War had a sound.
Not just the clash of steel or the shrieks of the dying — but a rhythm. A sick, steady heartbeat pounding through the mud and blood. It echoed across the scorched hills, swallowed by smoke and sky-thick ash. Arrows fell like black rain. Limbs scattered like broken branches. Shields splintered on impact. Horses screamed.
There were no sides anymore. Banners were gone — burned, trampled, buried beneath corpses. Formations broke. Orders died with commanders. Now, it was just survival — blind, brutal, filthy.
A soldier staggered through the carnage, blade chipped to the hilt, armor stripped down to cracked leather. His breath rasped. His eyes were empty. Beside him, a boy barely grown screamed until an axe found his throat. The sound stopped. Blood sprayed. No one looked.
The field stank of iron and shit. Men died choking on their own teeth. Fire crawled across the tents in the distance, eating wood and flesh alike. The dead didn't lie still anymore — they layered. Piled high and hot beneath the weight of more violence.
And then…
the ground stirred.
At first, just a shiver. Barely noticeable beneath the thunder of war. Then heat — slow, rising, pulsing. The dirt grew warm. Then hot. Then wrong.
It cracked.
A thin fracture split the center of the battlefield. Then another. Steam hissed from the breaks. The earth trembled beneath boots, but few noticed. They were too busy killing — or dying.
Then the land screamed.
A blast of fire and molten stone tore the sky open. The ground split wide, vomiting lava. Soldiers vanished mid-charge, swallowed whole by flame and fury. From the rupture came things — monstrous, warped, shaped in no image of God or man. Crawling, screeching, devouring without discrimination. The war didn't end. It was simply overwritten.
Then it rose.
Not summoned. Not born.
Unleashed.
The dragon.
A colossus of smoke and fire, its body layered in obsidian-like plates, glowing from the cracks with living magma. It didn't roar. It didn't announce itself. It just moved — towering over the field, silent and terrifying.
One man — bloodied, sword raised — stood before it. He didn't reach its knee.
The dragon's wings unfolded like stormclouds. One beat sent tents flying. A second shattered trees. Then fire fell — not wild, but intentional. It swept across the battlefield like judgment, incinerating steel, flesh, and soil alike.
It wasn't rage.
It was reckoning.
The world had no answer for it. Armies fled or burned. Steel turned to slag. Screams dissolved into silence.
But then… something answered.
Not salvation — only defiance.
Seven stepped forward.
Not from kingdoms, but from ruin.
Not chosen — driven. Marked by power older than gods, cursed or blessed, no one could say.
They came alone.
They stood together.
What they wielded should have broken them. Maybe it did. But they held the line. And when the dragon turned its eyes on them — not curious, but aware — the sky itself seemed to lean in.
They struck.
The clash was not a battle. It was a rewriting of nature. Fire met fury. Earth split again. Reality bent, and for the first time since its rise, the dragon staggered.
But even they couldn't kill it.
You don't kill a force like that.
You bind it.
Far below, beneath stone and silence, they carved its cage — not with chains, but sacrifice. Their names were swallowed by time. Their bodies never found. Only their silence remained.
And so the dragon slept.
Sealed in the dark, held fast by seven shadows the world has long since forgotten.
But peace is a brittle thing.
And the earth —
it remembers.
But power, once given, does not fade simply because the war is over.
The gifts the heavens had bestowed upon the Seven to stand against the dragon did not vanish when the beast was sealed — instead, they trickled into the blood of their clans. Children were born with sparks of the old might. Some carried the flame in their palms; others could command the air, or move faster than the eye could follow.
In the years that followed, these gifts spread beyond bloodlines. Marriage, migration, and sheer chance scattered the divine touch across kingdoms. A merchant's son might call lightning from a cloudless sky; a fisherman's daughter could calm the sea's rage.
Yet such blessings were never equally shared. In some, the gift burned bright and wild; in others, it was a faint echo. But whether great or small, the world had changed forever — for no village, no market, no battlefield was without the reach of those who could bend nature itself to their will.
Though the dragon's fury had been caged beneath the earth, the world did not return to peace.
The battlefield it left behind was littered with more than corpses — shadows moved among the dead, hunched and trembling, feeding on the warmth of fallen flesh.
These were the spawn it had loosed in its wake.
Some were hulking masses of bone and sinew, their skin crawling with molten cracks. Others were little more than twisted men, their eyes too wide, their teeth too many. The weakest scattered into the forests and mountains, disappearing into darkness. The strongest… waited.
Years turned to decades, and the beasts did not die. They bred in the hidden places, feeding on each other, adapting, growing clever. Hunters would vanish without screams. Whole villages would be found silent, houses still warm, doors still open.
The seal held, but the dragon's shadow remained in its children.
Though the dragon's fury had been caged beneath the earth, the world did not return to peace.
The battlefield it left behind was littered with more than corpses — shadows moved among the dead, hunched and trembling, feeding on the warmth of fallen flesh.
These were the spawn it had loosed in its wake.
Some were hulking masses of bone and sinew, their skin crawling with molten cracks. Others were little more than twisted men, their eyes too wide, their teeth too many. The weakest scattered into the forests and mountains, disappearing into darkness. The strongest… waited.
Years turned to decades, and the beasts did not die. They bred in the hidden places, feeding on each other, adapting, growing clever. Hunters would vanish without screams. Whole villages would be found silent, houses still warm, doors still open.
The seal held, but the dragon's shadow remained in its children.
The gifts that once united kingdoms in desperate defiance slowly turned against their purpose. In the beginning, they were shields and spears for the weak — tools to rebuild scorched fields, to drive back the stray beasts left from the dragon's wake.
Yet as the years dulled the memory of fire raining from the sky, greed sharpened its claws. Men who could split stone with a gesture began to take what they wanted. Villages fell not to armies, but to a single hand wreathed in flame. Raiders struck with the swiftness of storms, vanishing before steel could be raised. Kings turned their soldiers into weapons of fear, and the common folk learned that danger might come as easily from a neighbor as from a monster.
Peace was no longer enough to keep the dragon's slumber. With each act of cruelty, each hunger for more, the air grew heavier
The clouds of war could be seen again.
It started as border disputes, as vengeance for raids, as the old grudges of bloodlines—but power made them fearless. Fire bearers from the Flame Clan gathered in burning legions, their breath turning cities into ash before the screams could fade. The Waterborn twisted rivers into weapons, drowning entire companies where they stood. The Earthshapers split the ground and raised walls of stone to crush their enemies. Airbinders swept over battlefields, winds sharp enough to peel skin from bone, hurling men into shattered walls. Lightning Wielders rode storms, bolts leaping from their hands to tear through soldiers as if flesh were paper. Speed Clans blurred through the fray, blades flashing faster than the eye could track, killing before a breath could be drawn.
The seventh gift—its name long forgotten—lingered only in whispers. Some claimed it was lost. Others said it was simply waiting to return.
The world bled.
The dead lay in heaps, piled high enough to change the shape of hills. Spears jutted from torsos, arrows blackened with blood. Flesh charred by fire, bones cracked under stone, skin torn by wind—every element found its prey. Lightning struck so often the smell of burnt hair became part of the air. Blades left bodies spilling open like torn grain sacks. The ground drank greedily, red seeping into the soil, feeding something deep beneath.
The monsters—those twisted spawn of the dragon's first rising—feasted openly now. They stalked the edges of battle, dragging the wounded into the dark, their shrieks cut short by the crunch of bone. Every drop of blood, every shuddering death seemed to quicken the pulse of the land itself.
And far below, it was listening.
The seal, meant to hold for eternity, throbbed like a heartbeat under the carnage. Cracks spider-webbed through the ancient stone, unseen under the mud and corpses. Magma pressed against the prison walls, glowing faint through the fissures. Steam hissed from the earth where it should have been cold.
The last battle of men had become the first battle of something older. And when the roar came—low, distant, but rising—it was not the cry of any beast the living had ever known. It was a memory waking.
The dragon was coming back.