Born to Rule: The Dragon Queen

Mira’s POV

In seven days, I would marry a man who was in love with my sister.

The wind screamed past me as I dove, wings flared wide, the whole weight of the sky pressing against my golden scales. I let myself fall longer than I should have — long enough that the palace spires of Eradrakor blurred into streaks of gold and white — before I snapped my wings open and spiraled down. My claws bit into the emerald lawns of the royal gardens.

Through Asfar’s eyes, I caught the glint of steel from the training arena. One figure remained, sword carving silver arcs through the dusk, every movement precise, unhurried, beautiful.

Dorrin.

My soon-to-be fiancé. The man I had fled from an hour ago, the moment the royal council announced our engagement would be sealed within the week.

Guilt curled hot in my chest. A future queen wasn’t supposed to bolt from a council chamber like a child caught stealing sweets. But when they’d spoken his name — Dorrin, Royal Commander, the suitable match — something inside me had simply cracked, and I’d run for the open sky before anyone could see my face.

Because I had spent my whole life waiting for someone else.

Dragons find their soulmate after their eighteenth year. The bond is meant to be a certainty, a pull in the blood toward the one person made to stand beside you. I would turn twenty-one in a fortnight, and I had searched every province of the kingdom — every border town, every mountain hold — and felt nothing. No tug. No certainty. No one.

And it was more than longing. By the oldest law, no heir may take the throne until they are crowned at twenty-one and have found their destined mate. Asfar carried the royal mark; the crown was mine by blood and by right. But a queen without a mate was a queen with a hollow at her center, and the council would not gamble a kingdom on a hollow. So they chose for me.

They chose Dorrin.

And truly, who could object? Every girl at court sighed over him — tall, broad-shouldered, turquoise eyes and a wild crown of ginger curls, brave and honorable and unfailingly kind. He was everything a commander should be. Everything a king should be.

He simply wasn’t mine. He never had been. For as long as I could remember, Dorrin had orbited my sister Marina, not me — and I had seen the way he looked at her when she played the harp, as if she were the only living thing in the room.

Marina was the easy one to love. Graceful where I was blunt, radiant where I was wild. She wrote poetry and played five instruments and could charm a storm into stillness. I preferred my daggers, my bow, and a quiet corner with a book. When the court imagined a queen, they imagined her.

Instead they were getting me — curls I forgot to brush, no jewels, no patience for flattery — and a husband whose heart was already spoken for. And beneath all of it lay the fear I couldn’t drown: what if Dorrin’s true mate appeared? Because a dragon cannot live torn from their soulmate. If she ever walked through the palace gates, he would leave. Of course he would. So would I, in his place.

My dragon, Asfar, rumbled, impatient. She cared nothing for councils or crowns. She cared that Storm — Dorrin’s dragon — was somewhere close, and the bond those two shared was rare even among our kind. “Go to him”, she urged. I ignored her, shifted back into my own skin, and started toward the palace. I needed Caspian first — my oldest friend, my steady ground. Then I would face my parents.

I never reached the doors.

Voices stopped me on the garden path — low, sharp, the kind people use when they’re certain no one is listening. I slipped behind a hedge before I could think better of it.

My older brother, Valen, stood rigid in his pressed tunic, every inch the firstborn prince: blond, immaculate, gray eyes that missed nothing. Beside him, his wife Elena trembled with a fury she never bothered to hide, chestnut hair slipping loose around her flushed face.

“I can’t believe this is really happening,” Elena hissed. “Your useless sister is going to be queen.”

“Don’t speak about Mira like that.” Valen’s voice was a blade. “She bears the mark. She’s worthy.”

“I don’t know what curse the gods laid on this family.” Elena’s words dripped venom. “You’re the firstborn. You should be king. And if it had to be a woman — why not Marina? She’d make a better queen than that… that mess ever could.”

I didn’t wait for my brother’s answer. I’d heard enough — and Elena’s hatred had never been a secret. What unsettled me wasn’t her cruelty.

It was that some small, traitorous part of me agreed with her.

Cora was waiting when I reached my chambers, my head maid’s face soft with a sympathy she was too kind to speak aloud.

“Your bath is ready, Princess.” She hesitated. “And the King requests you in the throne room. As soon as you’re dressed.”

Something in the way she said it pricked the back of my neck. My father did not summon me on ordinary evenings.

I bathed quickly and dressed plainly — no powder, no jewels, hair loose and wild as ever. The only thing I wore was the amber ring Caspian had given me on my fifteenth birthday, a promise of friendship I had never once taken off. The palace had long since stopped expecting me to look like a princess.

But when I stepped into the corridor, the air itself had changed. Servants hurried past with their eyes lowered. Guards I had never seen before flanked the throne room doors — broad, silent men in colors that belonged to no house of Eradrakor, standing with the cold, watchful stillness of soldiers far from home.

Foreign banners. A foreign escort. In my father’s hall.

Inside me, Asfar went very still — and for the first time all day, she wasn’t thinking about Storm.”

“Something is coming, she whispered. “Mira — something is about to change.”

I drew a breath, set my hand against the cold gold of the doors, and pushed them open.