Stormbound Hearts

~LYRA~

The glass of the attic window was cold enough to ache against my forehead. Outside, the wind was doing that nervous dance it does before a blow, kicking dead leaves across our patch of dirt. The sky looked like an old bruise, heavy, gray, and refusing to bleed rain.

Downstairs, Mother’s voice cut through the floorboards. It wasn’t a shout, but it had that sharp, melodic edge that meant she was in "Legacy Mode."

“Selene, stand still! If this hem is crooked, the whole line of the gown is ruined for tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. The big Seventeen. The day the sun finally rose and set specifically for my sister. I traced a jagged crack in the pane, my chest feeling tight in that way it always did when the air got thin. I was eighteen, a grown woman by the district’s standards, yet I still felt like a piece of furniture people kept bumping into.

The Choosing was three days out. Seventy-two hours until the dragons dropped out of the clouds onto Aetherwind’s field, bringing that smell of ozone and old pennies. It was for the "legacies", the kids whose last names opened doors and whose blood supposedly hummed with rider magic.

I’d stood there last year. The memory didn't just burn; it felt like a physical weight. I remembered the wind whipping my hair into my mouth, the dragons circling overhead like picky predators, and then... nothing. They hadn’t even paused. Not a single golden or bronze eye had flicked my way. Mother had given me that "brave" smile afterward, the one that never reached her eyes and patted my hand while already looking over my shoulder at Selene, who was then just a sixteen-year-old promise of future glory.

“Some bonds just take a little longer, Lyra,” she’d said. Liar.

I caught my reflection in the glass. My hair was a problem. It wasn't "pretty" purple; it was the color of a thunderstorm at midnight. Deep, bruised violet that looked black until the light hit it. The neighborhood kids used to call me Storm-Weed. Mother hated it. She’d spend hours trying to braid it tight, trying to hide the color under scarves as if she could tuck away the fact that I didn't look a lick like her or Selene.

They had hair the color of sharp cheddar or summer hay, bright, golden, and "normal." I looked like an accident.

A soft thud at the door made me jump.

“Lyra? You hiding again?”

Selene. She didn't wait for an answer, she just creaked the door open and squeezed inside. She looked ridiculous, one of Mother’s oversized blouses pinned to her, a measuring tape trailing behind her like a yellow tail, and a smudge of tailor’s chalk on her jaw.

“Studying,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “That’s what I told Mom you were doing up here. Very intense, scholarly brooding.”

I let out a short, dry laugh. “Yeah. I’m a regular philosopher of dust bunnies.”

Selene hopped onto a cedar chest, her golden hair practically glowing in the dim light. She looked like a portrait; I felt like a charcoal sketch.

“Don’t be like that. It’s just a birthday, Lyra. Not a coronation.”

“Tell Mom that. She’s currently trying to sew your name into the fabric of reality.” Selene’s smile dipped, just for a second. She started picking at a loose thread on her sleeve. “She’s just... she’s lived through us for so long. Since Grandmother got sick and she had to give up her own bond. She just wants one of us to actually get off the ground.”

For you, I thought. I didn't say it. Mother’s brief stint with a wind-sprite dragon was the family’s only claim to fame, and she wore that memory like a crown of thorns. She treated me like a sturdy pack mule, useful for the market, good for hauling crates, but not meant for the clouds.

Especially with hair that marked me as "other."

I sat down next to her. She smelled like the kitchen, yeast and lavender.

“You’re going to be fine, Sel,” I said, and I actually meant it. I didn't hate her. I hated the world that made us opposites. “You’ll probably have a line of dragons waiting to choose you.”

She laughed, but it sounded thin. “What if I’m just... me? What if I stand there and the sky stays empty? Like...” She bit her lip, looking horrified that she’d almost finished the sentence.

“Like I did?” I shrugged, trying to act like it didn't sting. “Then you come home. You eat way too much honey cake. You help me mend harnesses at the stall and we joke about how dragons have terrible taste.”

Selene grabbed my hand. Her fingers were warm, soft from the creams Mother made her use, mine were a mess of rope burns and market callouses. “It’s crap that they only give you one shot. You’re better than half the riders I see in the square.”

“Rules are rules,” I said. “Aetherwind wants ‘fresh prospects.’ They don't want nineteen-year-olds with chips on their shoulders.”

But I wasn't nineteen yet. And I wasn't done.

“I wish you could try again,” she whispered. “It’s not fair that they only let you stand once.”

That was the rule at Aetherwind Academy. One chance at seventeen.

After that, you aged out unless you had special permission or a legacy invite. Most didn’t. The Academy wanted fresh blood, unscarred by disappointment. They wanted hope, not hunger.

But I had hunger. It gnawed at me every night when the wind howled past our house, carrying distant echoes of dragon roars from the training fields. I’d spent the last year sneaking out after dark, climbing the outer walls just to watch the older riders practice. I’d memorized flight patterns, studied the way storm dragons moved wild, electric, untamed. I’d even practiced the bonding stance in front of the cracked mirror in my room until my legs ached, my dark purple hair whipping around my face like something I couldn’t hide.

And now, at eighteen, I had a plan.

I wasn’t supposed to be there. Mother would never allow it. She’d say it was embarrassing, that I’d already had my chance, that I needed to focus on helping with the family stall and supporting Selene. “The sky isn’t for everyone, Lyra,” she’d say with that calm pity that stung worse than anger, especially when she looked at my hair like it was proof I didn’t quite belong.

But I couldn’t sit here and watch Selene step onto that field while I stayed behind folding linens. Not again.