Read Chapter 37: The Curse

The rain came the morning after the trial, cold and relentless, as if the sky itself mourned Voss’s final words.

Elara stood at the hatchery window, watching Aurelia on the cliff’s edge. The queen dragon had not moved since dawn. Her wings, usually spread wide against the wind, hung folded at her sides. Her great head drooped low, and when she turned to look toward the hatchery, Elara saw something she had never seen in those golden eyes before.

Fear.

“She tried to fly,” Kael said from behind her, his voice tight. “An hour ago. Got maybe three strides of lift before she came down hard. Didn’t try again.”

Elara’s chest went cold. “Show me.”

They found Aurelia’s tracks in the mud— deep furrows where her claws had gouged the earth, the desperate scrape of her belly against stone where she had attempted to launch herself skyward. The queen had never failed to take flight. Not once, not even with a wounded wing after the collar wars.

Elara approached slowly, pressing her palm against Aurelia’s warm snout. The locket at her throat pulsed, hot and insistent.

*I’m here,* she sent through the bond. *Tell me what happened.*

Aurelia’s answer came as a cascade of images, fragmented and raw. Voss’s face, twisted in fury as the guards dragged her away. The curse spilling from her lips. *They will never fly free.* And then nothing— just a hollow ache where the wind-song used to live, the part of Aurelia that had always known the sky had gone silent.

“She did something,” Elara breathed. “Voss. It wasn’t just words.”

By midday, the reports came in from every corner of the kingdom.

Riders from the eastern provinces arrived on foot, their dragons refusing to leave the ground. A messenger from the southern coast stumbled into the great hall, pale and shaking, describing how an entire wing of wild dragons had crashed into the sea. Even the collared dragons in the noble estates— still bound, still enslaved— had stopped answering their masters’ commands entirely.

The sky was empty.

Cedric found her in the archives that evening, surrounded by crumbling scrolls. His hand touched her shoulder, and she flinched— not from him, but from the weight of what she was reading.

“The old texts call it the Skybinding Curse,” she said, her voice hoarse. “It was used once before, during the Dragon Wars. A mage who could not bond with any dragon cursed them all— every creature that bore their blood— to never taste the wind again.”

“And the mage who cast it?” Cedric asked quietly.

“Died. The curse outlived him.” Elara pushed a scroll toward him, her finger tracing the faded script. “But there’s a note here. A fragment. It says the curse can be broken.”

Cedric leaned in, reading the ancient words aloud. “‘Only where the bond began, where the first rider touched the first scale, shall the binding lose its hold.’” He looked up. “The ancestral ruins. They’re real?”

“I thought they were myth.” Elara shook her head, frustration bleeding into her voice. “Every story I’ve heard says the first dragon riders built their sanctuary somewhere in the northern peaks, but no one has ever found it. The maps stop at the Frostfall Range, and beyond that, nothing but ice and legend.”

A shadow fell across the doorway. Aldric stood there, his face grim, a rolled map clutched in his hand. “The legends are true,” he said, stepping inside. “I’ve spent the last hour with the king’s cartographers. There are accounts— old, hidden accounts— of expeditions that found the ruins and never returned. But there is one path.”

He unrolled the map, and Elara saw the jagged lines of the Frostfall Range, the empty expanse beyond it. A single route was marked in faded ink, winding through a pass that no living mapmaker had confirmed.

“It’s a three-day ride to the mountains,” Aldric continued. “Another two days through the pass, if the weather holds. The ruins are said to lie in a valley that never thaws, where the first dragon eggs were hatched by human hands.”

Elara’s locket pulsed again— not hot, but aching, like a heartbeat that had lost its rhythm. Behind her, Aurelia let out a low, mournful cry that cut through the stone walls.

“We leave at dawn,” Elara said. “I’m taking her.”

“The queen is grounded,” Aldric said flatly. “She cannot fly you there.”

“She doesn’t need to fly. She needs to be there when I break this curse.” Elara met his gaze, unflinching. “The bond is the key. The text says the first rider and first scale— whatever ritual broke the curse before, it required absolute trust between dragon and rider. I can’t do this without her.”

Cedric stepped forward. “I’m coming with you.”

“The kingdom needs you here. The noble families are already circling, trying to spin this in their favor. Voss is in chains, but her allies—” Elara started.

“Can wait.” His voice was firm, and when he took her hand, she did not pull away. “You faced Voss alone and nearly lost everything. You won’t face this alone too.”

She looked at him— at the stubborn set of his jaw, the way his thumb traced a slow circle against her palm. Something in her chest loosened, just a fraction.

“Then we ride,” she said. “Before the curse spreads any further.”

They left at first light.

Aurelia walked beside them, her gait heavy and graceless without the sky to carry her. Elara had braided a thin leather strap through the queen’s mane, not to guide her— she would never guide Aurelia like a common horse— but to keep her close. To remind her that even grounded, she was not alone.

The northern road was empty. Farmers stood in their fields, staring at the vacant clouds with hollow eyes. Children pointed at the sky, asking when the dragons would return. Elara did not have an answer for them.

By the third day, the Frostfall Range loomed ahead— gray teeth biting into an iron sky. The wind howled through the pass, and Aurelia’s steps slowed. Elara felt the queen’s exhaustion through the bond, a heaviness that seemed to press down on them both.

“She’s getting worse,” Cedric said, eyeing Aurelia’s labored breathing.

Elara touched the locket, feeling the faint pulse beneath her fingers. “I know. We’re close. The ruins are on the other side of this pass.”

She urged her horse forward, Aurelia trudging behind. But as the pass narrowed, the wind died.

The silence was sudden and absolute. Even the crunch of hooves on stone seemed muffled. Ahead, the trail opened into a valley— a vast, sunless bowl where the snow never fell and the ground lay bare and black, etched with symbols older than any language Elara had ever seen.

And at the center of the valley, rising from the stone like a sleeping beast, stood the ruins of the first sanctuary.

Elara dismounted, her heart hammering. The locket burned against her chest now, pulsing in rhythm with something deep beneath her feet.

*We found it,* she sent to Aurelia. *We found where it all began.*

Aurelia lowered her head, touching her snout to the black stone. And then—

The queen screamed.

It was a sound Elara had never heard from her— raw, agonized, primal. Aurelia’s legs buckled, and she crashed to the earth, her whole body convulsing as if the ground itself were burning her. The locket flared so hot Elara cried out, clawing at the clasp—

And then she saw it.

Across the valley floor, carved into the ancient stone, was a depiction of the first rider and the first dragon. The rider’s hand was raised, palm open, toward the dragon’s chest.

Where the rider’s heart would be, the stone was cracked and blackened.

And beneath it, in a script that glowed faintly red as Elara approached, were words she somehow understood:

*The curse lives in the blood of the betrayer. To break it, the bond must be proven by one who is neither.*

Elara stared at the words, the meaning crashing over her like ice water.

Neither rider nor dragon. She had always thought the bond was enough— that her connection to Aurelia made her like the riders of old. But she was not one of them. She was something else.

And the curse knew it.