The world had forgotten the roar of dragon fire. The seas sang only the sigh of gulls, and the mountains held only the sigh of wind. Yet the gods, ever watchful, saw that balance had tipped. The Age of Men grew proud, and the old wildness was fading. In a whisper that trembled through the roots of Yggdrasil, the Aesir resolved to bring the dragons back. They forged four eggs, each the weight of a newborn babe, each the size of one. One glowed sapphire blue, another pulsed the hue of a deep forest, a third shone like fresh caught gold, and the fourth blushed the softness of a rose…

The sixteen winter storms had carved Erik into a quiet, watchful shape. His world had been the whispering pines, the granite teeth of the mountains, and the two souls who moved through that solitude: Elsinka, whose eyes held the fog of futures unseen, and Sigurd, whose silence was as deep and sturdy as the wood he worked. Friendship, in the way boys his age seemed to have it—easy, loud, constant—was a foreign country. Then came the war-band’s training encampment, and Erik was deposited into a roaring, stinking, crowded longhouse. The air was a permanent stew of woodsmoke, unwashed bodies, wet wool, and the metallic tang of sharpened steel. Benches lined…

My name is Gunnar Milkhause Schröeder, and if you’re wondering about the umlaut over the ö, yes, it’s real. So is the head full of voices. When I was a child, I didn’t just daydream—I conducted symphonies of imagination. Entire civilizations rose and fell behind my eyelids. Mars wasn’t just a red dot in a textbook; it was a desert kingdom ruled by librarians who rode sand-foxes. The moon? A quiet retreat for retired astronauts who’d grown tired of breathing and just wanted to float in peace. I climbed Everest in my socks, scaled Machu Picchu between math problems, and once walked the Amazon rainforest during a particularly long lunch…