The dragon beneath the city screamed every night.
The sound never reached the streets. It did not rattle windows or set dogs howling. The towers of iron and rune-glass stood unmoved, their lights burning steady, their engines humming with stolen power.
But it shook him.
Seventeen years old, grease ground into his knuckles, standing on a narrow gantry above the heart of the reactor—he felt it again. The pressure behind his blue eyes and his messy jet black hair. The ache in the bones. The soundless roar that had haunted his sleep since childhood.
Below him, bound in chains of sigil-forged steel, the dragon stirred.
The reactor chamber descended for hundreds of feet; a cylindrical wound carved into the bedrock beneath the capital. Runes the size of wagons glowed along its walls, pulsing in time with the city's breath. Heat shimmered in the air. Magic compressed, refined, stolen, flowed upward through conduits like luminous veins.
At the center lay the source.
The dragon's body was vast enough that its full shape vanished into shadow. Only fragments were visible at once: a horn ridged like a mountain spine, an eye sealed shut by plates of binding script, a chest that rose and fell with a labored, patient rhythm.
Every breath powered a million lives.
"Output stable," came a voice behind him. "Don't just stare, boy. Read the gauges."
He flinched and turned.
Master Kelth stood at the edge of the gantry, robes immaculate despite the heat, his artificer's staff humming softly at his side. The old man's eyes flicked from rune-panel to rune-panel with practiced ease, never once lingering on the dragon itself.
"It's… steady," the boy said, forcing his gaze back to the instruments. "Mana flow at ninety-eight percent. No harmonic bleed."
Kelth grunted approval. "As it should be. The bindings were reinforced last month."
The scream came again.
Stronger this time.
The boy's breath caught. His fingers curled against the metal railing as something pressed against his thoughts—not pain exactly, but weight. Like standing beneath a stormcloud heavy with unshed lightning.
Kelth did not react.
"Master," the boy said carefully, "do you ever hear—"
"No," Kelth interrupted, sharp. "And neither do you."
The words were not angry. They were afraid.
The boy swallowed.
"Yes, Master."
He returned to his work, checking seals, recalibrating conduits, pretending his hands were not trembling. The scream ebbed, fading back into the constant, low thrum that had defined his life.
He had grown up with it.
As a child, he thought it was thunder. Then the earth itself. Later, he decided it must be his own heart, beating too loudly in his ears. No one else ever reacted. No one else ever noticed.
So he learned to be quiet.
The city above them—Aurelion, Crown of the Concord—thrived on the dragon's suffering. Airships crossed its skies in endless procession. Lifts carried nobles between floating districts. Factories sang day and night, forging weapons and wonders from power they did not understand.
And beneath it all, the dragon endured.
The shift should have ended there.
But as the boy reached to close the final seal, the rune-panel flickered.
Just once.
Kelth stiffened. "Kael What did you touch?" Kelth called the boy by his name
"nothing…," the boy named Kael answered. That was true. He had followed the sequence exactly as taught.
The runes pulsed again. Faster now.
A low tremor rippled through the chamber.
Alarms began to sound.
Kelth raised his staff, sigils flaring along its length. "Containment breach. Step back!"
Kael obeyed but then he froze.
Because the scream was gone.
In its place came something else.
A presence.
Not vast and distant as before, but close. Focused. A pressure that coiled around his thoughts with terrifying clarity.
You hear me.
The words were not sound. They were meaning, delivered whole and undeniable.
Kael's knees buckled. He caught himself on the railing, gasping.
Kelth spun toward him. "What's wrong with you?"
Kael tried to speak. Nothing came out.
The dragon's eye opened.
Just a fraction.
Light, ancient, molten, intelligent, spilled into the chamber. Runes along the chains flared violently, straining to reassert control. The reactor's hum rose to a shriek.
You have always heard me, the presence said. But tonight, you listened.
The world tilted.
Power surged—not outward into the city, but inward, toward him. The rune-panel beneath his hand shattered, glass and light exploding in a storm of fragments.
Kelth shouted an order, but it was lost beneath the roar of failing containment.
The dragon did not break its chains.
It did something far worse.
It spoke and the city felt it.
Above them, lights flickered across Aurelion. Airships faltered. Towers groaned as their enchantments stuttered.
For the first time in centuries, the flow of stolen magic changed direction.
And standing at the edge of the abyss, a lowborn apprentice realized—with sudden, terrible certainty—
The world had never been powered by engines.
It had been powered by will.
And now, that will had found a voice.