Black Wing and Shadows (The Sandorg Chronicles #1)

1. CHAPTER 1

Thousands of cadets before me had climbed these stairs, and thousands had failed.

What made me think I was different? Nothing.

Except I refused to go home and admit my father was right.

Some cadets sprinted as if four hundred and fifty steps didn’t wait above, shoving bodies aside in their rush.

Others dragged their feet, dread written in every slow step.

A few looked like prisoners, pushed into this climb by conscription, each motion reluctant, heavy.

Sandorg Military War College was massive, far larger than the drawings I had seen.

At Sandorg, regardless of which of the seven branches, everyone started from the same point.

The same hellish training lasted for eight weeks for each cadet.

My dad tried his best to prepare me for what I would face, but I felt he was trying to scare me away from going.

“Move out of the fucking way!” one guy shouted as he hauled up the stairs.

Like we weren’t all going to the same place. Chill the fuck out, man.

“What’s your name?” The voice came from behind me.

The female cadet had been consistently following behind me the entire time.

She appeared nervous, her breathing slightly heavier due to the pace.

Meanwhile, my mind raced with numerous thoughts, as it always did.

I told myself I didn’t want to make any friends.

I didn’t want any weaknesses or become attached to anyone who might end up going somewhere else—or dying.

She picked up her pace a little more, walking alongside me.

“Auriella, yours?” I paused for a second to look over at her. She had beautiful black hair and the perfect little points on her ears. Her pitch-black lashes framed her eyes, making them stand out. She stood about five feet six and had a nicely toned body.

“Torvi,” she said. Her voice was shaky. “What branch are you going into?”

“Does it matter until we actually get there?”

It really didn’t, if we didn’t survive basic. I don’t want to make friends. We probably wouldn’t be in the same branch.

She grinned. “Of course it does, if you are looking forward to a goal, you will fight to see it. I am going to be a Rider.”

“Same,” I said. She wasn’t taking the hint.

“Maybe we will be in the same wing.”

“Maybe.”

Maybe—Maybe we wouldn’t, if either of us survived the first few weeks here.

Even if we did, what was the point of making a friend that might die in the next four years, or won’t make it beyond Judgment Day.

Fuck. I might not make it. Her green eyes were too bright, too hopeful.

I couldn’t afford that kind of light in my life.

Friends got ripped away. Better to keep my distance now than mourn later.

We continued to climb in silence. My dad didn’t want me to pursue it, and although he was a Rider, I was the only child and wasn’t obliged to go.

However, I chose to attend. My mother supported me from an early age, enrolling me in courses to enhance my agility and teach me how to use weapons effectively.

Ahead, there was a lot of noise and shouting. My stomach started to churn, and nausea rose in my throat. In a few steps, I would be a cadet—and one step closer to bonding with a dragon.

“It’s yes, instructor,” a very loud, pissed-off instructor yelled ahead.

Fuck.

This was it. I wanted this. Right? Every seed of doubt my father planted came crashing into the back of my head.

They are going to yell at you nonstop. They will break you.

You will be treated like scum for weeks.

You’re different—they’re going to pick on you.

All the things he told me flooded into my mind as if he were standing right there. Shit, I hope he wasn’t right .

I stepped onto the top of the stairs. A brown-haired Historian, dressed in sage green, sat at a desk and took our names.

Six feet to her left stood the female drill instructor, whose dark eyes burned into us as we stepped forward.

She looked ready to incinerate us alive with her gaze.

Remembering what my dad told me, I reminded myself it wasn’t personal.

They were preparing us for war and molding us into warriors.

“Auriella Blackcreek, reporting for basic training.”

“Leave your bag here to be stored, and report to Dining Hall One.”

I turned, straightened my posture, and followed the other cadets, assuming they knew where to go.

I crossed over the large bridge that connected the administration building to the watchtower.

I passed by various drill instructors on the way, wearing caps that separated them from the rest, all standing firmly in place with no expression.

Each one of them looked eerily as though they might take our heads off at any time.

I wondered which of the seven branches they belonged to—Riders, Drusearons, Sorcerers, Shapeshifters, Infantry, Healers, or Historians—all of which played a vital part in our military, in wars past and future.

The dining hall was enormous, with space for at least five hundred of us. Row after row of stone tables lined the hall, some had benches and some had chairs, seating six to eight cadets. Cadets gathered in the hall upon their arrival. Some had been here for hours.

The bell tower tolled sixteen times, indicating it was sixteen hundred, and my stomach twisted inside out.

“Get your asses on the ground and give me twenty pushups,” a deep voice roared, making my bones tremble.

Everyone in the dining hall dropped where they were and started doing pushups. I executed mine flawlessly. My legs straight, my arms locked straight, dropping my elbows to move my chest to the ground, and back up. Some of the cadets around me struggled, and I hoped none of the instructors noticed.

“What the fuck kind of pushup is that?”

I turned slightly to see the cadet the instructor shouted at, trembling on the floor. I tried not to be obvious, not wanting to draw attention to myself. The cadet—a small female with vibrant red hair—was clearly struggling to maintain composure, her body shaking violently.

“At-ten-SHUN,” another instructor commanded. This one’s voice wasn’t as deep, but just as sharp. Everyone stood tall, hands to their sides.

“I am Drill Instructor Asselin. I am one of many who will be here pushing you to your limits for the next eight weeks. Let’s cover some ground rules: One: Do what you’re told, when you’re told.

Two: You should have nothing on you except the clothing you wore.

Three: The next eight weeks will be hell, and some of you will not make it out alive—and a lot of you will wish you were dead instead.

Four: If you have magic, you will not be able to use it.

Don’t even try. To my left, starting close to me: Instructors de Grignon, Minet, and Ramuel.

To the right, starting close to me: Rivet, Pascal, Ossent, and Quillet. ”

The deep-voiced instructor was de Grignon, and the female I saw on the staircase earlier was Ossent.

“There will be eight hundred and seventy-five cadets starting training this year. If you didn’t know, we hold one basic training session each year, which starts on May twenty-ninth and concludes on July thirty-first. Courses start tomorrow, you were the last group to arrive for this year’s cadets.

You will eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner here.

Following dinner, you will stand in formation in the courtyard outside this dining hall. Now line up for dinner.”

Asselin strode off, and the room broke into motion as boots scraped, and trays clattered against metal.

The line surged forward, the smell of grease and stale biscuits clinging to the air.

A hard biscuit was placed on my tray, with the meat that looked entirely too old to be served.

Great. If we didn't die from training, it would be food poisoning.

I carried it to an empty seat, the wood sticky beneath my hand as I pulled the chair out. The first bite turned to paste on my tongue, chalky and dry, tasting the way damp cardboard might if left in the sun. My jaw ached with the effort of swallowing.

I kept my eyes on the plate, counting each breath to ten, using the rhythm to anchor myself.

Voices rose and fell around me, chairs scraped, a spoon clinked against a bowl, but I forced the sounds into the background.

I reminded myself not to snap my head at every noise, not to let the chaos peel my focus away from the food in front of me.

Clink. Clack.

Boom. Smack.

Chewing mouths.

A cadet sobbing.

Voices overlapping.

Tune it out, I told myself. Bite by bite.

The clock on us ticked, though no one had said how long. My father had warned me—they would return, and when they did, we’d pay for every wasted second.

“Get the fuck up.”

“Whhhaa… whaaa… whatttt did I do?”

“You didn’t eat fast enough.”

“Was… was… was… was there a time limit I missed?”

“Was there?”

“Uh… uh… uh… no… no, sir.”

The cadet, another female taller than me with dark brown hair braided down one side of her face, looked petrified. From her constant stuttering, I felt bad for her.

After that little show, every cadet finished their meal and rushed outside to the courtyard, falling into formation.

Instructor Pascal paced back and forth in front of us, surveying us.

He stood six feet even, with light brown hair.

From my quick calculations, there were two hundred of us standing there—shoulder to shoulder, twenty across, ten rows deep. I stood in the second row.

He stopped in the middle of us, glanced at the other instructors, and announced that they would be walking us as groups to our barracks to join the rest of the cadets who arrived earlier.

He would take rows one and two, Quillet would take three and four, and the other six instructors would each take one row. The row we stood in now.

Wait. What. The. Fuck .

My mind spun. They were not going to place us with our intended branches.

We would be bunking all together. I swallowed the lump in my throat.

We were not technically assigned to the branch we selected until we completed basic training, and even then, there was no guarantee we would graduate into that branch.

No branches. No certainty. Just strangers piled into barracks like sacrificial lambs.

The forty of us followed our instructor across the courtyard and into another building.

We climbed seven flights of stairs, turned right, then left into a vast room filled with bunks.

I scanned the room, doing the math. On each side stood twenty triple bunks, making one hundred and twenty beds in one room.

At the opposite end, two doors waited—one marked “Male Latrine” and the other “Female Latrine.”

“Attttennnnn-tiooonnnnn!”

The cadets already in the room immediately stood at the ends of their beds, creating two lines facing each other.

“This is the remainder of your platoon. Help them get settled into the empty beds.” Pascal turned and left us in the room.

We stared at them, and they stared back. My eyes moved from person to person, taking in the other cadets. Then, down at the end of the room, my eyes widened, my eyebrows lifted, and my heart dropped into my stomach.

Huge black wings.