by C_M_Rabenhorst
Markeo has spent his life sketching dragons. Now he has to kill one. In a kingdom where strength is everything, 17-year-old Prince Markeo has always felt like an outsider. While the other men train for battle, Markeo hides in the library, filling pages with sketches of dragons and losing himself in myths everyone else has forgotten. His older brother Andreo is everything he is not—couragous, admired, and destined to become king. He earns the respect of both their father and the kingdom, while Markeo is dismissed as a dreamer more suited to books than battle. But to Markeo, his older brother is something far more important: the one person who has always believed in him and stood up for him. When Andreo is killed in battle protecting his younger brother, Markeo is left crushed by grief and guilt. Then he discovers an ancient legend that offers him an impossible chance to undo what happened. The tears of a dragon can bring the dead back to life. There is only one problem. To claim its tears, Markeo needs to find and kill a dragon—a creature no one has seen for centuries—and it must be done in less than four weeks. With only a handful of unlikely companions—some more loyal than others— Markeo leaves the safety of his kingdom for a world his books never prepared him for. What begins as a desperate quest to save his brother soon becomes a dangerous journey that will test his courage, change his destiny and reshape the future of the entire kingdom. —------------------------------ Tears of the Dragon reimagines the classic dragon-slaying quest into a heartbreaking coming-of-age journey of grief, sacrifice, and hope. It follows a young man who refuses to accept losing the person he loves most. It’s a slow-burning, character-driven story that is very personal to me and inspired by the loss of my own brother far too early and the many emotions I went through after his death. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed creating it. I aim to upload a new chapter once or twice a week. Comments and suggestions are always welcome. If you enjoy the story, feel free to follow it and share it with your friends. Thank you :)
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 2 Oct 2026, 02:29 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 02:29 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Coupled 14-day outlook
rs-joint-entry-copula-v1
Any eligible RS entry
4%
Two or more lists
2%
Likely threshold order: Drama → Action → Adventure → Fantasy → Main.
Leading bundle: Drama (3%).
Estimated from one fitted shared story path; category probabilities are not multiplied as if lists were independent.
Separate entry forecast; this probability does not enter the ranking score.
Overall Rising Stars Shadow RS rank
#9920 of 12,432 · 9870 below RS #50
By genre
beats 94% of similar stories
beats 14% of similar stories
beats 38% of similar stories
Mid-pack, room on both levers
Traffic and conversion both sit mid-field for a story this size. Growth here compounds from consistency: steady cadence feeds traffic, and a sharper hook lifts what each view is worth.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 20–49 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.
