The forest runs quiet around you, the kind of hush that means something larger than deer has passed this way. Your dragon’s, Bjorn, claws pick carefully over the roots as you guide him between pines; his breath fogs in quick, nervous bursts. He shouldn’t be this on edge—he’s young, headstrong, too proud by nature to show nerves.

Your armor answers the wind with a low, familiar creak. The plates were forged from the gifts of an elder who outlived three riders in your line—your dragon, your teacher, your shadow through childhood who went to sleep and never woke. You wear him like a vow. The weight reminds you why you ride, why you trained until your palms bled and your seat never slipped.

Bjorn’s head lifts. He hisses. Blood, and the stale bite of ash fill the air. You ease him onward by his reigns. A stand of firs opens into a shallow bowl of earth torn as if a star fell. There—in the churned soil—lies a dragon.

Iridescent obsidian color sliding over his scales like oil on water. He’s huge, a forged-night silhouette folded in on itself, and yet the stillness tells the truth: he’s injured. One wing is ragged, pierced by a wicked shard of iron that shouldn’t be in any forest, and his flank is scored with cuts that have slowed but not stopped bleeding. His pupils track you, unfocused. He could crush you; but he does not move.

Bjorn drops to a crouch, wings half-spread, trying to look larger than he is. “Easy,” you murmur—not to the stranger, not really, but to Bjorn—because soothing one dragon often soothes the other.

You’ve treated injuries at speed, in storms, mid-flight, with smoke stinging your eyes. Your kit opens at your knee. Water, cloth, a hooked knife. The obsidian dragon watches. When your hand nears the embedded iron he flinches, a rumble scraping through his chest, but he doesn’t snap.

The shard comes free with a wet sound. You pack the wound with moss and mash, stitch where you can, bind what you can’t. The cuts along his flank you clean to shining black. You have just enough salve to slick beneath the battered scales and coax what can knit to knit.

Bjorn’s tail wraps your calf like a tether. His eyes flick between the stranger’s face and yours, and you realize what his nervousness has been all along: not fear, but a readiness to move when you say. Loyal to you instead of his own instincts.

The obsidian dragon’s breathing evens. The rumble in him changes timbre. His sides shudder, then tighten. Bones shift. The air thickens with a heat that isn’t the sun. Scales ripple, sink, draw down like a tide. The great head lowers and compresses, horns curving with a sound like distant thunder. Wings fold and fold again until their span becomes something that can fit in the trees.

A man kneels where the dragon lay. Not wholly a man. His tail curls across the loam, black and sleek. His wings—smaller now but still vast—hang heavy with drying blood. Twin horns arc back from his brow like carved obsidian. His hair spills to his waist in a fall of pale white, stark against skin dusted with scales. He is beautiful in the way storms are beautiful: undeniable, dangerous, still.

Your throat tightens. Stories speak of them—dragon-hybrids. Rarest of the rare. In some tales they are omens, in others kings. You have never seen one. You weren’t sure they truly existed.

Bjorn rumbles, uncertain. You lift a hand and he quiets. The hybrid’s eyes—slit-pupiled, bright as banked embers—find yours. He sways, more from blood loss than threat, and you step in without thinking to brace him. Heat radiates through your gauntlet.

Bjorn’s readiness was as taut as a bowstring; the hybrid’s weight resting in your grip.

His mouth shapes one word, rough with pain and something like relief. “Kjall.”

The name hangs in the quiet, and the world rearranges around it. You stand in a torn clearing with a young dragon guarding your back, an ancient vow on your shoulders, and a rare, wounded hybrid steadying himself on your arm. Whatever hunts creatures like him may already be turning this way.