He lay where the cocoon had let him fall, cheek pressed to cold grit, listening to a sound he had not heard in a lifetime.
A heartbeat.
Not the distant thrum of essence rolling through a lattice, not the rushing hush of slime sliding over stone, but a drum struck inside his ribs, steady and stubborn. Each beat sent a small shiver through bone and muscle, as if the body itself was surprised to be echoing.
He pushed a palm against the ground. His claws clicked faintly on ash. Tendons bunched along his forearm. Gravity did its patient work, pulling him down as he fought it up. He had known weight as mass before—how to spread it, how to flow around obstacles—but this was different. This was the weight of a frame that could not bend out of shape. This was balance, or the lack of it, announced by every trembling muscle.
He rolled to one knee. The motion drew a sharp breath from him, and heat flared in his chest in answer—an ember turning with the inhale, stripping the air of softness. He coughed until the ember softened, until the sting at the back of his throat faded to a tolerable burn. Then he set his other foot under him and rose.
The world tilted. His legs quivered and the ground lurched up, quick and unceremonious. He met it with both knees and his palms, claws scraping a thin arc into the stone. The impact knocked the sound out of him. His heart stuttered, resumed.
He hissed between his teeth and set himself again.
Stand. Balance. Shift.
He had learned this a lifetime ago, though the memory did not come as a picture; it came as a pattern. Weight over the balls of the feet. Knees unlocked. Hips beneath the spine. The knowledge sat somewhere low in him, older than any skill tag, older even than hunger—a human lesson embedded in marrow, finally given marrow to live in.
The second rise held longer. His shoulders curled forward, arms out to steady. He swayed, caught himself with a small shuffle, then another. Each small victory was loud: the scuff of skin on stone, the click of claw, the rasp of his breath. His aura stuttered with his balance, sparks and motes and thin shadow wisps answering every wobble. He grimaced and tried to pull the leaking power back in; it slipped between his fingers like water.
A step. The heel struck too hard; the knee wobbled; his other foot slid to rescue him. Another step—barely more than a stagger—and a third that ended in a lurch and a graceless drop to one knee. He stared at the ground, panting. Sweat prickled the back of his neck where hair clung to skin. He was ten years in shape and felt older than stone.
He pushed upright again.
"Legs," he rasped. The word sounded like a stranger wearing his mouth. "I… have legs."
He took them for a walk—if the shambling chain of steps deserved the name. He threaded his way between pale mounds of ash and the dead shapes of old husks. Twice he lost the thread of balance and caught it by instinct, spine bowing, arms splayed. The third time he didn't catch it and sprawled on his side in a graceless skid. He lay there laughing under his breath, a cracked, breathy thing that shook sparks from his lips.
When he rolled onto his back and blinked upward, the dim ceiling above his nest glittered with fading motes. His pupils narrowed to slits; the light came into focus, edges drawn crisp, the world partitioned by a vertical blade so sharp it seemed to divide thought. He touched his face—cheek soft, jaw small, the bridge of his nose unfamiliar—and then the horns that curled back from his skull. Mana answered his fingertips with a quiet ring, horn to bone, bone to chest. The rhythm met his heartbeat and fell into step.
His left hand drifted to his chest. Scales there lay in neat shapes, smooth under his claws. They ran in mirrored lines over ribs and across shoulders, down the outer forearms, a pattern so tidy it felt like a decision. He pressed the pads of his fingers between them and found skin—pliable, warm, not the slick of the old life. He slid his hand lower and felt the leashed heat banked just beneath the sternum. It was not idle; it waited.
He turned onto an elbow and pushed up. The ember answered the effort with a small flare. He inhaled deliberately, drawing the heat upward, shaping it with a thought that was more animal than language. When he exhaled, a short gout of fire stumbled from his mouth and scattered itself across the ground a pace away. It hissed out on ash with a smell like hot stone and copper.
He jerked back, startled. The movement unseated him; he ended up on his heels with his hands behind him, hissing through his teeth while the taste of burned air faded from his tongue.
Then—carefully—he tried again.
The second breath found a channel. It was not smooth; it grated his throat, scraped the roof of his mouth, and singed the tips of his claws when he raised a hand too close to feel the heat. He shook his hand, half laughing, half wincing. It was ugly and it was real.
"It's… real," he said, and the sound broke into a whisper at the end. He swallowed. "Mine."
The ember subsided to a watchful glow. He sat with it a while, breathing until the urge to cough stopped owning his ribs. When he finally stood, his legs answered more readily. The first step was still a gamble, but the second came under him like a promise kept. He took a third, a fourth. On the fifth, hunger hit.
It did not creep or warn. It struck—heavy as a thrown stone—behind his navel and down into his thighs, in his forearms, behind his eyes. The old hunger had been absence, an ache that could be ignored until it couldn't. This one was demand. Feed. Now.
He swallowed against sudden saliva and scanned the nest. He had left stores here before the cocoon—hollowed husks stacked along one wall, a strip of tough meat hung to dry near a low heat source, a pile of bone shards. He reached the nearest bundle in a handful of stiff steps and tore it open.
The smell was wrong. Iron and rot and old ash. His jaw clenched on its own. He did not want it. His body did.
He lifted a strip of meat and put it to his mouth. The first bite gagged him. His eyes watered; his throat tried to throw it back. He forced the swallow down, braced for it to fight him.
It didn't.
Essence Furnace turned, quiet as a wheel in a dark room. The meat came apart not as flesh but as fuel; threads of mana unspooled along the channels that had been carved in him during the breaking. Warmth spread into his arms and down his thighs, steadying his tremor. The furnace drew from the meat what his body asked for and made the rest into heat. A trickle of ash-sour taste returned to his tongue; it didn't linger. The wheel turned again. He ate.
By the third mouthful the gag had retreated to a dull protest. By the fifth he could tell when the furnace wanted him to slow, to breathe with it, to let the heat fold in instead of surge. He obeyed. The hunger softened around the edges. The spinning in his head eased.
He set the last scrap aside and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grimacing at the smear. Disgust pulsed weakly and passed. Survival stayed. He glanced at his hands again—at the child's bones under the new lines of scale on his forearms, at the glossy points of his claws—and felt a strange pride climb his throat. They were clumsy hands. They were his.
Silence collected around him after the feeding. Not the silence of unhearing slime, but the room's quiet: the tick of cooling stone, the soft fall of ash from a ledge, the faint hiss of residual heat where his breath had marked the ground. He stood in it and became aware, in a way he had not allowed while falling and fighting, of how alone he was.
The thought came with a picture—Cass's mouth twisted in stubborn laughter; Aunt Kat's palm landing on a floury counter; Uncle Alexi's shoulders in the doorway, all patience, all steadiness; Grandpa's eye crinkling at a joke he didn't say out loud; Zein and Zia flash-running past a window, the blur of them a dare. The ache that opened was clean and bright and terrible.
"I'm back," he rasped, and the words hurt. He lifted a hand and touched one horn, as if to confirm the sentence had a subject. "But… alone."
His aura answered his voice like a bodyguard unsure of orders. Fire crackled once and faded. Light-motes rose, dimmed, sank. Shadow drew close around his ankles and then unfolded, embarrassed, as if it had overstepped. He tried to gather them in and managed only a pause, a breath of stillness before they leaked again. Control would come later. Control always did when he stayed.
He turned in a slow circle. The nest had seemed large when he was fluid—spaces to spread, to pool in. In flesh it felt smaller, closer to the measurements of a room meant for a person. His eyes cut its corners cleanly now; his new pupils made edges out of everything. He went to a low wall and ran his hand along its top, feeling stone rasp under the pads of his fingers and then go slick where scale met it.
He practiced the simple things.
Forward two steps. Stop without falling over his own feet. Turn. Lower his center of gravity and rise without the world pitching. Lift a foot and set it down with the ball first. He spoke these instructions inside his head, not as orders but as reminders. The body obeyed at the speed of patience.
When he tired—and he did, quickly—he paused and listened. The heartbeat had steadied, less drum and more engine. Breath no longer scratched raw at his throat when he drew it deep. The ember under his sternum kept time: inhale, turn; exhale, cool; repeat. Draconic Crucible worked in the background, tempering fluctuations that would have ripped him at the seams yesterday. His vessels felt… held. Not fragile. Not yet strong. Held.
He found a flat patch of floor and stood at its center. The ash there was disturbed only by the tracks his earlier stumbling had left. He set his feet shoulder-width, let his arms rest, and lifted his chin until the room settled into a line his eyes could divide. He did not look at the dying glow on the ground where fire had kissed it. He did not look at the meat scrap he had not wanted and still eaten. He did not look at the places where the cocoon's light had burned everything clean.
He looked at his hands. At the boy's bones. At the claws.
"Standing," he said, very quietly, as if the word would flee if he startled it. The sound steadied his spine. "For the first time in… forever."
He did not fall.
Smoke, faint as a memory, slipped from his mouth and rose in a thin ribbon into the dim. He watched it go, then let his arms fall to his sides and simply stood, while his heartbeat wrote its soft insistence against his ribs and the room, for once, did not turn away.