Storm Rider

Dragons choose nobles. It’s law, tradition, and — everyone agrees — the will of Zerath herself.

Tarin Rook works an orchard his family will never own, in a village too small to matter, in a county that ships its fruit downriver to people who will never learn his name. When the Choosing caravan docks at Paythar, he goes to watch. Watching is free, and he has never seen a dragon.

He was never meant to touch one.

The Stormscale that bonds to him is the rarest creature in Vax Caldera — born once in a generation, bonded to the royal line since before the Succession Wars. It chooses him in front of a thousand witnesses. By nightfall the Crown has a problem it can neither kill nor explain, and a farm boy holds a dragon that should have gone to a prince.

So they give him a title his father can’t pronounce, land they never expected anyone to want, and a place at the Academy on the Rim — where the children of the great houses have trained since they could walk, and where every one of them knows exactly what he used to be.

The trials are designed to break his body. His classmates will see to the rest.

And somewhere above it all, someone has noticed that a dragon chose a boy from the dirt — and started asking what else the histories might have gotten wrong.

Storm Rider is the first book of Dragon Riders of Zerath, an epic fantasy of dragons, blood, and the lies that history tells.