BOOK ONE: Chapter 5: Europa and the First Experiment
**Marcellus** was no idiot. He knew returning to Pandora as a god-in-the-making would trigger an immediate, all-out war with the Archmages. He needed a place to hide and experiment with his newfound abilities. He was no longer Marcellus, the discarded boy. He was the First Dragon, and he was ready to begin his grand experiment.
He climbed back into his space shuttle—a relic of his former life—and launched from the dead planet. For weeks, he drifted through the cosmic void until he found it: a water galaxy on the far edge of the known universe, a place populated by outlaws, mages, and renegades who had been exiled from Pandora. As he approached, a faint, technologically encoded signal hailed him.
"Hello, traveler," the voice said over his cockpit's comms. "My name is **Diana Treeborn**, an exiled Earth Archmage. We are a peaceful people, and you may enter. I'm in control of the politics on this planet, if any."
Marcellus looked down at the planet. It was a beautiful, watery world with three gigantic islands that subtly shifted in position every day. He felt a strange pang of recognition. This was **Europa**, a planet he had studied in his Pandorian history books, a world whose islands moved so slowly no human eye could ever see it. A perfect hiding spot.
"Yes, madam, I am Marcellus," he replied, a hint of his old, charming self surfacing. "I, too, am exiled and would like a safe journey on your planet to conduct my research."
Diana sent him a GPS track to some open land on the Western Island. For months, Marcellus worked in solitude. He built a colossal underground laboratory and spent his days above ground, practicing with his new abilities.
He discovered he had three primary stages:
1. **First Stage:** His human form, a **6-foot-2** man with skin as hard as stone.
2. **Second Stage:** A terrifying, **6-foot-10 dragonoid** form, complete with claws, fangs, and, uniquely to him, wings. This was his combat stage, **ten times stronger than his human body**.
3. **Final Stage:** The **mile-wide Titan form**, a raw power he only dared to wield underground, so as not to scare the exiled mages. His practice was meant to master a higher form of the Dark Energy he had been gifted.
One day, while he was practicing, Diana came to see him. She used an air spell to form a bird, its wings made of living branches—a testament to her power as an Earth Archmage. She had been observing him for weeks, and her curiosity had gotten the better of her.
"What do you want, Ms. Diana?" Marcellus said, as he grew to his mile-wide Titan form in two seconds and used his ten-foot-long hand, a cloud of dark energy, to grab her bird form.
"I want to talk to you about your abilities," she said, undeterred by his transformation. "And what are you?"
He looked at her, truly looked at her. Her beauty, her strength, her quiet power. In two seconds, he shrunk down to his 6-foot-10 dragonoid form and, with a flick of his wrist, used Earth magic to create two chairs for them to sit.
"Why were you exiled?" Marcellus asked, his new Dragon instincts cutting straight to her deepest secret. "I thought all Archmages were intrinsically connected to a continent."
Diana smiled, a flash of genuine rebellion in her eyes. "I betrayed Pandora, so I was exiled and released from my continent," she explained simply. She leaned forward, the smile fading into shrewd curiosity. "So, what are you?"
Marcellus thought about it for a second, feeling the cosmic power humming in his core. He met her gaze with a look of conquering pride. "**I am the First Dragon of this universe**."
It only took one conversation, one shared word or two between two genius exiled mages, for him to take her to bed.
Over the next ten years, they had four children. Marcellus observed the children, watching their human and dragon traits clash. He decided to call the new hybrid race the **Drakain**—a name that sounded ancient, formidable, and entirely his own. The Drakain children were powerful, their Drakain forms ranging from the first to the third stage, **but the third stage was only a dragon body, a $\text{10}$ meter-tall, huge dragon—still only the size of Marcellus's foot.** They were monstrous to humans but nothing to a true dragon. He taught them ruthlessly, training them as **warriors**—not the regular children Diana had wanted, for he had plans for all of them.
Marcellus grew restless. He had to lay eggs. As unappealing as it sounded, this was the only way for him to obtain the power he wanted, to have offspring that were truly his own kind, born from a dragon egg, in the Titan form he had discovered.
He hid his new obsession from Diana, using his charm to cover his true intentions. His lust for her was a means to an end, a way to experiment with his bloodline and his abilities. He didn't love her; he was using her to test the limits of his new, divine existence.
One day, ten years after they met, she woke up and went to take a shower. He came up behind her, his love for power eclipsing any shred of human emotion he had left, and broke her neck. He disposed of her body with dark magic.
He then went to their four sleeping children. He touched the forehead of each child with his finger. A **shadow immediately transferred from his fingertip, disappearing into their minds**. Their eyes flashed black, then returned to the pure, powerful color of their Pandorian affinity. The mind spell was complete. His next venture was to lay his three seeds, his three eggs, an embarrassing reality for a man who still clung to a shred of humanity. But he knew this was the only way to obtain the power he truly craved.
---