The line stretched longer than you'd expected.

You'd arrived early enough to get a decent position, but somewhere between the city gates and the college steps, the crowd had thickened around you until you were just another body pressed between strangers, all of you sweating through your best clothes in the late summer heat. Around you, candidates murmured to each other in tight, nervous clusters. Some were built like they'd been training for this their whole lives — broad shoulders, calloused hands, the kind of stillness that came from knowing exactly what they were capable of.

Others looked like they'd rolled out of bed and wandered in by mistake.

You weren't sure which category you fell into. Probably something in between, which felt like the worst possible place to be. The Parapet was visible from where you stood. You'd heard about it, of course. Everyone had. A narrow stone bridge, no rails, a drop on either side that didn't care how ready you thought you were. Dragons had been known to fly beneath it just to see who flinched. Some candidates froze halfway across and never made it to the other side — not because of a dragon, just because their legs stopped working and their heart stopped cooperating and that was the end of it. You'd told yourself you wouldn't think about that until you had to. You were thinking about it now.

"First time?" The voice came from your left — a girl about your age, dark-eyed and observant, watching you with the particular look of someone who had already catalogued everything about you and was waiting to see if you'd lie.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You've looked at the Parapet four times in the last two minutes." She shrugged. "I've been counting. I do that when I'm nervous — count things. It helps."

"Does it?"

"Not really." She extended a hand. "Sera. From Calldyr."

You gave her your name, shook it. Her grip was firm and her palm was as clammy as yours, which was oddly reassuring.

"What brings you here?" she asked.

It was the question everyone asked in line. What brings you here, like you'd all just shown up to a market day and not the single most dangerous threshold most of you would ever cross. Some people had good answers. Family tradition. Military service. A dragon spotted them young and they'd felt the pull ever since.

Your answer was more complicated. It sat somewhere between necessity and stubbornness and something you hadn't found the right word for yet.

"It felt like the right call," you said.

Sera looked at you for a moment, then nodded slowly, like that was actually a reasonable thing to say.

The line shuffled forward. You could hear it now — not just the crowd, but something underneath it, something low and resonant that you felt more in your sternum than your ears. The presence of the dragons in the Vale beyond the college. Even at this distance, even without seeing them, the air felt different. Charged. Aware.

"What if you get to the middle and freeze?" Sera asked. Not unkindly. Like she was asking herself out loud.

"Then I freeze," you said. "And then I figure out what to do about it." She almost laughed. "That's not a plan."

"It's what I've got."

Another shuffle forward. The line was thinning ahead. Each name called was someone stepping away from the crowd and toward the bridge, and you watched them go with the focused attention of someone cataloguing useful information — how they carried themselves, whether they looked down, whether they hesitated at the first step or committed to it. A tall boy with close-cropped hair barely broke stride. A girl two heads shorter than him stopped at the edge for three full seconds before crossing at a near-run. Both of them made it.

One more name, and another.

And then, closer now, you could see the Parapet properly. The stone was old and worn smooth by centuries of feet that had come before yours. The drop on either side was exactly as bad as advertised. And in the middle distance, circling on a thermal with the lazy patience of something that had watched a thousand of these days and expected to watch a thousand more, a dragon banked left and disappeared behind a ridge.

Your name was called.

Sera looked at you. You looked at the bridge.

"Count something," she said.

"Right." You exhaled. "How many steps across, you think?"

"Sixty, maybe seventy."

"Sixty steps," you repeated. "That's nothing."

"It's really not," she agreed, in a tone that suggested she was lying to be kind.

You stepped out of the line and walked toward the Parapet. The crowd noise fell away behind you — or maybe it didn't, maybe it was just as loud as before, but your focus had narrowed to the stone under your boots and the drop on either side and the far edge, which was solid ground, which was the Riders Quadrant, which was the thing you'd come here for.

One step. Two.

The wind off the mountains hit you at the midpoint — harder than you'd expected, pushing at your shoulder like it was testing something. You widened your stance without thinking. Breathed through it. Somewhere below, you heard the rush of enormous wings. You didn't look down. You kept your eyes on the other side and walked.