Echo of the Dragon God

Time crept by. The echoes of blood and steel faded into nothingness, swallowed by the silence that blanketed the ravaged field.

Where once chaos reigned, only a single figure remained.

A child—small, bloodstained, barefoot—stood amidst the corpses with a sword in his hand. Its blade shimmered faintly in the dying light, humming with something ancient. Something lost. Something that remembered.

His fingers tightened around the hilt. Not out of fear. But wonder.

His gaze wandered across the weapon, slowly, like he was reading scripture written in steel. Every curve breathed power. Every rune, a forgotten whisper.

"How wondrous…" he murmured, voice soft as mist. The sword pulsed in response, a faint glow rising where his blood touched the metal. "It seems to respond to my blood… and…"

The thought slipped away, unfinished.

Something stirred in his chest. A shape without a name. A hunger without a language. He tried to summon it, to frame it in words—but it stayed just out of reach.

"Mana…" he whispered.

The moment the word left his lips, the wind moved. It brushed against his cheek with quiet reverence, like an old friend returning. As if the world had been waiting, listening, holding its breath for this exact moment. For him to remember.

"They used that word often. I remember…" His voice carried weight now, distant, searching. "It's the force that breathes with us. The current beneath all things. The pulse that keeps the stars turning and the skies alive."

He extended his hand toward the heavens, palm open, waiting for them to answer.

They didn't.

No light. No stir in the cosmos. Only the unmoved void, stars hanging above like watchers that no longer cared to look down.

His arm lowered. Fingers curled into a fist. The silence settled deeper.

"Am I… unworthy?" The words slipped free, quiet but sharp, like the edge of something breaking beneath the surface.

The sword felt heavier in his grasp now. Or perhaps it was his own resolve that shifted.

"Fine," he said, the intensity in his voice rising slowly, steadily, unmistakably. "Then I'll take it back. Piece by piece."

"There's no time… please hurry!"

The voice rang through his mind—not spoken, not shouted, but carved directly into his thoughts. Urgent. Pressing. Familiar in a way that unsettled him. It was the same voice that had urged him forward when his egg first cracked, the one that whispered in the silence between his breaths, guiding his steps toward something he could never quite see. The same voice that had driven him to kill.

He wasn't sure whether it was friend or parasite. Only that it wanted.

The sword in his hand lacked a hilt. No guard. No wrapping. Just a single, seamless edge—gleaming, hungry, sharp enough to slice wind from air. He glanced down at it, unsure whether to follow the voice's call or stop and bind the blade before it bit into his own flesh again.

But hesitation faded.

Something deeper pulled at him, not from his feet but from his soul itself—an invisible thread tugging him westward, toward the bleeding horizon where the sun sank behind broken hills.

And so he walked.

Barefoot. Blood-speckled. A child with a god's weapon and no memory of why it sang for him.

The sword glinted in his hand, catching the last rays of light as the sky burned gold and red.

He didn't know what waited beyond the ridge. Didn't know if answers would greet him or more silence. But something in him hoped. Hoped that whatever lay ahead would quiet the storm in his chest, would give shape to the shadows swirling behind his eyes, would name the things he had lost.

He didn't walk with purpose.

He walked because the world itself was pulling him forward.

His eyes sharpened, clearing for the first time since he'd emerged. Not just from bloodlust or instinct—but with awareness. True sight. The kind that drinks the world in, not just glances through it.

The sky above stretched impossibly wide, a blue so vivid it almost hurt to look at. Yet it wasn't whole. Thin white fractures ran across it, delicate and sharp like cracks in glass. They pulsed faintly, as if something behind them breathed. They weren't clouds. They didn't move. And they didn't belong.

Something was leaking through those fissures. He felt it—not with logic, but with the old part of his soul that still remembered how the stars should hum. This world was bleeding. Quietly. Slowly. And whatever dripped from the sky's broken skin carried weight he could not yet name.

Before him stretched the forest. Towering trees, tall and ancient, bark like black stone, roots coiled like serpents around earth too stubborn to give in. But it was silent.

Too silent.

The kind of silence that didn't feel peaceful—but abandoned.

There was no wind. No birdsong. No rustling of prey. Only stillness. Thick and stale and watching.

And yet… the scent lingered.

Faint, but everywhere.

It stirred something in him. Familiarity. A memory without images. A longing without shape. It smelled like scale and storm, like smoke and divine blood. The scent of dragons. Dozens of them. Maybe more.

They had been here once. Long ago.

His gaze dropped to the earth beneath his feet. The moss was too undisturbed. No claw marks. No signs of struggle. Just stillness. They hadn't died here.

They had left.

Perhaps they abandoned the egg. Perhaps they buried it beneath the roots, then vanished into the cracked sky and never looked back.

His fingers curled tighter around the blade. He didn't speak.

But the silence felt heavier now.

He walked without urgency, letting the world speak to him as he moved. Each step through fallen leaves and shifting light became a quiet exploration—not just of the forest, but of himself. His breath found rhythm with the land. The blade in his hand hummed faintly, as if guiding him even when the voice fell silent.

The sun sank behind the trees. The blue bled out of the sky. And soon, the night took hold.

When he stepped forward again, the ground changed.

The leaves beneath his feet no longer shimmered with gold or green—but bronze. They were strange, metallic in texture, yet soft to the step. Their color gleamed under moonlight like fallen coins, as though this place itself had been touched by some forgotten divinity.

And then, through the trees, he saw it.

A structure—simple at first glance, yet unmistakable in presence. A towering altar, smooth and black as obsidian, its surface glinting with faint runes that pulsed with dormant power. It stood perfectly straight, not a degree tilted, as if the earth itself held its breath to keep it aligned. A shard of intention driven into the forest's heart.

He stepped closer.

"Step forth… enter the altar…" the voice whispered again. Not a plea. A command wrapped in longing.

He obeyed.

The moment his foot crossed the altar's edge, the air tightened around him. The wind vanished. Time stilled. And then came the light—violet, thick and fluid like smoke made of stars, rising from the altar's grooves and coiling around his form.

It wrapped him whole. No pain. No resistance. Just a quiet swallowing.

And in the next instant, he vanished.

Not a trace left on the bronze leaves behind him.