This takes place in a Wild West-like world where cowboys and outlaws are dragon riders. ___ The main character, Virgil Deadwood, was raised by outlaws for much of his early years. His mother regarded him as a nuisance, and seldom looked after him. Her dragon picked up on said instincts, and eventually burned half of Virgil's face off. The bandits left Virgil to die, thinking he would be unable to survive. But he was picked up by settlers, and managed to keep living if not completely recover. He later tamed a dragon, and then got a job as an escort. As there's multiple dragon riding outlaw gangs, to protect wagon caravans as they head out there needs to be protection in the form of dragon riders hired by the government. Virgil picks up such a job, aiding settlers and such. Virgil's always on the lookout for his mother though, determined to get his justice. One day he finds the survivor of one of his mother's raids, a young man named Addam Baird. Baird's also badly burned from a dragon, and Virgil reluctantly allows him to join him as an escort. Thoughts or questions?
Sounds interesting! I think one thing you'd need to consider is a fairly evolved way of treating burns in what sounds like a pre-modern medicine type world, burn wounds are highly susceptible to infection and can be hard to treat effectively without skin grafts, effective sterilisation of the patient's environment and such. One thing that stuck out to me, if I'm imagining a dragon the size of (at least) a horse, their flames don't seem that scary if they can target someone and only burn off half their face? If so I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, one of the difficulties a lot of dragon books have IMO is just how overpowered the creatures are. It could be cool to have them as dangerous but not to the point of wiping out whole villages by accident. (Also, maybe this is just me but my first reading I took 'escort' to mean prostitute. Having read the whole thing I'm pretty sure you mean it as armed (with a dragon) escort?)
Dragons vary in size, with most being somewhere in the region of horse-sized. They can adjust how much flame they produce, but they’re not living nukes like some shows portray them as. They’d need a lot of effort to actually burn down a village. Escort does refer to actual escorting, yes.
