The sun bore down with no mercy, a molten hammer in the sky. Dune moved with the caution of one who had learned—painfully—that the desert did not forgive mistakes. His steps were slow, calculated, claws dragging faint grooves in the sand. The wind was hot, the kind that didn’t cool, only seared. The kind that whispered through the dunes like voices he didn’t want to hear.

He paused at the crest of a dune and squinted across the empty expanse. Sand. Sand and more sand. It had once felt like home. Now it just felt like grit in old wounds.

His wing twinged. Or what was left of it. The jagged stump, healed but raw in his mind, twitched as if it remembered flight. Dune let out a low growl and shook it off. No use dreaming. Not anymore. That part of his life—wings wide, soaring into battle, a young fool with something to prove—was gone. Burned up in a skirmish he barely remembered and didn’t care to relive.

Not that the others let him forget.

He could still see their faces. The sneering healers, the whispering soldiers. The pitying looks from the few who had once called him brother-in-arms. They saw the wing and assumed the fire had burned out of him, too. That he was finished. Broken.

He might be. But he wasn’t useless.

Not yet.

Dune adjusted the leather satchel strapped to his side. Inside were scrolls—carefully inked and sealed instructions from dragons who thought too highly of themselves. Dragons with power. Dragons who thought breeding a prophecy like a clutch of eggs would fix everything. As if war and death could be undone by careful parenting and a few heroic bedtime stories.

He snorted. The sound was harsh in the dry air.

Still. Orders were orders. He had taken this job because it gave him purpose, even if the purpose was grim and absurd. A dragonet prophecy. A hidden cave. A life lived in secret, raising dragonets like some glorified nursemaid.

He hadn’t met them yet. Not the dragonets. But he’d read the notes. He knew their names. He knew what they were supposed to do. He knew he wasn’t supposed to care.

And yet… something in him stirred. Some half-dead instinct, shriveled but not gone. Maybe it was the same foolish flicker that once craved glory. Maybe it was the memory of clutchmates lost. A SandWing. One of his own.

Dune shifted again, grimacing as his legs popped from standing too long. The sun hadn’t moved. Or maybe it had, and he just hadn’t noticed. It all looked the same. Endless heat, endless dust, endless silence. But something else hung in the air now. A scent, faint and uncertain.

Movement.

He turned his head slightly. Another dragon approaching. A messenger, perhaps. Or a recruiter. Or a fool.

Didn’t matter. He was ready. Scarred, grounded, and older than he felt, but still Dune. Still here.

He raised his head, the wind tugging at the ragged ends of his wing, and narrowed his eyes against the sun.

“Let’s get this over with,” he muttered. "Before the sand buries me, too."