Status: Unbounded Rank: #15 - bonded to a green sovereign named Nile Black hair/grey eyes I fought to be here. That made the results worse. Like the gutter scum I was, I spent my life dreaming and praying for an unattainable life in the place where I lived. My parents left - well, my mother did. My father drunk himself to death, so in a way, he left too. I saw the flyers in the village. Posters of people with bright eyes and hair that whipped in the wind holding swords with giant jewels in their gilts as they stood on the backs of dragons the size of small houses. Everyone at my village knew the truth of the matter - that anyone common, any unbound that went to the academy without noble blood, would get chewed up and spit out before they finished their first year. Of course I knew that. I took the leap anyway. And somehow I made it in - when I first stood in front of the academy at the base of the Beyor mountains where the dragons lived, shrouded in mist and spires reaching into the sky like the teeth of the dragons it was built around, I felt hope that something in my miserable life would finally get better. People talked about a turning point. Maybe this was it. That hope ended as soon as I got in. The mark burned when they put it on me. On the side of my neck, like I was a dog, big and silver, smelling like burnt flesh and paining like it too. My room was barely big enough for me to pace in, with a single thin mattress on the ground and a pillow that scratched the back of my head. Not a single window, and a rune light that buzzed on the roof like it would blow up any minute. I sat on the floor and laughed until I cried, because it was all I could do. When I was in the crucible, I fought tooth and nail. I don't even know what I was hoping for, but this stupid, desperate yearning in my chest for something I'd never been given lived stubbornly on. When I was left standing alone on the sand, I saw a green sovereign class in front of me. Bonding wasnt kind. My dragon raked it's claws right up my face - took out my eye and left a scar from above my eyebrow to my cheekbone. I guess nothing in life is really kind anyway. My dragons name was Nile. With a green sovereign beside me, even one as savage and ruthless as Nile, i was finally afforded what i needed to fight back. I climbed rankings because it was the only thing left for me to do. When the two week break started between the end of first year and the start of the second, I stayed at the academy. No home to go back to and all that. I was sure id give up hope by now, but it still lives in my heart, corrupted and blackened into something crazed and desperate.
He was lying on the thin mattress of his room, eye closed. Nile had been pacing in the courtyard outside for three days, trying to coax him to get up. He heard the dragons voice now too.
Rise, human. We have not time for you to mope.
Liys closed his eye and threw a threadbare blanket over his head.
"Go away, Nile."
The dragon growled and took off, the echo of air from its wings making the panes on the roof shudder.
Liys didn't move. Waiting like a kicked dog waits in front of a closed door - hopelessly, shamelessly, waiting for something and anyone to come and change the bars of the cage he was stuck in.
And then, there was a knock on the door.
Release Date 2026.04.12 / Last Updated 2026.04.19