The day after the skirmish at the woods began with the quiet camaraderie of soldiers pretending, just for a morning, that they were still boys.

  Mizi sat cross-legged on the porch, a pair of scopes laid out on a cloth before him, working a tiny screwdriver with the focused patience of someone who had learned that small tools required more respect than large ones. Idham was sprawled beside him, eyes distant.

  "My father has an old katana from the Great Wars," Idham said. "Still wrapped in cloth in our attic. He never talks about it. But sometimes I catch him looking at the stairs like he's thinking about it."

  Azmei nodded slowly. "Mine has an anti-tank rifle from the first world war. I don't even know if it still fires. It's more rust than metal. But it looks terrifying just sitting there. I used to dare myself to touch it when I was little."

  Neither of them said what they were both thinking, that one day soon they might need those weapons. That attics had a way of becoming arsenals.

  Mizi set down his screwdriver and held out two modified optics. "Here. I've tuned these scopes for your sidearms. They'll help at distance."

  They took them without ceremony, the way people accept gifts when they know the giver understands them.

  Azmei's brother ran their training session in the forest that afternoon, the crack of pistol fire absorbed by the ancient trees until it sounded almost quiet. They ran drills until their shoulders ached and their stances stopped looking like guesses. Afterward, because they were still twelve and thirteen regardless of everything else, they found a flat patch of ground and played football in the rain until none of them could tell sweat from mud from sky. They laughed the way you only laugh when you've stopped thinking about tomorrow.

  It was the last easy hour for a long time.

  A scout met them at the village gate, still running. "The bridge. Two platoons, maybe more. Marching now."

  The Bridge of Sacrifice

  They had no time to change out of their wet clothes. Mizi pulled his watch tight on his wrist as they ran, the metal cold against his pulse.

  When they reached the Dusan bridge, the reality of it landed in his chest like something dropped from height. It wasn't just soldiers. It was a wall of them, black-and-grey uniforms stretching back into the tree line, laser submachine guns gleaming in the grey afternoon light. Two platoons meant eighty men at minimum. Probably more in reserve.

  "Stay at the treeline," Mizi said to Idham and Azmei without looking back. "Be ready to move the moment I signal."

  He walked out onto the bridge alone. The planks were still wet from the rain, and they creaked under his boots in a way that made the silence on both sides feel heavier.

  "Why are you doing this?" he called out. "This is a civilian village. There are families here."

  The lead soldier looked at him for a moment with the particular contempt that certain men reserve for children who don't yet know their place. "Go home, little boy. This isn't a game."

  Mizi stood still. He thought about what negotiation actually required, which was two parties who both believed they had something to lose. These men didn't believe that.

  "Alright," he said quietly, more to himself than to them. He activated the watch.

  The pulse that erupted from it hit the front line like a wall of compressed light. The explosion was not what he expected. He had fired it before into open air, into trees. He had not fired it at men. The sound was different. He made himself keep looking, because he had made the choice and looking away would be cowardice dressed up as sensitivity. Then he raised his barrier as the survivors opened fire.

  The laser rounds hit the shield like hail on glass, rapid and unrelenting. On the watch face, the percentage dropped in lurching increments. Seventy. Fifty-two. Thirty-eight.

  "AZMEI!" he screamed over his shoulder. "THE BRIDGE! BLOW IT NOW!"

  "Mizi, you're still standing on it!"

  "I know! DO IT!"

  A beat of silence. Then Azmei threw the grenade.

  The explosion did not feel heroic. It felt like the world being folded in half. The planks beneath him split and dropped and Mizi jumped before he had finished deciding to jump, and then he was falling, and the river swallowed him whole.

  The cold hit him like a closed fist. The weight of his gear, the watch, the shield on his arm, all of it pulled him sideways and down. He kicked hard and went nowhere useful. His lungs began to burn almost immediately, the fire spreading from his chest outward. He could see the surface, murky and distant and getting further, and he thought with strange calm that he had survived a great many things to drown in his own village river.

  Then the mark on his forehead ignited.

  He felt the heat even in the water, a gold warmth cutting through the cold. Something enormous coiled around him, and the current reversed, and then he was moving upward, fast, and then he was gasping on the riverbank with stones pressing into his cheek and a dragon watching him from three feet away.

  He lay there for a long moment, coughing river water and just breathing. He turned his head.

  The dragon had three colours in its scales, deep green, copper and white, shifting as it moved. It was watching him with an attention that felt nothing like an animal's attention. It felt like being read.

  Then it was gone, dissolving into the mist along the bank as though it had simply decided to be somewhere else.

  Mizi walked home on shaking legs and woke up in his bed without remembering how he got there.

  His mother was sitting beside him when he opened his eyes, her hands folded in her lap with the careful stillness of someone who had been holding themselves together for hours. When she saw him blink, she pressed both hands over her mouth.

  "Uncle Su found you by the bank," she said when she could speak. "You were face down. We thought—" She stopped. "Don't make me say what we thought."

  Outside, Jalal's voice carried through the walls, low and controlled in the way that is worse than shouting.

  Mizi got up too fast, steadied himself on the doorframe, and went outside. His father was standing in front of Idham and Azmei with his arms crossed and his jaw set hard.

  "Don't blame them," Mizi said. "I ordered it. Every decision at that bridge was mine."

  Jalal looked at his son for a long moment. Something in his face shifted, not softening exactly, but changing in a way that was harder to name. He turned and walked back into the house without a word.

  "He'll come around," Maryam said from the doorway. "He's not angry. He's frightened. There's a difference."

  Idham put a hand on Mizi's shoulder. Azmei just looked at him with the expression of someone who had spent several hours believing their friend was dead and hadn't quite stopped believing it yet.

  "I saw a dragon," Mizi said.

  They laughed. Of course they laughed.

  But Uncle Su, who had been sitting quietly on the low wall nearby cleaning mud off his boots, looked up and said, "I saw it too. Three colors. Big as a river barge." He went back to his boots. "Just so you know."

  The Seven Shadows of Gaia

  High above the clouds, somewhere that had no geography on any map, the Vincerist Supreme Leader's voice came through distorted and cold. "If they will not come out for our guns," he told his Colonel, "we will make them come out for the fire. Release the Cursed Flight."

  Mizi was still sitting on the porch that evening, picking at a loose thread on his sleeve, when the sound reached them. Not sound exactly. Pressure. A rhythmic thudding that he felt in his sternum before he heard it with his ears.

  He looked up.

  The sky was full of dragons.

  For a moment he simply stared, the same way you stare at anything that your mind has no category for, processing the shape and the scale and the wrongness of it before the fear arrives. Then a stream of frost hit the ground thirty feet from him and the fear arrived all at once.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The village erupted. People ran. Houses caught fire on one side and froze solid on the other. Mizi heard his mother screaming for his father and heard his father answering, and he tracked their voices until he knew they were moving toward the Ancestor Tree, which the dragons seemed to avoid with a superstitious wide arc.

  A dragon came straight at him, maw wide, frost building in its throat.

  Something hit it sideways with a sound like a boulder striking water. Tricolor scales. The dragon from the river. ZaZuZ slammed the attacker back and then landed between Mizi and the chaos, breathing hard, watching him.

  It lowered its head and held position.

  Mizi had ridden exactly nothing larger than a bicycle. He climbed onto ZaZuZ's back with the gracelessness this deserved, grabbed a ridge of scales, and held on.

  They went up fast. Mizi's stomach stayed on the ground for the first hundred feet. The village shrank beneath him, the fires looking almost beautiful from height, which he hated himself for noticing. The wind at altitude was nothing like wind at ground level. It was a physical force with intent, pressing against his face and tearing at his collar and making his eyes stream constantly. He pressed himself low against ZaZuZ's neck and focused on not falling.

  ZaZuZ flew north, away from the burning village, and landed in the mouth of a cave cut into a hillside. He began to speak immediately, urgent and low, a language that moved like stones rolling downhill.

  Mizi held up both hands. "I don't understand you."

  ZaZuZ went still. The sound that came from him then was not quite a sigh, but it had the same quality, something between frustration and resignation.

  Mizi thought for a moment. Then he pointed at himself. "Mizi." Then at the dragon. "You?"

  ZaZuZ watched him.

  "Your name. What is your name?"

  A long pause. Then, slowly, the dragon said something short and guttural. It sounded like the beginning of an earthquake.

  "ZaZuZ?" Mizi tried.

  The dragon's head came up.

  "Okay," Mizi said. "Okay. I know someone who can help with the rest."

  The Translation of the Ancients

  Landing a dragon in the middle of the Habas City Defense Center at midday created the kind of institutional chaos that tends to either end careers or define them. Soldiers scattered. Someone fired twice into the air before being physically restrained by a superior. General Afamiszt came out onto the steps, looked at Mizi on the dragon's back, and said nothing for a full ten seconds.

  "I need a translator," Mizi said from above. "Ancient Dusan dialect. Dragon language specifically."

  Afamiszt stared at him. "Dragon language."

  "I know."

  "There are men in my courtyard running in circles right now."

  "I know. I'm sorry about that."

  Afamiszt was quiet for another moment. Then he turned back into the building and shouted a name.

  It took three hours. The scholar who arrived was a small man with ink-stained fingers who looked at ZaZuZ the way most people look at things they have spent their entire careers studying theoretically and assumed they would never see in practice. He went through four reference books before finding what he needed in a thin volume with a cracked spine and handwritten margin notes that were older than anyone in the room.

  He worked slowly, cross-referencing each syllable, asking ZaZuZ to repeat words, occasionally covering his mouth with his hand when a translation surprised him. Mizi sat on an ammunition crate and waited, watching ZaZuZ's face for any emotion he could read.

  Finally the scholar looked up. His voice was careful and deliberate, the voice of a man who understood that the words he was about to say would not be reversible.

  "His name is ZaZuZ, seventh child of Zalakeenihr of Gaia. He says he is the only dragon who was not taken by the evil spell. He calls you the Golden One." A pause. "He says his brothers are not evil. They are prisoners in their own bodies. He is begging you to free them. He says only your light can break the curse."

  Mizi looked at ZaZuZ. The dragon met his eyes and held them.

  "Tell him I'll try," Mizi said. "Tell him I'll need a way to get close without getting killed first."

  At this, the scholar began translating, and Mizi turned to Afamiszt. "I need something that can take a direct hit from dragon fire. Do you have anything like that?"

  Afamiszt's expression suggested this was not a question he had expected to field this week. He was quiet for a moment, weighing something internal, then made a decision. "Saiful. Bring me the Anti-Impact Shield 4.0."

  The shield that arrived was heavier than it looked, fitted with the Habas insignia and a row of intake vents along the inner face that Mizi didn't fully understand. He strapped it to his arm and looked at ZaZuZ.

  "Test it," Afamiszt said.

  Mizi nodded to ZaZuZ. The dragon breathed a torrent of fire directly at him. The heat arrived as sound first, a deep roar, and then as pressure, and then the shield's magnetic field caught it and the vents along the inner face hummed with sudden warmth. Mizi's arm held. The shield glowed at the edges but did not buckle.

  Mizi turned to Afamiszt. "We need to go back to Dusan."

  The Fall of the Brother

  They found the village deep in the kind of fighting that has no clean geometry. Idham and Azmei were in the back of their truck firing improvised missiles at anything with wings. Jalal was at the treeline with his rifle, methodically targeting the eyes of whichever dragon came low enough to give him a shot. His right arm, the one the Vincerist bullet had weakened years ago, was shaking with the effort but he was not stopping.

  A black dragon hit him from behind with its tail, a careless sweep that sent Jalal spinning into the dirt. He didn't get up immediately.

  Mizi saw it happen from above and something went cold and specific in his chest. He pushed ZaZuZ into a dive.

  They crashed into the black dragon's side at speed, ZaZuZ's shoulder connecting with the creature's ribs and driving it sideways. Mizi raised his shield as the black dragon wheeled on them, fire already building in its throat. The blast hit the shield dead center and the heat washed over him in a wave he felt in his back teeth, but the magnetic field held.

  He fired the watch into the black dragon's chest. The barrier around it absorbed the shot without flickering. Whatever controlled this creature also protected it.

  That was when Mizi understood the shape of the problem. The black dragon was the source. While it stood, the others would not break. And something on its head, something small and dark and moving with horrible purpose, was the reason.

  But there were too many of them. The other dragons pressed from three sides, and ZaZuZ absorbed blow after blow, his movements becoming slower, his fire weaker. Mizi pushed the shield against each new attack, rotating, covering ZaZuZ's flanks, but there were angles he couldn't cover and he knew it and ZaZuZ knew it.

  ZaZuZ crashed into the village square with a sound that Mizi felt in his spine. He landed beside him and raised his shield and looked up and the black dragon was already descending.

  The fireball hit Mizi square and sent him through the air and he landed hard on his back with all the air gone from his body and his vision full of white. He lay there for a moment that felt much longer than it was, staring at the sky, trying to remember how breathing worked.

  He heard ZaZuZ make a sound he had not heard before.

  He turned his head.

  The black dragon's claws were at ZaZuZ's throat.

  He got up. He did not know how he got up. He was running before he had decided to run. "NO!"

  The black dragon's grip closed. ZaZuZ went still.

  The mark on Mizi's forehead detonated in golden light. It came out of him like pressure that had been building since the river, since the bridge, since before that, since a glass bottle and a boy who hadn't wanted to continue. Every dragon in the air froze in place as though the light had weight and pinned them.

  In the ringing silence, a man appeared at his left shoulder. Covered face. Calm hands. He said nothing by way of introduction or explanation, only reached out and turned a dial on Mizi's watch that Mizi had never thought to turn. The watch's face split open along a seam and a blade extended from it, thin as a finger and radiant, a needle of pure compressed light.

  "The thing on the dragon's head," the man said quietly. "Cut it."

  Then he stepped back, and Mizi stopped asking questions he didn't have time for, and moved forward.

  The black dragon turned on him. Fire came in a wall. Mizi took it on the shield and kept walking into it, one step, two, the magnetic field screaming with effort, the heat building behind the vents until the metal was hot against his forearm. He lowered his head and pushed through.

  He jumped. His hands found the ridge of the black dragon's neck and he pulled himself up, and the creature thrashed, and he locked his legs and held on. The parasite was visible up close in a way that made his skin crawl, segmented and dark, its mandibles deep in the base of the dragon's skull.

  He raised the needle of light and cut cleanly.

  The parasite dropped. The black dragon shuddered from its head down to its tail, a full-body convulsion, and then went still. One by one the dragons around the village lowered themselves to the ground, no longer attacking, simply present, their eyes clearing.

  Mizi slid down from the black dragon's neck and stood in front of it. The golden light from his forehead faded slowly.

  The black dragon looked at ZaZuZ's body for a long time. When it finally spoke, its voice was deep and measured and carried the particular weight of someone returning to themselves after a long absence.

  "Thank you, Golden One." A pause. "I am free. But I have killed my brother with my own hands while something else wore my face." Another pause, heavier than the first. "Do you forgive me?"

  Mizi looked at ZaZuZ. At the tricolor scales already going dull. At the creature who had pulled him off the bottom of a river and asked nothing in return and followed him into a fight it couldn't win.

  The forgiveness did not come easily. He stood with it for a moment, feeling the edges of it, understanding that saying the words quickly would make them hollow.

  "I forgive you," he said finally. "Because you didn't choose it. But it still happened. And I'll carry that." He looked up at the black dragon. "Who did this?"

  "We do not know his face or his name. We know only that he rules the evil world, and that he hates you specifically." The black dragon lowered its massive head until it nearly touched the ground. "From this day, all dragons hear only your voice."

  Mizi told them to take ZaZuZ home. To give him a burial worthy of the seventh child of Zalakeenihr of Gaia.

  He watched them go until the sky was empty and quiet, and he stood alone in the wreckage of his village for a moment that was only his.

  The Declaration of War

  Most of Dusan was gone. The houses near the Ancestor Tree still stood, including his family's, but the rest was ash and splinters and the smell of things that had burned that weren't meant to burn. The villagers moved through it quietly, some weeping, some simply walking in circles because they didn't know yet what else to do.

  Then the radio crackled.

  Habas City was falling. The Vincerist final assault had broken through the last line of defense. The transmission cut out mid-sentence.

  The silence that followed it was the worst kind, the silence of people who had been holding on to something and could no longer feel it in their hands.

  Someone said it first. "It's over."

  Mizi climbed onto a charred table. It creaked under him. He had mud on his face and a burn along his forearm from where the shield's heat had finally got through and his voice came out rougher than he intended.

  "Listen to me."

  He wasn't sure they would. But they did.

  "I know what this looks like. I know what it feels like. I've felt it before." He paused. "But I'm still here. ZaZuZ is gone and my village is in pieces and Habas is bleeding, and I'm still standing on this table in front of you and the watch on my wrist is still warm."

  He held up his arm. The watch pulsed once, faint gold.

  "I don't know what my fate is. I genuinely don't. But I know that this watch exists for a reason, and I know that a dragon pulled me off the bottom of a river to make sure I was still alive, and I know that none of that happened so I could stand here and watch this country get taken." His voice steadied. "I'm going to the city. I'm going to finish this. Not because I'm fearless. Because I don't have anything left to lose except the thing I'm trying to protect."

  The silence held for one more second.

  Then a single voice broke it. Then another. Then the sound built and spread through the ruins of Dusan like water finding its level, filling every space the ash had left empty.

  The counter-offensive had begun.