The night sky above Veyra-9 glowed with fractured stars and drifting shards of broken satellites. It was a world carved apart by war—half alive, half ash. The oceans had dried into glassy plains, and the cities that once touched the clouds were nothing more than skeletons of steel buried under black sand.
Yet in the ruins, life whispered.
Kaelen Veyra crouched on the edge of a shattered tower, his boots scraping against crumbling ferrocrete. His visor flickered as he scanned the horizon for signs of energy. "Nothing but static," he muttered, tightening his grip on the plasma rifle slung across his back.
He wasn't a soldier anymore. He told himself that every morning. He was a seeker, a salvager, just another ghost combing the ruins for fragments of a world that had burned too quickly. But in the deep places of his heart, he knew the truth: once a soldier, always a soldier.
The war had ended five years ago, but the scars it left on him—and the planet—never healed. The Empire called it The Cleansing War. To Kaelen, it was genocide. Entire colonies erased. Entire cultures turned to dust. And among the thousands of forbidden secrets erased from history, there was one whispered in every shadow: the legend of the Shadow Dragon.
Kaelen had heard it first as a child, long before the war. An ancient beast born from starlight and fire, a creature that could bend shadows into wings and consume suns. Some said it was a myth, a bedtime story for star-born children. Others swore it was real, and that the Empire had hunted it down to extinction because no weapon could stand against it.
Now, staring at the dead horizon, Kaelen almost believed the whispers were calling him here.
He adjusted the comm link at his ear. "Tessa, you reading me?"
Static crackled, then a familiar voice replied, warm and teasing: "Loud and clear, flyboy. Don't tell me you're brooding on rooftops again. You'll fall and I'll have to scrape your stubborn hide off the pavement."
Kaelen smirked despite himself. "I don't brood. I… consider."
"Mmhmm. And what exactly are you 'considering' this time?"
"The dragon," he admitted quietly.
Silence. Then a sigh. "Kael, we've been over this. It's a story. Even if fragments of it exist, they're buried so deep the Empire would never let us near them. Let it go."
But Kaelen couldn't. Not when every dream he had was haunted by flickering wings of black fire, by a low rumble like thunder beneath his skin. He didn't know if it was madness, trauma, or something else. All he knew was that the dragon was calling.
He slid down the ruin's side, boots kicking up clouds of ash, until he landed in what remained of a plaza. The cracked tiles formed a spiral, half-buried but still glinting faintly under the twin moons. He crouched, brushing his gloved hand over the markings. They pulsed faintly in response, as though the ruins themselves remembered him.
And then he felt it—heat.
Not from the air. From below.
His breath caught. "Tessa," he whispered. "I think I found something."
Her voice sharpened. "Don't you dare go underground without me. Wait for extraction."
But he was already moving, tracing the spiral until it led to a collapsed stairwell. Beneath the rubble, a faint glow shimmered like molten embers.
His pulse hammered as he pushed aside debris, prying open a path with brute force and determination. Dust filled his lungs, ash clung to his skin. And when at last he broke through, he froze.
The chamber below was no ordinary ruin. It was a sanctum.
Crystals jutted from the walls, humming with suppressed energy. Ancient glyphs glowed faintly, forming a circle around a pedestal in the center. And resting upon that pedestal was… nothing. Only a sphere of shadow and light, swirling together like a captured eclipse.
Kaelen's visor overloaded, flashing warnings. He ripped it off, unable to look away. His heart raced as he stepped forward, every instinct screaming that this was it—the heart of the legend.
The sphere pulsed. Once. Twice. Then it whispered.
Not in words, but in feelings. Hunger. Loneliness. Rage.
And beneath it all, a deep, aching sorrow.
Kaelen staggered back, gripping his head. "What are you…?"
The shadow inside twisted, forming the outline of wings that stretched across the chamber. A dragon's silhouette, vast and terrible, flickered in the air.
And then it looked at him.
Kaelen's knees nearly buckled under the weight of that gaze. It wasn't just seeing him—it was inside him, peeling back the layers of his soul. Memories flashed: his first flight as a cadet, his brother's death in the war, the night he swore never to kill again. Every wound, every scar, every dream laid bare.
"Stop!" he gasped, but his voice was swallowed by the shadows.
Then, just as suddenly, it ended.
The silhouette faded. The sphere dimmed. And in the silence, a single word burned across his mind like fire:
Chosen.
Kaelen stumbled back, gasping for breath. He stared at the sphere, heart thundering in his chest. He didn't know what he had awakened, only that the legend was no longer a story.
The Shadow Dragon was real.
And it had chosen him.