Lord of Dragons

The dragon egg is not supposed to be warm.

Imina Qar feels the lie the moment her palm settles against the mottled shell, because warmth in the aerie is a language—vents exhale it in measured sighs, ward-stones drink it, and dragons lend it only when they mean to be known. This heat comes in pulses, precise and climbing, and the chalky scale-dust on her fingertips brightens to a faint glow that makes her stomach go tight.

She is a scale-scribe, not a handler. Her work is meant to stay on the safe side of stone: copying old shed-scales onto vellum, translating the hairline grooves that record a dragon’s vows, filing them in the basalt archive niche behind the vent-grate where the air tastes of salt and iron. She tells herself she likes the order of it. She tells herself that after last winter—after her brother’s mind went blank in the street when the binding flickered—she will do anything to keep the city from tasting mindfire again.

Boots hit the stairwell landing below. Three sets. No hurry, which is worse; only the Order of Ashen Oath climbs like they own the air.

Varek Soryn arrives in the corridor mouth with ash on his coat seams and a soot-gray cuff fused around his forearm, runes biting his skin where the metal meets flesh. He does not look at the egg at first. He looks at Imina’s hand, at the faint crescent of pale dust that has already printed itself into her palm.

“The Tithe is tightening,” he says, voice roughened by smoke offerings. “The dragons are resisting. We secure what hatches before it chooses a wrong allegiance.”

The Order enforces the Tithe of Breath to keep the cliff-city safe: a binding that stores dragon breath-sparks in stone to smother mindfire. Everyone knows the cost, even if most pretend not to. Dragons go quieter each decade. Their eyes dim. Their tempers shorten.

Behind Varek, the corridor’s vent-grates exhale a hotter draft, and somewhere deeper in the roost-stones a massive body shifts—Sableth, the ancient cliff-dragon, listening. The egg’s pulse accelerates until it matches Imina’s heart, and the glow in her palm refuses to fade.

Varek steps closer, close enough that the air between them tastes scorched. “Give it to me, Scribe.”

Imina’s fingers tighten, not from bravery but from a sudden, terrible clarity: if she surrenders the egg, the Order will own whatever it becomes—and if she keeps it, the bond-mark on her skin will betray her in a corridor with nowhere to run.