I wasn't supposed to survive.
Not the war.
Not the Bloodfall Fields.
Not the life I was born into.
My name wasn't even mine. It was the scream my mother made when she died giving birth to me on a battlefield thick with ash and broken bodies.
I never had a legacy. No noble blood. No dragon lord title.
Just war.
I was a lowborn hatchling thrown into the maw of a conflict older than history — a boy fed to the Crystal War like firewood to a dying flame.
They told us it was about honor.
About protecting our kind.
They lied.
It was about power.
Control.
Greed
Want.
Not need not because our people were in danger, threatened, or suffering.
Nobody cared about who was holding the blade and who was left bleeding beneath it.
I was conscripted at eleven. By thirteen, I'd seen more corpses than sunrises. I earned my first scar before I learned how to fly.
My first battle left me deaf in one ear.
My second left me buried under the bodies of my brothers.
By eighteen, they called me "cursed." The soldiers feared me. The commanders used me. And the Tyrant King — the bastard ruling over the dragonkin with a fist of iron and a heart of stone, if he had one — saw me as a tool. Disposable.
The battle at Bloodfall Fields was supposed to be our victory.
A final push. An ambush against the elven lines.
We were told it would break the war.
Instead, it broke us.
The elves unleashed something on that field — twisted with shadows, blades that sang in the dark and stole the fire from our veins.
My unit was slaughtered before the first sunrise.
I fought until I couldn't.
Until my wings snapped beneath me.
Until my fire drained to embers.
Until I collapsed in the snow, waiting for death like a loyal dog left in the cold.
I remember the cold.
Not the pain. Not the fear.
Just the cold creeping into my bones, quiet and sharp, whispering, this is how it ends.
I wasn't afraid.
I was angry.
I'd bled. I'd fought. I'd obeyed. And in the end, I was nothing more than another corpse tossed on a cursed battlefield.
I would've died angry.
Except…
She found me.
At first, I thought I was hallucinating.
A girl in crimson kneeling beside me, her silver hair tangled in wind, her violet eyes burning in the frost.
She wasn't afraid.
She wasn't supposed to be there.
But gods… There she was.
She touched the ground beside me — fingertips grazing the ice like a secret, not to be tested. Then she sang, and it felt like she could destroy me in ways that dying in war as a blind loyal dog couldn't.
I felt it before I heard it.
A low hum, wild and sharp, slicing through the numbness like a blade.
The snow shifted. Symbols I didn't know bled into the ground. My skin burned— veins lighting beneath my flesh.
I gasped. Arched. Reached—
And met her eyes.
For a moment, I thought she'd kill me.
Her magic didn't soothe. It was scorched. It ripped through me, forcing my bones to knit, my blood to surge, my heart to slam back into a rhythm I didn't know I still had.
She wasn't saving me.
She was commanding me.
Live.
I felt it in every pulse of my body, every flare of raw, untamed fire.
I remember reaching for her—claws twitching—afraid she'd vanish like smoke.
But she pressed something into my hand. A crystal shard, humming with her melos.
And then…
She was gone.
Vanished into the storm like a ghost called back to the void.
I don't remember how long I laid there, clutching that shard like a lifeline.
I don't remember crawling out of that grave made of snow.
But I remember the fire that woke in me that day.
Not the fire of dragons. Not the fury of war.
Something deeper.
A hunger.
I need to find her again.
To know who she was.
Why did she save me?
And what the hell she unleashed inside me.
I swore then—on the blood of my brothers, on the grave of every lie I'd been told—
I wasn't going to die forgotten.
I was going to burn the world until it remembered my name.