Aero

You were born to a house of dragon-riders, but when every young dragon refuses you, your family decides your failure is worth killing for.

Veyr is an old kingdom kept together by sworn houses, useful marriages, unpaid debts, and the king’s soldiers. Crownreach rules from the center, but it does not handle the White Coast the way it handles the rest of the realm.

The coast has dragons.

Eggs turn up across Veyr in rare places: old battlefields, cliff nests, drowned stone, and the mouths of caves no one enters twice. On the White Coast, they are found often enough to make its families powerful. They guard the nests, raise the younglings, and send riders to the crown when the treaties require it.

You are the child of one of those families. Your father is a lord commander with a dragon of his own, and your choosing is supposed to confirm what everyone already believes: that his bloodline still produces riders worth fearing.

When the next clutch is brought beneath the cliffs, the young dragons are shown to candidates from across Veyr.

One by one, they refuse you.

No one can explain it. No one can hide it.

Crownreach sees a weakness. The coastal houses see an embarrassment. Your father sees a threat to the name he has built his life around. Before the shame can leave the coast, your own family decides you are easier to bury than defend.

You run below the cliffs, into sea passages sealed before the crown’s treaties were written. There, under the White Coast, you find the thing your family feared more than disgrace.

"You are terrified of what I am going to do to them, but the only thing that should frighten you is how easily I would do it to myself if you commanded it. I would turn my own heart into grease on your boots if you said it was in your way. Do not beg me to be merciful to your enemies when you are the one holding the match. Just tell me to burn them, and watch how quickly the night turns white."

Aero is the name the White Coast buried.

He was born before the treaties, before the choosing rites, before Crownreach turned dragon-bonding into law. In the old records, dragons of his bloodline did not wait to be claimed. They spoke for themselves, made bargains, broke th