When Judgment Learned to Kneel

Bahamut motioned for me to follow.

As he passed Velih, she bowed.

Not some shallow courtly dip either. She bent with reverence, graceful and precise, and remained that way until he had gone by. The moment my shoulder crossed her line of sight, however, her devotion sharpened into something else.

Pressure rolled off her.

A warning.

A threat dressed in perfume and gold.

I will give her this: she was strong. Stronger than most dragons I had felt since waking in this new life. Her aura struck like sunlight through a blade, meant to make lesser creatures flinch, kneel, remember their place.

It washed over me and died.

Something layered over my divinity drank the force of it before I could even decide whether to be offended.

Bahamut felt it, of course. He paused, glanced back, and for one brief second I expected a reprimand.

Instead, he smiled.

“Velih,” he said, “come here, my love. You will be needed.”

Her expression changed so quickly I almost laughed.

The executioner of divine law became a delighted woman in the space of a heartbeat. She crossed to him, looped both arms around one of his, and pressed herself against his side with a fondness so open it felt obscene in a palace built on secrets.

Shockingly sweet.

Not what I expected from one of Bahamut’s golden killers.

He did not look embarrassed by her affection. If anything, he softened into it. His hand covered hers for a moment as we walked, thumb brushing over her knuckles. Small. Human. Unnecessary.

That bothered me more than the threat had.

The halls had changed since my absence.

Half a century had passed since I had last walked freely through the Starlight Palace, though most of that time I had been confined to the place they called the Hatchling Ward. A charming name for a divine kennel where dragons newly bound to Bahamut’s service were trained, shaped, tested, and—when needed—broken into useful forms.

Some of the additions impressed me despite myself.

New crystal braces held old arches in place. Living maps glimmered behind glass. Prayer niches had become strategy alcoves. Corridors once built for ceremony now fed into barracks, training courts, armories, and sanctums humming with defensive spellwork. Bahamut had turned my palace into a war machine and somehow convinced everyone to call it sanctuary.

We passed through a broad garden enclosed beneath a vaulted crystal ceiling. Silver trees grew from black soil veined with starlight. At the far end, two dragon statues flanked a towering wooden door banded in platinum.

Above it, draconic glyphs burned in clean, formal script.

The Flight Ward.

A place for the dragons in Bahamut’s service.

The moment the doors opened, sound hit me like a siege engine.

Cheering.

Laughter.

Roars.

Arguments over wagers.

Metal cups hammering against tables.

A bronze dragon in human form shouting that someone owed him three sapphires and a public apology. A silver woman standing on a bench, cursing in three dialects. A cluster of gem dragons drinking something that smoked blue and smelled strong enough to pickle a corpse.

The room was enormous, larger inside than the architecture should have allowed. Metallic and gem dragons filled the place in every shape and size, some wearing mortal faces, others lounging in partial transformation, wings folded against rafters, tails coiled under tables, horns scraping enchanted balconies.

Five miniature arenas floated in the center of the hall.

Each looked like a coliseum shrunk to the size of a carriage wheel and made impossibly deep by magic. Within them, dragons battled in compressed space, shifting between human and draconic forms with terrifying fluidity. Spells cracked. Claws flashed. Breath weapons erupted in miniature storms. Every impact sent ripples through the runes around the arena rim.

When a fighter took a wound that would have maimed or killed, the warding sigils flared.

The dragon vanished, reappeared outside the arena, healed but exhausted, usually to laughter, sympathy, or immediate mockery from their own flight.

Bahamut pushed through the crowd. The moment several dragons noticed him, they parted—not with fear exactly, but with reflexive respect. Velih remained at his side, glittering and smug, like she knew damn well the room belonged to him because half the creatures in it would die for him before dinner.

We stopped beside one arena.

Inside, two flights were tearing each other apart with admirable creativity.

Five against five. Formation combat. Magic, fang, spellcraft, draconic instinct, and mortal cunning braided into one vicious mess. One brass dragon turned a silver’s shadow against him. A bronze dropped from above in human form, transformed mid-fall, and slammed a copper into the arena floor hard enough to shake the table beneath us. A ruby spectator howled approval.

I watched the runes flare and reset.

“So,” I said, “this is supposed to teach me how to harness that power?”

Bahamut’s smile answered before he did.

“Exactly. I’m pleased you understand quickly.”

“I understand cages when they come with cheering crowds.”

His smile thinned, but did not disappear. “This is not a cage.”

“No?”

“No. It is a crucible.” He looked down into the arena, and there was pride in him. Real pride. Not vanity. Not only control. “These dragons survive because they learn each other. They test one another. They come back from Faerûn bloodied, angry, half-mad from what they have seen, and this place gives that violence a language before it turns inward.”

That was not the answer I wanted.

It was too reasonable.

Then he ruined it.

“And this is not your only challenge.”

I glanced at him. “What challenge are you presenting, Bahamut?”

A beat passed.

“Sir,” I added, because I still needed the mask.

He laughed, full and bright, and clapped a hand on my shoulder.

“I want you capable of facing a council member and their chosen champions. Eventually. Before that, I want you to be able to survive all seven of my ladies in one-against-seven flight combat.”

Velih’s smile sharpened.

“And,” Bahamut added, far too pleased with himself, “bonus points if you can remain in mortal form while drawing on that deeper power.”

There it was.

The hook under the lesson.

He wanted the power accessible. Repeatable. Controlled. Preferably obedient.

His mother had tried to tame me with mercy and failed. Bahamut would try with discipline, affection, purpose, and just enough praise to make it look like trust.

Fine.

Let him try.

“How soon do we begin?” I asked.

Velih’s eyes gleamed, “immediately.”

I should have known then that I was fucked.

The first flight they threw at me was brass.

Five of them. All wearing mortal forms when they entered the arena, smiling like they had come to a tavern brawl rather than a sanctioned divine beating.

Their captain, Tazhem Qor, was lean, sun-browned, amber-eyed, and dressed like a desert prince pretending poverty was an amusing costume. Sarella Qint stood half a head taller than the others, copper-brown skin, brass-blonde braids falling down her back, tiny bells threaded through them that did not ring until she wanted them to. Vhorun Mesk carried a jeweled cane and looked bored enough to be insulting. Iskavelle Ruun blew me a kiss with two fingers. Raqilan Dorth smiled like they already knew the ending and were waiting for me to catch up.

Velih stood outside the warded rim.

“Begin.”

Judgment formed in my hand.

The arena floor became desert glass beneath my feet. Heat shimmered across the false horizon. The five brass dragons spread out with lazy confidence.

Tazhem tilted his head. “So this is the new divine hatchling?”

“Looks grumpy,” Iskavelle said.

Vhorun leaned on his cane. “Most hatchlings are.”

“I am not a hatchling,” I said.

Sarella’s bells chimed once.

“Adorable. It speaks.”

I moved first.

Fast. Hard. No wasted warning.

Judgment flared gold-white as I drove toward Tazhem, intending to end the captain before the flight found rhythm.

He did not block.

He talked.

“Left side is open.”

I ignored him.

A ribbon of sand struck my eyes from the right.

Not enough to blind a god. Enough to make me blink.

That blink cost me.

Raqilan’s spell unfolded beneath my feet, turning the glass into sucking brass-colored mud. Iskavelle vanished in a flash of heat-haze. Sarella came in low, much faster than something that tall had any right to move, and slammed her shoulder into my ribs.

I hit the ground, rolled, came up swinging.

Judgment cut through a mirage.

Tazhem was behind me.

“Good follow-through,” he said. “Terrible listening skills.”

I spun.

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Vhorun’s cane cracked against my knee.

Pain shot up my leg.

The crowd outside the arena roared.

I snarled, let power flood the blade, and carved a crescent of radiant force across the field. The blast tore through three illusions and struck Sarella hard enough to drive her back several paces.

She looked down at the smoking mark across her chest.

Then up at me.

“Oh, he does tricks.”

“Banana-colored tricks,” Iskavelle called from somewhere unseen.

I frowned. “What?”

The entire flight laughed.

That was when daylight detonated in my face.

Not sunlight. Not holy radiance. Brass dragon cruelty wrapped in battlefield utility. A concentrated flare burst through the fog Raqilan had conjured, reflecting from suspended grains of sand and shattered glass until the whole arena became a white furnace.

I saw nothing.

Someone kicked my ankle.

Someone else struck my wrist.

Judgment almost slipped from my hand.

Tazhem’s voice drifted through the glare. “Important lesson, little ymmute. If you can’t see the enemy, consider not standing where every idiot knows you are.”

I released a pulse of divine force.

It should have cleared the field.

Instead, Raqilan’s counter-runes caught it, bent it, and scattered it into harmless sparks above us.

“Pretty,” they said. “Do it again. Slower this time. I’m taking notes.”

I roared and shifted halfway before remembering Bahamut’s condition.

Mortal form.

Fuck him.

Fuck all of them.

I forced the change down and paid for the hesitation.

Sarella hit me from behind.

The impact drove the air from my lungs. She hooked one arm around my throat, the other under my weapon arm, and dragged me backward with appalling ease. Her strength reminded me of Mira so suddenly my fury stuttered.

That was all she needed.

“Got him,” she said.

“Careful,” Iskavelle replied. “He might scowl us to death.”

I drove my heel into Sarella’s shin.

She grunted, laughed, and tightened her hold.

Vhorun appeared in front of me, cane resting on his shoulder.

“You rely too much on being terrifying.”

“I am terrifying,” I growled.

“Clearly. We’re all devastated.”

Then Tazhem stepped into view, smiling.

“Yield?”

I gathered power.

The old kind stirred.

Black edged my vision. Something primordial opened one eye inside my chest.

The arena runes shivered.

For the first time, the Gilded Tongues stopped smiling.

Velih leaned forward.

Bahamut did too.

I could have torn through Sarella’s hold. I felt it. I could have broken the arena, maybe the warding, maybe the dragons inside it.

Then Raqilan whispered a word I did not recognize.

Not power.

Timing.

A sleep-thread brushed the edge of my mind. Vhorun struck the back of my knee. Tazhem caught my wrist. Iskavelle appeared at my side and pressed two fingers to my throat, releasing a burst of stunning heat straight through my nerves.

My body betrayed me.

Sarella drove me down into the arena floor and pinned me there with one knee between my shoulders.

Judgment flickered out.

Silence held for one humiliating heartbeat.

Then the Flight Ward erupted.

Sarella leaned close to my ear.

“You’re very intense,” she said. “Has anyone told you that?”

“Get off me.”

“Say please.”

“I will rip your spine out through your mouth.”

Tazhem crouched beside my face. “That sounded like no.”

Vhorun nodded gravely. “Definitely no.”

Iskavelle sighed. “Manners are dead.”

Raqilan peered down at me with scholarly delight. “Not dead. Merely underdeveloped.”

The ward flared.

The match ended.

I appeared outside the arena, healed, exhausted, furious, and still tasting sand.

Velih smiled like a knife.

Bahamut, damn him, looked pleased.

Not because I had lost. Not only. There was something almost fatherly in his expression, something proud and insufferable and human enough to make me want to hit him.

“You lasted longer than I expected,” he said.

“Comforting.”

“It should be.” He nodded toward the Gilded Tongues as they climbed out laughing. “They are among the best.”

Sarella slapped my shoulder as she passed. “Chin up, hatchling. We only embarrassed you publicly. That’s practically affection.”

Iskavelle pointed at me. “Next time, try not leading with murder. It’s predictable.”

“Next time,” I said, “I’ll start with you.”

She grinned. “Promises, promises.”

That was my introduction to training.

Over the next century, Velih oversaw my education.

Education is too polite a word.

She fed me to the arenas.

Again and again, she matched me against rested flights fresh from successful missions, dragons still sharp with victory and full of the kind of camaraderie only shared danger can forge. They knew each other’s breathing patterns. Their feints had feints. Their insults were tactical. Their trust was a weapon I had never bothered to cultivate because I had spent too long believing power was purer when it stood alone.

I lost often.

Badly.

The Gilded Tongues became a recurring torment.

Talkative bastards.

Clever too. Far more cunning than most flights I faced. Even when I gained the upper hand, even when I poured strength into Judgment and brought the arena to its knees, they found ways to make victory slip. Sand in my eyes. Fog thick enough to taste. Sudden daylight sharp as broken glass. False voices behind me. Heat mirages. Pits that were not pits until I stepped over them. Raqilan once convinced me I had disarmed Tazhem when I was holding an illusion of his sword and the real blade was already at my back.

Sarella pinned me more times than I care to count.

She was enormous in mortal form. Tall enough to remind me of the half-dragons we had found years ago in Hlal’s temple, except there was nothing grafted or stolen about her. She was all dragon, folded into human shape by effortless magic and intolerable confidence.

“Down again,” she told me once, knee on my chest.

“I noticed.”

“Good. Awareness is the first step.”

“Toward what?”

“Not getting your divine ass handed to you by five brass couriers.”

The others laughed for a week.

It took years before I could reliably sense the old power stirring.

Ten more before I learned how to hide it from Velih.

She was not the only one watching. Bahamut’s ladies came and went, seven golden executioners with perfect posture, perfect faces, and eyes that missed very little. When I began winning too often, one of them would join a flight as a fifth or sixth member. Sometimes two. The rules shifted whenever I grew comfortable.

Slowly, grudgingly, I improved.

Judgment changed with me.

At first I had to build the blade with focus, drag authority into shape, and force it to hold. Later it came as easily as breath. A sword. A spear. A lash of radiant force. A chain. A storm of thin golden lines cutting through illusions. I learned to project verdicts through the weapon, to mark targets, to collapse spells by naming the weakness in their structure.

Iskavelle called my long-distance slash “the banana blast” because of its yellow hue.

I nearly killed her for it.

She only laughed harder.

Gods, she reminded me of Mira.

Not in face. Not in voice. In that fearless, vicious wit. That infuriating talent for making pain feel survivable by insulting it first.

I asked her once, after a sixteen-hour day that left me bleeding from places the runes had already healed, whether she had ever known a dragon named Mira.

Iskavelle blinked.

“No.”

I looked away before the disappointment could show.

She studied me for a moment, then said, “Most brass dragons are witty cunts, you know. Don’t make the mistake of thinking every one of us is your ghost.”

That stung.

I did not fault her for it.

By then, the Flight Ward had become the nearest thing I had to a life.

Not a good one.

A life.

Sixteen hours of combat. Food swallowed standing. Healing sleep taken wherever an open bed could be found before Velih came to drag me back into the noise. Some days I hated all of them. Some days hatred was the only thing keeping me upright.

Then Eshala, Haroven, Brasken, and Kavira decided I looked too pathetic to be left alone.

Their words, not mine.

Eshala Wintervein, a silver with eyes sharp enough to cut spellwork, sat beside me after I lost to the Ruby Pyre and handed me a cup of something freezing.

“You fight like being hit is a moral argument,” she said.

“It usually is.”

“No. Sometimes it means you failed to move.”

Haroven Sunmantle laughed into his drink. The gold was patient, broad-shouldered, annoyingly serene, and one of the few dragons who could knock me flat without making it personal.

Brasken Tidejaw, a bronze with sailor tattoos and a grin like bad decisions, pointed at me with a chicken bone.

“You also keep overcommitting your right side. Makes you easy to bait.”

“I am not easy to bait.”

Kavira Emberwit, small, copper, and made entirely of bad ideas, leaned across the table. “You threatened to disembowel a man today because he called your sword pretty.”

“He was mocking me.”

“Yes,” she said. “And you made it rewarding.”

That was how friendship started in the Flight Ward.

Not with loyalty oaths or grand confessions.

With four dragons telling me I fought like an angry cathedral falling down stairs.

They drank with me when the day ended. They offered advice when I was too tired to pretend I did not need it. Haroven taught me how to let Judgment wait instead of throwing it the moment rage demanded release. Eshala drilled precision into my spellwork until I could shave a feather in half at thirty paces. Brasken taught me to use terrain like an ally. Kavira taught me three dirty tricks and insisted two were legal if no one saw.

They made it bearable.

Even enjoyable, on rare nights.

The Flight Ward was crass, loud, undignified, and alive in a way no council chamber had ever been. Dragons who bowed before Bahamut in daylight cursed like dockhands after midnight. Gem champions sang obscene marching songs. Brass couriers gambled with silver tacticians. Bronze scouts arm-wrestled ruby siege-breakers while copper dragons invented new lies about who owed whom money.

Even Bahamut’s seven golden ladies could not kill the mood completely when they arrived.

Though they tried.

Whenever they entered, polished and radiant and impossibly elegant, someone at my table would nudge me.

Kavira once leaned close and whispered, “Think they shine their scales with prayer oil or expensive guilt?”

Brasken snorted ale through his nose.

I laughed.

Velih heard.

“If you have time to laugh,” she called across the hall, “you have time to train, hatchling.”

Kavira lifted her cup. “Run, banana boy.”

I hated that nickname.

I also missed it when no one said it.

Around the age of two hundred and fifty in this new body, I could handle four of Bahamut’s seven executioners in arena combat before my control began to slip.

That was when the old power became dangerous in a way none of us fully understood.

The more I drew on it, the more violent I became. Not only in the arena. Outside it too. My temper shortened. My patience frayed. Flights scheduled to face me began withdrawing. Some claimed injury. Others mission fatigue. A few were honest enough to say they did not want to step into a warded arena with something that looked at them like kin and struck like a sentence.

That was when the nickname began.

Kin Slayer.

At first, it was muttered.

Then joked.

Then written on a betting slate after I nearly tore through a non-divine flight before the runes could safely extract them. The wards prevented death, yes, but they did not prevent fear. They did not stop memory. They did not erase the way my power clung to dragons after a match.

Bane.

That was what Velih finally called it.

My power weakened dragons.

Not just harmed them. Diminished them. Their magic stuttered. Their breath faltered. Their forms resisted them. Non-blessed flights could not fight me at full strength once the black edged into my eyes.

Only Bahamut’s chosen, demigods, paragons, lesser gods, and dragons fortified by divine blessing could withstand me cleanly.

So Velih adjusted.

The fights became more unequal.

More brutal.

Never torture, exactly. That would have been simpler to hate. This was worse because it had purpose. They were using me to refine the power before any of them understood what it truly was.

And I let them.

Because every victory tasted like proof.

Because every loss gave me something to sharpen.

Because somewhere beneath all my resentment, I wanted to know what I had become.

The last day came with ceremony.

Bahamut himself took the central balcony above the largest arena. The Flight Ward packed tight around him. Velih stood among the other six, each of them radiant in mortal form, each wearing the calm confidence of dragons who had executed monsters, traitors, and worse in their lord’s name.

All seven consorts entered the arena.

I stood alone opposite them, Judgment burning in my hand.

The crowd fell quiet.

For once, no one joked.

Not even Kavira.

Bahamut leaned forward, his face unreadable from the balcony. But I felt him watching me—not as a king studying a weapon, not entirely. There was worry in him too. Hope. Pride. Something almost like fear.

I should have listened to that.

Velih raised her blade.

“Begin.”