The Legend of Angers.
“Time is a wound, and I am the scab that will never heal.”
In the late autumn of 1894, in Cambridge, Hilbert Jean Angers was still a sixteen-year-old orphan, searching for a place to belong among ancient books and poetry collections. Then Menek Cassell, a gray-eyed young German, approached him and offered him a badge engraved with a half-rotted World Tree.
“Welcome to the real world,” Menek said. “Here, dragons are no legend, and you are their descendant.”
From that moment on, Angers stepped onto a battlefield hidden in the shadows. He joined the Lionheart Society and swore a blood oath with seven companions from around the world. They believed that with their intelligence, courage, and dragon blood, they could protect humanity from the darkness.
Until the summer of 1900, when the disaster later known as the “Summer of Mourning” reduced every vow to dust. The Lionheart Society was nearly wiped out. Twenty-five companions were reduced to unrecognizable remains in the scorched earth. Only Angers survived, his pocket watch forever stopped at 3:17 p.m.
From that day on, Hilbert Jean Angers was dead. The one who survived was a lonely machine bent on revenge.
He took charge of Cassell College and trained generation after generation of dragon slayers. He moved through the shadows of the world wars, hunting dragons as they awoke amid the conflicts of humanity. He raised his glass with effortless grace and smiled with impeccable manners, the stopped pocket watch always tucked into his suit pocket.
Until a Chinese boy named Lu Mingfei appeared.
As Dragon Kings awaken one after another and bloodstained truths tear open history long buried, Angers must face his ultimate choice: continue his century-long path of revenge, or attempt the path of reconciliation that no one has ever taken?
