Aethon moved first.
Forty feet of war-dragon shouldn't move like that. Shouldn't be fast. But he came across the grove like a landslide that had learned to aim, and the ground shook, and I had about half a second to remember every stupid thing I'd ever survived.
I dove left.
Claws came down where I'd been. CRUNCH. Bedrock, not dirt — he cratered the bedrock.
Rolled. Came up swinging.
My blade caught the side of his neck—
clang—
Nothing.
Scales like red steel. Two years ago that exact clang had come off a black dragon on a highway and I'd felt my whole future die in the sound. I knew this sound. I hated this sound.
The tail came around.
I didn't see it. Felt it — the air moving wrong — and got the sword up and both arms braced a quarter-second before forty feet of muscle hit me like a bus with a grudge.
CRACK.
I flew.
Not far — the Kavach ate most of it — but I flew, hit an oak, dropped, and here's the thing that stopped me cold even mid-air:
My ribs were fine.
Two years ago a hit a tenth that size had cracked three of them. Now a war-dragon's tail put me through the air and the golden armor just... held. Took it. Passed the bill somewhere I couldn't feel.
I got up.
I got up fast.
"Oh," I said, grinning through blood that wasn't there. "Oh, that's new."
"HA!"
Ares' voice rolled across the grove from thirty feet up, delighted, where he sat cross-legged on absolutely nothing, chin in one fist like a man at a very good game.
"You SEE that? Tail-check, full weight, kid walks it off. GOOD hit, dragon — do it again."
"He is not a sporting event, Ares."
"He is EXACTLY a sporting event. Hestia. Hestia." A pause. "...Where's my popcorn."
A long, ancient, sisterly sigh drifted down through the trees. And a bowl of popcorn appeared in the god of war's hands, warm and buttered, out of a curl of gold hearth-light, because apparently even the apocalypse runs on snacks if Hestia's feeling generous.
"GET HIM, dragon!"
Aethon got him.
Came in low and fast, jaws first, and I sidestepped the bite but not the shoulder — twelve tons of dragon clipped me spinning, and I hit the dirt rolling, and when I came up there was a scrape down my forearm the armor hadn't quite covered. Beading red. Small. But mine.
So he could touch me. Good to know. Great, even. Loved that.
I came back at him anyway, because standing still against a dragon is how you become a story people tell at campfires.
Blade high — down across the snout—
clang—nothing—
duck the head-swipe, roll off the horns, blade into the soft-looking gap behind the jaw where soft-looking gaps are lies—
clang—nothing—
and a wing came around like a red sail full of bricks and swatted me thirty feet into a tree.
CRACK. Bark, not bone. But I felt that one in my teeth.
I peeled off the trunk, spat, and made a decision that history will record as stupid.
The claw was coming — a full downward swing, all five talons, the big committed kind — and instead of getting out of the way like a person with a functioning brain, I thought: the armor's held everything else. Block it. Show him.
I planted both feet, crossed the sword and the Kavach's bracer, and caught a forty-foot war-dragon's full claw swing head-on.
DONNNNNNG.
The armor held.
I did not.
The force went through the block, through the sword, through both arms, through my spine, through the soles of my feet and into the ground and back up again, and every molecule I owned started vibrating at a frequency I'm pretty sure attracts bats. I stood there — upright, technically, gloriously not-crushed — ringing like a struck tuning fork, eyes rattling in my skull, the whole world gone to a high silver hum.
"HAAAA—"Ares, distant, muffled, thrilled. "He BLOCKED it! Head-ON! Kid, that's the DUMBEST — I love it, I LOVE it, do it AGAIN—"
"nnno," I said, to nobody, wobbling. "no, that — that was a one-time thing. we're not — the ears are ringing. everything's ringing. why did I—"
Aethon watched me vibrate with what I can only describe as amusement.
Okay. New plan. Sword's not cutting him and my body is not built to arm-wrestle a mountain.
Range.
I threw a hand out and built something — pulled the fire off my own arms and shaped it, weapon-mastery and solar flame folding together the way they'd learned to, and a spear of white-gold fire took form in my grip, humming, sharp as intent.
I threw it.
It hit Aethon dead in the chest and burst in a bloom of gold sparks.
He blinked.
I made another. Threw it. A third — javelins now, one after another, a whole barrage of solar fire screaming across the grove and bursting against red scales, FWP FWP FWP, gold splashing off him like surf off a cliff.
I threw everything. Spears, blades, a genuinely inspired flaming chakram I was briefly very proud of.
Aethon stood there and took all of it.
Every single one.
Didn't dodge. Didn't flinch. Stood in the middle of my entire ranged arsenal with the bored, faintly insulted patience of a creature whose entire body language said, at maximum volume:
I am a dragon. I am forty feet of war and fire, forged by a god and survived a Titan's prison. And you are throwing... campfire at me.
The barrage guttered out.
I stood there breathing hard, out of dramatic flourishes, having thrown my best spears at a war-drake and achieved: mild inconvenience.
A shadow fell across the top half of my face. Somewhere, thematically, a very grim line of ambient music started playing.
"...right," I said, hollow, eyes gone flat and dark. "Right. Of course. It's a dragon. I threw fire at a fire dragon. Cool. Cool cool cool. Love that for me. Genuinely inspired work, Aditya, truly your best—"
And then Aethon shifted his weight.
Rolled one massive shoulder. Snorted — a hot, annoyed gust that flattened the grass — and I saw it, small but there: three little scorch-marks on his chest where the spears had burst. Not wounds. But marks. He'd felt them.
He was irritated.
And the light bulb came on over my head so hard I nearly heard it.
He got irritated. Irritated means he reacts. The weapons don't have to hurt him.
They just have to make him flinch.
Grinning now. Different grin. The good kind.
I built four spears at once — the most I'd ever held, floating in a fan around me — and I hurled them not in a line but spread, one at each eye, one at the wound-scent nostrils, one straight down the throat he'd been so proud of.
Aethon did the thing every living creature does when four burning javelins come at its face.
He flinched. Head rearing, wings snapping up to cover, one instant of the great body turning away—
—and the gap opened.
Right up the centerline. Chest to throat. Undefended for half a heartbeat.
I was already moving.
I planted. Both feet. Deep. Toes digging in, weight loading forward, everything coiling to drive — not to hold a line, to launch off it.
And this time I didn't throw the fire at him. I'd tried that. Fire alone splashed off him like water. Steel alone just rang.
So I put them together.
I poured everything up through the ground into my legs, my spine, my arms — every scrap of Surya's fire, Mahadev's mastery, two years of not dying — and I channeled all of it straight into the blade. Not around it. Through it. The greatsword drank the fire and turned white, then past white, the edge screaming with sun, physical steel and solar flame fused into one thing that was neither and worse than both.
Fifty percent was the deal.
I gave it everything I could hold without coming apart.
Because that was the trick, wasn't it. His scales laughed at fire. His scales laughed at steel. Nobody'd introduced them to fire and steel arriving in the exact same place at the exact same instant.
I drove up into that open gap and swung with the whole of me behind a blade that was now a bar of burning white sun.
A single rising slash. Heel to sky.
SHRRRAAAKK—
—and the blade of pure sun met the scales of a war-god's dragon in the one spot he'd left open, and this time—
This time it bit.
Three scales. Split clean, edge to edge, the sound of steel tearing, and the fire poured into the wound and singed — a black-gold scorch blooming across his hide, the smell of burnt dragon, a line of gold light where no light should get in.
Aethon reared back.
And went still.
He looked at the wound.
Then at me.
And something moved behind those molten eyes that hadn't been there before — not pain, dragons don't do pain the way we do — surprise.
Genuine, blinking, forty-foot surprise.
Because cutting a war-dragon's healed scales is hard. It is supposed to be impossible for a boy with a sword. And the boy had just done it, three at once, and stood there smoking and steady with a bar of sunlight in his hands, not the half-dead kid who'd bled on a highway two years back.
I'd gotten stronger.
And Aethon—
Aethon liked that.
I watched him decide he liked it. Watched the surprise turn over into something hot and pleased and hungry, the molten eyes flaring brighter, the great chest swelling, and I had exactly enough time to think one entire word:
Uh.
Because he answered the way a dragon answers a thing it respects.
He gave me more than fifty percent right back.
The whole sky turned to fire.
WHOOOOOOOOOSH—
Not a stream this time. A flood. A tide of molten red-gold big enough to swallow the grove, and me in the middle of it, and I got the sword up and the armor locked and I tanked it — feet planted, gold blazing, taking a war-dragon's real breath full in the chest and holding, holding, holding—
The grove lost its mind.
"AGAIN?! HE'S DOING IT AGAIN—" / "MY LEAVES, MY BEAUTIFUL — a THOUSAND YEARS—" / "we are going to be a CAMPFIRE, we are going to be a—" every tree in Dodona shrieking as the overflow washed over them a second time, and honestly, at that point, same.
And me?
I was fine.
Perfectly fine. Not a scorch. Not a mark. The armor held. The fire held. I held.
There was, however, one small problem.
The fire washed off. The light died. The grove smoked. I stood at the end of two long furrows the blast had shoved me back through — gleaming golden Kavach, sword in hand, victorious, bonded, magnificent—
—and completely, catastrophically naked.
Every thread of cotton I owned: gone. Ash. My shirt, my jeans, everything the armor didn't cover, vaporized clean off my body by a war-dragon's affectionate high-five. The Kavach covered chest and arms and some — not all — of the strategically relevant real estate. The duffel, thank every god, had been flung clear during the fight and sat smoking but intact at the treeline, five hundred bucks and my nectar safe.
Me, less so.
"Yup," Hestia said. "That's it."
She rose off the air, brushed nothing off her plain warm dress, and nodded at the smoking, panting, largely-nude teenager and the enormous pleased dragon like a woman confirming a delivery.
"A deal's a deal. He drew blood, he matched the fire, he stayed on his feet. He is bonded to you now, Ares. Officially. It's done."
"WHAT—" Ares was on his feet on the air, popcorn flying. "No — that was just getting GOOD, they were barely — one more round, the kid's got a second gear in him, I can SMELL it—"
Hestia turned and smiled at him.
Just smiled. Sweet. Warm. Grandmotherly.
Ares shut up so fast he swallowed a kernel.
"...fine," he muttered, sitting back down on nothing. "Fine. Bonded. Whatever. Ruined a perfectly good afternoon."
I barely heard any of it. I was staring up at forty feet of dragon with my sword still out and my dignity in cinders and one single, burning question.
"You—" My voice cracked with pure outrage. "You couldn't have — I let you HIT me, I chose to tank that, and you couldn't have aimed around the pants? One job, man! You had ONE—"
Aethon lowered his enormous head to my level.
And looked at me with molten golden eyes full of the deepest, most ancient, most profound draconic contentment I have ever seen.
Absolutely no remorse.
"...I hate you," I told the dragon I was now bonded to for life. "I hate you so much. We're gonna be great."
He rumbled. It might have been a laugh.
I dug the last coin out of the smoking duffel and checked it once — the second one, gone now, spent to start all this. One left. Blessing of War, still bronze, still waiting. I zipped it away and pulled on the least-cremated thing in the bag, which turned out to be a spare pair of jeans and no shirt, so: golden armor, denim, sword, dragon, no top. A look.
Good enough.
So. Turns out nobody teaches you to ride a dragon.
I climbed up the foreleg. Got a leg over the neck. Grabbed a horn.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. I've got this. How hard can—"
Aethon jumped.
Straight up. No warning. No countdown. Forty feet of muscle and fire went from ground to not ground like a bullet leaving a barrel, and my stomach did not come with me. It stayed down in the grove to think about its choices. The rest of me got yanked into the sky at a speed that had opinions about my organs.
I lost the horn immediately.
WHAM — wind, a wall of it, tearing at my face.
Lost the seat next.
And then I was sliding — down the scales, off the side, one hand clamped white-knuckle on a spine ridge and the entire rest of my body flapping out sideways in open air like a flag on a very fast, very tall, very on-fire pole, two thousand feet of nothing under my dangling boots and a naked-except-for-armor teenager screaming words that would've gotten me expelled—
"WHY — DOES HE — GO STRAIGHT UP — IS THAT A THING DRAGONS DO — WHY DID NOBODY MENTION THE GOING STRAIGHT UP—"
"HAHAHAHA—" Ares, somewhere below, absolutely losing it. "LOOK at him! Bonded to the mightiest dragon of the age and he rides it like a sack of wet CATS — kid, KID, use your KNEES, gods, did nobody—"
"OH, I'M SORRY—" I hauled myself back onto the neck by pure spite, wind tearing the words out sideways. "I'M SORRY I DIDN'T TAKE THE DRAGON-RIDING ELECTIVE, ARES — must've been scheduled the same period as GETTING STABBED BY EVERY MONSTER YOU'VE EVER SLEPT WITH—"
Silence.
Below me, the god of war — the actual god of war — opened his mouth. And closed it.
Nothing came out.
For one perfect, golden, airborne second, I had left Ares completely, totally blank.
And then, drifting up through the trees, warm and delighted and helplessly amused —
Hestia. Laughing. Really laughing, the kind that's been waiting a few thousand years for someone to land one on her brother, bright as her own hearth.
"...I always liked that one," I heard her say.
Ares said something back that the wind ate. Probably rude. Definitely rude.
I didn't catch it, because Aethon had found his altitude, and the grove had shrunk to a green smudge, and the whole sprawling world had opened up beneath us — and somewhere out there past the curve of it, six hours west and getting further with every wingbeat, was a quest with my name nowhere on it and everyone I was terrified for riding straight into a Titan's painting.
I leaned low over the dragon's neck. Felt the fire in him answer the fire in me, the bond humming new and raw and real.
"West," I said. "Fast as you've got. We've got people to catch."
Aethon roared once — joy, still, all the way through —
and folded his wings, and dove into the wind, west, toward all of it.
We'd wasted an afternoon.
Now we were going to make the sky pay it back.