Fireborne

In a flashback to the orphanage, Lee and Annie have been planning their escape for a year. On Palace Day, the first anniversary of his family’s murders, there is a city parade. His father’s dragon, Aletheia, is brought forward and executed. Lee watches in devastation and puts an arm around Annie, who also sobs over the display. He believes she feels the same he does about the loss of the dragon but later she tells him that dragon killed her family. Lee cannot reconcile this version of his father—the kind of man who would execute an entire family with his dragon’s fire—with the memory of his loving father. He shouts at Annie, calling her a liar and claims her family must have deserved it. Annie explains that her family was killed because they didn’t meet a food quota during the Famine. When Lee claims that the Famine was a lie—something he’d been previously told—Annie is shocked. She tells him that her mother and baby brother died of starvation, their deaths proof that the Famine was very real. In the days after, her words continue to bother him. They taint his recollection of his father and the dragonborn. Lee decides to escape to New Pythos without her.