The world remembers dragons like they were gods — rolling mountains of iron scales, wings that blotted out whole suns, and mouths that vomited storms. People months and generations later still told stories about the first Binding, when men and women walked into the teeth of those beasts and walked back with power stitched to their bones. The winners wrote the rules: tamers were born with marks, beasts answered them, and cities rose on the backs of bonded wings.
Kail had none of that.
They called him the Forgotten Tamer because the world had simply forgotten his name. He was the boy who failed at the Ceremony, the one whose mark didn't blush with light and whose offering beast crawled from the mist like a wet stone. The elders whispered that his family had wasted coin and honor on a lantern with no flame. Children threw pebbles at his back. Merchants spat when he passed. Even the river had learned to ignore him — when he cupped his palms, it returned water with a sigh, not a shimmer.
He lived in the last house of Row Twelve: a crooked roof of old tiles, a single plank door that needed two hands to close, and a window that breathed cold. His father hammered obsidian at the forge and his mother stitched emblems into cloaks for city guards; both had bet their futures on that one Ceremony. The shame of it sat on the table at night and ate with them. The neighbors kept distance, as though disgrace was contagious air.
Kail kept his silence.
On the morning of his twelfth winter — when most tamers earned the first scale or the first feather — he woke to a light that didn't belong to the sun. It bled through the cracks in the ceiling like an accusation: blue and red at once, like clashing stars. He climbed out of bed and found the village in an awkward hush. People peered from behind curtains. Guards milled about, faces hard and curious. At the center of the square, an ivory column of pure light cut the sky; raw, humming, and tomb-white. A soul flare.
Every tamer in the district had feared such a thing. Soul flares were rarities, thrown up by the world when some impossible alignment happened — when a beast crossed its own fateline, when a forgotten god twitched, when the deep bones of the earth shifted. For people like Kail, they meant one of two things: miracles for the chosen, or catastrophe for the rest.
When the column died and the light unstitched into motes of ash, there appeared at its base a thing no one in the square could name. It was not a dragon nor a wolf, not a hawk, nor a serpent. It was a knot of living shadows and fragments: a chestnut beetle's armoured shell, a fox's ear, a lamb's eye, a sliver of crystal, and the thin suggestion of a wing that might have been feather or flame. It steamed with breath that smelled like rain on metal and rotten orange. It crawled, not toward anyone, but precisely to where Kail stood by the market wall.
He had not gone to the flare. He had not pushed through the crowd or sought it out. He had been fetching water — quietly, as if a wrong move would cause his mother's hands to shake — and then, suddenly, something on the cobbles turned and blinked at him. The crowd stepped back with the cautious reverence of people watching a snake.
Old stories said beasts chose their tamer. Kail had imagined beasts choosing the worthy: champions, legends, those with a silver mark blazing. But the creature — if that was what it was — lept into his open palm as if it recognized the shape of need.
Kail expected nothing. He expected a quick bite, a hiss, or something small and humiliating. Instead, warmth slid into his bones like memory finding a body. The small thing folded itself along his wrist, and for a heartbeat it was a cool stone pressed against skin. Then a voice — not spoken, but like wind through a hollow bone — brushed the inside of his mind.
No name. No home. No debt. You carry empty hands.
The thought was simple and not a thought at all; like a bell struck inside a shell. Kail's breath came short. He did not speak. He had been taught to be careful with names. Names were doors. To say a name wrong was to invite something in. He let the silence answer for him.
Around him, people muttered. The city guard moved. The high priests in their cloth caps narrowed their eyes into slits. But the creature pressed closer, and for the first time in years, Kail felt something answer back. The shame that had sat at the family table felt smaller, less sharp, as though the world had rearranged its furniture.
"You—" his mother's voice came like a whip. She had emerged from the market lane, her hands still smelling of cloth and dye. For a second she trembled as if the old fear sought its familiar posture. Then she stepped forward and opened her mouth to call him foolish, to pull him away. She stopped mid-word as if the words themselves had become costly.
The creature's lights shifted from blue to red and back, like an argument between oceans. Then it unfurled a thread: a filament of silver so fine it was almost thought. It wrapped once around Kail's wrist, and under his skin, something warmed. He could feel the world breathing: the taste of metal on the air, the memory of his father's hammer, the echo of his neighbor's laughter when they had mocked him last spring. These were small things, but together they formed a tapestry that had been missing from his life.
"Bind," the voice said again — and this time he heard it as a possibility rather than an imperative. Not just binding beasts to tamers in the old simple way, but a binding of bones and memory; a stitching of forgotten rights.
The priests pushed forward now, faces carved out of stone. "Child," the eldest intoned, voice thin as paper, "that is unnatural. Soul anomalies are dangerous. Step back."
Kail looked at the priests. He looked at the creature coiled along his arm. He looked at the column of the dead flare behind them: the world had given him a scrap of something terrible and beautiful. He had failed the Ceremony; the village had turned away. But the thing on his wrist pulsed like a sun with no name. It offered him not an easy path or cheap glory but a fragile doorway.
He took one step forward. Not because he wanted to be seen. Not because he sought their approval. He stepped forward because for the first time the emptiness he carried had been offered something to hold onto.
The ancient priest's hand flicked, as if toward a signal. Guards tightened. A child in the crowd began to cry. For one breath, the square felt like it had been compressed until every sound came out sharp as glass.
Then the creature unfurled a second shape behind Kail's shoulder — a suggestion of wings, too small at first, then lengthening as if sketched into being. Its eyes became stars, twin coals of blue and red turning and looking not at the crowd but into Kail's face. He could feel its hunger, yes, but it was a hunger that suggested not devouring, but of devoting. It wanted something from him: not food, but a binding.
Kail could have run. He could have let the priests seize him, let the guards drag him home, let the shame anchor itself back to the table. He could have walked back to Row Twelve and kept his name as ash in his palms. Instead he lifted his chin and met the creature's gaze, and in that instant he made a decision that pulled a thousand small threads taut.
He would bind.
It was not a ceremony learned at his mother's knee, nor a lesson from his father's forge. It was raw, almost brutish — two wills pressing into one small, impossible spark. He felt the creature's filament sink into his skin like frost. It reached for his thoughts, for the hollow places where people had carved him into nothing. It found sorrow, yes, but also a stubborn grit that had kept him sweeping ashes, fetching water, and learning how to fold a cloak square and neat.
With a sound that felt like teeth on a bell, something latched. The warmth folded deeper. The colors that had been strangers — crimson and cold blue — became a small sunrise in his chest. The crowd dispersed like animals sensing the weather change: some fled, some laughed out of fear, some fell to their knees with hands over their mouths.
Kail opened his eyes. Where once his skin had been plain, a fine sigil bloomed along his wrist, an ink made of moonlight and ember. It pulsed once, twice, slow as a new heartbeat. The creature curled into the hollow of his hand and slept.
The priests found their words after a long time. "Abomination." "Error." "Blessing." "Pestilence." The magistrate stamped and ordered a procession. No one noticed that the river, not far away, had stilled and that the geese in the wet market had gone mute.
Kail, the boy who had no name, walked home with the thing asleep in his palm. The world around him had not decided whether he was condemned or chosen. He had not decided either. All he knew was the quiet certainty of the sigil on his skin and the soft, alien breathing against his fingers.
That night, when his mother thought he slept and his father had gone to the forge late, Kail pulled the creature into the moonlight and whispered, not expecting an answer.
"What are you?"
The thing unfurled its head and the eyes opened like doors. For a moment the eyes were countless, as if all the beasts that had ever been were mirrored there. The voice touched him in the place between thought and dream.
I am many. I have no name, because I have had too many. I choose the forgotten. I will teach you how to bind. But know this: names cost. Soulbinding is not simple kindness. Every stitch takes a debt.
Kail pressed his palm to the sigil, feeling the slow heat under his veins. He had already paid a price: the years of scorn, the empty chairs at the table, the cold that turned laughter sharp. He had nothing left to lose but the small dignity he had kept for himself.
"Then teach me," he whispered.
Above the crooked roof, the sky folded like a curtain. Far beyond the city walls, in mountain caverns and ruined sanctuaries, deep things shifted their sleep. Something had woken in the world, and it had chosen to send a scrap of itself to a tamer the world had forgotten.
Kail did not yet know what binding would demand of him, nor how far the debt might reach. He only knew that the first thread had held. The sigil hummed. The creature breathed. The world, for better or worse, would have to remember his name — or remember to forget him in a far more dangerous way.
And in the distance, beyond the last torchlight of the city, something like a dragon's shadow moved against a broken moon.