The dragon had been sleeping for so long that the kingdom built around its back had forgotten what it was built on. Generations had lived in the shadow of its spine, which rose from the center of the palace grounds like a geological formation, and the palace itself had been constructed in concentric rings around the point where its skull had settled into the earth, so that the throne room was actually the hollow of a socket that had once held an eye the size of a cathedral.

The emperor in power when Kai was born was the forty-seventh of his line, and every one of those forty-seven emperors had lived in the same simple truth: you did not disturb the dragon. You did not dig at its bones. You did not try to determine whether it was truly dead or merely sleeping, because the answer either way was unusable information—the dragon was not a resource, it was a fact, and the empire organized itself around that fact the way a river organizes itself around a boulder.

Kai was the third son, which meant he would never inherit, which meant he had time to be curious in a way that his brothers did not. He spent his youth in the imperial archives, reading the oldest texts, and he was the first emperor’s son in three hundred years to read the founding documents closely enough to notice the discrepancy.

The dragon had not always been there. The founding records, the ones written by the first emperor’s own hand, described a landscape without a spine, a palace built on flat ground. The dragon had come later—walked in from the eastern desert, or flown in from somewhere beyond the sea, or simply appeared one morning in a kingdom that had not been expecting a dragon any more than it had been expecting a destiny.

The records of the dragon’s arrival were the ones that had been removed from the archives. Kai found this out by the simple method of checking the registry of documents against the physical shelves and noticing the gap where something had been.

The gap was in the section labeled “Arrivals.”

He was twelve when he made this discovery. He was twenty-three when he finally found the missing pages, in a private collection owned by a family that had been close to the first emperor and had kept copies of everything the official archives had been told to destroy.

The dragon had not come to the kingdom. The dragon had been invited. The first emperor had been facing a threat from the northern tribes that he could not defeat with armies, and someone—he was never named in the surviving pages, the ink where a signature should have been was deliberately corroded—had offered a solution that came in the form of a creature that ate iron and slept for centuries and whose presence made a kingdom unassailable simply by existing.

The price was not described in the pages Kai found. But the price was mentioned as being ongoing, a recurring thing, something that would need to be paid every generation when the dragon’s eye opened for its regular inspection of the kingdom it had been given.

Kai was twenty-three and the emperor was old and his brothers were positioning themselves for succession and no one was watching Kai in the archives, and Kai understood that he had a choice. He could say nothing and let the succession happen and let whatever the price was continue to be collected from a kingdom that had long since forgotten it owed anything at all. Or he could do the thing that the missing pages had been removed to prevent.

He went to the dragon’s skull and climbed inside the socket that had once held its eye and looked into the darkness where the other eye should have been, and in the darkness, something looked back.

It had been waiting for him, Kai somehow knew. It had been waiting since before he was born.