The sky split in crimson streaks as firestorms raged across the horizon. Aurelius' vision blurred, not from smoke, but from the sensation of being... dead or reborn. He struggled to remember and yet every detail of his failure clung to him like molten chains.
A low rumble vibrated beneath him. Not the tremor of the earth. His heartbeat or was it a pulse of something older, wilder that echoed through his chest.
He opened his eyes.
Flames licked the cavern walls. The scent of sulfur burned at his nostrils and then he saw himself, not the human warrior he had been, not the hybrid of legend, but something smaller, fragile, yet magnificent.
A hatchling. Scaled in dark obsidian with streaks of molten red running along his spine. His claws dug into the jagged rocks, and instinct screamed in his mind: survive.
He blinked.
"This... this isn't... human."
The words trembled on his lips.
They felt alien, yet familiar.
Memories flooded: battles, betrayals, the city in flames, the Dragon King's laugh and the one truth that had haunted him: he had failed.
But now, the past lay before him, thousands of years earlier and he was not half-human anymore.
The cavern shifted. Smoke curled into shapes, forming the looming figure of the Brood Matriarch of the Infernal Pyreclaw. Her eyes burned like twin suns.
"You awaken." she rumbled.
Her voice was both threat and prophecy.
"The flames know you. The Core in you... unusual. Dangerous."
Aurelius lowered his snout, instinctively.
"I... I remember. I know what comes. I cannot..."
"You do not yet belong to memory." the Matriarch interrupted. "You belong to this world and in this world, only the strong survive. Only the Core decides who rises, who burns and who becomes ash."
A chill ran through what remained of his human consciousness. He was small, vulnerable, yet he felt the ember of something more: the echo of a soul that had known death.
That soul whispered: "You can change it. You must."
Footsteps echoed behind him. A small figure emerged, hunched and human, eyes wide in terror. A girl, barely older than ten, shackled and trembling.
"Please... help me." she whispered.
"The dragons... they..."
Instinct warred with memory. The hatchling's claws twitched. Hunger, power, rage, they all clawed at his mind. But he remembered the man he had been. He remembered humanity.
"Stay behind me." he hissed, voice a strange mix of growl and human tone. Heat rippled across his scales.
Embers lifted in the air, swirling like tiny stars around him.
The girl's eyes widened.
"You... you're a dragon?"
Aurelius' gaze softened, even as the shadows of his instincts gnawed at him.
"Yes. But I am... something more."
And in that moment, the first flicker of rebellion stirred, not against humans, nor dragons, but against the inevitability of fate itself.