For the first time in his life, Kael, the one they called the Dragon, did not know what to do.
He stood at the threshold of the hut, one massive hand resting against the doorframe, Above, through a break in the treeline, two sky dragons circled lazily — great winged creatures whose scales caught the firelight
He thought about why his people called him what they called him.
It wasn't his size, though the gods had been generous with that. It wasn't the hair — that deep volcanic orange that fell past his shoulders, the precise color of dragonfire caught in the throat before it becomes something catastrophic. No. They called him the Dragon because of what fire was to his people. Not destruction. Purpose. Fire warmed the cold. Fire cooked the meat. Fire pushed back the darkness at the forest's edge where things with too many teeth waited patiently. He had always been the one to carry that flame — to feed it, protect it, be it.
Kael. The Dragon. Protector. Provider. Servant of his people.He didn't feel like any of those things tonight.
There were other clans scattered across the world — the Stone Clan in their mountain halls, the Tide Clan along salt-bitten coasts, the Green Clan deep in living forests. Each tended their piece of the earth faithfully. They did not always love one another, but they held to the covenant: keep your corner of the world breathing, and the world keeps you.
Then there was the Rain Clan.
They lived above it all, literally — in a kingdom built from stormcloud and arrogance,They drank. They feasted. They laughed too loudly and slept too late, and when they grew bored or volatile — which was often — the weather below paid for it. Storms without season. Hail that shattered harvests. Floods that swallowed villages whole. cruelty dressed in clouds.
Kael had known all of this.He had married her anyway.
Even standing outside his own home like a stranger, the thought of Sorra rearranged something behind his ribs. He had loved her.For their marriage she had descended from the cloud kingdom, leaving behind a sky full of careless, glittering people who never once considered what their storms did to the world below. The Fire Clan had watched her arrival in silence. They were not a cruel people, but they were a long-memoried one — they remembered every flooded field.They had given her a chance because Kael asked it of them.
She had not made it easy.Nearly a year had passed, and the hut told the story plainly.
He pushed open the door.
The hearth had burned down to sullen embers — no one had fed it. Clay pots sat empty and unwashed. A fur lay pooled on the floor like something that had surrendered. And there was Sorra, stretched across the bench in the low amber half-dark, one arm draped over her eyes, a wine skin balanced on her stomach with the ease of long practice. Three empty ones nearby.
*Grief, wearing the costume of indifference.*He understood it. She had not chosen this earth — the woodsmoke, the drums at dawn, the elders who looked at her like an unhealed wound. She had chosen him, and choosing him had cost her everything she'd ever known. The sky. The lightness. Her people.
Understanding it did not make it survivable.
Because his people were no longer quiet about it. they were saying it now, openly.
He has been enchanted. He is no longer the Dragon.
In the Fire Clan, those were not careless words. Lately Kael had noticed his own dragon tracking Sorra across the yard, smoke curling slow from its nostrils, neck scales tightening the way they did before a burn. It hadn't moved against her. But it was thinking about it. He could feel it
He looked at his wife in the wreckage of the home she couldn't be bothered to inhabit.
The fire in his chest — the one that had always driven him to lead, to protect, to build — flickered in a way it never had before.
His fist closed. The old leather of his wrist brace creaked.He crossed the hut in four steps and pulled the wine skin from her hands with a quiet, immovable firmness.
"Give me that drink." "We need to talk."