I was twelve years old when the monsters stopped waiting for nightfall.When they stopped pretending to be human.When they stopped underestimating me.
Somewhere deep in the Appalachian forest, miles from the nearest road, I lay on my back beneath a twisted pine. My chest burned with frostbite wounds and my head spun from blood loss, but my mind was clear as glass.
The two Dracaenae stalking through the mist ahead of me were whispering in Greek. They thought I couldn't hear. They thought I was too weak to fight.
They were wrong.
You have two seconds, Indra.My eyes — the ones that people said glowed faintly silver in the dark — flickered open. In the mirrored sheen of my vision, I saw their movements before they made them: the twitch of a tail, the flex of a scaly hand around a bronze spear.
Two seconds. Plenty of time.
I whispered the words, feeling the runes tattooed on my forearm heat beneath my skin:"Fulmen et Ignis."
The air trembled. Sparks raced up my fingertips. Lightning and fire danced together — two rival siblings who obeyed me alone.
The first Dracaenae lunged. I vanished — a shadow melting into the underbrush. I reformed behind her, pressed a palm to her spine, and unleashed a bolt of living flame so hot it turned her hiss into silence.
Her sister shrieked. She spun, throwing her spear. In my vision, I saw it strike me — but only in the future that would never come to pass. In this reality, I was already gone, slipping through the shadows like water through a sieve.
When I reappeared, I spoke softly."Somnus aeternus."
The words wrapped around her mind like a velvet noose. Her slitted pupils dilated. She collapsed into the wet leaves, her bronze spear clattering beside her.
Silence returned.
I sank to my knees, my vision flickering as the magic cost sank in. The Merlinian grimoire in my satchel pulsed faintly against my ribs — pages full of secrets, rituals, spells I was too young to cast without burning myself hollow.
But that was the price of being me.
The child of Hades. The grandson of Hecate. The last blood of Merlin.
The monsters would never stop coming. Because even they knew: if I survived long enough, I'd become something they couldn't control.
A king of shadows. A storm in human form.
And I wasn't planning to die anytime soon.