Lyra Stormwing's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Lyra Stormwing had hunted dragons since she was a child, and now she wanted the one no rider had ever caught. The last wild sky-dragon. Riders older and stronger than her had gone looking for it. Some came back empty-handed. Some never came back. She meant to be the one it finally let ride. But she had a problem no dagger could fix. She did not know where it nested. Without that, her hunt could not even start. She knelt at the edge of a stream and washed the dust from her face. Three deep claw marks scarred the left side of her leather armor. She had cut them herself, hoping a wild dragon might read them as another dragon's mark. She had cut them a year ago. She still had nothing to point her toward the beast. A glow moved across the water. Lyra went still. A butterfly settled on a wet stone beside her hand. Its wings held colors she had never seen on any moth. Blue, gold, and pink light shifted across them like scattered stars. She had studied dragons all her life, and dragons ate strange things. This was food only the rarest kind hunted. She had read about creatures like this once, in a dead rider's journal. The old man wrote that the wild sky-dragon fed on glowing moths that lived in one place only. High cold cliffs where the moths bred. He had drawn the moth's shape in the margin. He died before he found the dragon itself. The butterfly lifted off the stone. It did not fly at random. It climbed, steady and straight, toward the far ridge where the land rose into stone teeth and cold air. Lyra watched it shrink to a spark against the gray rock. She stood up fast. The journal had never named the place. The moth did better than a map. It flew home, and home was where the dragon hunted. Lyra memorized the line of its flight. Two peaks, split by a narrow pass. Snow on the higher one. She fixed the shape in her mind so she could not lose it. She pulled her pack onto her shoulders and checked her daggers. Her hands were steady now. For the first time since she left home, she knew which way to walk. The cliffs were a day's climb, maybe two. Cold, thin air. The kind of place riders went and did not return from. She thought of the men who had died looking for what she had just found in a butterfly's flight path. Lyra started toward the ridge. She had her lead at last. Now she had to reach a nest guarded by the one dragon that had killed everyone who came before her.