Dreams of Gold and Fire

1st Place (Tied) - 28th Annual Critters Readers' Poll, Children's Books Finalist, 2026 Imadjinn Awards - Best Middle Grade BookAron has one job: watch the sheep. He can't stop daydreaming about fighting dragons long enough to do it. When a coyote nearly costs his family part of the flock while he's off battling imaginary monsters, his father sends him to the pig pens instead.Humiliated and certain he was built for more than muck boots and sheep counts, Aron slips away in the night, crosses the mountain, and shows up at the gates of Lanfield to demand entry into the King's Knights. The guards laugh him out. A city bully takes his money and breaks his bow. A murdered guardsman lands him on the wrong end of a warrant he didn't earn.Then he stumbles into a mountain cave - and finds out that dragons are real.Doubloon isn't what the stories promised. He's eight hundred years old, deeply suspicious of humans, and absolutely certain this scrawny farm boy is more trouble than he's worth. He lights the fire anyway. And somewhere between fishing lessons, the first flight of Aron's life, and a conversation about why you shouldn't judge things by what other people fear, a friendship forms that neither of them expected.When Aron finally spots what's marching toward his home - thousands of goblins and the humans driving them - he has to decide what kind of knight he actually wants to be: the kind who charges in swinging, or the kind who protects the people he loves.Dreams of Gold and Fire is a fast-moving adventure for boys 8-14 who like their heroes believable, their dragons complicated, and their battles genuinely earned. No chosen ones. No magic schools. Just a kid with a shepherd's crook, a golden dragon, and a lot to prove.The adventures of Aron and Doubloon will continue.