The day of the Awakening was always the loudest day in the Dragove estate.
It was loud in a way that had little to do with sound. The manor itself seemed to lean into the ceremony — oaken beams creaked as if remembering older, crueler winters, frescoes in the vaulted ceiling watched with faded contempt, and the great hall smelled of incense and iron and something that had nothing to do with prayer: lineage. Lineage, polished and sharpened until it cut. The Dragoves collected trophies the way other families collected portraits: dragon-teeth and contracts folded in ancient leather, sigil-pinned cloaks and the jagged crowns of those who'd risen before. The house breathed pride and expectation, and it had no patience for stains.
Drake Dragove had spent his life being told he was a stain.
He was sixteen that morning, the cusp of whatever adulthood a summoner's household claimed: old enough to be judged, still young enough to be discarded. He had learned to wear his invisibility like a coat. When he walked past his brothers and sisters at breakfast, they pretended not to see the peculiar color of his hair — a wild, impossible thing split down the middle: galaxy-red sweeping from the left, a cold, comet-white from the right, each strand catching light like two small northern skies tethered to his scalp. They called it a trick of the light. Old servants murmured of portents. The house physicians called it a genetic fissure and asked the Patriarch for a sample.
"Enough," his grandmother would say, and that was how the family treated him: an irritation they tolerated, a blemish that would, with proper application, be corrected.
He kept his head down. He learned how to fold himself into the angles of corridors where eyes darted like hawks. He learned, with childish cunning, which smile would be mistaken for competence, which silence would be mistaken for wisdom. He practiced the language of the house — the single word the Dragoves used for everything: dominance — and taught himself not to be begging under it.
The Awakening Hall was carved from black stone and stained with history. It was the room where contracts were gifted, where bloodlines stepped forward and the world catalogued whether they were worthy. Torches burned in sconces that were older than most nations; above them hung the old banners of the Dragove line: a dragon devouring a star. The ceremony unfolded as it always did — a process steeped in ritual, an arc of pronouncements and bowed heads — but this year the hall seemed especially taut, as though it anticipated a springboard or a snap. There were whispers that the world beyond the gates had had another tremor, that the rifts pulsed in the sky. The eldest aunt clasped her fingers until the knuckles brightened, and the Patriarch — a man who could split a continent in personal history — held himself with his usual geometry of authority. He had prepared speeches about worth and blood and duty; later, Drake would remember each word like a chisel stroke.
When Drake was called forward, the air itself changed. He could feel the watchful weights on the crowd — ancient members of the order, visiting summoner families, and the servants who stood as pillars of indifference. He walked between two rows of polished stone guardians and sensed their judgment like a breeze that chilled bone.
The ritual began with the Chant of Lineage, voices low as the sea, names like anchors thrown into deep water. An elder unrolled a Contract Codex and opened it to the blank page set aside for Drake. Ink slept there like a held breath. A silver circlet sat on a velvet cushion: the House Circumference, an heirloom that would, in normal years, hum with the residual of a summoner's contract. Everyone expected nothing. Some had bet on the verity of that nothing.
Drake's hands were steady. He did not show the tremor that cut along the back of his neck, guesswork or muscle. His heart hammered because he did not want to be seen as weak. More than that, he had rehearsed the face of defiance until it became a mask: the tight mouth, the even stare. He would meet the Patriarch's gaze and not flinch. He had practiced this in the mirror at four in the morning, whispering to the curling hair that stole from the stars.
"Drake Dragove." The elder's voice had the texture of old pages. "Approach."
He stepped forward. Torchlight cast shadows like questions. The Patriarch sat upon the raised dais — a throne of hammered bronze that had been won in wars where dragons were not metaphors — and the house watched as if the very earth listened. The man's face, though weathered, was granite: carved and clean. He had a voice that could cut the air into decisions.
"You have worn the house name and little else," the Patriarch intoned. He did not look pleased. "For years you have twisted into the margins of ceremony. Today you stand in the hall of claim. Summon now, and let us see if the Dragove blood remains untainted."
The circlet awaited; the Codex leaf trembled like a bee. Normally, in other houses, there would be a barely audible sign: the faint ringing of a tether taking hold, the scintillation when something within the blood answered. People held their breath and counted in their heads: a hum, a bloom, a spark. Those were the markers of life.
Drake closed his eyes. He had never prepared for the big thing, because the house never required it. Where he had expected emptiness, he found a well. The well was older than his lifetime, older than the notion of time the Dragoves liked to pretend to own. It opened inside him like a memory borrowed from before the stars had names. He felt not a single species rise — no dragon warm and roaring — but a library unfurling in the hollow of his ribs: names of monsters he'd never seen, gears of binding, the taste of cold iron and the first full breath of a world streaming exhalations.
That breath, when it arrived, was not a thing he would have called malevolent. It was enormous. It was ancient. It tasted of ice and ash and far-off constellations. He felt in one electric, impossible moment the sense of every creature's weight — the beasts that were, the beasts that had been, the beasts that could not be named. A voice, older than the house itself, threaded through his skull like a loom pulling at fate.
It said: Recognize. Choose. Become.
Drake's eyes opened. He moved his hand without thinking, and that motion released the smallest of avalanches. The circlet did not warm; the Codex leaf did not burn. Instead, the air above his palm started to ripple like a pond struck by a meteor. People gasped. A red mote flickered at his fingertips and expanded into a geometry of light: runes, circles, constellations, a summoning glyph that had not been used since the ancients bound the gates. It hummed — not with the languid hum of smaller summoners, but with a resonance that matched an entire sky.
He should have been cut down then, declared a heresy and a hazard. The hall should have closed like a trap. The Patriarch should have risen with the weight of every ancestor and put an end to the aberration. Instead, the old man's face went very, very still. The matriarch behind him paled. The aunt who loved pompletely narrowed her eyes as if she could calculate currency out of the air itself.
The glyph brightened in a concentric pulse. The older members of the order stiffened, tongues tasting metal. The Codex shivered like a small animal, and in the margins of everyone's vision, hair on their arms lifted. The circlet slid from its cushion and hovered between the dais and Drake's hand, as if the house itself were taking inventory. Someone coughed. It sounded like a bell struck too hard.
"Impossible," whispered a visiting lord.
Drake's voice, when he found it, came out small: "I don't — I didn't—"
"You did," said a voice that was both not and entirely his own. It came like a notification and like thunder. The hall fell into a kind of wailing silence where you could hear the history of the Dragoves reconsidering itself.
> PRIMORDIAL SUMMONER SYSTEM — INITIALIZING.
No one moved. The words were a detonation. Some of the older families had stories — whispers that a System was a myth, a device from the Before. The System was a rumor that lived in the back alleys of academies where reckless summoners traded chips of their contracts for promises. Some called it superstition. Others burned those stories in the night. The World had no business making surprises in a house such as this, and yet here it was, announcing itself.
> User: Drake Dragove — Vessel Detected. Rank: SSS — PRIMORDIAL ANIMA. Feature: Origin Summon (Universal). Warning: Unknown Side Effects.
The hall erupted into a storm that was not meteorological but social and immediate. The aunt rose, and her voice made the walls shrink.
"Legacy," she shouted, "this is a breach! He is a danger. We must—"
But the Patriarch did not stand. He sat like an object that could not be moved. His hands, folded in his lap, trembled only slightly.
"Young man," he said, finally. His voice had the weight of an executioner and the calm of a judge. "Explain."
Drake swallowed. The words of the System hummed like embers at the back of his teeth, and he could not stop the truth from pouring out — not because he chose to confess, but because the marrow of the event demanded it. He told them what the System said. He felt the syllables shiver like blades leaving grooves in the air.
The house interpreted. In their speechless calculations and the slanted eyes of those who lived by contracts and lineage, the word "Primordial" unfurled like a stain. It meant not just power but history. Primordials were the legends that had once walked the edges of maps and had been sealed away because they had no pedigree you could buy or a family you could tax. They were old gods, old beasts, older than the treaties that stopped wars. They carried truths the world had spent centuries smoothing over.
"An SSS," someone breathed. "Myths call the SSS 'stars fallen into flesh.'"
"And the System," another mused, their face losing color in the light of its pronouncement, "it has selected him."
The hall was a web. Faces turned. Friends drew closer like guard dogs. Other families glanced at one another, asking silently what this meant for their plans, for their prestige, for the balance of blood across the nations. In that instant Drake understood what the Dragoves had always been: not a family but currency.
It was the Patriarch, more than anyone else, who had the first clearly visible reaction. His mouth clenched into a knife line. Where once he might have felt triumph at the prospect of a powerful scion, the knowledge that such a thing had bloomed outside of meticulous breeding made his jaw harden into something colder. Power in the Dragove house was an algorithm of bargains and expected outcomes. Drake's SSS rank did not slot neatly into any ledger.
"What will you do?" the Patriarch asked. His voice was not unkind. He sounded more like someone inquiring about how to dispose of a defective object.
Drake wanted to say, I will be what I am. He wanted also to say, I will bind the sky itself. But the first thing that came out of him was smaller, more human: "I don't know."
Aunt Clarissa, who had a taste for spectacles and tribunals, called for counsel to convene. The hall emptied into arguments and whispered forecasts. Mothers clutched children and prayed in the corners. Visitors bowed and retreated like tides. It would have been enough, in most houses, for a master to declare exile or banishment and crust the stain away. But the System kept speaking. Its messages threaded into the edges of the ceremony like red string.
> EVENT LOG:
User: Drake Dragove
Acquisition: PRIMORDIAL ANIMA (SSS)
Unlocked: Initiate Quest — "Primordial Thread: Asta—"
System Alert: Seeded Entity Requesting Bond.
At those last words, something in the rafters above them shuttered. It was a human sensation: an intake of breath that moved across a hundred faces. The air in the hall stilled as if some invisible mouth had been opened.
Then, with a sound like a wind ripping through parchment, the glyph floating above Drake flared. It did not form into a dragon or a beast the way most Summoners' first illusions did. It opened instead like a doorway — vignetted lights folding inward and revealing an animal compressed like a star: a shape of wolf and dragon and something older, limbs braided with cosmic runes. It was anchored by little chains of light that looked simultaneously fragile and unbreakable.
The thing called Astraeus did not roar so much as make the room understand an ancient physics. Everyone felt it press against the edges of their minds like a tide. The beast's eyes — if one could call them eyes — were not pupils but shards of sky, and they settled on Drake with the particularity of remembering.
Astraeus moved. The chains of light fell away like spun glass, and for a heartbeat it stood within the glyph, contained and monumental. Then it stepped forward.
A gasp rose as one. The house's priest tried to chant a binding, but his words were swallowed as though the room had been swallowed by a thin throat. The gift smelt of ozone and fires long-dead. Servants dropped to knees. Syllables from before the Making trembled in the air.
The Patriarch's face cracked. For a man of precise measures, he betrayed a flash of uncontained emotion: fear. Perhaps it was that a power which had never been sculpted into their family's ledger had now walked into the hall and looked Drake in the eye. Or perhaps worse: perhaps the Patriarch understood that there were things in this world not made to be ordered.
The house moved, then, in the way a beast moves when it smells a wound among its own. Dealings began. Rapid, fatal, unseen. Clarissa and her cronies argued for purging. There were whispers among the assembled lords of "containment" and "extraction." A visiting magistrate hinted at quarantine. An old general proposed exile — a swift and noble-sounding word that always meant a carriage to a distant cliff.
Drake felt the room arrange itself against him. He saw the calculation in his family's faces: either they could attempt to harvest what he offered, and thereby make themselves immortal in the ledger of blooded houses; or they could burn him out as a blemish and force other houses to balance the scales. The old logic of summoner politics chewed at him like termites at wood. He had been invisible for years, and now every eye compassed him like a needle.
Then the Patriarch rose.
It was not a cry nor an attempt at mercy. It was a procedural movement, the lift of a leader refining an order: "Take him," he said.
The words were clinical. There were guards, dark and leathered, at the doors. They moved with a legal swiftness, ringed by loyalty and years of unquestioned obedience.
Drake had thought about this possibility — the possibility that his family might brand him for what he had become. He had rehearsed pleas and retorts and false bravados. None of those preparations mattered when cold hands gripped his wrists and the room narrowed to the measure of his arms.
"You should be honored," the house physician murmured as they led him down the corridor. "Think of the opportunities."
Drake's palms felt hotter than he had ever known, and his breath came like a storm. When they pushed him into the wing of the estate where they kept contracts quarantined — the place where the house buried things they did not understand — he realized that a life could pivot on the hinge of a single sentence. He realized too the soft cruelty in the idea of being given to scientists and priests to be catalogued like a specimen. He wanted to show them. He wanted, with the simplicity of youth, to say that he would not be paper in their files.
That was when his grandmother, the only one in the house who had ever paid him the pity of touch, caught his sleeve. Her hand was small and cold, and she looked at him with a clarity that hurt.
"They did not mean—" she began.
"They meant perfectly," Drake said.
"I have a coin," she whispered. "Keep it." She pressed a small, flat thing into his palm. It was a charm with a faded rune. She bent and kissed his forehead, and for a second he felt something like the love of a person who had learned to love in secret. "Hide. Run."
But running from the house was a kind of death in itself. The Dragove lands were wrapped with thorned borders and contracted mercenaries. Beyond them sat a world of anchors and armies and gates that chewed at the horizon. Running would mean leaving every advantage he didn't have: friends, contacts, even the smallest leverage of a name. It would mean becoming a myth that other people could use as a warning to their children.
He didn't run. The house escorted him to a cell that gleamed with runes and iron. It was meant for the containment of beast-touched items, a place where the walls whispered and the light tasted like old iron filings. Men in white came at dawn to sedate him, to take the little things he kept — his mother's locket, the small ink-stained letter he had never sent to anyone. They took his hair ribbon, the last trivial token of a childhood invented like a story.
They thought the sedation would be the end of it.
Systems, however, do not always cooperate with human assumptions.
When the men in white closed their eyes and the world softened into the beginning of anesthesia, a sound — like the clarity of wind on glass — announced itself in the cell.
> SYSTEM: PRIMORDIAL THREAD ACTIVATED.
Astraeus Request: Bond Permit — Awaiting Confirmation.
The men froze. Glassy. Their training failed to cover this. The sedation vaporized in their lungs like smoke. The little chains of light, like those in the hall, tasted the room and found a seam; from that seam a sliver of space uncoiled. Astraeus was not a domesticated thing to be bound by cuffs. It moved with the graceful cruelty of something that never learned to crouch.
Drake woke with a scream in his throat. He had one hand free and it was wrapped around air that had the taste of thunder. A light as red as the inside of a comet bloomed in his palm and made every rune in the cell scream. Astraeus pushed at the seam and then, like a thing finding its own flesh, poured out — wolf and dragon in one perfect, terrible curve.
The containment ward was not built to handle myth on foot. It shattered like glass. Runes cracked. Men in white ran like boys being chased by the history of the world. The beast's shadow collapsed the corridor. For a sliver of time Drake and Astraeus looked at one another and shared what looked like recognition and possibility. The animal lowered its head, not in submission but in the old way of animals that knew you by the marrow of your name.
"What did you do?" a gaoler shrieked from the doorway.
Drake could not answer. He felt, instead, the System breathe in at his ear like a machine leaning towards a microphone.
> SYSTEM: BOND COMPLETE.
Entity: ASTRAEUS — LAST PRIMORDIAL.
Notes: Entity demonstrates high sentience and linked memetic field.
Quest Update: Survive the Dragove Purge.
The last line came like a tombstone. The world had grinding gears of etiquette and war. The word "purge" was not merely rhetorical; it had teeth.
Astraeus nudged Drake with its great head, smelling of stale constellations and salt. There was intelligence in that nudge — not human, not sentimental, but a promise: I will not be bound like a journal.
The thing with the house was that once it chose a direction, it moved like a glacier. Within the day the family had divided. Some wanted to extract the Anima, to translate it into contracts and coin and the assured immortality of recorded deeds. Others, older and wiser, feared a power that had not been bred to their specifications. The Patriarch made decisions with the ruthlessness of someone who liked to be first to market. Contracts were read aloud that night; there was a council. The family voted. The Patriarch struck the final voice, as he always did.
They called the execution "containment" in courtly voices. Men with trained hands, mercenaries with knives that glinted like promises, were paid. They wore masks that covered their mouths to give an impression of dignity. Their monstrousness was a courtesy. They came to the cell with ropes and steel and the language of taking.
Drake watched them approach, feeling as if he existed now only in the edges between their fingers. Astraeus — tethered by blood and something older — pressed close. Drake could feel the animal's breath ghost along his cheekroad like the knowledge of where to aim.
When the mercenaries struck, they aimed to extinguish. They had watched the hall recalibrate that morning; they had been informed that the man who could summon primordial beasts should be made to vanish. They had not expected the thing in the cell to move like a god.
Astraeus moved with the terrible economy of the ancient. The first swing of a blade fractured like wood under a boulder. A man who had been confident and paid in coin found his chest empty of life before he could cry out. Another tried to fire a bolt and found the weapon rusted like bone. The thing did not kill in rage; it responded in essential measure. Those who were instruments of the Patriarch were no longer necessary. The beast's eyes glowed and the walls shed splinters.
In the chaos, Drake felt something else: shame and a newness of kinship. He was not an outcast because he had been born wrong but because the house had always wanted to make him their register — their ledger entry. Now he was something else: marked by the system and accompanied by a creature that had laughter like thunder. The scales of his life recalibrated — not into the ledger of the Dragoves but into the wild mathematics of power.
He did not think of the world outside beyond a fugitive's rational concerns. He thought of the smell of his mother's locket and the fragile coin his grandmother had pressed on him, thinking it would buy him distance. He thought of faces he had never allowed himself to love and the sound of the house collapsing into accusation. Then the thing at his side blocked another sword, and he understood the simplest imperative of survival: move and do not look back.
They ran through passageways that had known centuries of secrets, and the Dragove estate responded like a breathing body in trauma. Servants, some still loyal in their own quiet ways, opened forgotten doors and sent them along secret stairways. The beast moved as a shadow, and Drake, with the coin in his hand, felt his old life peel away.
Outside, the sky over the Dragove lands had the color of a bruise. The wind carried ash from ruined areas where the rifts had touched the earth. Once Drake would have admired the house's prime fields and mechanical gardens, but those things were now unsalable to him. Beyond the stippled lights of the manor, the world waited with its own calculation: nations that might want him for war, academies that would cage him for research, and the unstable rifts that split the sky like a wound.
Yet as they reached the boundary, as the last of the loyal servants closed the gate behind them and the Dragove banners were swallowed into the wind, something like relief rose where fear had been. Astraeus curled at his feet and licked a palm that trembled with a certain ferocity. The coin in his hand warmed. The System pulsed, an omnipresent meter of possibility.
> SYSTEM: QUEST: Escape. Survive. Ascend.
REWARD: Knowledge Nodes — Primordial Archive.
Advisory: House Dragove — Purge Active.
Drake laughed then, a small sound that was half a sob, half a challenge. It was not the arrogant laughter of someone who believed himself invincible; it was the laugh of a person who had been cornered and had found, on the ledge of annihilation, a new path.
"Where will we go?" His voice was thin, but in it was the seed of a man who would learn how to become dangerous.
Astraeus looked to the horizon and then back to him. It did not answer in words, but the System did, for it enjoyed proclamations.
> DESTINATION: TITANFALL ACADEMY — RECOMMENDED.
RATIONALE: High security, advanced summoner training, potential anonymity in chaos.
WARNING: Entry may require alias and covert resources.
Drake rolled his shoulders. He felt the weight of his family's name in his throat and the freedom that came when you learn a system had made you into something untranslatable. He had been a stain; he would be an origin. The world had broken open, and in its fissure the System had plucked him up like a stringed instrument to be played.
He looked at Astraeus, at the razored line between the galaxy-red and gospel white hair that still fluttered as the wind caught it, and felt for the first time not the need to belong but the pureer, more dangerous thirst to remake. The sky cracked overhead; somewhere, a rift pulsed like a second heart.
Behind him the Dragoves would marshal armies. In front of him lay academies that made soldiers, cities that made bargains, and gates that spilled nightmares. He clenched his fist around the coin his grandmother had given him; it was an old thing, worn smooth at the edges. In the space between his fingers and the world he swore, only half-prayer, he made a promise to someone he barely understood: to the system that had chosen him, to the beast that had chosen him back, and to the man he had not yet become.
"I will learn your language," he said aloud, and the beast nudged him like an old friend agreeing to a journey. The System chimed, as if pleased with the resolution.
> PRIMORDIAL SUMMONER SYSTEM: User status: Active.
Objective: Unlock the Origin.
Note: This world will attempt to define you. Do not let it.
They walked into the bruised dawn. Behind them, the Dragove estate unrolled its grief and its fury like flags. Ahead of them, the world was both promise and wound, and the adventure of a boy with galaxy-red and galaxy-white hair had only just begun.