Chapter 15: The Gate of Bones
The cane struck the blade.
It was an unremarkable stick of dark wood. The varnish had worn away. Its handle formed a simple iron curve, polished by decades of a man dragging his ruined leg across the galaxy. It connected with Krazmakor’s ice-blade at the precise angle necessary to deflect rather than block, redirecting the killing edge six inches to the left.
The blade buried itself in the cobblestones beside Eshiren’s skull. The frozen mana hissed against the stone and cracked it.
Krazmakor’s head snapped toward the source.
An old dragon stood at the edge of the square.
Leaning on the cane with both hands, he settled his weight onto the wood as though he had carried the galaxy’s exhaustion since the First Age. The instructor’s posture sagged. A permanently locked left knee bent at fifteen degrees, giving him a lurching stance built from mechanical damage instead of age. Faded black Academy robes draped over his frame, their silver trim soaked with spilled mana-wine at the cuffs.
Deep folds of weathered, stone-like skin mapped a history of expressions he no longer bothered to make. This face carried the immense, geologic age of an ancient creature. He looked profoundly bored.
He took a drink from a battered flask he held in his free hand. Swallowed. Grimaced.
"Terrible vintage," he said to no one. "They water it down on the frontier worlds."
"Vretbor." Krazmakor’s voice was stripped to its coldest register. "You are out of your jurisdiction."
"I’m always out of my jurisdiction. It’s the only interesting place to be." Vretbor took another drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His gaze tracked from Krazmakor’s cracked armour to the blood on his lip to the swelling around his eye. "You look terrible, Your Highness. Did you fight a building, or did the building fight you?"
"This creature attacked an Inquisition detail, destroyed Imperial property, and interfered with a sanctioned execution. He is mine to dispose of."
Vretbor looked down at Eshiren.
The boy lay face-down on the cobblestones, his golden scars dark, his breathing shallow and uneven. The circle of restored stone beneath his mouth pulsed with faint, warm light. Vretbor’s pale eyes lingered on that circle. On the golden veins tracing the boy’s hands. On the specific shade of amber that still glowed, faintly, beneath his closed eyelids.
The old dragon’s grip on his cane tightened. A microscopic twitch disturbed the folds around his eyes, vanishing before it could fully register, buried under six hundred years of practised indifference.
The instructor exhaled a long breath. "So she actually did it," Vretbor murmured to himself, shaping the quiet realization into language before discarding it.
He straightened. The cane tapped the cobblestones twice. Sharp. Authoritative.
"Imperial Conscription Statute, Section Gorr-Threnn, Subsection Twelve." Vretbor’s voice changed. The gruff, wine-soaked drawl hardened into something older. Military. The cadence of a man who had once given orders that moved armies. "Any non-dragon entity demonstrating cultivator-grade combat capability in an Imperial engagement zone may be claimed as a Conscript by a licensed Academy Instructor for evaluation, training, and deployment. The claim supersedes all local jurisdictions, including Inquisitorial authority."
Silence filled the freezing square. Krazmakor’s hands curled into tight fists.
"You cannot—"
"I can. I just did." Vretbor produced a small crystal disc from his robe and pressed his thumb against it. The disc flared with pale light and emitted a low, resonant chime. "Conscription claim registered. Timestamp locked. The Gorr-Thrennakh relay will have it on file within three minutes. If you kill this boy now, you will be executing an Academy Conscript, which requires written authorisation from the Dragon God himself." He paused. "Would you like to call your father and explain why you needed his permission to kill a slum child?"
The silence that followed was the most dangerous silence Eshiren had heard. He was conscious. Barely. His cheek pressed against the cold stone, and his vision was a narrow slit of grey light in which Krazmakor’s boots and Vretbor’s cane occupied the same frame. The ice-blade was still embedded in the ground two inches from his ear.
Krazmakor’s hand trembled. The ice-blade hummed.
"He has Dragon blood," Krazmakor said. The words came out low, each one bitten off at the edges. "I can feel it. He carries the royal bloodline. That is a capital offence. Cross-breeding is—"
"Punishable by execution of both parties and the destruction of the offspring. Yes. I’ve read the statute." Vretbor took another drink. "I’ve also read the addendum that Kzar-Gorthennakk added in Turn 3: ’All exceptions require the Dragon God’s personal adjudication.’ Which means the decision belongs solely to your father. Executing him here is forbidden. Murdering him today would be political suicide. Doing it in front of—" He gestured with the flask at the crowd. Several hundred Azarians still stood at the square’s perimeter, watching. "—an audience that just saw you bleed from the fist of a fifteen-year-old, would be even worse."
Frost crackled across Krazmakor’s cracked armor. His violent aura flared brighter, driving the ambient temperature down past freezing as the prince ground his teeth together in silent fury.
"He humiliated me."
"He did." Vretbor’s voice carried no sympathy. "And the Empire’s response to humiliation is not to murder the source in a public square. It is to bring the source to Earthgon, put it through the Academy, and prove that Imperial superiority is earned, not inherited." He paused. "Unless you’d prefer the narrative that a Dragon Prince was beaten by an untrained half-breed and responded by killing an unconscious boy on the ground. That would make an excellent story for your siblings."
Mentioning his siblings struck a raw nerve. Krazmakor’s expression smoothed into a calculated, political mask. Sudden clarity hit him. Vretbor had trapped him in a public game he couldn’t win.
Vretbor had found the pressure point. Krazmakor’s terror of being replaced. His desperate, pathological need to appear perfect in his father’s eyes. If he killed Eshiren here, the story would reach Earthgon before the blood dried, and the story would not be about a prince defending the Empire. It would be about a prince who panicked.
The ice-blade dissolved. The frozen mana dispersed into the air in a plume of white vapour.
"Take him," Krazmakor said. His voice was flat. Empty. The voice of a boy sealing a wound by cauterising it. "But know this, Vretbor. When he arrives at the Academy, he is mine. I will break him in every arena, every examination, every trial the curriculum offers. I will strip him down to the bone and prove that he is nothing. And when I am finished, I will present what remains to my father and let him decide what to do with the scraps."
"Looking forward to it." Vretbor drained the flask. "Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a student to collect."
Eshiren woke to the taste of mana-wine being poured between his teeth.
He coughed. The liquid burned, acrid and potent, and his body absorbed the mana it carried with the blind desperation of a man drowning in air. His golden scars flickered. The veins on his hands pulsed once, faintly, then stabilised.
His eyes opened. An old dragon’s face hovered above him, creased and unimpressed.
"You’re awake. Wonderful. Try not to bleed on my robes, they’re the only clean pair I have."
"Who—"
"Vretbor. Academy Instructor. Your new owner, legally speaking. I just conscripted you, which means you belong to the Empire’s educational system rather than its penal system. Congratulations. Your life expectancy just increased from about four minutes to about four years, depending on how stupid you are."
Eshiren tried to sit up. His arms shook. The Golden Magic was gone, retreated so deep into his biology that he couldn’t feel its warmth. What remained was the hollow, scraped-out sensation of a body that had been used as fuel.
"My father—"
"The rebel." Vretbor dropped the sarcasm, adopting a slightly softer tone. "He goes to a labour camp instead of the execution block. That was part of the deal."
"What deal?"
"The one where you come to Earthgon and spend the next several years pretending to be a loyal servant of the Empire, and in exchange, the Empire doesn’t kill the man who raised you." Vretbor stood, leaning heavily on his cane. "It’s a terrible deal. You should take it."
Eshiren turned his head. Across the ruined square, two Inquisitors dragged Senreno toward an armored transport. Chains bound the resistance leader’s wrists. The maimed leg dragged uselessly across the cobblestones, while Senreno kept his face pointed at the ground.
As if sensing the gaze, Senreno stopped. The Inquisitors pulled at his chains. He didn’t move. His head lifted, and across forty feet of ruined cobblestones and shattered timber, his good eye found Eshiren.
Senreno nodded.
One nod. Slow and deliberate. The way he nodded when he said eat your food or keep your head down or I love you without using any of those words. The nod said: survive. It said: destroy them from the inside. It said: find your sister.
The Inquisitors pulled him forward. He went. He didn’t look back.
Eshiren’s hand closed around the pendant in his pocket. The wood was warm. The crooked branches pressed into his palm.
"I’ll take the deal," he said.
A ground-bridge tore open in the centre of the square. The rift rose two metres tall. Its edges shimmered with compressed spatial energy that smelled strongly of ozone and iron. Warm, golden-white light poured through the vertical rift, replacing Azaria’s grey smog with the vibrant illumination of a living atmosphere.
Vretbor stepped through first. His cane struck a surface on the other side that rang like crystal.
Eshiren followed.
He stumbled out of the spatial tear onto a vast platform made of crystallised dragon-bone. The surface felt smooth. It pulsed with deep veins of molten mana flowing beneath his boots. This massive landing pad stretched for an entire city block, bordered by towering bone-crystal spires that pierced a strange, alien sky.
The sky.
Eshiren looked up, and his lungs forgot how to function.
Two suns hung in the firmament. One was the deep, burnt orange of dying iron. The other was white-gold and smaller, orbiting its companion in a slow, visible arc. Between them, the sky was not blue. It was violet. Deep, cosmic violet streaked with bands of crystallised atmospheric mana that caught the twin sunlight and fractured it into colours that Azarian eyes had no names for.
The air was thick. Heavy with raw, unprocessed mana that pressed against his skin and sank into his pores with each breath. After fifteen years of breathing the depleted atmosphere of a conquered world, the density was overwhelming. His draconic blood surged. His golden scars flared once, involuntarily, as the ancient power inside him tasted the air and woke.
Distant mountains dominated the horizon. These peaks consisted of fossilised dragon-bone, forming the remains of creatures so colossal they shaped the continent’s geology. Wide rivers of liquid mana wound between the skeletal ranges, casting a pale blue glow across the deep valleys. Eshiren felt small. Immense heights and impossible widths warped his sense of perspective, reducing his massive landing platform to a mere speck in a landscape built for gods.
Earthgon. The Dragon Homeworld.
Behind him, the ground-bridge sealed with a sound like a closing fist.
A massive gate stood open ahead of them. Carved directly into the base of the nearest bone-crystal spire, the forty-foot entrance was framed by the jagged, fossilised teeth of a leviathan that had perished before civilization existed. Three Vreth’kaan words burned above the archway in cold violet fire:
Gorr-Threnn Muhzakaan.
Where the Weak are Made Useful.
The Dragon Academy.
Vretbor leaned on his cane beside the gate and gestured with his flask.
"Welcome to the worst years of your life, boy."
The gates closed behind him.
Comments