Everyone wants to be chosen by a dragon. The noble houses breed for it and the war colleges kill for it. Kerran Vale, who cleans harnesses and sleeps by the ash bins, knows better than to want anything that flies high enough for kings to notice. Then the great grey turns its eye on the wrong boy, and the wrong boy is bound to a power the citadel spent centuries keeping caged.

Because a dragon bond is not partnership. It is occupation. Every flight, every borrowed flame, every rung of the Bond Depths makes Kerran stronger and less himself, and the answer waiting at the bottom is that riders are how dragons remember. The old war never ended. It moved into human bodies.