Draevorn Academy: The Dragon’s Last Word

The Branding Iron

ZYRAEL

Burning metal.

That was the first thing Draevorn gave me — the smell of someone else’s branding iron and a memory I had spent four years trying to get rid of.

I let it pass.

I was good at letting things pass.

The gate warden was a broad man with the boredom of someone who had been standing in the same spot for years and had stopped expecting anything interesting to happen.

He lifted his hand without looking up.

“Left wrist. Don’t make me ask twice.”

Around me, forty-nine other students raised their wrists at the same time. Blue spirals for Aqua magic. Amber knots for Ironhold magic. The shifting silver of Shroud magic. The pale gold seal of Lumis' magic.

My brand came up with the rest of them.

Ember magic. Red-black flame against my left wrist, raised and deliberate and completely, entirely, not mine.

My mother burned it there the night I was born.

Not the real mark. The forgery was pressed over the real one before anyone could see what her daughter actually carried. I had been too young to understand what was happening that night.

I had not been too young to spend the next nineteen years carrying the weight of it.

The warden’s eyes moved to my brand.

They stopped.

One. I counted silently. Two.

My stomach had already understood what my brain was still processing. I knew how to hold my face. I knew how to breathe like someone who had nothing to hide — slow through the nose, nothing moving, nothing giving anything away.

My mother had taught me that before she taught me anything else.

You are Ember magic. You have always been Ember magic. There is nothing else here.

I had been saying some version of that to myself my entire life.

I was saying it now.

The warden waved me through.

Ten steps past the gate before I exhaled. I counted those too.

Okay, I thought. First one down.

The academy was not what I had imagined and that was my fault for imagining it. The main tower was black volcanic stone, cracked through the middle like something had hit it very hard a long time ago and nobody had bothered to fix it. The Lumis magic lanterns along the entrance corridor were cold and pale — the kind of light that told you where you were going without making you feel any better about going there.

I observed the exits first.

Always the exits first.

The gate behind me, a maintenance door on the east side, was propped open with a stone that someone had left deliberately. There were two ways out. I filed both and moved to the faces.

Forty-nine new students. All of them are performing some version of calm. All of them are failing at it in different ways.

The girl near the front kept adjusting her collar with the focused repetition of someone who had decided that if the collar was right, everything else would follow.

It won’t, I thought. But good luck.

The boy two steps ahead of me was moving his lips around words that weren’t coming out. Prayer or rehearsal. Both made sense here.

Then I saw him.

Far back wall, in dark coat, completely still — not the stillness of someone who had run out of reasons to move but the stillness of someone who had chosen it deliberately and was comfortable staying there.

His Shroud magic brand was old silver.

The kind of old that meant his family had been wearing that mark for generations. The kind of old that meant the Magisterium knew his name before he did.

He wasn’t looking at the corridor.

He wasn’t looking at the other students.

He was looking at me… me!

Not the way strangers looked at each other in new places — curious, quick, moving on. He was looking at me the way you look at something you have been specifically told to look at.

Focused. Patient. Like he had all the time in the world.

File that, I told myself. File it and keep moving.

I looked away first.

I needed him to think that meant something it didn’t.

“First years assemble in the Crucible,” a voice announced from somewhere above us. “Ranking begins at noon. Ranking is not optional. Neither is survival.”

The boy ahead of me stopped walking.

He turned around slowly with the expression of someone who had not included the survival comment in his calculations when he decided to enroll here.

“Did they just say survival?” he asked. He was looking at me specifically, like I had answers.

“Yes,” I said.

“Like — actually?”

“I would assume so.”

He stared at me. I stepped around him and kept moving.

One objective, I reminded myself. Get through the ranking. Stay invisible. Find the Vaultdeep.

Three years of planning. Three things in that order. I was not going to let a nervous boy with bad timing pull me off any of them.

The Crucible doors were at the end of the corridor and they were every bit as bad as the banned texts had described.

Made of thick iron, enormous, and covered from top to bottom in carved faces.

Real ones…

Each one belonged to a student who had died on the ranking floor since the academy’s founding. Someone had looked at that fact and decided it belonged on a door and apparently nobody had disagreed in several centuries.

I stopped in front of them.

Maren Aldis, third year, Aqua magic.

Sorev Crane, first year, Ember magic.

I pressed my left wrist against my thigh and felt the raised edge of the forged brand and held it there until my chest settled into something that felt less like panic and more like the controlled version of it I had been practicing since I was old enough to understand what I was hiding.

Behind me, the boy who had stopped in the corridor had apparently started moving again.

“There are faces on the door,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are those — students?”

“Former students.”

He went quiet.

The dark-eyed boy from the wall had moved too. I had been tracking him without looking at him since the entrance and he was somewhere to my left now. Closer than before. Still watching with that same specific quality of attention that I had not yet found a comfortable category for.

I did not look at him.

I was not going to give him that.

There were so many faces carved into those doors.

I looked for empty space and found none.

I wondered which one would be mine.