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…

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…

The wind howled through the high cliffs of Hrafnnes, rattling the stone walls of the palace and carrying with it the bitter scent of frozen pine. Inside the great hall, King Akbar paced before the great fire, its orange tongues doing little to chase away the cold that had settled deep in his bones. Beside him, Queen Egrida stood, her silken robes a muted gray that mirrored the sky outside. For years they had stood together on the throne, their rule marked by prosperity and peace, but their joy was incomplete, hollowed by a single, aching absence. He was fifteen winters old when the iron clad scent of salt first…

The forest had always been a place of secret murmurs, a living tapestry of scent and sound that most in the kingdom chose to ignore. To Prince Erik, however, the Whispering Woods had become a second home—a realm where the ordinary rules of the palace dissolved into the rhythm of wind, bark, and bone. It had begun when he was twelve, the year his father, King Aric, sent him down a winding path to meet the old seer and healer known as Elsinka. Elsinka was not a woman of great stature, nor was she cloaked in the usual trappings of power. She was a head full of silver hair, a…