Chapter 17: The Devshirme Protocols
A concussive blast of white noise tore through the barracks.
The alarm was a Vreth’kaan command embedded in a siren, a single sustained syllable bypassing the ears to detonate directly inside the skull. Eshiren’s body hurled itself off the stone slab before his brain registered consciousness. His knees hit the floor. The suppression collar around his throat vibrated so that his teeth cracked against each other, flooding his mouth with the taste of copper.
Around him, three hundred recruits scrambled in the grey half-light. The barracks had no bunks. No blankets. The lower rings of the Academy offered a slab of volcanic stone per recruit, stacked in rows along a cavernous hall whose ceiling vanished into shadow. The artificial gravity pressed down on everything with that same relentless, planetary grip, turning every movement into an act of physical defiance against the weight of Earthgon itself.
Eshiren stood. His calves screamed. His recovering core had spent the night cycling mana through damaged muscle fibres, burning through what little caloric reserve remained from his last meal on Azaria. That meal had been a half-portion of stale bread and dried fish, shared with Senreno in a tunnel that no longer existed.
He was starving.
The recruits filed through the barracks exit in a column of two. Nobody spoke. The siren had stripped language from them, leaving only the animal urgency to move, to obey, to avoid becoming the slowest body in the herd. Eshiren slotted himself into the column and kept his head down, watching the boots of the Dragon youth ahead of him. Crimson-scaled ankles. Thick, clawed toes gripping the stone with an ease his human-shaped feet could not replicate.
It was massive. Carved into Earthgon’s crust, the circular amphitheatre dominated the Academy’s second ring and dwarfed Sector Four’s entire market district. Heat bled from the raw basalt. High above them, the artificial sky’s geometric bands and orbital platforms cast harsh, mechanical shadows across the stone.
An instructor waited at the centre.
She was enormous. Seven feet of scaled muscle wrapped in the black uniform of the Academy’s training cadre, her horns curving back from her temples in elegant, polished arcs. She carried no weapon. Her hands rested behind her back, fingers interlaced, and her posture communicated a total, unshakeable authority that made even the largest recruits shrink slightly as they filed into formation.
"Formation. Rows of twenty. Arms extended. Hold."
The command was spoken in low Vreth’kaan. The words carried no magical force, but the recruits obeyed with the frantic speed of creatures who understood what happened to those who hesitated. Eshiren found a spot in the seventh row and extended his arms outward, palms facing the basalt sky. The position seemed simple. Hold your arms out. Shoulders level. Fingers straight.
Under Earthgon’s gravity, the position was agony within thirty seconds.
His arms weighed three times what they should. The suppression collar siphoned ambient mana from his muscles, denying him the passive reinforcement that every Dragon took for granted. The other recruits sweated crimson-tinged mist from their pores, a natural byproduct of draconic thermoregulation that vented excess heat through the blood. Eshiren’s sweat ran clear at first. Then, as his body strained harder, a faint golden shimmer threaded through the droplets on his forearms.
Eshiren forced the gold down. He dug his nails into his palms until the skin broke, locking the cage tighter.
Don’t glow. You cannot glow here.
The shimmer receded, retreating beneath his skin, and ordinary, colourless sweat replaced it. The effort of suppression cost him a spike of pain behind his left eye that made his vision blur for two full heartbeats.
Minutes ground past. Five, ten, twenty. Pacing the rows with metronomic precision, the instructor’s boots struck the basalt in a rhythm that became the only measure of time. She didn’t shout or threaten. When a recruit’s arms began to tremble and drop, she simply walked to them, gripped the offending limb, and snapped it at the elbow in a single, efficient motion. The sharp crack of bone bounced across the basalt courtyard, followed by the recruit’s scream, before the instructor released the ruined arm and moved on.
No medic arrived. The broken recruit was expected to heal on their own or die. Dragon physiology could mend a fractured bone in hours if sufficient mana and calories were available. For a starving conscript in the lower rings, it could take days.
In the row ahead of Eshiren, a girl collapsed.
She was smaller than the others. Thinner. Her scales were a dull, tarnished silver rather than the vibrant crimsons and obsidians of the pureblood clutches, and her horns were stunted, barely protruding from her hairline. She dropped to one knee, her arms folding inward against her chest, and her breathing came in shallow, rapid gasps that rattled with exhaustion.
The instructor turned.
Every instinct Eshiren possessed from fifteen years in Sector Four screamed at him to reach forward, grab the girl’s shoulder, haul her upright. He had dragged Lyalina through rubble. He had carried Senreno across a collapsing tunnel. The reflex to protect someone weaker was wired into his hands, his spine, the fundamental architecture of his nervous system.
He did not move.
The girl would die if he touched her. Helping a fallen recruit in the courtyard was an admission of weakness by association, marking both parties for escalated punishment. Eshiren had watched the Dragon youth on the upper ring throw a boy into the abyss yesterday for less. Compassion was a currency that bought execution here.
He kept his arms extended. His shoulders burned. The muscles in his back seized and released in spasms that made his whole torso shudder.
The instructor reached the girl and looked down at her. No anger. No contempt. The gaze was purely evaluative, a technician assessing a defective component.
"Stand, Conscript."
The girl pushed herself upright. Her left leg buckled. She caught herself on the basalt with her palm, the skin shredding against the rough stone, leaving a smear of silver-tinted blood. She stood again. This time she held it, swaying, her jaw locked so tightly that the tendons in her neck stood out like cables.
She did not make a sound. The instructor moved on.
Eshiren filed the girl’s face into memory. Dull silver scales. Stunted horns. A body built for endurance rather than brute force, lean and angular where the purebloods were and broad. And silence. Absolute, practiced, unbreakable silence under pain that would have made a grown Azarian soldier scream.
She stayed quiet. This was familiar territory for her.
The identity stripping began at midday.
Kneeling in the courtyard in perfect rows, the recruits ground their knees against the hot basalt. Earthgon’s artificial sky held the sun immobile; light remained at the same harsh, overhead angle, eliminating shadows to ensure every face was fully exposed. Walking the first row, the instructor stopped at each recruit.
"Designation: Seven-Seven-Three. Clutch Morrekhan. Acknowledge."
"Seven-Seven-Three," the recruit barked. Immediate. Mechanical.
The instructor moved to the next. "Designation: Seven-Seven-Four. Clutch Drovaan. Acknowledge."
"Seven-Seven-Four."
Down the line. Name after name stripped away, replaced by numerical sequences that carried no history, no lineage, no identity. The recruits accepted it with the dead-eyed compliance of creatures who understood that individuality was the first casualty of the Academy’s intake process.
Eshiren knelt in the seventh row. His number was coming. He had been told it once during the registration process yesterday, a string of digits stamped onto the iron collar around his neck. Seven-Nine-One. He repeated it in his head as the instructor worked methodically through the rows. Seven-Nine-One. Seven-Nine-One.
The instructor reached him.
"Designation: Seven-Nine-One. House Vesh, Disgraced. Acknowledge."
Opening his mouth, Eshiren let his lips form the number. A single syllable rasped from his throat.
And his brain, clouded by twenty hours of starvation and physical duress, betrayed him. Instead of completing the numerical designation, his Azarian survival instinct fired a correction. The name that rose to his tongue was the one Senreno had given him at birth, the one whispered in Ohn-Thari over a cradle in a bombed-out apartment in Sector Four. The syllable hung in the air for a fraction of a second, unfinished, but the hesitation was enough.
The instructor’s eyes locked onto him.
"You hesitated."
"I—"
"KNEEL."
The Vreth’kaan demand hit Eshiren like a sledgehammer to the base of the spine. This was a real demand, carrying the full weight of draconic authority. Knees buckling, his spine compressed until his forehead struck the basalt with a crack that split the skin above his right eyebrow. Blood poured down his face in a hot, copper-scented rush. The suppression collar amplified the compulsion, channelling the instructor’s will directly into his nervous system to override his motor control with absolute, mechanical precision.
His body was no longer his own.
He lay face-down on the stone, trembling, the demand pinning him like a physical weight laid across his back. The other recruits stared straight ahead. Nobody looked at him. Looking at a punished recruit was itself a punishable offence.
The instructor crouched beside him. "That name belongs to whatever you were before you entered this Academy," she said. "Whatever you were is dead. You are Seven-Nine-One. Answer to it. Think of yourself as it. Hesitate again, and I will remove the thing that hesitated."
She stood. "Isolation block. No rations. You will remain until you have forgotten the name your weakness tried to speak."
Two armoured sentinels materialized from the edges of the courtyard. They gripped Eshiren under the arms, hauling him upright with the casual force of machines handling cargo. His boots dragged along the basalt as they carried him away from the formation, past the rows of kneeling recruits, through a narrow archway cut into the chasm wall.
The isolation block narrowed as they descended into the second ring’s interior. The air grew hotter. Ambient mana pressed against Eshiren’s skin like wet cloth. Finally, the sentinels stopped before a door made from a single slab of volcanic glass. Its surface was smooth and opaque.
They shoved him inside.
The cell measured six feet by four feet. Without a light source or ventilation, the volcanic glass door sealed behind him with a hiss of pressurized air. Every sound from the corridor vanished as if someone had severed his auditory nerves. darkness pressed in. Stifling heat radiated from walls that hummed with a low-frequency vibration, interfering with his mana circulation to make the suppression collar’s effects even more devastating.
Eshiren pressed his back against the far wall and slid down to the floor. The cut on his forehead throbbed. Blood dripped down his nose and fell onto his thigh in slow, rhythmic drops that he could feel but not see.
His stomach was a hollow, collapsing void. The last real food he had eaten was Senreno’s dried fish, nearly forty hours ago. His Dragon physiology demanded enormous caloric intake to fuel its passive healing and mana cycling. Without food, the healing would consume his own muscle tissue. His body would eat itself to survive.
In the perfect darkness, with his name taken and his body failing, Eshiren pressed his fists against the hot stone floor and tried to remember what Senreno’s voice sounded like when he said the word ember.
The memory slipped through his fingers like smoke.
The door did not open.
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