"Get up, asshole."

  The boot slammed right into Kael's ribs.

  "I said get up!"

  Every breath stabbed through Kael's chest. He looked up at his half-brother, who had combed his long dark hair back in the traditional style of the old bloodlines. Dorian seemed determined to drag Kael to his fate if necessary.

  Kael turned his head. Above the rim of the Bonding Pit, the gallery was packed. Three hundred faces, probably more, all cheering and laughing and hungry for what came next. Kael took a deep breath and pushed himself up. Not because Dorian had told him to. But because he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of seeing him crawl.

  The Pit stank of sulfur and hot stone. The sand beneath Kael's feet was warm and black as coal, and somewhere beneath it, if you dug deep enough through the burnt grit, there were the bones. Kael examined the monstrous walls surrounding the sand arena. Like old stone wounds, the scratches ran as deep as a man's arm.

  And then he heard them. Hidden behind the iron gates. A sound still sharp enough to cut through the roaring crowd. The hatchlings. The high, metallic shriek they made when they sensed unbonded blood nearby.

  His blood.

  "Come on, move!" Dorian grabbed Kael by his robe and yanked him forward. Instinctively Kael tried to break free, but he already knew it was pointless. Dorian had bonded at age fourteen. Five years of rider training had turned him into something that didn't feel entirely human anymore.

  "You'll have your chance today," Dorian whispered. "Father gives you more than you deserve."

  Kael stumbled forward, into the center of the pit where the white lines of ceremonial salt cut through the black sand. Each of the four eggs was about the size of a man's torso, carefully placed in iron stands above the heated stones. Dark shells, shot through with veins, like something was pressing against the inside, trying to get out. In front of them sat one young noble from each of the Empires, chosen by their bloodlines and sent to the Pit as the tradition demanded. Their ceremonial white garments were spotless. Next to them, Kael looked down at himself, the torn robe, bare feet black from the ash. His hands wouldn't stop shaking no matter how hard he pressed them against his thighs. He was the fourth candidate - his father's candidate.

  Kael glanced up at the Lord Commander's balcony where his father stood watching. It was the same unsettling expression he had worn at his study window, when Dorian marched Kael across the upper courtyard earlier that evening: the look of someone making sure a delivery arrived where it was supposed to.

  Dorian shoved him down. "Sit."

  Kael dropped to the sand. From the corner of his eye, he could see Dorian's nasty grin at the edge of the ceremonial circle. His half-brother's place was in the gallery with the other riders, but of course he had come down here instead. Someone had to make sure the bastard son of Lord Commander Ashford showed up. And Dorian wanted to witness every second of Kael's humiliation up close. He always did. The whispers in the corridors. The accidental shoving in the streets. The servants who looked through Kael like he wasn't there. But today was supposed to be the last one. And Dorian wasn't going to miss it. He didn't leave until the Bondmaster descended the stone steps into the Pit.

  "Let it begin," the old man said. His deep blue robe dragged across the ceremonial ground and his piercing eyes studied the candidates from deep beneath his bald scalp. His nose must have been broken at least twice - a hatchling's tail maybe, or a panicking claw. The kind you got from being too close to a bonding gone wrong.

  The gallery began to quiet down.

  "First candidate," the Bondmaster announced. "Sera, House of Morreth. Approach!"

  A young girl stepped forward. Fifteen maybe, but with the resolute gaze of a young rider. Without hesitation, she crossed the sacred center of the Pit, as if she had already made the decision to be accepted into the Empire's warrior caste. She placed her hand on the crimson egg.

  Almost instantly a deep, resonant hum vibrated in Kael's chest, unsettling and beautiful at the same time. The egg, it sang. Then the shell began to crack. Slowly at first, just a single dark line splitting the crimson surface. Then another. The lines spread across the shell until the whole egg shuddered and fell open, spilling out something slick and steaming. The creature balanced on trembling legs, but was already reaching for the girl with its needle-thin claws.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The moment they touched, the crowd erupted.

  The lords and ladies of the Four Empires, drunk on their own noise, stamped their feet until the gallery shook. Meanwhile, in the sacred heart of the Pit, a barely visible bond mark appeared on the girl's forearm: faint red lines tracing patterns just beneath her skin.

  And one by one they went. Crimson. Blue. Emerald. Each egg cracking open for the right noble hand, each time a bond mark appearing on the candidate's skin, each time the gallery roaring its approval louder than before.

  Three eggs. Three bonds. Three new riders welcomed into the Empire with thunderous applause.

  And one egg was left.

  The smallest one. Dull gray, sitting at the far edge of the heating stones where the warmth barely reached. Not worth the heat. Not worth the space. Kept only because tradition demanded that every egg in a clutch be presented.

  "Candidate four," the Bondmaster called. "Kael, House of Ashford. Approach!"

  Kael walked to the gray egg. His legs felt hollow. This was the closest he had ever been to one. In sixteen years of living in a fortress built around dragon breeding, he had never once been allowed to go near the hatcheries, the roosts, or the incubation vaults. He remembered the time he was four or five and had snuck into the eastern hatchery with a fistful of raw meat that he had stolen from the underground kitchens. He made it three steps past the door. The air was thick and sour, and something was breathing in the dark. He never saw what it was. A handler dragged him out and handed him to his father. The bruises lasted days and he never went back.

  The air shimmered above the heating stones, and sweat ran down the side of Kael's neck. Standing this close to an egg for the first time in his life, he wondered why his father had spent sixteen years keeping him away only to force him here tonight. Kael could feel the crowd holding its breath above him.

  Then he reached out. Gently, he placed both hands on the shell.

  The egg didn't hum. It sat under his palms, cold and heavy and utterly indifferent to his touch. He pressed harder.

  Nothing. Not a single vibration.

  Seconds passed that felt like minutes. The silence in the gallery stretched until it hurt.

  Kael's throat tightened. Please. Just once.

  Then his hands slipped. The egg rocked sideways off its stand. Even then it didn't crack. It didn't break. Just a dull and heavy thud of a dead thing landing on the ground.

  Someone in the gallery laughed. Then it spread: a wave of laughter rolling down through three hundred throats, echoing off the pit walls until Kael could feel it in his aching ribs.

  The Bondmaster raised his hand and the laughter slowly faded. Once it was quiet enough, the old man turned to face the gallery.

  "The candidate is rejected," he proclaimed. "Per the Law of the Four Empires, the unbonded adult of House Ashford forfeits all rights of inheritance and title. The candidate will be -"

  “That won't be necessary,” Kael's father called down from above.

  The gallery stirred, heads turning toward the upper balcony.

  Lord Commander Ashford stood at the railing, both hands on the stone. Behind him, through the open archway, his Stormbringer rested on the landing platform: a war dragon the color of a thundercloud, its massive head turning slowly to follow the sound of its rider's voice.

  Finally, the pit went silent.

  "I'll handle this myself," his father said.

  The Bondmaster hesitated. He had conducted this ceremony for over thirty years, and no one had ever interrupted the sentencing. But looking up at the forty feet of scaled muscle behind the Lord Commander, whatever he had been about to say about tradition, he swallowed it.

  "As the Lord Commander wishes."

  His father looked down into the pit, his eyes fixed on Kael.

  "Strip his name", he said. "Strip his quarters. He is no longer a member of this house. He leaves tonight."

  Kael stared up at him. Waiting, but for what exactly, he didn't know. An explanation. An apology. One sentence that meant I'm sorry it came to this. Something — anything — that helped him understand what was going on and acknowledged that the boy kneeling in the sand below him was his son.

  But the Lord Commander was already turning away.

  "Put him on the next supply ship to the coast," he said over his shoulder. "I don't care where it goes."

  Slowly, the gallery emptied. Only a few glanced down briefly as they got up. The feast was calling and three hundred people turned their backs on the boy in the sand below them.

  Kael didn't move. He couldn't. He knelt there in the sand, watching the light shrink as the torch bearers pulled their flames from the brackets. The pit grew darker. Colder. The smell of sulfur faded into plain stone.

  He looked at his hands. They wouldn't stop shaking. He kept watching them, as if he might find something else to hold on to. But they didn't stop shaking even after the last torch had gone out.

  And in the dark, Kael could hear boots on the stone steps. Coming down. And Dorian's voice.

  "Everyone out."

  Kael's head snapped up. A door closed somewhere above. The sound of a lock turning. They were alone.

  "You know what Father told me? Before the ceremony?" Dorian's voice was the way it got when he was enjoying himself. "Pulled me aside, just the two of us. He gave me instructions, Kael."

  Kael scrambled to his feet.

  "Dorian—"

  "Sixteen years," his half-brother said. "Sixteen years he's kept you fed, kept you housed. And you've been nothing but an embarrassment to this family. You think a supply ship is the worst thing Father could do to you?"

  Something scraped against leather. Metal sliding out of a sheath.

  "The ship leaves at dawn. But that is a long time from now, little brother."

  Dorian walked toward him. Slow and steady. His boots crunching through the sand with the patience of someone who knew every exit from this pit was blocked. He was in absolutely no hurry as he pulled his sword.

  "There's only one way out for you, Kael."