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I could not look away from the carnage. I had never seen a depiction of that day. I’d only heard the stories and accounts of the Hormung. On Sigur Day, the anniversary of that momentous occasion, we feasted and raised our glasses and celebrated. The old warriors shared the stories passed down to them from their forefathers: heroic tales of adventure, of good defeating evil, and we lapped it up. Including me.Especiallyme. I felt a part of that lore, connected to the distant past more than others because of my unlucky (or lucky?) beginnings.

I was three years old when my father rescued me. At least that was the best estimation of my age. I could never know for certain. What was certain? Twenty-three years ago, Balor the Butcher led a raiding party into the snow-swathed Crags, far into the cavernous deep. That was where he found me, underneath the mountain’s thick skin, a hapless, naked toddler shrinking at the feet of a monstrous beast, waiting to be its next meal.

It had been eighty years then. Eight decades since a dragon was last sighted. Everyone thought them gone. Dead. Eradicated. Extinct. But there I was... in the den of a dragon. The last one. An anomaly. An outlier. Like a cockroach, the thing had holed up, buried deep in the bowels of a mountain, only surfacing under the cloak of night to hunt, to claim and devour what food it could find—in that instance, me.

Dragons lived for centuries, and that one, my captor, would likely have lived longer if not for Balor the Butcher. I owed the Border King my life. Not only had he saved me and killed the sole remaining dragon, but he had also taken me in and raised me as his son.

For others, this was merely a painting.

For me, it was more.

I understood what it represented. It breathed violence, pain, desperation. Loss and triumph. The triumph of humankind over the demon dragon, over those fiendish creatures who had taken so much and would have continued to take. Continued to destroy. Just as that one—my dragon—had taken my true parents and destroyed the family I would never know.My dragon.As fucked as that was, I would always think of that dragon as mine. The dragon that had stolen me and would have killed me.

And beyond all that, buried within the canvas’s vibrant strokes of ochre and tempera, something else throbbed and breathed... and called to me. A... ghost of something. Something that prickled and tightened my skin to the point of anguish.

Something beyond the striking artwork and my fascination with the story it told.

I narrowed my eyes, peering harder, deeper into the scene, which was as visceral as a bleeding wound. Whatever I felt, whatever I sensed in this room originated here, in this painting.

I stared at it, illogically, impossibly convinced that it stared back at me.

My hands curled at my sides, fingers digging into the flesh of my palms. The chamber grew stifling. My breath steamed from my lips and nose.

“My lord?” The voice came from my left. The king stood beside me. I had not heard his approach, so intent was I on hunting whatever was affecting me.

I inhaled. Exhaled. It did no good. I was still too warm. My chest still too tight.

“Impressive,” I murmured, unable to tear my gaze away from the scene, even though I knew I should have fully given my attention to the man beside me.

“I am told it is a remarkable depiction.”

He wastoldthrough the annals. Not through the collective memory of his family.

No member of the royal family had been there a hundred years ago to pass down the tale of his exploits in that final, grisly battle. The armies from the south were not led by the king of Penterra. Not then. Not now.

The Hormung—the Threshing, for that matter—had largely been fought by the armies of the north.Inthe north. Dragons had crushed their bones to dust, burned their flesh to ash. The blood of warriors from the Borderlands had soaked the battlefields. Warriors like my great-grandfather. A hundred years ago, he led the armies of the north in the Hormung. No warrior had done more than he to eliminate the dragon plague from our land.

He had been a fourth son. Three brothers and countless cousins had fallen before him. Before he took up the mantle of Lord of the Borderlands. Before he formed an alliance with Fenrir, the sire of all wolves, and secured the allegiance of every wolf in the land to aid in the hunt for dragons.

That was the past, but it was not forgotten. Not in the north. And not now as I stared expectantly at the king, patience a thin, fraying thread in my hands. The Borderlands was done waiting for its due.

Iwas done.

He sighed, and there was resignation in the sound. “Well. I do have daughters.”

The implication was very satisfying.Daughters.Plural. Multiple. The admission was a surrender. I had known he would eventually reach this decision. He had no other choice. He needed me too much not to capitulate. At least that was what I had been telling myself ever since I left home.

I smiled slightly, turning back to gaze straight into that painted hellscape, unable to tear my eyes away from it even with my goal so close at hand. “Indeed. You do.”

“Your Majesty!” the lord regent blustered from somewhere behind us. “You cannot mean to say—”

“I haveseveraldaughters,” King Hamlin clarified in a stern voice, no doubt meant to quell the lord regent’s protests. It was thefirst time since my arrival that he had resembled a king. “Perhaps I can spare one for such a worthy man as Lord Dryhten.”

Heat radiated from the painting. It was as though the fire flashing through the sky were real and had come to life to reach out and scald me.

I had won.

I’d accomplished exactly what I’d set out to do. Or very nearly.