Chapter 687: The Dragon Riders Need A Minute

The Queen of Aevamorra Vyracarum didn’t hesitate. "Consider it done, Keeper. Our dragon teams always include at least one Fae or mage. You will draw from their magic if needed. They will flank you at all times."

Serena’s eyebrows lifted by a fraction. Then she smiled, genuine, warm, the brief flash that crossed her face when her brain encountered something it admired.

"Our mages don’t ride. Just the wolves," she admitted. "That is brilliant that yours do."

Serena meant it. It wasn’t flattery. She didn’t do flattery. It was professional admiration from a woman who had spent months watching Drakenfell’s mage librarians refuse to get on dragons and had privately thought, more than once, that putting a mage on a dragon was so logically obvious that the resistance to it bordered on insanity. A good mage could fabricate during an emergency, not to mention heal dragons and riders. Even one in a team of six dragons would make a difference.

The queen received the compliment with a single nod that said I know it is.

Serena walked towards Talon.

The dragon was frost-scaled like the others but darker at the edges, sapphire bleeding into obsidian along the ridgeline of his spine. He was leaner than the rest. Built for speed the way wolves were built for speed: long, angular, every ounce of mass distributed for velocity rather than endurance.

His eyes were silver-white and tracked her approach. She knew that look. Velkaris had it. Onyx had it. The look of a creature whose brain was running evaluations that predated language and whose evaluations were thorough.

She stopped in front of him, held her hand out, palm up, and waited.

Talon’s nostrils flared. He inhaled once. Long. Reading her the way dragons read everything: through scent and frequency and the invisible architecture of magic that lived beneath the skin.

He lowered his head. Pressed his muzzle into her open palm. Serena ran her hand once along the bridge of his snout.

"Thank you," she said quietly. To the dragon. To the queen who had offered him. To the night that was about to get worse and the people counting on her to make it better.

Serena didn’t mount the way riders mounted.

She planted her boot on Talon’s bent foreleg and launched herself up, landing in a stand on the dragon’s back. Both boots planted. Bow in hand. Weight centered between the wings the way a person stands on solid ground.

THUMP.

Serena looked up. Every wolf on Shadowclaw’s western wall had thunderclapped their fist to their chest in salute to her. Wolves who had met her yesterday morning. Wolves who had watched her sort paperwork. Wolves who had seen her execute a man and defy the elders. Those wolves. Every single one.

She blinked a few times, stunned because she had not been expecting that whatsoever. It put a lump in the back of her throat that she swallowed down before it turned into something she couldn’t afford.

Then something else unexpected happened.

CLANG.

The Queen of Aevamorra Vyracarum fist banged against her dark steel breastplate. Her warriors followed in the same instant, riders and spotters striking their chests.

Two kingdoms were saluting a woman who had introduced them forty minutes ago after showing up in a throne room at midnight with a bow and a mage and asking for an army like she was asking for directions.

THUMP.

Serena hit her own chest in answer, returning the salute.

"I told my husband you were worth the army. Prove me right," the queen called.

"I will," Serena replied with zero hesitation.

WHOOSH.

Talon lifted.

His wings spread and drove downward in a single, massive stroke that launched them both off the field. Wind tore across the ground hard enough to flatten the grass in a twenty-foot radius.

Serena didn’t crouch. Didn’t grab. Didn’t sit. She stood on the spine of a rising dragon with her boots planted on scales and her eyes already scanning the southern horizon, the bow resting at her side, her body adjusting to the climb with the unconscious balance of a woman whose relationship with gravity had been renegotiated a long time ago and gravity had lost.

She wasn’t paying attention to the field below her anymore. She was reading the sky. Calculating distance. Counting the minutes until contact.

But the field was paying attention to her.

Every frost dragon rider on the ground was staring. These were professionals. Career military. Men and women who had trained for years to ride in formation, who had spent their first hundred hours learning not to fall, who had graduated to unassisted riding after months of drills, and who still sat when their dragons climbed because standing on a rising dragon was not something people did.

She had done it without thinking. The way someone steps onto a staircase. The way someone walks through a door.

The Shadowclaw wolves on the wall were worse. Beta Sharpe’s mouth was open. Gamma Knox wore an identical expression. Captain Ravenhall’s hand, which had been gesturing towards a defensive position, was frozen in the air pointing at nothing.

The Queen of Aevamorra Vyracarum watched Talon climb with Serena standing on his back and her expression did not change. Her arms crossed. She looked like a woman whose assessment had just been confirmed for the fourth time tonight and who had stopped being surprised by the confirmations.

Aeron stood beside Beta Sharpe on the wall. He glanced at Beta Sharpe’s face. Then up at Serena, who was now fifty feet in the air, still standing, still scanning, still completely unaware that she had just broken every rider in the field’s understanding of what was normal.

"I’m told her first dragon ride was on one of their heads."

Beta Sharpe turned to look at him. The look carried the specific expression of a man whose capacity for surprise had been exceeded hours ago and was now running on fumes.

"As in a literal dragon head?"

He asked it loud enough that three archers turned around. He did not care. His understanding of his future Luna had been restructured four times tonight and this was the fifth and he was out of quiet reactions.

"Oh yes. Her first day in Drakenfell. She did a Truebond Veil then too," Aeron replied.

Beta Sharpe looked at the sky, then at Aeron. "Finnick would absolutely hate this."

"He would."

"When he wakes, he is going to ask—"

"Not it."

"You can’t call ’not it.’ You’re the Master Mage."

"I just did."

They both looked at Knox, who was standing thirty feet away, blissfully unaware that he had been nominated unanimously for that task and there were no take-backs.