Location: Chamber of the Last Egg → The Slumbering Dragon's Heart → Valyria's Burning Sky
Time: The Hour of Reckoning → The Final Hour → The Hour Beyond Time
I. The Child of the Abyss
The eggshell exploded outward in a shower of golden shards.
What emerged was neither dragon nor shadowkin.
The creature stood on two legs, its form slight and humanoid, but its skin gleamed with iridescent scales that shifted between gold and abyssal black. Its eyes were entirely white, no pupil or iris, just liquid radiance that spilled down its cheeks like tears.
But its mouth—
Its mouth was wrong.
The jaw unhinged like a serpent's, revealing rows of needle-thin teeth that spiraled down its throat into darkness. When it spoke, the voice was a chorus of whispers, some young, some ancient beyond reckoning:
"Father."
It wasn't looking at Lysander.
It was looking past him, at the Drowned King's specter forming in the chamber's mist.
The System screamed:
"Entity Identified: Abyssal Heir"
"Threat Level: Cataclysmic"
"Recommendation: Immediate Soulburn"
Maelora gasped, her merling blood making her kneel involuntarily. "It's not a weapon... it's a vessel."
The golden child tilted its head, and the colossal dragon's heartbeat resumed—louder, each thump shaking the chamber hard enough to crack bones.
II. The King's Gambit
The Drowned King's form solidified, his crown of dragon skulls dripping with phantom seawater. He reached for the child with hands of bleached coral, his voice the roar of a tidal wave:
"You are my flesh. My will. COME."
The child obeyed.
It moved—not by walking, but by unfolding space, its body flickering across the chamber in disjointed steps. Each movement left afterimages that whispered in languages dead before Valyria rose.
Lysander reacted on instinct.
He shadowstepped, intercepting the child with his own body, the crown still clenched in his fist. The moment they touched, the System unleashed a torrent of crimson warnings:
"Soulbond Attempt Detected"
"Compatibility: 99.9%"
"Warning: Bonding May Result in Identity Death"
The child's white eyes locked onto his.
"You smell like home," it whispered with one voice now—Aelar's.
Behind them, the Drowned King howled, and the chamber ruptured as the slumbering dragon began to wake.
III. The Dragon's Price
The world split apart.
Lysander gripped the child, Maelora screamed a blood-song, and the spire above them shattered as the mountain-sized dragon lifted its head for the first time in millennia.
"SYSTEM OVERRIDE," Lysander roared. "SOULBOND CONFIRMED."
The crown melted in his grip, the black coral fusing with his shadowmark in a conflagration of blue-black fire. The child shrieked, its form dissolving into light as the bond seared them together at the soul.
The Drowned King lunged—
—just as the dragon's true voice shook the world:
"ENOUGH."
The king froze, his coral body cracking under the weight of that word.
The dragon was not a beast.
It was a god.
And it was pissed.
IV. The Hour Beyond Time
When the dragon god spoke again, its voice unmade reality:
"YOU FORGET YOUR PLACE, LITTLE KING. THESE FLAMES WERE MINE BEFORE YOUR OCEAN WAS A DREAM."
The Drowned King screamed as his form unraveled, his crown shattering, his essence dragged screaming back into the deep.
The child—now part of Lysander's shadowmark—whimpered.
The dragon god turned its gaze on them, its eyes supernovas contained in flesh.
"YOU CARRY MY ENEMY'S SEED. BUT ALSO MY OWN."
Maelora collapsed, her blood-song drowned in that presence.
Lysander stood, even as his bones threatened to powder.
The dragon god considered him. Then:
"WE SHALL SPEAK AGAIN, SHADOWLORD. WHEN THE TIDES RETURN."
With a beat of wings that spanned continents, it vanished—taking the chamber, the ruins, and half the sky with it.
Lysander and Maelora fell through empty air, the ocean rushing up to meet them.
The System's final message flared and died:
"PRIMARY DIRECTIVE COMPLETE"
"NEW CYCLE INITIATED"
"PREPARE FOR THE TIDES"
Then—
Darkness.