Time dragged its heavy feet across the ravaged field, sweeping away the last echoes of blood and steel until only silence remained—dense, suffocating, absolute. The storm of battle had faded, every trace of chaos drowned beneath that hush, and in its place, the world shrank to a single child left standing amid the dead.
He was small, bloodstained, bare feet pressed into soil that had seen too much. In his grip rested a sword, its blade shimmering faintly in the dying light, whispering with an ancient hunger that lingered beneath the surface—something lost but never gone, something that remembered long after memory itself had rotted away.
He tightened his fingers around the blade, not because fear crept in, but because a wordless wonder gripped him, as if the weapon itself was a question that only he could answer. His eyes traced the patterns etched along its edge, reading runes as though deciphering a sacred text, letting each mark breathe against his thoughts. The weight of power in those curves was unmistakable, every line echoing with a forgotten promise.
"How wondrous…" His voice came out softer than breath, drifting through the stillness. As his blood touched the sword, a faint glow stirred in response, pulsing with quiet recognition, bridging the gap between flesh and metal. "It reacts to my blood… and…"
The rest fell away before it could take shape, dissolving somewhere between mind and tongue.
Something restless moved in his chest—a hunger with no language, a shape that refused to be named. He tried to catch it, to pin it down with words, but it slipped away every time, circling deeper. His lips parted anyway.
"Mana…" The word was barely audible, but as soon as it left him, the world responded. The wind shifted, brushing against his cheek with a reverence that felt almost old, as if even the elements themselves had paused, waiting for him to remember what had once been so obvious. For a heartbeat, he could sense that the world had been holding its breath for this moment—waiting for him to awaken something that had slept for far too long.
"They used that word… I remember." The weight in his voice thickened, colored with the ache of half-formed recollection. "It is the breath beneath everything. The current that carries life. The pulse beneath the stars and the skies above."
He lifted his hand, palm open to the heavens, hoping for an answer that did not come. No light greeted him. The stars looked down with their ancient indifference, unmoved and unreachable, and nothing in the void stirred to meet his hope.
Slowly, his arm fell. Fingers curled in, making a fist that trembled with unspoken frustration as the silence pressed in deeper. He could almost hear it breaking him from within.
"Am I unworthy?" The question was not a plea, but something sharper, quieter, as if testing the blade of his own resolve.
The sword seemed heavier now. Maybe it was only his own heart shifting—brittle, uncertain, determined all the same.
"Fine," he breathed, letting strength flow into the quiet. "Then I'll take it back, even if it's piece by piece."
A voice carved itself into his thoughts, slicing through with the urgency of a wound. Not spoken, not heard, but inscribed directly onto the marrow of his being: "There's no time… please hurry!"
It was the same voice that had haunted the darkness within his shell, the one that had drawn him out of the egg, that had lingered in the shadows between heartbeats and beckoned him through blood and hunger. Whether it was friend or parasite, he could not tell—he only knew it wanted, and that was enough.
He glanced down at the sword—no hilt, no guard, just an unbroken edge gleaming with a hunger that felt almost alive. It was a blade designed for nothing but purpose, so keen it could split air and hope alike. He wondered if he should bind it, stop it from carving deeper into his hand, but that thought too was carried away by something deeper—a pull that did not start in his body, but somewhere in the invisible machinery of his soul.
He moved west, drawn not by his feet but by an invisible thread tied to the bleeding horizon where the sun collapsed behind hills torn by ancient wounds.
Step after step, he became a silent procession of one. Barefoot, speckled with drying blood, a child cradling a god's weapon with no memory of why it chose him or why it sang for him.
The sword caught the last light, flickering gold and red as dusk crept down the broken sky.
He could not say what awaited beyond that ridge—whether there were answers or only more of this aching silence. Still, hope pushed him forward, a hope that whatever waited would put shape to the shadows swirling in his chest and finally name the things he had lost.
He did not walk with purpose. He moved because the world itself seemed to pull him onward, each step drawn by something larger than his own will.
For the first time since awakening, his eyes cleared—not clouded by instinct or bloodlust, but sharpened by an awareness that tasted the world instead of simply looking through it.
The sky overhead stretched out in impossible blue, so vivid it stung the eyes, yet not whole. Across that expanse, white fractures ran like scars, thin and sharp as broken porcelain, pulsing faintly with something alive behind them. They were not clouds and would never be. They did not drift or fade. Instead, they waited, hinting at a world above that bled quietly through invisible wounds.
He felt the weight leaking through those fissures, sensed it in the marrow of his bones—a pressure, old as the stars, that had once belonged here but was now only a memory bleeding from a wound that refused to heal.
Ahead, the forest waited. Trees rose tall and black, ancient things with bark hard as obsidian, their roots twisted deep into earth that would not surrender. The silence was not gentle here. It pressed in close, as if the world itself had been abandoned and left to rot.
There was no wind, no cry of bird or beast. The air itself seemed frozen, heavy with a watchfulness that unsettled. But even in that dead quiet, a scent lingered—faint yet inescapable. It stirred something old in him, a familiarity without form, a memory that tasted of scale and storm, of smoke and divine blood. The smell of dragons, layered deep into the bones of the world.
Many had passed here once. Maybe dozens, maybe more.
His gaze fell to the moss at his feet—unbroken, too pristine. No claw marks, no evidence of battle or loss, only stillness. They had not died here. They had simply left.
Perhaps the egg had been abandoned. Perhaps it was buried beneath these roots and forgotten, the dragons fleeing upward into the fractured sky, never once looking back.
His grip on the blade grew tighter, but he said nothing, letting the silence do the speaking for him. Every step became a slow communion with the land, a negotiation with the ghosts that watched from the trees.
He moved without haste, letting the world settle into him with every breath. Fallen leaves, dappled light, shifting shadows—each became part of his rhythm, blending the beat of his heart with the memory of the place. The sword thrummed gently, still guiding even as the voice within him faded.
The sun sank away behind the trees, draining the blue from the sky until night crept in, thick and silent.
As he stepped onward, the ground changed beneath him.
No longer gold or green, the leaves at his feet shone bronze, metallic and strange yet yielding to his step. Under the moon, their gleam took on the sheen of coins, as if this place had once been brushed by some divine hand.
Then the trees parted, and he saw it—an altar rising from the forest floor, black as the heart of midnight, its surface smooth and unmarred except for the faintest runes that glimmered in the gloom. It stood straight as an oath, unyielding, as if even the earth itself dared not let it lean.
He moved closer, drawn by something deeper than curiosity.
"Step forth… enter the altar…" The voice wrapped him again, no longer pleading but commanding, saturated with longing.
He did as commanded.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold of the altar, the world shrank around him. The wind disappeared, and his sword dropped to the ground. Time slowed to a crawl, making even the dust appear frozen in place. Violet light poured up from the altar's carved grooves, thick and fluid like smoke, swirling around him in slow spirals.
It wrapped him whole—no pain, no fear, just a quiet surrender to whatever power lay waiting.
And in that moment, he was gone.
The bronze leaves behind him remained undisturbed, empty beneath the moon, holding only the memory of where he had stood.