty-one. He dropped to his knees beside me. "Sera. Sera, are you alright? I saw you fall—"
"I'm fine," I coughed. "I'm fine. Someone caught me."
"Who?"
I looked toward the cavern entrance, where the caldera rim was visible against the sky. The Shade dragon was gone. Voss was gone. But I could still feel the cold of that shadow around my wrist, like a brand.
"Nobody," I said. "It doesn't matter."
But it did matter. It mattered because Kaelen Voss had saved my life. It mattered because his dragon had spoken to me, and I had understood. It mattered because in that moment, when our eyes had met across the Scorch Stairs, I'd felt something shift in my chest—not my lungs, not my heart, but something deeper. Older.
Something that had been sleeping since the day my mother died.
Something that was waking up.
"Thirty-sixth," Malachi said, offering me a waterskin. "You did it, Sera. You're a Rider."
I took the waterskin. Drank. Felt the cool water soothe my raw throat.
"I'm a Rider," I repeated, and the words tasted like ash and possibility.
Outside the cavern, a dragon roared. Not an Ember. Not a Tempest.
A Shade.
And somewhere in the dark of the caldera, Kaelen Voss was listening.
*— End of Chapter One —*
