Chapter 1 - The Blood on the Dirt
Colonel Maro hit the training yard dirt with enough force to knock the wind clean out of him. Kestrel reared to his full height above the fallen man, his vast wings snapping open with a crack that echoed off the academy’s stone walls like a second thunderclap.
It was the fiftieth rejection in seven days. And this time, it had drawn blood.
Three long claw marks raked across the colonel's forearm, right where he'd tried one final time to force a thick, iron-reinforced saddle strap over Kestrel's shoulder. Every recruit and instructor watching from the fence rail went dead silent — the kind of suffocating silence that settles over a crowd once everyone privately agrees they've just watched something go terribly wrong.
Winn watched from the stable doorway, a wooden pitchfork still clutched in her dirt-stained hands. She was close enough to see something in Kestrel's stance that none of the panicked instructors seemed to notice: a subtle stiffness in his crimson shoulders that looked less like blind rage and more like sheer disgust — aimed with startling precision at Colonel Maro rather than the yard in general.
She had cleaned this dragon's pen for two years without him so much as glancing at her twice. In that time, she had learned the small, unspoken differences between a beast refusing a rider and a dragon actively rejecting one. The second was far rarer, far more violent, and far more deliberate than the academy's official reports ever recorded.
"Get the chains!" someone screamed from the guard tower. "Restrain him!"
Before the guards could mobilize, Chancellor Reev arrived. He walked slowly, unhurried, the way a man arrives when he’s been expecting exactly this outcome. He surveyed the bleeding colonel clutching his arm on the ground and the still-panting red dragon with an expression Winn could only describe as satisfaction.
"Fifty riders in seven days," Reev said, his voice carrying clearly across the yard. "Each one more qualified than the last, and each met with the same senseless violence. I believe the High Council has seen more than enough to classify this animal as an irredeemable public danger."
Nobody argued with him. Not even Colonel Maro, who was being dragged away by medics, glaring at the beast with venom in his eyes.
Kestrel had arrived at the Highcrest Academy three years ago — captured as a fully grown wild dragon after a hunting party found him circling a remote northern valley for weeks without explanation. Every rider assigned to him since had failed, usually within hours. The academy's official logs contained exactly two paragraphs on him: both clinical, highlighting his untamable aggression, with nothing at all about why a dragon capable of leveling a fortress had never once hurt anyone badly enough to require more than a bandage — until today.
May you like
Winn had always suspected there was restraint behind his fire. I have swept this yard every morning for two years and never said a word about what I actually notice, Winn thought, watching Reev construct a narrative to destroy a creature no one cared to understand. And standing here today, I feel a rage I barely recognize as my own.
She said nothing. Stable girls didn't contradict chancellors. She turned back to her work, jaw set tight, her hands trembling with a sudden, dangerous resolve.
