It was darkness, but not the simple kind that settles after sunset. This darkness was alive, pressing in on every side, so complete it became its own world.
I can't see... where am I? Dravion's thoughts churned, restless as wings in a storm. Only moments ago, he had stepped onto the altar—then everything was torn away by a trembling that didn't strike the flesh but shook the very core of him, as if the sky itself had screamed and only he could hear it.
He felt as lost as a leaf thrown into a thunderstorm, spun in circles with no hope of finding ground.
"Open your eyes..."
The voice found him again. It was soft, unhurried, yet carried a command that only something ancient could give.
You think I haven't tried? The frustration blazed through him, raw and electric. He had already endured too much—woken in blood, wandered in silence, watched the world split open at the seams. Now even his own sight was stolen from him?
Still, he forced his breath to steady. His hands curled, and with an effort that felt deeper than muscle or will, his heavy eyelids lifted.
Light crashed into him.
Where he expected emptiness or ruin, he found himself gazing down upon a city that shimmered in impossible brilliance—a vision at once alien and intimately known. White marble unfurled across the land, flawless and proud, its towers climbing like spears toward the heavens, their peaks carved with runes that glimmered as if each one was a prayer hammered into the bones of history.
Dragons soared above it all—some vast and winged, trailing banners of fire and starlight, others cloaked in mortal forms, moving through the crowds in robes spun from clouds and sun.
The city throbbed with life. Broad avenues teemed with vendors calling in ancient tongues, hawking bread and weapons sanctified by mana's blessing. Laughter wound through the air, and music drifted between archways and colonnades.
And there he was—Dravion, a child now seated at the very heart of it all, perched high atop a black altar surrounded on all sides by dragons who knelt in silent reverence, their eyes lowered, their bodies turned in prayer.
A tightness wound through his chest.
What is... this? What's happening to me?
His heart stammered in its rhythm, a flicker of memory burning through him like fire racing across frost. He knew this place. He knew it better than any dream—but the instant he reached for the memory, it unraveled, slipping through his grasp as if it had never truly belonged to him.
Then the chanting began.
"Great Dragon God Primarion," the voices intoned, deep and solemn, thick with hope and fear. "We pray for your safe return and for victory against the demon race."
Their words rolled through the stone beneath him, sending power in waves that reached higher and higher, out to the stars above, as if the city itself was pleading with the universe.
No... this isn't right. This is—this is the moment... I need to—
"Relax." The voice returned, this time closer, gentle, yet carrying a gravity that could calm any storm. "You are not here to change anything."
He turned, and beside him stood a woman made not of flesh but of the living night itself—a figure spun from the midnight sky, her form wrapped in constellations that shimmered and pulsed with every subtle movement. Her presence was neither warm nor cold, but inevitable.
"You are only an observer," she said, her words drifting through him with a hush that quieted even the echoes of battle.
"Who are you?" Dravion managed, the reverence in his own voice surprising him. The anger, the frustration—gone, replaced by a weight that pressed against his soul, asking for surrender.
"You may call me a Guide." Her tone offered no comfort or threat—just fact. "You will shape your own fate, but there are threads that must still be drawn. I'm here to show you the path that leads back to what was taken."
He frowned, uneasy. "What I've lost?"
The question rumbled through him, stirring a hollow ache where something once lived and was now gone.
"You feel it, don't you?" the Guide whispered, her words threading between his thoughts. "It lingers just behind your mind, a name without a voice, a memory with no face. It was yours, but it isn't now."
He caught his breath. He knew that emptiness all too well—that gnawing, silent ache that pressed always at the edges of his mind, close enough to sense but never to grasp.
"I don't blame you," she went on, her voice falling softer now. "You are only a shard—a splinter from a soul that was once whole. The soul called Primarion—"
"I hate that name." The words left him before he could stop them, sharp and certain.
She paused, absorbing the truth of it.
"Call me Dravion." He forced his voice steady, though it trembled beneath. "Whatever I was, whatever you want to call it, that name—" His hand clenched over his heart. "That name feels like a wound."
"Dravion…" she echoed, her voice glimmering like starlight lost in the void. "You are one of the Eight Originals. The Dragon God of Creation. Do you remember?"
A splintering pain lanced behind his eyes. The Guide's words cracked something old and brittle deep inside his skull, scattering memories like shards of glass. He sucked in a breath, vision swimming. He didn't understand.
Yet sometimes, words he'd never learned slid from his mouth as easily as breath—pieces of a language older than thought, born from some other self.
"I—" he started, but the truth vanished before it could form.
"It's alright," the Guide said, stepping closer. "Walk with me."
She extended a hand woven from living starlight—smooth, beautiful, and impossibly cold. He reached out, uncertain, and as their fingers met, a chill spread through him—not painful, just empty, as if her hand remembered warmth but had forgotten how to hold it. Even in its hollowness, the touch felt complete, cracked but real.
"Where are we going?" He glanced at the city, watching dragons pass them by, oblivious. No one saw him. No one heard. At last he understood—he wasn't in the past. He was watching it bleed out in memory, untouched by anything but longing.
"You'll see," she replied, as soft as the last note of a song.
His vision blurred, the city dissolving like mist at dawn.
In its place rose a throne—vast, imposing, shaped from obsidian streaked with living veins of gold that glowed with their own fire. The design was achingly familiar, every line and angle echoing the shapes of his own scales, but cast in majesty, a king's seat built for eternity.
His hand reached for it, moved by a need he couldn't name—
And then the sky tore itself open.
A thunderclap ripped through the heavens, the very air fracturing into a thousand shrieking lines of white. Shards of the sky itself rained down, mountains of shattered light crashing toward the city, tearing the world apart.
At that instant, something deep within Dravion shifted. His pupils flared gold, his irises spinning with a life of their own, coiling and twisting like a dragon born from pure light. He saw. He remembered. The power inside him rose, hungry and old.
And then, the words formed, unbidden, in his mouth:
"Today is the day the universe was supposed to die…"
He did not know how he knew. He did not know why he spoke. But as the sky fell, and the city was drowned in silence and ash, Dravion remembered.