This is where you die, whispered a voice that sounded like every healer who’d ever looked at my chart.
The Unweathered
The parapet was weeping.
Slick, black granite glistened under a bruised sky, each gust of wind from the Dragon’s Spine sending a fine spray of rain across the narrow bridge. Three hundred feet below, the jagged teeth of the ravine waited to pulverize whatever flesh lost its nerve. Fourth Wing
Because for the first time in my life, I wasn’t reading about the storm.
“Next!” the Wingleader barked. His name was Xaden Riorson, and the shadows beneath his eyes looked sharp enough to cut glass. A scar bisected his left brow—a gift from a rebellion he’d led at seventeen. He didn’t look at me like he looked at the others. He looked at me like I was a sentence already carried out.
He stood, brushing the mud from his hands. This is where you die, whispered a voice
“And if you survive the Threshing,” he added, turning his back on me, “try not to die during the War Games. It’s a waste of a good uniform.”
As he walked away, the rain began to fall harder. I looked down at my hands. The knuckles were split open. The skin was raw.
Around me, forty other first-years watched. Some had already failed. One boy was vomiting behind a pillar. A girl with cropped silver hair was counting her fingers to make sure they were all still there. Three hundred feet below, the jagged teeth of
His mouth twitched—not a smile, never a smile—and he grabbed my forearm. His grip was iron. He hauled me over the edge and onto the muddy, blood-stained soil of the Riders’ courtyard.
I knew that. Everyone knew that. My bones were too light, my frame too slender for the weight of dragon-scale armor. My eyes, a shade of hazel too soft for the killing fields, had been deemed “insufficient” by the Scribe Quadrant’s entrance exam. Too imaginative. Too prone to lying.