Dragon's Dawn: First Light (Book 1)

Chapter 1: Island Day!

Chapter One: Island Day

The dream came for the seventh night in a row.

Max couldn't have told anyone exactly what happened in it - not in a way that made sense, not in the clean, linear fashion that dreams were supposed to work. It was more like being submerged in someone else's memory. Fragments. A city burning against a night sky. The sensation of being carried through smoke and noise and screaming, pressed against a chest that smelled like gunpowder and something older. A dome of warm, amber light surrounding him like the inside of a lantern.

And a voice. Patient. Enormous. Speaking words he almost understood.

He surfaced from it the way you surface from deep water - gasping slightly, disoriented, one hand braced against his mattress as though to confirm it was still there.

It was. He was in his room. Guerrin. Morning.

The sunlight coming through his window fell directly across his face, which meant it was later than it should have been, which meant he'd overslept again. He sat up, raked a hand through hair the color of an open flame, and padded to the bathroom mirror.

The boy looking back at him was fourteen - almost fifteen, he reminded himself - with dark circles under his eyes and the particular hollowed expression of someone who hadn't been sleeping well for a week. His hair caught the light the way it always did, each strand shifting between copper and gold depending on the angle, like actual fire rendered in something slightly more permanent. His mother had the same hair. He'd never asked what it meant, in the way that children don't ask about things that have always simply been true.

He leaned on the edge of the sink and looked at his reflection for a long moment.

Chosen one.

The words had been in the dream again. He said them aloud, quietly, testing them the way you'd test ice on a frozen pond - one foot forward, weight held in reserve.

They felt ridiculous.

They also felt, in the part of him that was not fourteen and not entirely rational, like something he had been waiting his entire life to hear.

Through the open window drifted the distant sound of hydro bikes crossing the harbor, their engines a familiar hum above the push and pull of the tide. On any normal morning, that sound would have had him out of bed and halfway down the stairs before he'd finished waking up. Max Dragonblade had built his first hydro bike modification at eleven. By thirteen, he had opinions about impeller design that made most adults blink.

But today the sound floated past him, and he stood at the mirror, and he thought about fire.

The time of reckoning is approaching.

That was what the voice had said. Approaching - as though it were a weather system, something you watched on a horizon for a while before it finally arrived. He looked at the peaceful harbor beyond his window, at the morning light lying in long gold bars across the water, at the city of Guerrin going about its ordinary business in the way that cities do, and he tried to imagine anything disturbing it.

He couldn't. He never could. That was either reassurance or ignorance, and he was seventeen days away from being fifteen and not entirely sure which.

A knock at the door. Then his brother's voice, immediate and completely unburdened by introspection:

"Max! Are you finally awake? Everyone's waiting!"

The group that filed into his room shortly after was, in its way, a complete portrait of his world.