Fireborne (The Aurelian Cycle, #1)

by Rosaria Munda

each riding one of the other two breeds: Crissa and her skyfish are in the air above us, while Cor and his stormscourge glide below, bellowing ash

Pallor is an aurelian, a smaller breed known for being careful and maneuverable,

Moments like this, it hits me like it did the first time: that the life I have begun to think of as routine is, in fact, extraordinary.

her presence soft at the back of my mind. Hold. Be still. Not now. For as long as I can remember, Aela has been able to temper the feelings I couldn’t.

Tournament sparring is won by hits of unsparked dragonfire—a smoky substance called ash, which has enough heat to burn and blackens tourney armor on contact. The torso counts as a kill shot, the limbs as penalties; three penalties serve as a kill.

Lee and Pallor move with a perfect balance of fluidity and precision, never overshooting, never falling short, never holding back.

Crissa grows impatient, veers in a roundabout, and charges. Lee swerves left a split second before Pallor fires. Pallor’s first breath of ash is the one that wins the match: The front of Crissa’s cuirass blackens. Lee won without a single penalty.

Duck’s opening was wide; Power could have made a kill shot. Instead, Power went for a full-heat penalty. A long, slow roast. Power’s going to draw this out.

Annie flies like something out of the old order. She always has. The instincts that were trained, for me, by a childhood of watching dragons with their riders are, for her, instincts she was simply born with.

There are whistles of delight around us as the other riders realize what Annie’s doing. Height is always an advantage; gravity is a weapon. But the most obvious way to use it—descending from on high with double the speed of your opponent—is the kind of maneuver very few riders have the skill to pull off.

Aela’s wings are beating at full force, maximizing her speed in free fall; she is hurtling toward Darius. And then when they are in range, it happens in a blurring instant: Darius fires, she swerves, it misses, and she fires into an opening that only she can see. And then she’s hurtling past him, toward the Eyrie, and Darius is following behind. The front of his armor is blackened with a kill shot. Annie won her match in a little under two minutes.

“On the white aurelian?” The traditional description of Pallor’s color mutation, silver where most aurelians are shades of amber and gold.

Atreus’s post-revolutionary People’s Assembly held concerning thirty-two dragon eggs that had survived the Red Month. Should the eggs be destroyed? Should Callipolis do as neighboring Damos had done centuries before, and become dragonless and democratic? Or, if their dragons were hatched, and Callipolis remained an airborne nation, how would they decide which children would be offered to the dragon hatchlings for their Choosing?

“The families started allowing female riders?” “Desperate times,” Julia says mildly. But her lifted shoulder doesn’t bely the fact that she moved a mountain, and the smile that plays at her lips shows she knows she did. There’s something gladdening about the realization that, after all we’ve lost, this at least Julia gained. The next question is stranger, but I can’t fight my curiosity. “Have you had a ranking tournament, or . . . ?” Julia hesitates for the first time, then nods. “I’m Firstrider.”

Hanna Lund and the other patrician students I’ve been doing homework with in the library pass me a handmade card signed by most of the girls in the class. They’ve written a quote from the Aurelian Cycle inside: And as she turned, it was revealed by her tread that she was fireborne.

Two rules of tournament sparring that both of us know: first, that contact charges are off limits between dragons of different breeds during sporting events. Second, that whatever happens out of sight of the referee is considered fair game. If I go into those clouds, Eater will tackle Aela. He’s more than half her size. But if I wait, his lungs will recover.

though she’s gained the leverage to break free of Eater, she doesn’t. She claws her way up his torso, scrabbling with him arm and leg. Both dragons’ wings are beating madly, keeping us aloft and stalling, blocking each rider’s sight of the other as they lock in their embrace. Then Aela sinks her talons into the membrane of Eater’s inner wing. He shrieks, Power cries out, and Eater curls the wing into his side—and then, finally, as we begin to free-fall with only three wings holding two dragons aloft, Eater’s folded wing gives us an opening

It’s strange how you can fight your way to a door, even through it, without thinking about what lies on the other side.

Julia’s stormscourge is midsize for an adolescent, unusually slender, her wingspan exceptionally long.

The virtues of the old houses and their dragons are shorthands we’ve grown up knowing: Skyfish House, known for their moderation and mercy; Stormscourge, for their discipline and strength; Aurelian, for their judiciousness and learning.

For a second we just stare at each other, and then she tosses her head back, lets out a laugh of abandon, and breathes a word. It takes me a moment to understand that it’s a command, and it’s for Erinys. Erinys lifts her head like a wolf to the moon and fires. For a brief, blinding moment, sparked dragonfire warms the night like a beacon.

“Are we really such an idle threat, cousin?” she asks. “Even if it were just Erinys. One sparked dragon is enough to level a town.

“I think there’s more to this than questions of vengeance and birthright.”

Tonight, in a very special addition, we also welcome the thirty-two Guardians who have reached the final stages of their training.

“Will the Guardians of the Thirty-Second Order please rise when I call their name.” He begins with the lowest-ranked of the dragonriders, whose ranking was determined in qualifiers before the public tournaments began. Their names are followed by drakonym instead of surname, and modified by dragon breed.

I'm kind of upset there's supposedly 32 dragonriders, but we've only met like 6 of them

“Conspiracy theories find fertile ground where people are frightened.”

As I speak, I feel Annie’s fingers find mine again, roll them into hers on our knees beneath the table, and a feeling like dizziness comes over me. Hours left. And we’re still together, and she’s smiling. Smiling while she holds my hand.

We break apart when the bells begin to toll. Crissa groans, lowers her face onto my shoulder, her hair still spread across us both. As I recognize the bell’s tones, the blurred world snaps back into focus. “How is it already morning?” she asks. “Those aren’t striking the hour.” Crissa stills.

The bells are rhythmic, tolling in the patterned code we were taught to interpret as children but have never since had reason to use. Dragons. Attack.

they watch us kneel, they see the back of our heads, and they think we’ve given in. They don’t realize you can think from your knees just as well as from your feet.

that’s enough for me to know what happened. They saw no combat; Lee faced no one. But what they did see was almost certainly worse.

Instead of staring at her feet, the girl was looking up. Past him. He followed her gaze and saw that she was looking at an aurelian, and that the aurelian was looking back at her. He’d heard it said before that a kind of magic came with a dragon Choosing you—that the dragon bound you to it, that you formed a connection that was deep and full of an old magic.

he didn’t stop to wonder what was nudging him until he turned to acknowledge it. Then he looked up, into a pair of great, liquid black eyes, and everything around him stood still.

I’d follow you into hell

Do they have hell in this world? I don't think real-world religions would be what the fantasy-world characters would worship

As much as I come away from these sessions furious—furious with Power, furious with the memories, furious—there’s also triumph. Because for the first time in my life, the old wounds are useful.

Lee curls his hands into fists and looks down at the text beneath them. For a moment he’s silent, but then he starts listing words aloud, throwing out the Callish equivalents of each word without any effort to make sense of them: “The enemy, has, walls, rushes, in the deep, away from, summit—” Tyndale throws an eraser at Lee’s head.

“I should tell you,” Tyndale says, turning back to us abruptly. He holds up his own copy of the poem, an old leather-bound version that looks like he’s had it since his own school days. “The Aurelian Cycle was officially banned today, by the Censorship Committee.”

It was already restricted. Now it’s being purged.” “Why?” Lotus asks. Tyndale grimaces. “It was . . . decided . . . that the poem promotes values that are contrary to the national interest.”

“Don’t tell me a few dead fishermen were enough to turn your stomach.” “Unarmed civilians—” “Casualties of war. An unfortunate price.”

These are not my people; I am not one of them. Not anymore. These people understand justice only as revenge. They are undeserving, ignorant, and cruel.

By the end, he is rigidly upright. Others might perceive this as a sign of pride, but I know the truth. It is the posture of someone receiving a beating and determined to get through it on their feet.

“Yes. Large numbers of people can be saved . . . and heaviest losses can be contained within certain populations.” Certain populations.

it’s—it’s objective, it has to be, it has nothing to do with who you know—” “And objectively, unskilled laborers don’t deserve to live as much as everybody else. I get it, Annie.”

We’ll lie about it, just as the dragonlords did. After that, are there differences? Do the justifications for our choices matter to those who starve?

Then he heard Atreus’s command. It had been said so quietly, the soldier thought at first he had misheard it. “Take the boy into the hallway,” Atreus murmured, “and slit his throat.”

We’ve reached the bounds of reason and have come to the threshold of belief. I would not do her the dishonor of imagining that her beliefs have been any less hard-won than mine.

A sound fills the air: my own cry, wild with despair, in time with Pallor’s blast. It feels as though I, like Pallor, am igniting. He twists down, inhales, and fires.

Then the silence breaks. An inhuman, hair-raising keen goes up, unearthly, alien, full of unbearable sorrow. Though it’s a sound I’ve only ever read about, I know it at once. It is the sound of a dragon who has felt the bond with its rider break in the only way it can be broken. It takes the breath out of my lungs. Pallor recovers before I do, driving us forward, firing again to finish what we’ve started. The grieving stormscourge barely resists.