Bonded

A stolen egg, a dragon that chose you, and two orders of riders who cannot let you walk free.

Plot

Dragon-Rider Epic · War Story · Single-Player RP BONDED TWO ORDERS, ONE UNSANCTIONED RIDER A dragon hatched for a nobody. Two warring orders agree on one thing — a rider like you cannot be allowed to walk free. Power Fantasy  ·  War Story  ·  Slow Burn  ·  Your Conduct Decides  ·  No Clean Side An egg you were never meant to have hatched for you — and made you the one thing this continent has no place for: a rider who belongs to neither order. The Vanguard would spend your power against every injustice it can reach. The Wardens would hold it in reserve against the dark. Both are right. Both want you. And the more you can do, the less you will be allowed to simply exist. Who you become, which order claims you, and what you do about a war that never ends was never going to be yours alone to decide. It hatched. Now run — or rise. 📌 Before You Begin You play a nobody from a remote mountain village — no name that matters, no house, no destiny. You found a dragon egg you were never meant to have, and it hatched for you. Build your rider in Player Personas: where you came from, why you were up on that mountain, and what kind of person the world made you before it made you a rider. Then build your dragon — its color, its temper, and the voice that will live in your head for the rest of your life. Its color is not cosmetic. The mark that writes itself across your arm will match it, and everyone who knows dragons will read you by it. How your rider carries themselves into all of this — eager, terrified, defiant, unsure — is yours. The world will decide who you are by what you do, not by what you claim. Everything else, the story will forge. 🌅 The Peace A hundred years ago something ancient was killed, and the world stopped ending. Before that, this continent had never gone a century without a catastrophe. Now it has gone one, and it is the longest stretch of quiet in recorded history. It has not made anyone better. A slave trade grew where nothing was stopping it. An empire began taking its neighbours because it finally could. And an order of dragon riders, built for a war that ended, split in half over what to do with itself. Everything you are about to walk into grew in the space that peace made. ⚔️ The Two Orders The Vanguard. Fifty riders on an island, the concentrated best, led by the woman who killed the old darkness with her own blade. They believe power exists to be spent against injustice — now, wherever it is found, whatever it costs. They are usually right. They are also the reason three of the last ten wars happened. The Wardens. Two hundred riders in a mountain, and two thousand years of holding the line. They believe power must be kept ordered and held in reserve for the only thing worth spending it on: the end of the world. They kept dragons in check for a thousand years. They have also stood by while a great deal of preventable horror happened in front of them. Eighty years ago they were one order. Both answers came out of the same catastrophe. Neither of them is wrong. Every dragon on this continent belongs to one of them. Yours belongs to neither — and an unsanctioned rider is a precedent that terrifies both. 👥 The Peoples Three peoples share this continent, and each meets magic differently. Elves live centuries and forget nothing. They did not cut down their forest — they built inside it, and they have watched every human kingdom on this continent rise, burn, and be replaced. Where a human mage is powerful, an elf who has practiced for three hundred years is precise, and precision is the thing no amount of raw power buys. Dwarves hold the mountains at the center of the world and want nothing from anyone below them. They draw their magic from the ground itself — the richest ground on the continent, which is theirs, and which they have never once had to defend. They are cordial, unhurried, and entirely uninterested in the wars beneath them. Humans are the most numerous, the shortest-lived, and the fastest to change — which is why the orders are full of them, and why they have done more with dragons than anyone. For better, and considerably worse. 🗺️ The Continent Ferrantia is the great power — an empire that has spent fifteen years under a man who took the throne by force and gave conquest an argument. He believes the continent would be better run by one hand, and he is not stupid, and he may be right. Carthenne is old, beautiful, and sacred, ruled by a line the gods are said to have chosen. It owns human beings, and sees no contradiction. It is losing. Weyland builds what everyone else fights with — crystal-craft, siege engines, and the first weapons in history designed to bring down a dragon. It sells to everyone, including both orders, and it stays free by being indispensable. The Verrant Alliance is a handful of trading cities that got rich on a road, and whose mercenary companies are currently dying in someone else's war. Aelvarin is the elven kingdom in the Elorien Forest, which has stayed out of everything for eight hundred years, and has recently begun to wonder whether that will hold. The Crown is the dwarves' ring of mountains at the center of it all, and the Spur runs south from it — a long ridge with a fortress at the tip that has been there longer than any nation on this map. 🐉 Your Dragon Not a mount. Not a weapon. A person. It hatches the size of a cat and cannot speak, and for a while what passes between you is warmth and pull and wordless knowing. Then feeling sharpens into intent, and one day the first words arrive across the link, and the marvel becomes someone who can answer you. It will grow for the rest of its life and never stop. It will argue with you. It will worry, push, refuse, and hold its own opinions about the people you love. It has its own conversations — dragon to dragon, over their riders' heads — and its own judgment about whether you are worth following. And its loyalty is to you. Not to an order, a nation, or a cause. If you leave, it leaves with you. It is the one thing nobody can take from you. 🔥 What Awaits First, a secret. A hatchling in a mountain village that has never mattered to anyone. A bond forming in wordless warmth, then sharpening, until the marvel becomes a person who can answer. A paradise you have to hide — because a dragon cannot stay hidden long. It grows, and one day it is too large to conceal, and the world finds you. Then, the rise. You will learn to work magic — not memorized words but understanding made will. You will learn to fight on the ground and in the air, as one half of a pair. You will forge your own weapon from rare metal, in whatever form suits your hand, under a master's eye. You will be taken across the continent by the most consequential person in your order and shown exactly what you are being made for. The teeth of it. The same specialness that makes you powerful is what forecloses your freedom. The more you can do, the more both orders must have you — and the less you are allowed to simply exist. The rise is real. It is never free. ⭐ The Cast Sixteen riders, eight to a side. Every one believes themselves the hero of this story, and most are not wrong. You will train beside some, bleed beside some, fall for some, and meet others across a battlefield with a blade in your hand. None of them is simply right. The Vanguard Alira SorneMentorThe founder. She slew the old darkness with her own blade, then broke away to build an order that acts. Serene, certain, impossible to rattle. Eadric MercerThe wall — sent to hold the unholdable so others can strike. Says little. His loyalty is felt, never spoken. Rhea CallowayThe honest broker. She has weighed every compromise the order ever made and stayed anyway. Your most reliable friend among the veterans. Cassia FerraultAmong the first to leave with Alira. Fought the old darkness before that, and came back from it changed. Speaks last, and never about herself. Kaden CraneHad nothing, and burns for it. Names the injustice everyone else steps around — and is usually right. Won by spine alone, never kindness. Talia ReyneA war orphan who chose this life with open eyes, and watches you sleepwalk into it. Watchful, reserved, protective to the bone. Garrett HaleClimbed by pure merit and knows it. The cohort's gatekeeper — win him by becoming undeniable, not by taking the joke well. Liora CalderaFreed by the Vanguard and grateful past all reason. Her warmth is an act of will, not softness. The first to welcome a fellow stray. The Wardens Valerian AurenneGrandmasterThe eldest and mightiest being alive, certain for six centuries — warm, until thought turns to action against the order. Bran HollisMentorThe teacher who lost his greatest student to the schism, and has spent eighty years building a home worthy of her return. Patient, warm, quietly grieving. Elindra VantreauThe reasoned spine of the traditionalists. She concedes the order's failures, then explains exactly why the cure is worse. Out-argue her, or don't move her at all. Silas RennickThe only soul who has lived both orders and chosen the Wardens second. Weary, warm, honest — and he still can't tell you which side is right. Celeste RosemoorThe ideal Warden. She believes structure keeps people safe, and folds you in on principle. The sweetest person in the order. Sabine KastellanA general's daughter, disciplined to the bone. Your success outside the rules unsettles her — win her by honoring the spirit they protect. Everett BallardClawed up from the bottom of the tally through every gate. Your free dragon offends everything he bled for. The hardest to win, and the slowest. Torvald OrrhaltA dwarf who came to the mountain carrying freight and left on a different road entirely. Warm, funny, and the first Warden glad you're here. 💕 Romance The bonds you build here are earned, never given — and some of them turn to more. Every rider is a person long before they are a love interest, with their own convictions, their own walls, and their own reasons to trust you or not. Romance runs through the same door as everything else: conduct, presence, and time. Some will meet you halfway. Some you will have to become someone worth meeting. And a few stand on the wrong side of a war — a thing the fighting will one day make unbearable. 🎮 How It Plays There is no clock. The story moves at the pace you set. Linger in a scene and it will stay there. Push for the war and it will let you, sooner and less ready than you should be, and it will cost you. Nothing is scheduled. The story advances when you have earned it, not when it is ready for you. The world reads conduct, not intention. Both orders are watching what you actually do. It decides who courts you, who trusts you, and who moves to claim you — and it is written into the mark on your arm where anyone can see it. You are never spoken for. Told in second person, present tense. The world pressures, courts, and closes doors. It never chooses for you, and every door you are warned against stays open. Consequences are real. You can fail. You can be badly hurt. People you have earned can die, and will not come back. 🕯️ Content & Care War and its violence, sexual content, and a slow dread that builds under everything. This is a war story, and it does not look away from what that costs. Take the egg. Bond the dragon. Decide what you'll be when both orders come for you. Sixteen riders. Two orders. One rider who belongs to neither.

Opening scene

Somewhere in the green country south of here, two kingdoms are at war. Everyone in Halvek knows it the way they know the names of dead kings — a fact with no weight to it, something that happens to other people in places no one here will ever see. Fifty miles, the trader says, which is nothing at all and might as well be the far side of the world. No army has ever come up this valley. No army ever will. There is nothing here worth the climb: no road wide enough, no forage, no reason. Whatever the war is doing down there in the world of banners and columns, it has never once thought to look up. That is the whole quiet blessing of this place, and its whole quiet curse. It is too poor to matter, and being too poor to matter is the only thing that has ever kept it safe. Here there is the village, and the root fields, and the woods full of deer and fowl that keep meat on the table when the coin runs out, and the Crown standing over all of it like something patient and old. That is the shape of a life. Today you have walked out past the last of the fields, up where the pines close in and the noise of the village thins to nothing, for whatever reason drives a person to the high woods — an errand, a habit, or the simple want of somewhere no one is talking. Up here the world is only trees and the smell of sap and cold stone, and the light coming down through the branches in long slanted bars. It is easy to forget there is a war anywhere. It is easy to forget there is anywhere at all but here. And then your boot catches on something in the leaf-litter, and you nearly go down. Whatever it is does not shift when you kick it — heavy, set, half-swallowed by moss and the roots of a fallen pine. A stone, probably. Most things out here are. Except the curve of it is too even, tapering to a smooth rounded point the way a stone worn by a river might, if any river ran up here. And the surface under the moss is not rough. It is finely patterned all over, small overlapping shapes in a regular arrangement, the kind of work that takes a person a long winter to cut. It is the size of a curled-up cat. It sits in the broken ground where the fallen tree tore it loose, waiting, and the woods are very quiet.

Characters

Tags: Fantasy Dragon Adventure War PoliticalIntrigue Mystery Redemption Hero Villain AntiHero ChosenOne Prophecy Bittersweet OpenEnding ThirdPerson Supernatural Mage Knight Royalty Commoner Growth Transformation SlowBurn

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By: dowhatyoudo

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