The Dragon Games

Prologue

SAMMY: 

The first time I met Raven Black, she was too young to remember it.

The second time, I was twenty five, and she was seven. It was a blistering summer day, one of the hottest the burrow had seen in decades. The sun cooked my saddle like a frying pan as I cut across the sky on the back of my dragon, Rauuk, flying high enough to see the entire city. 

Its belly was a clusterfuck of shacks stacked on top of each other like bodies at the morgue. They grew sparser the further I flew, then gave way to miles of dried out swamps and dead crop fields. On the burrow's outskirts, just like my informant promised, I found a massive shack enclosed in barbed wire. 

The warehouse. 

Its blacked out windows hid the interior from view, so I figured I was too late. This was a mission for revenge, not saving.

Earlier that year, I had formed the crew of mercenaries, crooks, and knaves that would later be known as the raiders, and the timing couldn't have been worse. Usually criminals are accepted as a territorial hazard of living in the burrow, but for a brief period, we were hated more than the Sword Brethren.

It was all thanks to this group of hack shamans claiming that wielder's organs possess special healing properties, causing an explosive demand on the black market. The death of a few wielders would hardly make anyone bat an eye, but the problem was, it wasn't the high court pricks getting picked off. 

It was the orphans, since they were the only kind of wielder that was young enough to lack full access to their powers and defenseless enough to be lured out by thugs. Every time I went out in public, I got lumped in with those bottom-feeding fuckers, since anyone who had ties to the black market was automatically assumed to be in the business of slicing and dicing little orphans. 

I was certain that had already happened to Raven, until Rauuk descended close enough to the ground for the screams and thuds to become audible, even through the walls. Just as I jumped from Rauuk's back and reached the door, a thug spilt out with a dislocated arm and blood splattered all across his shirt. 

He stumbled into me, clutching my shoulders. His eyes were wild, and his hair was plastered against his forehead in sweaty chunks. 

"Monster," he rasped. "She's a bloody damn–"

I yanked him off and shoved into the warehouse. It was dark inside, but through the flickering candle light, I caught glimpses of a tipped over operating table, discarded scalpels and knives, and seven thugs lying on the ground, their limbs twitching, bent, and broken. 

Below them, something was stirring. Shadows pulled back from the ground like a receding tide. I turned, following the darkness to the opposite end of the warehouse.

A young boy was plastered against the wall, tilted as far back as he could go. He squeezed his eyes shut, his face twisted in fear as a ten foot tall beast of darkness strained against invisible binds, its gaze locked on his throat. 

A little blonde in rags stood behind the beast, her hands extended in a grabbing motion, as if she was trying to hold it back. I couldn't see her face from the angle I was standing, just the ink black blood rolling down her chin -- a tell-tale sign she had reached her divine's limit.

That's the thing about the divine. Everyone is born with a fixed amount, whether that be none, a drop, or in cases like little miss Raven Black, an ocean. 

Their reason that children use less divine than adults isn't because they don't possess as much. They just don't know how to wield it. It's locked up tight inside of them, so when life-or-death situations force it out prematurely, it manifests in strange and uncontrollable ways.