ARC 0 – The Dragon Knight
Chapter 1 – The Night Everything Ended
The forest was wrong that night. Even the fire seemed to listen.
Eight-year-old Strom lay curled between his parents, the smoke curling up into a sky salted with stars. The last thing he remembered before drifting off was his mother humming, the sound soft as moss underfoot, and his father whispering a joke into the dark.
A sound woke him—too small to be a threat and too strange to be nothing. Strom blinked. The coals pulsed. The shadows leaned closer.
"Mom? Dad?" he whispered.
He reached for their hands. Cold. Stiff. His heart stumbled.
"Wake up… please wake up…" He shook them, small hands clinging to bigger, empty ones. No breath, no warmth, no answer.
The sound that left him then wasn't a word. It was a torn thread, a child's world ripping. He screamed and screamed until his throat burned, until tears blurred the fire to a smear and the trees to smudges, until the forest gave him nothing back but his own voice returning faint and hollow.
He ran. Branches clawed. Roots dragged. The night had no end—only a boy alone inside it. When at last he fell to his knees, the earth cool beneath him, a figure stepped from the dark—a man in long robes, hood shadowing his face.
"You're safe now, boy," the stranger said, kneeling so his voice met Strom's level.
Strom threw himself forward, arms wrapping the robes, sobs shaking his thin shoulders. "They won't wake up…"
A gloved hand patted his back. The man's voice was soft and steady, the kind that could anchor a boat in a storm. "You're not alone anymore," he said. "I'll take care of you."
The words stuck inside Strom like a nail. He clung to them as the night closed again.
Chapter 2 – Power and Death
The robed man proved to be a wizard, known in whispers and avoided in crowds. To Strom, he was teacher and roof and food and the only face left.
Years stacked like firewood. Strom learned how to move a blade so it found air and cut only what he meant to. He learned how to vanish in a forest and return with more than he'd taken. He learned to listen to stone and river and the quiet in his own chest. Sometimes, when the wizard was in a certain mood, Strom learned sparks: how to coax a candle's flame higher; how to make the air taste like copper and lightning; how to breathe when power tried to run wild.
On Strom's thirteenth birthday, the wizard called him to the worktable. Five stones lay there, each glowing with its own weather:
Red – Fire.
Green – Earth.
Purple – Dark.
Yellow – Gold.
Blue – Dragon Aura.
"Choose wisely," the wizard said, voice even but eyes keen. "This will shape who you are."
Strom didn't look twice. His hand reached for the blue stone that hummed like a heartbeat hidden inside a mountain. The moment he touched it, the glow flared. For a breath he felt enormous—as if the horizon had stepped closer.
The wizard's mouth twitched—approval or warning, Strom couldn't tell. He set to work crafting a pendant that would cradle the stone. "A brave choice," he said at last, fastening it around Strom's neck. "Or a dangerous one."
That night, Strom hammered at a blade of his own—thick grip, straight back, nothing fancy. He left the house open to the cool dark, the anvil ringing like a bell.
When he returned, the bell had stopped.
"Master?" The word echoed. He found the wizard on the floor. Blood had slicked his robes. The wizard's hand, when Strom took it, was already floating away.
"M–Master—!"
The wizard's eyes found his face. "Strom… live… be better… than me…" The last word faded as if the voice had walked into fog.
Strom pressed his forehead to the wizard's knuckles. The room swam. In the doorway, a silhouette leaned, casual as a man in a tavern.
A demon, eyes like coals sunk in ash, smiled with too many teeth. "Nice experiment, boy. See you soon."
Smoke folded around it. It was gone. The room settled, and Strom's world narrowed to the weight in his hands and the promise throbbing in his chest like a bruise: Never again.
Chapter 3 – Tower of Slayers
Grief hardened into purpose. Purpose asked for a place to grow teeth.
The Tower of Slayers rose where the city's shadow ended. Newcomers came to prove they weren't just noise. The test was old: bring back a demon's head.
Strom returned dragging the whole thing—horns, claws, hide carved by long cuts. He hauled it across the courtyard stones and let it thud at the examiners' boots. No one spoke for a breath. Then the whispers came.
"What is he?"
"Look at his eyes."
"Dragon aura," someone breathed, like priests say a god's name.
Two faces emerged from the crowd. One belonged to Sam, a mage with steady hands and a quiet smile that said he'd seen storms and survived them. He nodded to Strom once, approval without show.
The other was Knull, a knight with a jaw like a wall and a tongue like a knife. "Drop the sword, boy," he called. "Let's see what you've really got."
Strom laid the blade aside. The circle widened. Fists met forearms. Elbows found ribs. Knull was older, heavier, trained to crush. Strom was faster, colder, something inside him pacing. He slipped past a hook and drove a palm under Knull's guard. The knight staggered. Strom followed, a rain of strikes, each one measured until they weren't, until the pace blurred and Knull's knees dipped and someone shouted "Enough!" and hands dragged Strom back.
"You're dangerous, kid," a watcher muttered as Knull sucked air. Sam stepped forward between them, calm as a rock in a river. He put a hand on Knull's shoulder, then on Strom's.
"Or just determined," Sam said, meeting Strom's gaze. "Don't let that be the same thing."
Chapter 4 – The Demon Hunt
Rumors bled through the Tower like ink in water. A demon had been seen at the edge of the southern jungles—a demon whose grin sounded like a memory and whose shadow looked like the night that took a wizard's breath.
Strom packed without speaking. Sam found him at the gate.
"You know I can't stop you," Sam said. "So I'll try something harder. I'll ask you to be careful with the part of you you're about to use."
"What part is that?"
"The part that thinks rage is a blade you can hold without cutting yourself." Sam's smile was weary and kind. "Don't let it guide you. It will eat you alive."
Strom tightened the strap on his gauntlet. "If rage kills it faster," he said, "I don't care."
Sam looked like a man watching a ship leave harbor in a storm. "I hope you do."
The road south ate days. Birds sang songs Strom didn't know. The pendant lay warm against his skin, as if it had opinions.
Chapter 5 – Angela
The jungle breathed in damp and green. Vines wrote slow letters across trunks. Insects threaded the air with lines of sound. Strom moved like a knife through cloth.
Then he heard it.
A scream—no shape, only pain, the kind that drags the body without asking the feet. Strom froze, breath caught halfway to his lungs. He had learned to weigh traps against mercy. He had learned to choose the knife.
He took one step back.
Then forward again.
"I can't leave someone like that."
He ran. The trees tore at him; he pushed through. The ground fell away into a small clearing where the canopy lifted just enough to let moonlight find the broken things below.
A girl lay there, young and swallowed by a night too big for her. Her clothes were torn, stained with blood—some hers, some not. Around her, three demon beasts circled, their bodies a knot of old scars and fresh hunger.
Strom didn't think. The pendant flared; the world narrowed to lines and timing. The first beast lunged—Strom met it with a cut that turned motion into stillness. The second tried to flank; he pivoted, the blade describing a clean arc. The third hesitated, then sprang; Strom stepped into it, elbow crashing down, weight behind it, sending the creature stumbling at his feet. His sword answered the question it asked.
Silence returned, ragged.
Strom knelt beside the girl. Her breathing was shallow but steady. He sheathed his sword and lifted her, careful of the places pain had already claimed. She was light in his arms, a shape made of questions he would answer later.
He carried her to a river that laced the jungle like silver. Kneeling on the stones, he set her down and worked with the surety of old lessons—clean water, steady hands, herbs crushed between fingers until their scent rose green and sharp. He bound the worst cuts with strips torn from his cloak and cooled her brow.
Her eyes fluttered open. Fear filled them, then saw the careful, slow way his hands moved and softened.
"Don't worry," Strom said, voice low. "You're safe. No one can touch you when I'm here."
Something in the promise felt iron, even to him. The girl's mouth trembled. A single word fell out like a heartbeat breaking: "Mom…"
Strom looked away to give her privacy for grief. The river said nothing, which was kind.
After a while he asked, "What happened?"
Her voice came in pieces. "There's a demon… he used to protect us. A bargain my family made long ago. He wanted… more. Power. Something called Dragon Aura. He couldn't get it. He changed. He—" She swallowed. "My mother tried to run. He—" She didn't finish. "I escaped, but his beasts found me."
Strom's jaw tightened. "He'll regret existing."
She stared at him, as if gauging whether he said such things to feel big or because he knew how to make them true. She believed him.
"Angela," she said, as if giving him something of value. "My name is Angela."
"Strom."
She nodded once. The moon caught on her hair, turning it into a silver map. She gathered herself, breath steadier now.
"There's one thing," Angela added. "His spine. His pride made him careless with it. He… keeps it unarmored. It lets him move faster. That's his weakness."
Strom's eyes, which had been iron, turned to tempered steel. "Good," he said. "Then we'll find him."
Chapter 6 – Breaking the Beast
The demon's castle rose from the jungle like a tooth. Angela led with sure steps toward the dark shape—it had always been there, she said, just hidden by the way most people didn't want to see it.
They crossed a causeway where the river fought the stone. Gargoyles watched with patient contempt. Strom felt the pendant thrum higher, a drumbeat under his skin.
Doors taller than trees swung open before they touched them. The demon came out laughing.
"So the experiment brings a guest," it said, voice like mud dragged over bones. "A boy with someone to lose again. Good. Good."
Strom's sword slid free with the sound of decision. "You'll say fewer words by the time I'm done."
The demon moved first—a blur of claw and tail and teeth. Strom's world slowed. Each attack was a question; he answered. Blade met talon. Shoulder rolled under a sweep. He felt the air bend with each near-miss, the stone underfoot test his balance and return it.
He pressed in. A cut along the arm, shallow but loud. A kick to a knee, the joint stuttering. The demon snarled, the hall vibrating with it, and reached for the weapon rack set into the wall. It wrenched free a massive blade as long as a man and twice as indifferent.
Angela gasped. Strom didn't look away from the demon's eyes. The pendant sang. Gold-blue light crawled up the edges of his sword, soft as a halo and hard as a promise.
They collided. Sparks scattered. The demon's strength was a storm; Strom learned its rhythm and stepped where the lightning wouldn't, struck where the thunder had just been. He slipped inside a swing and drove his shoulder forward, then his knee, then the hilt of his blade up into the demon's jaw. Its head snapped back; Strom pivoted behind it, arms locking around its torso the way a riptide locks around a swimmer.
"His spine," Angela whispered, palms pressed together. "Strom—now!"
He set his stance, braced, and pulled with all the leverage a lifetime of training and a pendant's bloodline could turn into motion. Something deep in the demon's back gave, not with a scream but with the soft, inevitable sound of a door closing where it had always wanted to close.
The demon collapsed to a knee, the world slanting around it. Strom released and stepped in front, anger narrowing to a point. He planted his feet and threw one final punch—not wild, not animal, but precise and heavy, guided by every lesson he'd learned and everything he'd lost. It landed. The demon's head rocked sideways. The laughter stopped.
For a heartbeat, Strom didn't recognize his own breathing. It was a forge bellows—up, down, up, down. He lifted his fist again without thinking.
"Strom!" Angela's hands were suddenly on his face, small and steady. She stood close enough that he could see fear and courage inside her eyes at the same time. "Stop. You are not a monster."
The words hit harder than any strike. The pendant warmed against his skin, the light softening. He blinked, and some corner of him returned from where the heat had driven it.
He lowered his hand and stepped back. Angela bent, picked up the demon's fallen blade, and with quiet finality ended the fight herself—swift, clean, no cruelty. She stood for a long breath, shoulders rising and falling, then let the weapon drop to the stone.
"It's done," she whispered. "It's done."
Strom's chest loosened. He hadn't realized how tight it had been for so long.
Chapter 7 – A Fragile Peace
They didn't leave the jungle right away. The wizard's old cabin, half swallowed by vines and time, still stood where the path curved north. Its windows reflected trees. Its hearth remembered warmth. Strom fixed the door and patched the roof. Angela found a shelf of old books, herbs pressed between pages, notes in a hand that wrote like a blade—exact, spare, sure.
Morning brought chores. Afternoon brought training, light and clean—Angela insisting he teach her enough to stand, Strom insisting she learn the part where you leave a fight before you have to finish it. Evenings, the cabin filled with the ordinary sounds peace likes—water boiling, the scrape of a chair, two voices sharing space without fear.
"You've changed," Angela said one dusk as firelight crawled up the logs. "See? No anger. No pain."
"Maybe I'm learning to live again," Strom said. The words felt strange and right.
But peace and vows seldom share a roof for long.
"Someone has to stop the demons," he added after a while, staring into the coals as if they could argue back. "What we did here—that was one. There are others."
"There are people for that," Angela said, not unkindly. "You don't have to be the blade for every cut."
"When I chose the Dragon Aura, I decided," he said. "Protect the innocent. At any cost."
Angela looked away, jaw tight. "People are afraid of you because of how you fight," she said. "They think you're a monster in human skin."
Strom didn't flinch. "I don't care what they think. What matters is you. And my friend Sam." He stood, buckling his sword. "Nothing else."
She watched him at the door, the night thin as ink beyond him. "Come back early," she said, and tried to turn it into a joke so it would weigh less.
He nodded and was gone, the forest folding after him.
Chapter 8 – Blood and Chains
Evening had slipped most of its light when Strom returned. He knew something was wrong before he saw the door hanging off its hinge. Before he saw the gouges torn through the wood as if a giant had dragged a blade across it just to see if it would scream. Before he saw the way the air had learned how to be quiet.
"Angela?"
The house answered with a stillness that made his skin crawl. Inside, the table was overturned. The shelf was missing half its books. On the floor, caught in a spill of moonlight, lay Angela's scarf—ripped, stiff with dried red.
Strom knelt and picked it up. The cloth was cold. He closed his eyes and inhaled. It smelled like smoke and river and something he refused to name.
He went out the back, following marks that were more absence than track—places where the earth remembered pressure and the ferns remembered being stepped on. He had taken three steps when torches flared and men rose like weeds from the ditch.
"There!" someone shouted. "It's him—the dragon-eyed killer!"
Ropes would have been a courtesy. Chains of enchanted steel snaked like living things, coiling around his arms, his chest, his throat. The pendant flared in protest, then dimmed as the chains bit. Strom strained once, twice—no give. The magic was designed to lay blankets over fires.
"Where is she?" he shouted. "Where is Angela?"
No one answered. He saw fear in their faces—simpler, easier than the fear of the dark. The kind you could point at and say monster and then go to sleep.
They dragged him through streets that pretended they'd never seen him before. A cell door took him without asking. The chains sang to themselves.
Night thickened. Footsteps slid down the corridor, slow and soft. A key scraped. The door opened enough to let a shadow through—a figure in a hood. Small. Quick. The chains slackened, one by one, as nimble hands found locks and old tricks did what new magic could not.
The figure turned to flee. Strom moved faster. He caught a wrist, spun, and pushed the hood back.
He forgot how to move.
"Angela?"
She looked like Angela. Her face. Her height. Her hair catching the stray light. But her eyes were wrong—empty of the person he knew, filled instead with… nothing, like a mirror in a room with no one in it. When she spoke, her voice had the right notes but none of the music.
"Come," she said. "Quickly."
He followed, because not following would have felt like dying in a new way. They slipped through alleys into trees, and then the trees thinned and the horizon gathered itself into a shape of stone and malice—a black fortress like a candle burned to a stub and left to harden in its own soot.
"Black Candlen," the false Angela said.
The name fit in the mouth like a bruise.
Chapter 9 – The Truth Revealed
The throne room of Black Candlen did not bother pretending it was anything but what it was—a place made to make small those who entered. The ceiling lost itself above them. Columns rose like fingers ready to close. The floor took the sound of each step and broke it into echoes.
On the throne sat the wizard.
Strom's breath hitched and refused to go on. "You," he said, not trusting the word and using it anyway.
The wizard smiled, hands folded like a teacher about to begin a lesson. He was as Strom remembered and not—more alive, somehow, with a light under his skin that had nothing to do with goodness.
"Ah," the wizard said. "My greatest experiment walks in alive. How poetic."
"What did you do to Angela?" Strom's voice came out a growl he didn't remember learning.
The wizard lifted a finger. The not-Angela swayed forward a step, like a marionette. "She was never real," the wizard said. "Just a puppet, to keep your heart intact until I needed it broken. And look—perfect result."
Strom's fingers dug crescents into his palms. "No," he said. "No—you're lying."
"Oh, I never lie about perfection," the wizard said, standing, walking down the steps as if his feet never quite touched them. "You want truth? Fine. Here is a gift."
He stopped an arm's length away. His voice dropped so low the stone had to lean in to hear it.
"Your father was stubborn. Your mother was… inconveniently tender. He fought. She begged. 'Please,' she said, 'take me if you must, but spare my son.'" He shook his head, smiling like a man remembering a play he'd enjoyed. "They did not understand what I was building."
He let the words hang, heavy as a blade. "Weakness breeds weakness. You were my answer. A blank slate forged from tragedy." He tilted his head. "And look at you now—exactly what I wanted."
Something old and cold inside Strom cracked open. The Dragon Aura answered, gold-blue light pouring from the seams, humming in the chamber's bones. The chains the guards had left in a mockery of safety lay on the floor, wasted metal. He had not noticed them fall.
"I am not your monster," Strom said. "I am your executioner."
The wizard's grin widened until it wasn't a human expression anymore.
Chapter 10 – Dragon vs. Dragon
He changed as if remembering what he really was. Bones rearranged with the dry clatter of a thousand doors unlocking at once. Skin took on scale. Wings tore their way into the world like sails opening in a storm. In moments, the wizard was not a man but a dragon, black as a moonless thought, eyes burning a red that made the room colder, not warmer.
"Fight me, creation," the dragon said, voice scraping the pillars, the floor, the word creation.
Strom raised his sword. The pendant shone until it was hard to look at. "I'll end you."
The dragon moved, and the castle learned what wind was. A claw swiped; Strom went under it, the air clipping his shoulder like a thrown stone. Teeth snapped shut where he had been. Flame billowed; he rolled, heat licking his back. He came up inside the dragon's guard and struck. His blade hit the scales over the skull and rang like a bell. The dragon laughed.
Strom fell back, brain breaking the fight into pieces. The head—too strong. Chest—armored. Wings—soft. Tail—fast but predictable. Ear—slit. He stored each fact like a coin.
The dragon reared, fire gathering in its throat. Strom sprinted, flames chasing his heels, and cut across the left wing in a clean, committed line. The membrane tore; the dragon's roar shook dust from ancient carvings. Its tail whipped around, a building moving at speed. Strom dropped, felt wind kiss his hair, and as the tail passed he stood and cut—a surgeon's stroke, not a butcher's. The appendage jerked short; the dragon slammed it into the floor and glared.
"You learn," it growled.
"I remember," Strom answered.
He climbed. Not the dragon—yet—but the broken stones, the fallen brazier, a toppled column. From height he leapt, landing on the ridge of the dragon's back, boots skidding for purchase on scaled armor. He ran, hunched low, balance on a knife's edge, toward the head. The dragon thrashed; Strom let the movement throw him forward, a controlled fall ending in a thrust that drove his blade into the narrow slit where ear met skull. The dragon's howl wasn't pain alone; there was fury in it, and surprise, and the realization that the world sometimes makes weapons out of its wounded.
Strom ripped the blade free and slid down, landing hard, knees jarring. The dragon slammed a claw down where he had been. Stone shattered. He rolled and came up facing the chest, where a glow pulsed behind the armor, faint and terrible.
"The stone," Strom breathed. "Always the stone."
He went for it. The first strike threw off sparks and nothing else. The second dug shallow. The third he built, gathering everything he was and everything he refused to be and pouring it into a line no one else in the world could have drawn. The pendant blazed, the light around him so bright his own shadow fled.
The blow landed. The chest plate cracked with a sound like night breaking.
The glow faltered, then burst like a held breath leaving, and the dragon's body collapsed in on itself, scales fading to skin, limbs shrinking, until the wizard lay on the stone, human again in the way an old knife looks like a toy after you've seen what it can do.
He coughed. A red line trickled from his lip to his chin. He smiled anyway, because some men build houses out of spite and live in them their whole lives.
"Together, Strom," he rasped. "We could rule. Everything."
Strom reached to his neck, unclasped the Dragon Aura pendant, and set it lightly on the wizard's chest.
"This stone saved me," he said, voice steady. "It won't save you from what you made."
He looked at his hands. They were scarred and strong and shaking. He closed them into fists not to strike but to keep them from forgetting where to be.
"For my mother," he said softly. "For my father. For the boy you tried to break. For Angela—whoever she truly was." He leaned closer, the words finding weight. "For every lie."
He did not rain blows until the world went red. He did not lose himself the way the wizard had always wanted. He did the harder thing: he let the man who had been so certain he was a god die from the wound he had given himself—pride punched through and the power he'd stolen turning to ash in a mouth that could no longer swallow it.
The wizard's smile loosened, then fell away. His eyes went still. The pendant on his chest cracked down the middle with a soft note like a flute played far off.
The castle trembled. Stones remembered gravity. A fissure ran up the nearest column like a snake finding its tree.
From the shadows at the edge of the wrecked hall, a figure stepped forward—a shape more suggestion than person, cloak drawn tight, face hidden.
"You've carried enough pain, son," the voice said, low and warm, as hands stronger than they looked lifted Strom to his feet. "Rest now. Your war is only beginning."
Strom wanted to argue. About wars. About beginnings. About how the word son could still open a door he had bricked over. But the fight had taken the words, and the room was growing teeth, and for once surrender felt like strength.
He let the figure guide him out as Black Candlen shook itself apart behind them, the night pressing close to scatter the dust.
Aftermath
They made it to the tree line before the castle folded. The sound chased them—a long, slow exhale, stone returning to the patience of the earth. Strom turned to watch the place where so much had been built on lies vanish into its own shadow.
Wind moved through the leaves like a thousand quiet hands. The stars were as they had been the night he lost everything and the night he found something anyway. He touched the place on his neck where the pendant had hung, felt the bare skin, and didn't know if it felt like loss or like a promise finally kept.
Sam's voice came back to him, a steady echo: Don't let rage guide you. It will eat you alive.
He looked down at his hands again. Not monsters' hands. Not a savior's, either. Just a boy's hands grown into a man's too early, carrying weight because there had been no one else to carry it.
Behind him, the figure who had pulled him from the wreckage waited, saying nothing more, as if understanding that some silences are part of healing and some answers arrive only when called by the right question.
Strom closed his eyes and let himself remember the river's sound, Angela's palm warm against his cheek, Sam's calm, the wizard's smile cracking at last, and the feeling when a blow lands not because of hate but because of duty.
He opened his eyes on a new night.
The forest breathed. The stars watched. Somewhere far away, something that thought it was safe trembled without knowing why.
And Strom—dragon-eyed, iron-hearted, no one's monster—walked forward.
End of ARC 0.