Threshing · The full story

How the valley picked its riders — and the year it made history.

You survive to the end of first year just to be allowed in, walk into the dragons' valley on foot, spread out like you were told — and either something the size of a house decides you're worth keeping, or it walks past and leaves you nothing.

The rite

The most dangerous day of first year, and it's a job interview.

Into the Vale on foot, spread out, and wait to be chosen. A dragon bonds you or it walks on by — there's no partial credit for almost. Survive it and you're a rider; don't and the roll gets read out with the rest. The bond is the point of the whole quadrant, and this is the one day it happens.

The choosing

They don't pick the biggest. They pick the one who wouldn't run.

Dragons choose their own riders, and they aren't impressed by muscle — they watch for nerve. Violet plants herself between three cadets and the tiny gold feathertail they've come to kill, and doesn't move. Tairn descends because of exactly that. Courage read the room the way strength never could.

History broken

Two dragons. There was no rule against it because no one imagined it.

Tairn takes her first — an enormous black morningstartail, the lightning is his — and then the little gold one bonds her too. The first rider in recorded history to hold two, and the tether to Sgaeyl's rider comes free with it. Nobody wrote a law for this because nobody thought they'd have to.

That October first

How the valley picked its riders — and the year it made history.

Threshing runs the same brutal way every year: survive to the end of first year, walk into the dragons' valley, and hope. Most of it is waiting and dread. Then, one year, a fragile scribe's daughter did the thing the record had no category for. Here's how the day that set the whole series actually went.

01
Presentation
A few days before, the cadets walk the flight field and the dragons come to look them over. Violet clocks a tiny gold feathertail at the end of the line — the kind everyone says never bonds anyone.
02
Into the valley
October first. Professor Kaori marches the first-years down into the Vale and tells them to spread out and wait. Then the dragons come down to choose.
03
The hunt
Jack Barlowe and two others go looking for the little gold dragon — killing a rival's shot at a bond is just good odds at Basgiath. Violet reaches it first and plants herself in the way.
04
Tairn descends
An enormous black morningstartail drops from the sky, shelters the feathertail under his wing, incinerates the cadet who won't back off, and chooses Violet. She survives the bond that should have killed her.
05
The impossible bond
Then the gold one — Andarna — bonds her too. The first rider in recorded history to hold two dragons at once. The world's oldest rule breaks in the space of an afternoon.
06
The tether
Because Tairn and Sgaeyl are mates, the bond ties Violet to Xaden — the son of the man her mother executed. One walk into the Vale, and every fault line the series runs on is already drawn.

In its own words

The day the record keeps a straight face about.

“On the first of October, the first-year cadets of the Riders Quadrant enter the bowl-shaped forested valley to the southwest of the citadel and pray they come out alive.”
Fourth Wing — Rebecca Yarros

“up ahead, sitting so perfectly still that they might be gargoyles, are the hundred and one dragons who have decided to bond this year.”
Fourth Wing — Rebecca Yarros

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