Chapter 1 Signal in the Sky

The sky burned first.

Not with Dragonfire—at least, not yet—but with the sickly orange glow of signal flares streaking across the clouds. Three in quick succession. The pattern for the target is located. The pattern for no turning back.

I crouched on the ridge and watched them stain the night. Wind tore at my braids and worked cold fingers through the seams of my armor, but my palms were hot—tingling with the itch of magic that wanted out.

“Knight.”

My name—my rank—snapped like a command. I glanced back. Captain Rourke ducked behind the rock beside me, visor up, scarred mouth pulled into a thin line. His eyes stayed on the valley below.

“Visual confirmation?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I can feel him, though.”

The canyon hummed, low and constant, like the moment before a storm breaks. Magic prickled under my skin, responding to something vast and old moving just out of sight.

Rourke snorted. “Witch intuition. I’ll take steel and coordinates.”

“You’ll get both if you stop talking and let me listen.”

He grunted. In Captain Rourke language, that meant begrudging approval.

I let my senses loosen, the way my instructors had drilled into me until it was muscle memory.

Breathe in.

Let the world in with it.

Find the wrongness.

The Syndicate called it attunement.

My grandmother had just called it trouble.

Ash and cold stone. Smoke from campfires below. The sharp tang of metal and oil. Beneath all of it—fainter, older—heat. Not the simple heat of flame, but something alive. Hot enough to have a taste to it. Copper and ozone, threaded with something wild and unrepentant.

My fingers curled against the rock.

“He’s here,” I whispered. “He’s close.”

Rourke’s visor snapped down. “Then this is it, Knight. You bind the bastard, we drag him back in chains, and the war ends before winter. You screw it up—”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.

I’d seen what dragonfire did to flesh. To cities. To children who hadn’t realized yet that the monster overhead wasn’t just a story.

“I won’t screw it up,” I said. “You’ll have your dragon, Captain.”

He clapped my shoulder, heavy gauntlet rattling my bones. “That’s why they made you a Knight, Christine. Don’t make me regret defending you in those briefings.”

He pulled back from the ridge, heading toward the line of Syndicate soldiers hunkered down behind makeshift barricades. Rifles glinted faintly. Spellcasters murmured over talismans. The air smelled like fear pretending very hard to be courage.

I stayed a moment longer, watching.

The valley floor below was a scar carved through black rock, a narrow river threading through it like tarnished silver. Our forces were dug in along the far side, floodlights mounted on trucks aimed at the canyon mouth.

Waiting for a god to walk through.

I flexed my fingers inside my gauntlets, feeling the faint vibration of the sigils etched along the metal. They pulsed in time with my heartbeat—steady, disciplined, trained. The Syndicate liked that about me. I didn’t panic. I didn’t hesitate. I followed orders, even when they tasted like ash.

Especially then.

Once, early in the war, I’d asked what happened to the dragons they captured. The question had earned me a look from a superior and a night scrubbing blood off the inside of a transport truck. After that, I learned to keep my curiosity quiet.

Dragons destroy. Dragons burn. Dragons don’t think the way we do.

That was the lesson. Repeated until it felt true.

Still, as I watched the canyon mouth, unease coiled low in my gut. Not fear—fear was sharp and obvious. This was something heavier. A sense of standing too close to the edge of a story that didn’t care how it ended.

I thought of my grandmother then, bent over her stove, hands stained with herbs and soot. Magic always collects its due, she’d told me once, eyes sharp despite the smile. You just never know when it’ll come knocking.

The Syndicate called this operation containment.

I suspected it was something else entirely.

The runes in my circle hummed louder, warming the rock beneath them. Somewhere deep in the canyon, something answered. Not a roar. Not yet.

A presence.

Old. Watching.

I swallowed, grounding myself, and turned my focus back to the mouth of the canyon.

Whatever stepped through it tonight, I would bind it.

That was my job.

No. I swallowed hard. Not a god. A beast.

That’s what the Syndicate drilled into us from the first day: dragons aren’t people. Not anymore. Not after what they did.

I touched the thin, twisted scar along my left forearm. Dragonfire caught me once, when I was twelve and too slow to pull a boy out of a burning house. If I closed my eyes, I could still hear him screaming.

I opened my eyes instead and slid down the ridge.

As I dropped into the shallow trench behind our front line, the murmur of voices swelled—snatches of prayers, curses, someone laughing too loud. A young soldier glanced at my sigil-marked gauntlets and quickly looked away, like my magic might leak if he met my eyes.

Christine Knight. Witch-soldier. Asset. Weapon.

“That her?” someone whispered as I passed. “The Binder?”

“If she gets him, they’ll pin medals on her bones,” another voice muttered back. “If she doesn’t, there won’t be bones left to pin them on.”

I ignored them and walked to the circle I’d drawn earlier—a rough ring of chalk and crushed bone etched into the rock, symbols scrawled along the inner rim. It looked flimsy, sitting there like a harmless pattern.

It could unmake a god if I did it right.

Or unmake me if I didn’t.

No pressure.

I stepped into the center of the circle. The runes warmed under my boots, responding to my presence. I lifted my hands and felt the air shift, weightless and heavy all at once.

“Positions!” Rourke’s voice carried over the hum of generators. “Eyes on that canyon mouth! When he shows, we give the witch her opening. Do not fire once she initiates the bind—unless you want to die choking on your own lungs.”

They quieted. Even the wind seemed to pause.

The world narrowed to a single black cut in the rock.

The canyon mouth yawned like a wound.

And then—

The dragon stepped out of the darkness.