Hunt the Missing Dragon

Prologue

On the Nature of Furies, the Peculiarity of Dragons, and One Bond That the World Was Not Prepared For: An Addendum

[As preserved, with great personal suffering, by Mortimer Flickerby, Master Chronicler of Things Best Forgotten]

Let us begin, as all terrible stories do, at the beginning.

A Fury is not born.

This bears repeating, because mortals have a persistent and deeply inconvenient habit of assuming that all living things arrive the way they do, squalling and blinking into sudden light, fresh from the ordinary machinery of existence and genetics and such.

Furies do not. There is nothing ordinary about them, and the universe, to its credit, does not pretend otherwise.

A Fury comes into existence the way a storm does.

The way a wildfire does. Not made, not wished for, but called forth, pulled from a place where emotion has pooled so deep and so long that it stops being emotion and becomes something else entirely.

Something with a heartbeat. Something that breathes.

This is how the Sisters came to be. Four of them, in the time before Fuerlis knew what magic was. Four points of impossible feeling, made flesh, made power.

The eldest arrived in fury, and she wore it like armor. Anger is not inherently cruel, it simply knows what it wants. It arrives with its jaw set and its purpose already decided, and the Fury it produces is sharp and certain and very difficult to refuse.

The second arrived by something quieter.

By the particular ache of a soul who has watched the threads of what could be, unravel in real time, who has felt the weight of every choice not taken.

These particular Furies exist knowing too much and able to say too little, guided by currents of fate that do not explain themselves and do not apologize for it.

They are not heartless. They are simply already looking at the horizon everyone else has not yet turned to face.

The third Sister Fury in our story arrived by secrecy, by the pressure of things kept too long in the dark, truths too heavy for the world to carry in plain sight.

These ones arrive sideways, you might say.

Present without announcing themselves. Comfortable in the spaces between what is known and what is not.

They are not callous. They simply understand, in a way others often cannot, that some things survive only because they are hidden.

And then there was the fourth Fury sister.

She was odd, one might say. This chronicler certainly would.

She did not come from anger, or from fate’s cold nature, or from the pleasure of concealed things.

She came from longing. From something so achingly tender it should not have had enough force to crack the world open.

And yet it did. The wanting was simply that deep. That relentless.

She was softer than her sisters. Not weaker, softer, in the way deep water is softer than a breaking wave and infinitely more difficult to escape.

Where her sisters led and foresaw and concealed, she simply cared, with the particular thoroughness of someone incapable of looking at a broken thing and walking away from it.

It was her greatest quality and her greatest flaw, and her sisters thought it made her far too gentle.

They were not entirely wrong. They were not entirely right either.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. This is, after all, a note on the peculiarity of dragons as well, is it not?

When a Fury arrives, when that impossible moment of becoming splits the air and she steps through it, trailing the raw residue of whatever feeling called her into existence, magic is left behind.

Let the record state: magic does not waste itself.

And in the peculiar, unhurried logic of deep magic, it finds a shape.

An egg.

From it, a dragon hatches.

He enters the world already belonging to someone, already carrying within him the Fyrian, the bond between dragon and Fury, knitted into his very nature before he has even drawn his first breath.

The Fury he belongs to is already written into him like the first word of a sentence that has no other ending.

The dragon’s second soul bond, the Tilouri, is quieter.

Patient. The space within a dragon left open for a mate.

Not fated or forced, but possible if one allows such a thing and finds their Tilouri.

Most dragons never open that door. They are, as a general rule, creatures of tremendous loyalty and terrible stubbornness, and protecting one person with your entire existence leaves very little room for love.

This is important. Remember it.

In the Underworld, before Fuerlis knew what magic was, the four Sisters held court among demons. They were bound in their peculiar way to four dragon companions, each Fury and her dragon; two halves of something the world had decided should exist together.

And the youngest Sister, she of longing and sorrow, was bound to a dragon called Lyric.

The Fyrian between them sealed itself as it always does, at the moment of their arrival.

But the Tilouri, that second quieter soul bond, waited while she fixed things her sisters had accidentally broken.

It waited while she loved the Underworld in the particular way of someone who knows they do not quite belong to it.

It waited through ages of time and the slow accumulation of everything they were to each other.

And then, at some point that neither of them could have named precisely, the door swung open. Lyric only ever bonded with Celeste.

Both bonds. Fyrian and Tilouri. Guardian and mate. Dragon and Fury and something for which the chroniclers, to our lasting frustration, have never found an adequate word.

The scholars will tell you this is extraordinarily rare.

That the two bonds are meant to be separate.

That to collapse them into a single being is to make yourself catastrophically, irretrievably singular.

One anchor, one center of gravity, one point from which all of the rest of your existence hangs. Remove that point and everything falls.

They say this as a warning.

They are, as it happens, entirely correct.

What followed is recorded in the history you have already been told, though the history, as histories often do, skips the parts that hurt most.

The demon princes betrayed the Sisters. The Fourth struck Celeste, the youngest, down. She had never been made for destruction, and the Underworld, which had never particularly deserved her, lost her anyway.

The three surviving sisters fled. They tore through the veil between worlds with grief at their backs and vengeance in their hands, and they stole enough power on their way out to seal the demon princes behind a barrier that has held ever since. Mostly.

Three dragons went with them. They followed their Furies, as dragons do, bound by the Fyrian that is older and deeper than choice.

But Lyric?

Lyric had no Fury to follow.

He went anyway. Or rather: he was taken, swept up in the exodus of three dragons and three Furies and grief large enough to reshape the world, carried across the veil entirely against his will and deposited into a realm that was, at that precise moment, burning.

A dragon without his Fury has a wound that does not close.

The Fyrian pulls and pulls at nothing, the way a compass pulls toward a north that no longer exists.

And Lyric, who had given both bonds to the same soul, who had no second self to retreat into, no quiet Tilouri waiting patiently behind a different door, was simply, completely broken.

The histories noted the arrival of three Furies and their dragons. They recorded the Burning. They recorded the birth of magic in Fuerlis, and the Phoenix, and all the children of chaos that followed.

They did not record what it cost Lyric to survive any of it.

The Fourth Dragon went silent when his Fury died. Whether grief consumed his voice or simply his will to use it, no one living can say. He went quiet, and he stayed quiet, and in that particular silence, before the breaking, he became his own kind of dying legend.