Noctis stood over the colossal skull he had claimed, marrow still dripping from his claws. His spirals burned steady as he reached out, threads of crimson coiling through the empty sockets.
The dragon's bones trembled, then folded into his Blood Storage, piece by massive piece. The skull vanished in a flash of red, followed by ribs longer than towers, vertebrae the size of carriages, and claws like spires. Each bone settled into the storage void, catalogued and bound by his Grid.
He turned next to the pit around him. Wyvern carcasses dissolved into essence as their skeletons were stripped away, threads pulling every rib, wing, and skull into neat bundles within his storage. The ground cleared quickly, leaving the marrow pool alone to steam faintly beneath him.
Satisfied, he spread his wings and lifted into the air.
Then he froze.
His spirals widened.
Below, past the first pit, the cliffs stretched outward into a valley. And in that valley lay not one grave — but dozens.
Massive scars in the land. Fifteen pits in total, each one yawning wide, each one littered with bones.
Noctis hovered in silence for a moment, staring down.
Then he laughed.
It wasn't sharp, cruel laughter this time. It was full, deep, echoing across the cliffs like thunder.
"So this is your secret, Blackfang Range. Not carrion heirs, not scraps — but a dragon empire buried beneath the stone."
He dove lower, flying over the nearest pit. His spirals scanned the bones, drinking in every detail.
Two skeletons this time, coiled together like sleeping titans. Each larger than the first he had taken. Their skulls jutted upward like mountains, their spines carving through the pit wall.
The next pit held five. Their ribcages overlapped like shattered fortresses, wings collapsed into jagged canopies of ivory.
The third pit—three skeletons, each one larger still.
Noctis's claws twitched with anticipation. His Grid pulsed violently, nodes lighting up as though sensing the feast that awaited.
He rose higher into the sky, laughing again, louder this time.
"One would have armed my kingdom. Two would have armed Ashara. Fifteen… with dozens of skeletons between them?"
His spirals narrowed to sharp points, the grin on his face splitting wide.
"Then I'll arm an empire."
He spread his wings fully, his aura flooding the valley until even the wyverns circling the distant ridges shrieked in panic.
"Eight bones I'll forge into weapons and armor. Enough to arm my country, Ashara, and the nations I'll take after. The rest…" His fangs gleamed. "The rest, I'll devour. Their marrow, their blood, their bones, their abilities — all of it will belong to me."
The Grid pulsed again, threads snapping like chains across the sky.
Noctis hovered there above the dragon graveyard, spirals blazing, cloak snapping violently in the wind. For the first time in centuries, the bones of dragons stirred.
And they stirred for him.
The graveyard pit lay quiet once the last wyvern fell. Marrow steam hung in sheets above the crimson pool, curling along the edges of the old bones like fog over a battlefield. Noctis stood on a ridge of fused vertebrae and looked up at the thing he had claimed: a dragon's skull the size of a fortress gate, jaw half-buried, fangs shaped like towers.
"Come here," he said.
Crimson threads unspooled from his spirals and webbed the skull. The bone trembled, hummed once, and then slid free of the sediment with a grinding sigh that shook loose centuries of dust. One by one, the features came clean—eye sockets like amphitheaters, horn ridges chipped by age, teeth still perfect. The skull folded into his Blood Storage with a flash. He didn't stop. Ribs the length of avenues, vertebrae as large as caravans, talons longer than ballista bolts—each piece bound in red and stored. The pit floor dropped by meters as the skeleton vanished into his keeping.
He cleared the rest with the same cold patience. Wyvern scraps dissolved to essence; their skeletons were bundled neatly and sent away. When only the pool remained, he paused long enough to feel the marrow's weight still working through him—no drain from the new form, only the awareness of a limit he would not test today.
"Enough," he said to the empty air. "Time to see the rest."
He rose from the pit on steady wings.
The Blackfang Range opened beneath him like a broken crown. He'd thought this place held a single grave. He was wrong.
Beyond the first scar in the earth stretched a valley cut with more wounds—dark mouths that swallowed the light. One pit. Two. Four. Eight. Fifteen, by the time he counted them all, and at least a dozen smaller sinks that might hide more. Marrow mist hung in a low band over the whole valley, red in the throat of the wind. It tasted like iron and old oaths.
He laughed once, short and bright. Then again, louder, until the cliffs threw his voice back at him.
"So this is what you hid."
He banked toward the nearest pit and dropped to a hover above its rim. Two dragon skeletons lay coiled together like sleeping giants. One had a broken wing pinned under the other's ribs; the second's skull rested against the first's spine. Even dead, they looked protective. Larger than the one he'd already taken. He measured them by eye, the way a forgemaster measures a billet before a hammer's first strike.
"Armor and pike-iron for a thousand," he said quietly. "And still spare for heavy shields."
He crossed the valley to the next wound. Five skeletons lay in a tangle, ribcages interlocked into a lattice of ivory. Wing bones overlapped and fused. A shallow basin at the center held a slower, darker pool than the first—thick marrow congealed into a tarry mirror. Wyverns circled the perimeter and fled the moment his shadow cut across them.
"Five," he counted, and began to sort their uses aloud. "Skirmisher sets for the Night Legion. Throwing spears that bite through Tier VII wards. Plate for saints. Cloaks lined with scale for captains."
At the third pit, three skeletons slept in neat arcs, as if laid to rest by a hand that cared: skulls aligned, tails coiled along the walls. One skull dwarfed the others—larger than any he'd seen yet, ridged with scars that ran horn to horn.
"Siege," he decided, smiling. "Rams, anchors, and tower spines. And a throne that's not made of gold but of bone and intent."
He didn't rush. He flew the valley end to end, hovering over each grave with the same focused attention he gave to an enemy's stance. Some pits held neat lines of skeletons; others were memory storms—piles, ruins, fused cathedrals of bone. In one, a single wing lay splayed open, every finger-bone intact, the membrane long gone. In another, skulls were stacked like a silent court. Twice he found marrow pools; once, an obsidian bowl ringed with teeth where something larger had settled to rest and bled for years before the earth closed over it.
He hovered above the center of it all and let the scope settle into numbers.
"Eight dragon skeletons reserved for forging," he said, counting them off with a finger like he would name target cities. "One for my kingdom. One for Ashara. Six for the neighbors who don't realize they'll be mine. The rest…"
He looked across the graves and bared his fangs.
"The rest I'll eat."
He didn't dress the thought up. Bones this old carry marrow that re-writes a body. Abilities locked in scale and spine. Heat that isn't fire, pressure that isn't weight. He could feel the promise of it in his blood already—a faint drag on the grid like an enormous door waiting to be opened.
He made a second pass lower, taking practical notes a commander uses:
—Some pits were stable; he could clear them alone without bringing half a mountain down.—Others leaned into fault lines. He marked those for later, when he could brace walls with blood-forged anchors and let the saints harvest in shifts.—Several had wyvern nests clinging to ledges; he snapped each clutch without lingering. The valley would feed his future, not theirs.
At the fifth pit he landed, pressed his palm to a ridge of bone, and listened. The marrow was gone, but the structure sang. Dragons did not rot; they condensed. Density here was beyond iron—beyond titan spawn. Perfect for breastplates that wouldn't dent under Tier VII pressure. Perfect for tower shields that would take a sanctified spear and answer with a counterstrike stored in their core.
He pictured the line: Night Legion in black-violet lamellar, Saints in full bone plate, cloaks stitched with scale, helms horned and clean, not gaudy. He pictured Veyra with a commander's ridge helm and a marrow-laced greatspear that locked and flowed like his reapers. He pictured Ashara's elite in pale-white warded shields that hummed with inverted hymns at rest and sang when raised. He pictured the message those armies would send to every court that had called him myth: You cannot outlast a bone that does not break.
He let the picture go and returned to the work in front of him.
At the seventh pit he found a skeleton whose ribs had been gnawed smooth by time—each arc polished like ivory glass. The skull was smaller but heavy through the jaw: a biter, not a burner. Good for weapons that need to hold edges forever.
At the ninth, marrow had leached into a web of cracks and crystallized. He tapped a line with a claw; it chimed like a bell and kept ringing. Resonant channels. Those would feed Bloodstorm and World-Rend Tempest into the metal he forged, giving area skills a heartbeat in the blade, not just in his hands.
At the twelfth, he found vertebrae fused into a single spine that bent only once. He smiled. "Bridge beams," he said. "And the bones of a siege ladder that won't sag."
At the fifteenth, he hovered long enough to count four skulls in a row, horns tangled, mouths open toward one another. Not random. Ritual. He didn't know what the rite had been, who laid them like that, or which side had won the day the valley fell. He didn't need the story to use the bones.
He went back to the first pit he had cleared and swept the rim one more time. No marrow flicker. No intact bone left behind. He placed a blood ward marker on the cliff wall—a simple sigil that would sting anything that wandered close and catch the notice of his saints from miles away. He left another at the valley's neck: a lattice that would fold cleanly if he returned with a harvest crew, but would burn a wyvern brood out of the air if they tried to resettle.
When he finished, he rose high enough to see the whole valley and the mountains beyond.
"Eight to forge," he repeated, locking the number in. He chose them clean in his mind: two largest for armor spines and tower shields; two with singing crystal lines for weapons that carry storms; two with perfect wing-finger bone for pikes and javelins that don't warp; two whose skulls held space in a way that would let helms borrow authority from the shape. "The rest, I consume at my pace."
The wind shifted. It brought the smell of marrow and old stone, and the thin high whine of a wyvern too young to know silence. He tracked it, then let it go. He had already butchered enough today. The valley had heard his claim. It would wait.
He banked once more over the fifteen pits and laughed the way a builder laughs when he finds enough timber to raise a city and enough iron to armor it. It wasn't cruel, and it wasn't kind. It was free.
Then he turned his back on the graves and climbed for open sky.
The marrow valley lay silent.
Not the silence of death, but the silence of something consumed, something transmuted into the marrow of another will. Where once dragon bones rose like broken palaces, there was only scorched earth, marrow fog thinning into pale ribbons, and the echo of a sovereign heartbeat.
Noctis stood in the hollow of the fifteenth pit, claws flexed into the soil. His chest burned, not from pain, but from rhythm — the rhythm of a heart that was no longer his own. The Dragon Heart throbbed inside him, molten and colossal, each beat rolling through his frame like thunder in stone. It was not simply circulation. Each pulse exhaled marrow force, a sovereign's aura that made the air quiver and the ground yield.
The crimson fog of the valley bent with each heartbeat, tugged toward him, as though the marrow of the dead still answered to the marrow of the living.
He looked down at himself.
Where his devil form once left his skin etched in black and crimson cracks, and his draconic form armored him in scale-light, the two no longer alternated. They had fused. Four wings arched from his back: the upper pair vast, scaled, and embered like a dragon's, the lower pair woven of blood and shadow, stretched into veined sails that dripped with scarlet radiance. Every motion made them flex and fold in tandem, not separate powers, but one.
His strength thrummed. He raised a hand, curled it, and felt the marrow pressure stack threefold against his knuckles. Even standing still, he was stronger than the day he had first torn angels from the sky. And unlike then, there was no backlash waiting to punish him. The marrow lattice had woven itself into permanence. He had eaten enough. He had become something enough. There was no higher scaffold left in the Grid that resisted him — only new lattices waiting to be hammered into place.
He exhaled, and the sound was not breath but a pulse. The cliffs around the valley shuddered as though bowing.
"Good," he said softly, and his voice carried. Not loud, but sovereign. "Now we begin."
He launched upward.
The four wings tore the air into spirals, blood light mingling with dragon-fire as he climbed. Below him the valley receded into shadow, fifteen pits marked only by scar ridges and bone dust, each warded with his sigils. He had left no stray marrow for scavengers. What was his would remain his.
The valley's marrow fog clung low over the ridges as Noctis descended toward the first of the dragon graves. The pit yawned like the throat of a fallen giant, ribcages jutting from the sides as if the earth itself had grown bones.
But the pit wasn't silent.
Wyverns nested among the wreckage, their scaled hides slick with marrow sheen. They hissed when his shadow fell across them, wings scraping stone. Dozens stirred, then hundreds — a scavenger host fattened on the residue of dragons.
Noctis's lips peeled back, fangs glinting. "Wrong nest."
He dropped.
The first wave lunged. His wings flared once, and the air detonated. Blood threads unspooled from his spirals, slashing into wyvern throats before claws could close. He pivoted through them, every strike paired with siphon, every corpse collapsing into crimson mist.
The marrow pool at the bottom of the pit pulsed in time with the slaughter, its surface trembling as bodies fell into it. Wyverns shrieked, diving at him in desperation. He answered with a storm.
"Bloodstorm."
Crimson whirlwinds ripped outward from his frame, each strike tearing through wing and spine, siphoning essence with every scream. Wyverns dissolved midair, shredded into dust and marrow vapor. Those that fell were crushed beneath his claws, devoured before they could hit stone.
When silence returned, the pit floor was slick with wyvern blood. Bones cracked under his steps. He inhaled deeply, drinking in the fog of their essence, then extended his spirals. Wyvern bones snapped, shattered, and dissolved into his Grid.
The marrow pool beneath the dragon skeleton glowed faintly now, no longer hidden beneath scum and corpses. It was not large — perhaps twenty paces across — but its depth sang of centuries.
He approached.
The dragon skeleton loomed above, coiled protectively around the pool, its skull tilted skyward as if in eternal defiance. Its bones were whole, marrow still humming inside. He didn't bite. This one would be reserved for forging.
But the pool was his.
He stepped into it.
The liquid was thick, half-gel and half-fire, clinging to his legs like molten tar. It burned cold. His veins screamed as marrow surged into him, every beat of his heart pushing more of it upward. He lowered himself deeper until the pool licked at his chest, spirals feeding, drinking, consuming.
The first hour stretched long. His skin tightened, veins bulging under the weight of alien marrow. His scales flickered along his arms, ghosting in and out, trying to anchor. The Blood Grid vibrated against his will, threatening to fracture under the pressure. He forced it still, channeling the marrow line by line.
By the second hour, his regeneration had gone wild. Wounds he didn't even have itched and sealed, marrow trying to "fix" him beyond perfection. His bones creaked, density increasing, each rib humming faintly with power. He felt heavier, denser, a body being plated from within.
By the third hour, his chest burned as the marrow clashed against his vampire heart. Each beat was a duel. He leaned into it, spirals forcing rhythm, heart adapting with every throb. The marrow yielded at last, folding into his circulation instead of trying to overwrite it.
Hours bled together. The pool drained slowly, every drop consumed, every drop integrated.
When at last he stood, the pool had been reduced to a shallow sheen, its glow extinguished. His wings flexed involuntarily, bloodlight radiating outward. The marrow lattice inside him had thickened, reinforced. His regeneration surged. His durability no longer felt like resistance, but inevitability.
And only then did the Grid acknowledge the change.
[System Prompt: Dragon Marrow Pool Consumed → Dragon Marrow Vein II unlocked. Predator's Stance upgraded to VII. Resource Surge: +100,000 Blood Essence, +25,000 Beast Essence, +10,000 Faith Essence.]
Noctis exhaled. The pit walls cracked from the force.
He raised his hand. Energy rippled outward, invisible until it struck stone — the wall exploded outward, fractured by marrow shockwaves triggered by nothing but his stance. Predator's Stance no longer only absorbed. It punished.
"Better," he murmured.
He closed his eyes, summoning the lattice before him. The Blood Grid flared open.
Blood Grid Review — Pit One
New Vein:
Dragon Marrow Vein II – Reinforced marrow lattice; +50% regeneration, +50% durability, body density increase.
Upgraded Skill:
Predator's Stance VII – Counters now release marrow shockwaves; blocked hits siphon 2× more essence.
Resource Gains:
Blood Essence: +125,000 (wyverns, bones, marrow pool)
Beast Essence: +90,000
Faith Essence: +10,000
Iron Essence: +3,000
The Grid pulsed, stable, resonant. He let it fade.
He glanced up at the dragon skeleton, untouched. "One for the forge," he said quietly.
A crimson sigil spiraled from his palm, marking the ribcage. The bones shimmered, sealed under his ward.
He spread his wings. Blood light and dragon fire flared together as he rose from the pit.
The marrow fog parted around him. Ahead, fourteen more pits yawned, waiting.
He bared his fangs, eyes narrowing.
"One."
And he banked toward the next grave.