The Dragon and the Fox-Fire
The storm broke against the Black Peaks like a wave against a shore that had long since stopped caring about the tide. Heiyan rode the turbulence with the ease of something born inside it, his obsidian scales drinking in what little light pierced the clouds, each beat of his wings sending ripples through the mist that clung to the mountains like a shroud. Lightning split the sky to his left. He did not flinch. Thunder had been the lullaby of his childhood, and storms had never frightened him—only the silence after them, the way a sky could empty itself of violence and leave nothing behind but a terrible, aching quiet.
That quiet was what waited for him now, coiled at the base of his chest like a second heart.
Below him, the mountains of Yanwei rose in jagged black ridges, their peaks capped with frost that never fully melted even in the height of summer. Ancient magic ran through that stone, old as the first dragons who had clawed their way out of the earth's molten core and declared the sky their birthright. Heiyan had been raised on those stories, had believed them with the fervor only a child could manage, back before he understood that birthrights could be lonely things to…
