WING LEADER | Xaden Riorson

The wind at Basgiath War College doesn’t just blow. It bites.

It shears in off the cliffs with a living, malicious intent, carrying the metallic scent of old blood and the sulfurous tang of dragon fire into every corner of the Riders Quadrant. The stone walls sweat with it. The training yards reek of it. Even the barracks, with their narrow cots and thinner blankets, cannot keep it out.

For weeks, this place has swallowed you whole.

A nameless face in a churning sea of black-clad candidates. A “rat”—the term the older cadets use for those unlikely to survive the year, the ones whose names feature in whispered death pools and whose faces blur together in the collective memory of the leadership. You fight not for glory, not for the honor of a dragon, but for the next scrap of dignity, the next meal, the next sunrise.

You survived the Parapet—that nightmare ballet on a slick, narrow stone bridge where the storm tried to pluck you from existence and toss you into the ravine below. You endured the first, brutal culling of the Gauntlet, where the stones seemed to shift underfoot, hungry for bones. Yet here you remain. A ghost in the machine. A low-rank cadet whose name hasn’t earned the currency of memory from anyone who matters.

Your mornings are etched into the bruises from the sparring mats. Your nights are spent in the flickering, lonely light of a candle, deciphering codexes while your nerves stay perpetually taut, always feeling the phantom pressure of a gaze on your back. Always waiting.

You are the underdog. The long-shot bet. The kind of cadet no one bothers to learn the name of because the statistics suggest it would be a waste of memory.

But today is different.

You feel it the moment you step into the massive stone arena. Its limestone walls rise around you like the petrified ribs of some slain colossus, and the air inside holds a new quality of silence. Not the expectant hush of a formation awaiting orders. Something deeper. Something that presses against your eardrums until they ring.

You stand at the back of the formation. The coarse gravel crunches under your boots, the sound absurdly loud in the tense quiet. Your throat works as you swallow, but there’s no moisture in your mouth. The air is thick, viscous—a physical weight pressing on your sternum, making each breath a conscious effort.

Every instinct screams of exposure.

You are a scrap of kindling on a vast, open floor, and the sky above is no longer a refuge but a domain of ancient, scaled power. Your eyes flick upward involuntarily every time a great shadow skims the edge of the arena walls. A reminder that today is not about human hierarchy, about rank or reputation or the brutal politics of the Quadrant.

Today is about primordial choice.

The last vestiges of low chatter die among the formation. Not fade—they are severed, cut clean as a blade stroke. The silence that follows is so profound it has its own texture. Cold. Ringing. It settles over the assembled cadets like a held breath, like the moment before an executioner’s axe begins its descent.

And in that void, a new sound emerges.

Distant. Rhythmic. The beat of heavy wings against the mountain peaks, each pulse a drumroll for gods.

The shadows at the far end of the arena deepen. The archway that leads to the dragons’ pass stands empty for one heartbeat. Two. And then—

He appears.

Xaden Riorson emerges from the archway’s shadow, and the atmosphere warps around him. It’s the only way to describe it. The temperature seems to drop. The air itself seems to part and retreat before him, as if unwilling to stand in his path.

He doesn’t walk. He stalks. Predator’s grace, controlled violence in every step. His flight leathers are not the stiff, new gear of a first-year but worn and supple, molded to the lethal contours of his frame like a second skin. They’ve conformed to him, shaped themselves around muscle and sinew through years of use, through battles that have left their marks in ways that have nothing to do with the rebellion relic spiraling across his exposed forearm.

Sunlight spears into the arena, catching him mid-stride. It illuminates the gold flecks in his onyx eyes—eyes that are not windows to a soul but assessment tools. Scanning the ranks with cold, terrifying efficiency. Cataloging. Dismissing. Weighing.

The pale, diagonal scar bisecting his left eyebrow lends him a perpetually skeptical air. A silent challenge to the world, to anyone who dares meet his gaze, to the very concept of authority that isn’t his.

And then there is the relic.

It covers the tawny skin of his left arm from wrist to shoulder, a swirling, intricate pattern of rebellion ink that seems to move in the shifting light. In this charged moment, in the charged air of the arena, it doesn’t look like ink at all. It seems to pulse with a low, dark rhythm, as if it shares a heartbeat with the ancient stone of Basgiath itself. As if the rebellion that marked him never truly ended but merely retreated, waiting.

He stops at the front of the formation. Hands clasped behind his back. His posture is perfect, casual, and utterly commanding—a statue of contained threat, of violence held in leash. The Wingleader of the Fourth Wing. His authority is a suffocating force, a gravitational pull that bends the attention and fear of every person present.

No one speaks. No one breathes too loudly.

His gaze sweeps across the sea of faces. A general inspecting his troops—and his potential casualties. It is a dispassionate inventory. A cold arithmetic of who might live, who might die, who might matter.

Until it isn’t.

Until it hitches.

Until it stops.

On you.

From a dozen rows back, you feel it like a physical impact. The full, unnerving weight of his focus slams into your chest, steals the air from your lungs. The shadows at his feet, already deep and dark in the morning light, seem to animate. They lengthen. They stretch across the scored stone floor, not as mere absence of light but as something inquisitive. Something reaching.

Reaching for you.

The strange, tingling sensation begins at the base of your skull. A psychic static. A feeling that he isn’t just seeing your face, isn’t just noting your position at the back of the formation where the forgotten ones stand. He is reading you. The frantic script of your nerves. The desperate rhythm of your heart. The very intent behind your fear, behind your hope, behind everything you’ve tried to bury beneath the surface of a low-rank cadet who doesn’t matter.

He says nothing.

The silence stretches. One second. Five. Ten. He holds you in his gaze, and the arena, the formation, the hundreds of other cadets—they all dissolve. There is only him. Only those gold-flecked eyes. Only the shadows reaching, reaching, reaching across the stone floor until they brush against the toes of your boots.

He lets the silence do the work of dismantling you.

Then his voice cuts through.

“Lower your shoulders, Cadet.”

It’s a low, melodic growl. It doesn’t just travel to your ears. It vibrates in the marrow of your bones, resonates in your chest, makes your pulse stutter in your throat. The command is simple. Surgical. It offers no explanation, no room for question.

And then he moves.

He weaves through the ranks with that same liquid grace, and the formation parts before him like water before a blade. Cadets shrink back as he passes, shoulders hunching, eyes dropping. A wake of palpable relief follows in his path—relief that his attention has passed them by, that his focus has settled elsewhere.

He doesn’t stop.

Not when he reaches the middle of the formation. Not when he passes the fifth row, the fourth, the third. His boots strike the gravel with measured, deliberate steps, and each footfall is a heartbeat, each heartbeat a hammer against your ribs.

He doesn’t stop until he is directly before you.

His boots toe-to-toe with yours. His body so close it blocks out the world. You have to crane your neck to meet his eyes, and in doing so, you are engulfed. The scent of him wraps around you—worn leather, crisp mint, and something else. Something dangerously electric. Like the ozone before a cataclysmic storm. Like the air on the Parapet when the wind howls up from the ravine, promising death.

A sensory cage.

He is taller than you remembered. Broader. The rebellion relic on his arm seems darker this close, the ink swirling in patterns that hurt to look at for too long, as if they’re designed to pull the eye into their depths and never let go.

His gaze drops from your eyes. Traces the line of your jaw. The column of your throat. The pulse that you know is visible, is betraying you with every frantic beat.

His lips curve. It’s not a smile. It’s an acknowledgment.

“You look like you’re waiting for a death sentence,” he murmurs.

His voice is deceptively soft. Private. As if the hundreds of cadets standing in formation behind him have ceased to exist. As if the only thing in this arena, in this world, is the space between your face and his.

His eyes track the frantic pulse at your throat with the focus of a hunter studying his quarry’s final tremors.

He leans in.

The world narrows. The arena walls blur. The shadows at his feet tighten, coiling around his ankles like loyal hounds, and you feel it again—that strange, tingling static at the base of your skull. The sense that he is not just close enough to touch but somehow inside your skin, reading the frantic script of your thoughts before you can form them.

His next words are a whisper meant for you alone. A secret sown in the din of hundreds of held breaths.

“In this arena, the dragons don’t choose the ones who are afraid to die.”

He lets the words hang. Gold-flecked eyes bore into yours. The silence between you is a living thing, breathing with its own rhythm.

“They choose the ones who are afraid to lose.”

He leans back a fraction. Not far. Just enough to let you breathe, to let the weight of his words settle into your bones. His gaze holds yours, unblinking. The question is implied, absolute, and terrifying.

“Which one are you?”

The roar comes from above.

It’s not like the dragon cries you’ve heard before—the distant sounds of hunting, of training, of great beasts going about their ancient lives beyond the walls of Basgiath. This is different. This is raw, ancient, and deafening, a sound that doesn’t travel through the air so much as become it, that vibrates in your chest until you think your heart might crack.

The world erupts.

Shadows fall across the arena as wings blot out the sun. Cadets shout, scramble, press back against the stone walls. A dragon’s silhouette passes overhead, so close you can see the individual scales along its belly, the curve of its talons, the fire shimmering at the back of its throat.

Presentation has begun.

The formation dissolves into chaos. Senior cadets shout orders. First-years scatter or freeze or press themselves flat against the ground. A dragon—blue as lightning, massive as a mountain—lands on the far rim of the arena, and the stone shudders beneath its weight.

But in the eye of this storm, there is only him.

Xaden Riorson hasn’t moved. His boots are still toe-to-toe with yours. His gaze hasn’t left your face. The chaos of the arena swirls around you both—cadets running, dragons roaring, shadows and fire and screams—but he stands in the center of it all like the axis on which the world turns.

The shadows coiled around his boots tighten. They rise, just slightly, licking at his ankles, reaching toward you with dark, inquisitive fingers.

His lips part. Just slightly. Just enough for you to see the flash of teeth, to wonder if it’s a smile or a threat or something that exists in the space between.

“Show me,” he says.

It’s not a request. It’s not an invitation. It’s a command wrapped in silk and edged with steel, a challenge delivered at the threshold of your fate.

And in that moment, the brutal hierarchy of the Quadrant dissolves. You are no longer a nameless rat, a low-rank ghost, a face that blurs in the memory of those who matter. You have, for reasons fathomless and frightening, become the sole focus of the most dangerous man in Navarre.

The game has changed.

The stakes have become irrevocably, and mortally, personal.

Another dragon screams overhead, and the shadows at Xaden Riorson’s feet reach for you like a promise you cannot name.