You expect dying to come with a bit of flair. Trumpets, soft lighting, maybe a meaningful last line whispered to a loved one as you reflect on a life well-lived. You definitely don't expect it to happen at two in the morning on a Tuesday, staring at a phone screen with 3% battery, the greasy ghost of cheap pizza still lingering in your sad little studio apartment. Twenty-eight isn't the age for a grand finale. It's the age for student loan debt that follows you like a vengeful spirit and a job so soul-crushing you've started naming the different shades of beige in your cubicle. My grand finale was a quiet, pathetic fizzle, a faulty heart valve clocking out like it was the end of its shift.
The last thing I remember was the screen, the glowing words of a fantasy novel. The Crimson Dragon's Lament. I was at a good part, too. A description of the world's strongest hero, the Zenith, standing alone against a tide of monsters, her power described as a star given human form. I remember thinking how nice it must be, to matter that much.
Then, nothing. No pearly gates, no fiery pits. Not even a highlight reel of my C-minus existence. Just the kind of absolute, bottomless black that doesn't even have the decency to echo.
I woke up burning.
It wasn't a fire, not really. A fire is on you. This was in me, a thousand-degree fever in every single cell, a liquid sun being mainlined directly into what was left of my soul. I felt my nerves singing, not with pain, but with an agonizing, electric overload that was so far past the concept of pain it had lapped it twice and was coming around for a third. I tried to scream, to force some sound out of a body I couldn't feel, but the air in my lungs was already a silent, white-hot shriek that had nowhere to go.
My head—God, my head. It was a warzone of memory. A chaotic, violent collision of two lives that had no business sharing the same space. One second, I was sitting in my sad little cubicle, the scent of stale coffee and Mark from accounting's microwaved fish hanging in the air. The next, I was on my knees in a cavern that smelled of ozone and impossibly ancient dust, the hilt of a sword gritty in my palm. Flashes of spreadsheets and pointless corporate meetings collided with visceral, terrifying memories of parrying a goblin's rusty cleaver. The drone of my asshole boss was drowned out by the memory of a roar so immense it shook the fillings in my teeth.
My mind was a library caught in a tornado, pages from two different lives fluttering in a chaotic storm. One life was mine, a straight, predictable line of quiet desperation. The other… the other belonged to a kid named Lancelot Ashworth.
Mixed with the plot points from the book were Lancelot's own memories, raw, personal, and terrifyingly real. I felt the biting chill of the wind in the jagged mountains, the searing pain of a ghoul's claw mark on his leg. He'd been running. Fleeing a dungeon break gone wrong, his entire party of hopeful young adventurers slaughtered, their dying screams still echoing in his ears as he scrambled for his life. He'd stumbled into this cave, this deep, ancient place, not in search of glory, but as a last, desperate hope for a hole to die in. And he'd found something else entirely.
The dragon. Infernus the Worldburner.
He'd seen it coiled in the oppressive dark, a mountain of scales that had lost their luster, its colossal chest rising and falling with a labored, rattling wheeze. It had been dying for years, maybe centuries, a god in exile waiting for the end. It had opened one vast, golden eye, a sliver of its former glory, and truly seen him.
"You're weak," it had said, its voice the grinding of tectonic plates, a sound that vibrated through the very stone. "Pathetic. Desperate. Alone."
Lancelot, shaking, bleeding, at the absolute end of everything, had managed a single, honest word. "Yes."
"Good," the dragon had rumbled, a flicker of something ancient and terrible in its gaze, like the last ember in a universe of ash. "That's all you need. I'm dying, little human. My power will scatter to the winds, a feast for worms and time. Unless..."
"Unless?" Lancelot's voice had been a cracked whisper.
"Unless you take it. All of it. Right now. Survive the gift, and you'll have strength beyond anything your kind should possess. Fail, and you'll burn out like a candle in a hurricane."
Lancelot hadn't even hesitated. "I accept."
The dragon had let out a sound like a mountain cracking in half, a dry, dusty laugh that shook loose ancient stalactites from the cavern ceiling. "Of course you do. You've got nothing left to lose."
It had been wrong about that. Lancelot had lost everything. His soul. His chance. His entire existence, burned away into nothing by the very power he'd begged for.
The book I'd been reading, The Crimson Dragon's Lament, was the story of a kid who, by a twist of fate, receives the dying dragon Infernus's final gift and rises to become a hero. But the novel only mentioned this moment in passing, a bit of vague backstory in the first chapter about a "trial by fire." I was living through the raw, unwritten prologue. The part where the price was actually paid.
The memories of the book's tragic arc kept flooding in, now tainted with the grief of personal loss. I saw Leo the Unseen Blade, not as a name on a page, but as Lancelot remembered him: laughing over a mug of cheap ale, boasting about the vineyard he'd buy one day. Then I saw him bleeding out in a filthy alley, his bravado gone, staring at the sky with surprised, empty eyes. I saw Elara, the gentle mage, who Lancelot remembered tending to a wounded bird with a tenderness that defied their harsh world. Then I saw her choking on her own blood, silenced by a poison before she could finish the work that would have saved a city. Every single one of them, every bright star, systematically snuffed out by the Void Cult.
And then, I saw her. The Zenith. I remembered the passage in the book describing the crushing loneliness in her gaze, a burden no one else could see. Lancelot was meant to be her successor, her relief, her hope. But his every success only served to reinforce the lie her enemies had whispered in her ear for decades: that her duty was finally done. Her death wasn't a glorious battle; it was a quiet, lonely surrender that broke the world's last shield and let the real monsters in.
The fire in me surged, a final, annihilating wave. This was it. The power was going to finish the job it started on Lancelot. I felt my consciousness, my very sense of me, stretching thin, about to snap and dissolve into the heat. I could just let go. Give up. I'd already died once. The quiet blackness was peaceful, in its own way.
But my first death had been pointless. A quiet, pathetic fizzle in a cheap apartment. To die again, here, as collateral damage in someone else's tragedy? To have my soul erased by a torrent of magical fire?
No.
The thought wasn't a grand vow. It wasn't a hero's proclamation. It was the desperate, grimy refusal of a man who had already lost one life and wasn't about to get cheated out of a second. It was the primal, terrified scream of a soul staring into absolute oblivion.
I stopped fighting the fire. I stopped trying to endure it. I wrapped my consciousness around the searing torrent and pulled. I dragged that chaotic, world-breaking power into the center of my being, not with strength, but with sheer, stubborn, terrified want.
The inferno didn't vanish. It compressed. The screaming, agonizing energy folded in on itself, collapsing into a single, unbearably bright point behind my sternum, right where my own faulty heart used to be. It was no longer a flood but a forge, hammering away at my core. I felt something new being created in the crucible of my chest—not of flesh and blood, but of molten starlight and caged thunder. It pulsed once, a deep, resonant thump-THUMP that was both mine and not, a beat that shook the ancient cavern and silenced the storm within me. A second heart. A Dragon Heart.
The pain didn't stop, but it changed. It became a blueprint. The heat flowed through my veins with purpose now, a guided river of creation, rebuilding me from the inside out. I felt the cartilage in my ears and nose harden and shift, the bones in my spine pop and lengthen with a series of sickening, satisfying cracks. My teeth ached, a deep, throbbing pressure as they sharpened to fine points in my jaw. My old, useless human heart gave a final, fluttering beat and then went silent, its job now obsolete.
The air I gasped in wasn't just air anymore; it was a tapestry of information—the scent of iron from the dragon's cooling blood, the taste of latent mana shimmering in the rock, the subtle shift in pressure from a pebble falling a hundred yards away. My vision bled from gray to a world of vibrant, living energy. The darkness wasn't dark; it was just a different kind of light I hadn't been able to see before.
The boy named Lancelot was gone. The man I used to be was a ghost. Something new was breathing in the dark heart of the world, and as I took my first, shuddering breath, it felt like my own.