The night outside was not night at all.
Ash choked the sky, clouds burning red where embers swirled like false snow. The air stank of smoke and molten stone. Cracks split the earth, faint heat hissing through them, searing the ground in pulses. The land itself had been wounded — scarred by the return of something too vast for balance.
Draven staggered into the open, lungs raw, sweat streaking grime. Feyra limped close, fur singed in patches, her ears pinned flat. Stonehide's plates bore cracks spider-webbing across his emerald armor, breaths ragged, tail dragging against the ground.
They were alive. Barely.
Draven collapsed to one knee, halberd digging into the soil to steady himself. His chest throbbed, lotus mark glowing faintly beneath torn fabric. Every quake in the earth echoed through it like a heartbeat too heavy to carry.
Without them, without the Codex… he would have been ash.
The Codex pulsed in his mind, faint runes flickering as if struggling to catch breath too. For a moment, words bled faintly into thought:
"Overlords distort balance. Where they walk, nature unravels."
Draven clenched his jaw. The words weren't prophecy. They were truth. Already the world was unraveling around him — forests emptied, beasts scattered, even the sky burned.
He turned to Feyra first, laying a hand on her singed fur. The lotus flared softly, Codex runes spilling into the air, weaving into her wounds. The light sank into her body, the burns easing, breath steadying. But the runes that healed her shimmered differently than when they touched Stonehide's cracked plates.
It tailored itself. Each bond, a different song.
Draven frowned, the realization chilling more than the heat: It's not just one power… it grows with them.
He looked down the slope, the horizon glowing like a furnace door left open. A tremor rolled beneath the earth, not violent now, but steady — as if something vast had shifted and then settled back to rest.
The Drake was home.
Even here, far from the Ruins, the weight of its aura lingered. His beasts trembled, though no chain bound them. And Draven asked himself the question he had no answer for:
How do you fight something that is not beast, not storm, but calamity itself?
Behind him, the scarred ridges of the Ruins of Chains still smoldered, glowing cracks pulsing like veins of fire. He didn't see the shadows in the ash — League scouts, battered but alive, watching from a distance.
"He tends them," one scout whispered, awe and unease mingling. "Like kin. Not slaves."
"Kin that broke chains," another muttered. "Our commanders must know."
They vanished into the haze, retreating toward the League's camp.
Draven wiped soot from his face and pushed himself upright. Feyra leaned against him, Stonehide's weight pressed close. They were tired, broken — but alive. That had to be enough, for now.
The lotus flickered once more, faint but steady. The Codex whispered in thought, colder than the ash wind:
Balance is broken. Eyes turn to fire.
Draven glanced back at the glowing horizon, jaw tightening. Dominion would come. The League too. The world was shifting, and he had stepped straight into its fault line.
"Come," he said to his beasts, his voice little more than a rasp. "Before the vultures arrive."
And together, they moved into the ashen horizon, shadows against the fire-lit world.