Violet Sorrengail was already scrambling for the doors when the thunder cracked again.

She slipped on the rain-slick stone, caught herself, and hurried faster, shoulders hunched against the cold as the storm raged above her. The sky wasn’t a place she trusted. Dragons were terrifying enough without lightning splitting the clouds open around them. Whatever madness was happening overhead, she wanted no part of it.

Above her, that beautiful madness laughed.

She cut through the storm like she belonged to it. Her dragon banked sharply through the rain, morningstar tail swinging with lethal ease as lightning illuminated them both in stark flashes of white and pale grey. She threw her head back and laughed—wild, unrestrained, fearless—like the sky itself had never hurt anyone she loved.

“Would you fucking come down from there?” I yelled, even knowing the wind would tear the words apart before they reached her.

*The rest of the first-years were gone now, doors slamming shut behind them. Violet disappeared inside, safe and shaking, while the marked one climbed higher, daring the storm to match her.

Sgaeyl’s irritation brushed against my mind. She flies like she has nothing to lose.

“She flies like she’s always had something to protect,” I replied, already mounting the saddle. Sgaeyl launched, wings beating hard as we surged into the clouds.

The marked one spotted us immediately. Of course she did. She leaned forward instead of descending, laughter still on her lips as thunder rolled too close for comfort. She’d always been like this—even as a child—bright and reckless in ways the world never managed to punish out of her. I pulled Sgaeyl alongside her. “Enough,” I shouted. “Bring it down. Now.”

She finally turned, rain streaking her face, eyes alive with something dangerously close to joy. “You worry too much, Riorson.”

“I worry about consequences.”

A long beat passed. Then, deliberately, she tipped her dragon into a controlled descent. She listened. She always did—eventually.

As we dropped toward the flight line, memory pressed in just as heavy as the rain.

She hadn’t been born a rider. Not truly.

She’d grown up loving too easily, trusting too deeply. She noticed hunger before it was spoken, fear before it showed. She patched wounds with gentle hands and stayed when leaving would’ve been safer. Honest to a fault. Kind in ways the quadrant called weakness. She doted—on people, on animals, on me—like care itself was a form of defiance.

Everything a rider shouldn’t be.

While the rest of us learned to harden, she learned how to hold us together. When I learned silence, she learned how to sit beside it. When survival demanded cruelty, she chose kindness anyway.

She learned to hide it later. Buried it under scars and discipline and flight leathers.

But watching her now—laughing in a storm she should’ve feared—I knew the truth.

The most dangerous thing about her was never the dragon. It was the unbridled defiance. Her hair, unbound, soaked and free falling down her back like extinguished flames, that would shine like spun gold come the morning sun.

A part of me feared for her. For where her reckless love would lead her. The selfish part of me wanted her love to remain mine.

As soon as we touched down on the flight field, I whirled on her. “Are you mad?”