prologue

“But why,” Sùng Lãm asked again, with the stubbornness unique to 9 year olds. 

“Because,” Long Quân said with all the patience of an older brother, “it’s tradition.”

“I wanted to sleep in. The next episode of The Black Dragon is on and I want to see it.” Súng Lãm pouted. 

“You forget you are the real dragon, little brother. You don’t need a holocast show to remind you of us.”

Súng Lãm couldn’t argue with that. Even at the precocious age of 9, the lightest traces of his dragon marks were coming to fruition. Red and black intertwining tendrils of a dragon stretching across his left shoulder, crawling down his arm. An irrevocable mark of their clan. Of his status of “Prince” and his father as “King.”

“Why do we have to go to Bố’s business meeting again? I still don’t understand.”

Quân laughed, patting his brother’s carefully moussed hair (done at the last minute with a particularly exasperated cosmetics bot their mother had hired to wrangle her youngest son) careful to not mess up the ‘artisanal work’, as the bot had put it.

“Ông Nội is going to be there. He wishes for the city to see the might of the Dragons. All of us, presented with the Senate, for a unified front in the city.”

Maybe it was because Long Quan was Sung Lam’s older brother, or maybe it was because Long Quan was a true Dragon Prince, but Sung Lam couldn’t help but feel slightly mollified at those words. After all, he was the second son of the Hung dynasty. He was strong. And his family was the best. Of course they’d show them!

Quan most of all, Lam thought. His brother, elegant and poised with perfectly coiffed black hair, intelligent bright “dove eyes'' as their mother put it, and softly tanned skin from the muggy sunlight in Lac Viet City. Concealed beneath the tuxedos both of them wore, Lam could almost see his brother’s marks. Red and gold, the mark of the true firstborn son of the Dragon, spiraling from up his hip to his ribcage, across his chest and around his biceps. A sign of his brother as a fully-fledged, adult Dragon, incumbent in his own power. 

His mother’s mark was on full display, however, with the sheer sleeves of her matte gold ao dai, the edges of her dragoness peeking out from her shoulder all the way down her left arm to the back of her hand. She sat regally in the backseat of the luxury hovercar, hair pulled back in a chignon and her imported qilin-fur coat draped over her lap. She gazed out the window, at the fleeting urbanity of Lac Viet with a steady and composed eye as the hovercar sped through the winding chaotic streets accompanied by the retinue of bodyguard droids and actual bodyguards alike.

His father, though…he sat rigid and straight backed on the farthest end of the hovercar cabin, across from the two boys, gaze steely and unnerved. Lines weathered his otherwise young face, the edges of his Dragon mark emerging from the top of his collar. And he was muttering under his breath. Lam didn’t like that. Wasn’t that what the villains in pre-New Era media did? Mutter under their breath and plan creepily for the demise of the superhero? Or maybe he had been watching too many holocomcasted movies. It wouldn’t have been the first time Quan told him off, rotting his brains watching those old era movies and things called “television shows” instead of studying with his tutors. 

Either way, it was kinda creepy, and Lam didn’t like it.

Pretending to fidget with one of his cuffs, he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “Anh, Bo’s being creepy…”

A perturbed expression flitted over Quan’s face, but he quickly hid it with a smile. “I’m sure he’s just stressed. With our, um, extra special dealings and with grandfather, things have been going a little-”

That was probably the last thing Sung Lam ever heard his brother say before his world was engulfed in flames.