Prologue

— The Storm Dragon Bonded Both Captains

Talia

The cold does not just bite; it methodically chews through the reinforced neoprene of my survival suit, seeking the marrow of my bones.

I hang suspended from a steel cable, thirty feet down a sheer glacial crevasse, the roar of the Storm Ocean echoing somewhere far beneath the ice shelf. Around me, the walls of the abyss bleed a haunting, luminescent blue. Above, the sky is a bruised, violent purple, choked with the blizzard that marks the final stage of the Polar Crown examination.

"Slack the line, two feet!" I bark into my throat-mic, my voice cracking against the sub-zero gale.

"Slacking, Captain Frost," comes the immediate, staticky reply from my rigger up on the surface edge.

I drop, my crampons sparking against the dense ice, until I am hovering just inches above the churning, freezing saltwater trapped in the belly of the crevasse. The objective—a hundred-and-eighty-pound weighted rescue dummy—is sinking into the slush. If it goes under the ice bridge, my entire squad fails. If we fail the Polar Crown, Aurora Sound Naval College pulls the funding for my civilian rescue fleet. I cannot let the families of my old crew starve just because the Admiralty wants to monopolize the skies.

I pull off my right thermal glove, exposing my bare hand to the biting wind.

"Captain, biometric alarms are flashing," my rigger warns.

"Ignore them. Prime the winch."

I thrust my bare hand toward the churning water. I call upon the tide magic, the rigid discipline drilled into me since I was an eighteen-year-old cadet. The magic is not a gift; it is a transaction. To freeze the water around the dummy, I have to give the ocean my own heat.

The moment I channel the current, a brutal, agonizing chill rips up my arm. My veins bulge, turning a stark, bruised purple beneath my pale skin. Frost crystallizes on my eyelashes and traces the edge of my jaw. But beneath me, the violent water slows, thickening into a dense slush, then hardening into a solid block of ice, trapping the dummy at the surface.

I gasp, my lungs burning, as my core temperature plummets. My hand goes entirely numb, the skin taking on a dangerous, waxy pallor. Frostbite is the tide-caster’s shadow. I clip a heavy carabiner to the dummy’s harness with clumsy, freezing fingers.

"Package secured," I grit out, shivering violently. "Haul us up."

The winch grinds, pulling me and the heavy payload upward through the howling wind tunnel of the crevasse. I should feel a sense of triumph. I am twenty-four, leading a team of hardened civilian veterans, executing a textbook extraction in a Category 4 blizzard. We are going to ace the Admiralty’s lethal obstacle course.

Then, a shadow blots out the sliver of sky above.

A high-pitched, mechanical whine slices through the storm, followed by the wash of a repulsor engine. A tempest-skiff—a sleek, single-rider naval glider designed for coastal interception—banks so sharply over the crevasse that its wingtip nearly clips my winch cable. The updraft from its thrusters hits me like a physical punch, slamming me into the ice wall.

My shoulder takes the brunt of the impact. I swallow a curse, tasting blood on my bitten lip. There is only one pilot in this entire godforsaken academy reckless enough to break standard airspace protocols during a live-fire exam.

"Juniper Kade," I snarl into the open comms channel.

A soft, crackling laugh answers in my earpiece. "You’re moving too slow, Frost. The ocean doesn’t wait for you to do your paperwork."

Juniper

The wind is a physical weapon out here, and I love every brutal second of it.

I lean over the handlebars of my tempest-skiff, letting the blizzard sandblast my face. I am twenty-seven, a disgraced dragon racer, a stripped lieutenant, and currently the biggest thorn in the side of the Aurora Sound Naval College. I am only flying in this exam because of a technicality in a sovereign treaty that Admiral Vance couldn’t bury. He wants me to wash out. He wants the ice to claim me so he doesn’t have to deal with the secrets I smuggled back from the forbidden zone.

Down below, Captain Talia Frost is hauling herself out of the crevasse like a mechanized soldier. Perfect posture, perfect execution, utterly rigid. She is beautiful in the way a sharpened combat knife is beautiful—lethal, cold, and entirely devoid of humor. She relies on tide magic and textbook physics. She doesn’t understand that the ice is alive.

"Keep your skiff out of my designated rescue corridor, Kade," Talia’s voice snaps over the radio, tight with suppressed rage and the subtle, tell-tale chatter of hypothermia.

"You’re creating a localized pressure drop by freezing that water, Captain," I reply, banking my skiff in a lazy, mocking circle above her squad. "You’re begging for a sheer-wind collapse. Loosen up. The rules won’t keep you warm."

I tap the throttle, meaning to kick up a little more snow to obscure her squad’s optics, just to prove my point. The academy teaches these adult cadets that the ocean is a battlefield to be conquered. My time in the illegal racing circuits taught me the truth: the ocean is a sleeping beast, and you only survive if it allows you to.

I glance down at my left boot, where a folded, waterproof map is hidden against my ankle. The map that proves the massive, permanent hurricane dominating our coastal border isn’t a natural weather phenomenon. It’s a cage. And Aurora Sound is the warden.

I prepare to cut the comms and leave Frost to her shivering, perfect victory. But as I bank away from the crevasse, my altimeter begins to spin wildly.

The barometric pressure drops so fast my ears pop painfully. The air grows impossibly heavy, tasting of ozone and raw static. The tempest-skiff’s engines sputter, the repulsor lifts failing in the sudden vacuum.

I look down at the glacier. It isn’t just ice beneath us.

Through the dense, blue-white surface of the shelf, a shadow is moving. A shadow the size of a dreadnought.

"Frost," I say into the mic, all the mockery stripped from my voice. "Get your team off the ice. Now."

"Do not give my squad orders, Kade—"

"Talia, move!" I scream, pulling back on the throttle to gain altitude, but the air has become a dead zone.