(V1)

Rumor put a price on your kind long before Emeric ever saw you. He’d spent seasons chasing your kind. Hybrids were stories until tracks turned to scorch marks and shed scale-dust on river stones. Valuable wasn’t just coin; it was reputation, leverage, the kind of catch that made a hunter’s name travel faster than he could.

You were flying low over the ravine when it sprung—bolas braided with rune-wire uncoiling upward like thrown lightning. One cinched your left wing joint; another bit across your foreleg. A weighted net, oiled to slip past heat, snapped wide and dragged you sideways. You fought the fold, claws raking the air, but iron sang in the lines and the ground rose hard.

The first impact stole your breath. The second broke the rhythm of your heart into stutters. You tried to shift—bones wanting the human shape to slip the mesh—but the threads hummed cold and held you in your dragon skin. The more you pushed, the tighter the runes bit. Blood pooled warm under your scales; one membrane tore in a clean, cruel line.

Emeric came down the slope without haste. He moved like a man who’d rehearsed this a hundred times. He watched your pupils, your chest, the twitch in your tail that warned of a last lunge. When you snapped anyway, the net’s anchors held.

“Easy,” he said, barely above a breath.

Leather gloves, iron stakes—three hammered through the net’s corners into stone. A hook-knife to cut only what he’d chosen to cut; not mercy, just precision. He found the rune knots and tightened two, loosened one, dialing your strength to something that wouldn’t shatter the cage or yourself. A vial uncorked under your nostrils bled the stink of damp ash and numbroot. Your vision narrowed, but not enough to blur his face.

Up close he was weather and effort: scar along the jaw, windburnt cheekbones, hunter’s eyes the color of old glass. He counted the breaths between your flares of pain as if they were numbers he could own. When he touched the torn edge of your wing with a splint, it was careful in the way a craftsman is careful with expensive materials.

“You’re worth more breathing.”

Two stakes more. A collar you’d never seen—a band of etched iron that didn’t choke so much as press a cold weight into your voice until the instinct to roar folded in on itself. He slid it on without meeting your gaze.

Travel straps were next. He measured your span with a glance and built the harness around you, all muscle and method, only pausing when you tried the net again. The runes hummed; the hum crawled into your bones.

The history between you began there—in the quiet of necessary movements. He had hunted your race a long time. You had outlived hunters before. Now you lay pinned to stone while he made you small enough to move.

He tested the harness with a tug that lifted your ribs and set you down again. Satisfied, he stepped back, eyes raking the treeline, then you, then the sky. The daylight was thinning; moving at dusk meant fewer witnesses and colder blood.

“Soon,” he murmured, more to the schedule than to you.

You shifted your weight as far as the net allowed and found only the bite of wire. Pain made a slow circle from wing to flank and back again. The iron collar cooled each effort before it could become fire.

He crouched, finally, close enough that you could see the ledger tucked in his coat—thin leather, corners abraded, a bookmark ribbon the color of dried wine. The page visible had a sketch: a dragon, arrows noting horn curve, membrane density. Below it, a figure—what the market would pay if the catch arrived “alive and manageable.”

Emeric didn’t open it. He didn’t need to. He had you.