Draevorn Academy: The Dragon’s Last Word

Three centuries ago, the empire of Valdreyn made a decision. They called it progress. The decision was simple. There was a magic in the world that the empire could not control and could not afford to ignore. It lived in certain bloodlines, passed from parent to child the way eye color passed, quiet and persistent and entirely indifferent to what the empire preferred. The people who carried it were called the Dravari. What they carried was Dravic magic, the original language of dragons, encoded in human blood over generations of contact between two kinds of beings who had shared the same tongue since before Valdreyn had a name. The empire studied the Dravari for thirty years before it moved against them. Thirty years of documentation, classification, and research conducted by people who wrote their findings in neat handwriting and went home to their families afterward. At the end of those thirty years, the empire understood exactly what Dravic magic was, where it came from, and how to take the pieces of it that were useful while removing the parts that were not. The parts that were not useful were the Dravari themselves. The empire was called what followed the Silencing. It lasted eleven years. At the end of those eleven years, the Dravari were gone from every official record, every census document, every institutional archive in Valdreyn. Their names were removed. Their histories were removed. Their children, if any survived, were not acknowledged. The magic was not gone. The empire had spent thirty years learning to take it apart and they had taken it apart carefully by encoding fragments of the original dragon language into five separate disciplines that could be branded onto children at birth, monitored through a central institution, and controlled completely. They called the five disciplines Ember, Aqua, Ironhold, Shroud, and Lumis. Every child in Valdreyn received one at birth. The brand was permanent. The discipline was the empire’s version of what the Dravari had carried, broken into smaller, controlled, and deliberately incomplete fragments, a magic that was never meant to be fragmented. The empire presented the five disciplines as its own discovery. Nobody alive remembered otherwise. Only the dragons remembered. There were seven places in Valdreyn where dragons were held in chains, Bindingspires, built into the foundations of the empire’s most significant institutions. The dragons had been bound during the Silencing, their throat chains suppressing the original language so completely that three centuries passed without a single dragon speaking a word the empire had not authorized. The empire classified them as strategic assets. The oldest of them had been in the mountain for one hundred years. She did not have a name in any empire records. The records listed her as Asset Designation Seven, Bindingspire One, Draevorn Installation. Status: contained and compliant. In truth, she was not compliant. She was waiting. Beneath Draevorn Academy, carved into the black volcanic stone of the mountain, in the pre-empire ruins that existed long before the first stone of the institution was laid, sat the engine. The founding maintenance records listed it as Infrastructure Asset One. Status: operational. It had been operational for three hundred years. Every branding ceremony performed in Valdreyn fed it. A fragment of each child’s magical signature was harvested at the moment of branding, processed through the engine’s architecture, and used to maintain the discipline foundations the empire had built from stolen Dravic magic. Three hundred years of children. Three hundred years of branding ceremonies. Three hundred years of an empire running on something it had told everyone was gone. But the mountain knew what was underneath it. On a grey morning in the four hundred and twelfth year of the empire’s calendar, fifty new students walked through Draevorn Academy’s iron gates for the first year of enrollment. The gate warden checked their brands in the order they arrived. Blue spirals for Aqua magic. Amber knots for Ironhold magic. The flame is red-black for Ember magic. The shifting silver mark for Shroud magic. The pale gold seal for Lumis' magic. He waved each student through without particular interest. He did not notice anything unusual about the girl with the Ember magic brand on her left wrist. He waved her through. Seven floors below the academy’s main corridor, in the dark of a chamber that had not been properly inspected in four years, the oldest dragon in Valdreyn opened one eye. She had been waiting one hundred years for this specific sound. Dravic magic. Walking through the front door of the institution built over everything the empire had tried to destroy. She closed her eyes. She could afford to be patient. She had been patient for one hundred years and the girl with the forged brand on her wrist was not going anywhere. Not yet. There was work to do first, the kind of work that could not be rushed, that had to be built from the ground up. One word at a time.