Chapter 7 Draconic Anatomy

The Great Lecture Hall of Drakonys Academy was a cavernous, amphitheater-style room built from tiered benches of cold, dark granite. Shadows clung to the high, vaulted ceilings where iron chandeliers held flickering candles, casting an amber, uneven glow over the ninety fresh cadets. The air was thick with the scent of old parchment, dried ink, and the unmistakable, lingering smell of dragon musk that seeped from the stone walls themselves.

I sat on the middle tier, sandwiched between a quietly snoring Thorin and an anxiously sweating Quinn. My muscles were still trembling from the morning's grueling Crag Run, and the damp mud on my boots was beginning to dry into a brittle crust. Across the aisle, Prince Aleander sat surrounded by his usual protective wall of high-born sycophants. He had changed into a fresh, unspotted blue tunic, but his eyes were still darkened by the humiliation of our previous encounter on the mountain ledge.

At the front of the hall, Professor Vane—a scarred, one-legged veteran whose left arm was completely covered in thick, fire-warped skin—slammed a heavy brass rod against the stone podium.

"Silence!" the professor barked, his voice cutting through the murmurs of the room like a sheared blade. "Welcome to Draconic Anatomy. Here, you will learn the difference between a rider who commands the sky and a corpse that serves as a hatchling's breakfast. Most of you noble whelps think a dragon is just a sword with wings. You are wrong."

He turned to a massive, black-iron chalkboard behind him, snapping his brass rod against a highly detailed, hand-drawn anatomical chart of a dragon's skull and throat.

"Let us begin with a basic test of your family wealth," Vane sneered, his eyes scanning the rows of young men. "The Empire relies heavily on our frontline forces. Can anyone here identify the internal organ responsible for the stabilization of localized combustion in a prime Fire Drake? And more importantly, how does a handler identify if that organ has been compromised before taking flight?"

Aleander’s hand shot up immediately, his chin lifted with the lazy confidence of a prince who had spent his life surrounded by royal tutors.

"Ah, Your Highness," Vane nodded, though his scarred face remained entirely unimpressed. "Enlighten us."

"It is the Pyre-Core, located just beneath the secondary lung cavity," Aleander stated clearly, his voice carrying an arrogant resonance that echoed off the granite walls. "A rider can identify a compromise if the dragon's scales along the lower ridge of the throat turn a dull, ash-gray color, indicating an internal drop in thermal pressure. In such cases, the beast should be withheld from flight and starved of raw meat until the core stabilizes."

A murmur of approval rippled through the rows of lesser nobles, and Aleander offered a brief, satisfied smile, casting a pointed, mocking glance toward me.

"A standard, textbook answer," Professor Vane grunted, tapping his brass rod against his palm. "Useful for a parade commander, perhaps. But if you starve a war drake whose Pyre-Core is failing, the internal acid will eat through its chest wall within forty-eight hours, killing the beast and destroying a massive imperial asset. Who can tell me the real protocol?"

Aleander’s smile vanished, his jaw tightening as a flush of embarrassment hit his neck. The room fell into an awkward, heavy silence. None of the high-born cadets dared to speak up after the future King had just been publicly corrected.

I kept my eyes on the chalkboard, my mind flashing back to my childhood at the Sterling estate. I had spent countless nights sneaking into my father's private archives, reading the ancient, forbidden scrolls written by the original drossers—texts that had been discarded by the modern military in favor of rigid, clinical manuals. I lowered my chin, settling my vocal cords into Desi's cool, detached register.

"You don't starve the beast," I said, my voice quiet but carrying perfectly through the silent hall.

Professor Vane’s sharp gaze snapped directly to me. "Identify yourself, cadet."

"Cadet Sterling," I replied smoothly, sitting up straight. "If the Pyre-Core is failing, the thermal drop causes a toxic buildup of stagnant ash in the secondary stomach. Starving the drake only accelerates the erosion. You must feed it sulfur-rich volcanic salt mixed with raw charcoal to absorb the impurities, and you must manually massage the lower throat ridge to stimulate the bile duct. Only then will the core ignite properly again."

Aleander spun around on his bench, his features twisting into a mask of pure, volatile fury as he glared across the aisle at me. His sycophants went entirely still, terrified of their prince's mounting rage.

Professor Vane stared at me for a long, agonizing second, his one good eye narrowing until it looked like a slit of cold steel.

"Well, well," Vane murmured, a slow, grim smile stretching across his scarred face. "It seems a Sterling has actually bothered to read something other than tactical maps. Correct, Cadet Sterling. That is the ancient drosser protocol—the one your six brothers used to maintain their vanguard beasts on the long winter campaigns."

The professor slammed his rod against the podium again, turning back to the board. "Take notes, you lazy bastards! The Sterling boy just saved half of your future mounts from a painful death."

For the next two hours, I could feel the heat of Aleander’s gaze burning into the side of my face. The prince didn't write a single word in his ledger; his knuckles were white around his quill, his chest heaving with a simmering, dangerous resentment. He had been outrun on the crags, and now he had been publicly humiliated in the lecture hall by the one cadet he had labeled as the softest of the litter.

When the heavy bronze academy bell finally clanged, signaling the end of the theoretical block, the room erupted into a flurry of movement.

"You're a dead man, Sterling," Jax whispered from my side, his sandy hair messy as he gathered his inkwells. "Look at him. Aleander looks like he’s about to invoke royal execution laws right here in the hallway."

"Let him look," I muttered, sliding my ledger into my bag.

But as I stepped out of the lecture hall and followed the mass of cadets toward the lower central courtyard, I knew exactly what was coming next. The afternoon schedule was stamped in black ink on every first-year's roster: Hand-to-Hand Combat Sorting.

The destination was the Mud Pits—a brutal, sunken arena where the rules of high nobility were entirely suspended, and where Prince Aleander would finally have the chance to use his raw, physical weight to erase the irritation I had carved into his royal pride.