The smell of burning thatch filled Ronn's lungs as he stumbled through the smoke-choked farmhouse. His mother's scream had been cut short three minutes ago. He'd counted each second.
"Mama!" His voice cracked, throat raw from smoke and terror. At fifteen, he was tall enough to see over the overturned table where his father lay crumpled, blood pooling beneath silver armor that bore the Church's sunburst sigil.
The Inquisitor stood in the doorway, backlit by flames that consumed everything Ronn had ever known. Holy power radiated from the woman's form—a sickly white glow that made his skin crawl and his chest tighten with primal wrongness.
"Once dragons bled fire," she said, amused as a guillotine. "Now they bleed like men. Tonight the last of that fire dies."
Ronn's hand instinctively went to the leather cord around his neck, fingers closing around the carved fang that had been his grandfather's. The bone felt warm against his palm, almost pulsing.
He didn't understand. His family were farmers. Good people. His father tithed to the Church every harvest, his mother healed neighbors with her herbalist skills. They weren't—couldn't be—
The Inquisitor's palm glowed brighter. "The dragon's taint runs deep. Your kind nearly destroyed humanity once. We won't permit a resurgence."
Run. The thought came from somewhere primal, somewhere deep in his bones that recognized death wearing human skin.
But his legs wouldn't move. Couldn't. Not past his mother's body in the hallway, not past the ruins of everything he'd been.
The bolt of holy power struck him square in the chest.
Pain. White-hot and absolute. It felt like being unmade from the inside out, every cell screaming in protest as divine energy scoured through flesh that suddenly felt wrong, incompatible, other. The fang burned against his chest, searing his skin even through his shirt.
Ronn's vision tunneled to a pinpoint of light, then darkness.
Then nothing.
---
Awareness returned in fragments.
Cold stone pressed against his cheek. The smell of piss and rot and unwashed bodies. Distant screaming that might have been human once. Pain—but different now, older. The ache of bruises and starvation, wounds half-healed and infections festering.
Ronn tried to breathe and his lungs hitched, body convulsing. Wrong. Everything was wrong. His arms were too thin, covered in scars he'd never earned. His clothes hung loose on a frame that felt like it belonged to someone else.
Because it did.
The memories hit like a battering ram.
Chains. Darkness. The Lady's cruel smile as she decides which prisoner to torture today. The snap of his friend Marcus's neck. The taste of moldy bread and rainwater licked from stone. Three years. Three years in this cell. Three years of—
Ronn lurched to his knees and vomited. Nothing came up but bile—this body had been starved too long for anything more substantial. He retched again, hands splaying against filthy straw, and that's when he saw them.
Not his hands. Too calloused, too scarred. A brand on the left wrist: the mark of a criminal sentenced to the Church's dungeon.
"No, no, no—" His voice wasn't his voice. Deeper, rougher. Broken by screaming.
More memories crashed through him. A name. Kael Thornwick. Thief. Captured trying to steal Church relics. Torture. So much torture. Holy power used to hurt instead of heal. The Inquisitors laughing. Praying. Hurting.
Ronn screamed—Kael's scream—and somewhere in the darkness of the cell, another prisoner shouted for him to shut up.
He couldn't. The memories kept coming, overlapping with his own. Mother's smile as she served breakfast. The Lady's blade cutting into his—into Kael's—back. Father teaching him to plow fields. Marcus dying. The farmhouse burning. The cell walls closing in.
He didn't know who he was anymore.
Time lost meaning. Minutes or hours later, Ronn found himself huddled in the corner, arms wrapped around knees that jutted like knife points through ragged prison trousers. His breathing had steadied to ragged gasps. The memories had settled into something he could almost distinguish from his own thoughts.
Almost.
The fang—his grandfather's fang—still hung around his neck. He could feel it, warm against a chest that wasn't the one he'd been born with. Somehow it had come with him. Somehow he was here, alive, in a stranger's body, in what had to be the bowels of the very institution that had murdered his family.
That's when the words appeared.
They materialized in the darkness before him, glowing with a soft crimson light that had nothing to do with holy power and everything to do with something older, something that made the dragon blood in his veins sing with recognition he didn't understand.
[CONGRATULATIONS, USER]
[YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY ACTIVATED THE DRAGON'S LEGACY SYSTEM]
[WELCOME TO YOUR SECOND CHANCE]
Ronn stared at the floating text, mouth dry, heart hammering in a chest that remembered both his death and three years of torture it had never actually endured.
"What..." His voice—Kael's voice—cracked. "What is this?"
The words shifted, new text appearing:
[INITIALIZING SOUL BIND...]
[ANALYZING VESSEL COMPATIBILITY: 47% MATCH]
[INTEGRATING USER CONSCIOUSNESS...]
[DRAGON'S LEGACY SYSTEM ONLINE]
[STATUS: ACTIVE]
[HOST: KAEL THORNWICK (RONN ASHWOOD - SOUL)]
[BLOODLINE: DRAGON BLOOD (DORMANT)]
[CURRENT CONDITION: CRITICALLY MALNOURISHED, MULTIPLE INJURIES]
More text scrolled past, too fast to read, before settling on a final message:
[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE]
[SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: DISCOVER THE TRUTH]
[NOTICE: DEATH WILL RESULT IN SOUL TRANSFER TO NEAREST COMPATIBLE VESSEL]
[CULTIVATION METHODS AVAILABLE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO BEGIN TUTORIAL?]
Ronn's hand found the fang again, gripping it like an anchor. The warmth spread through his palm, up his arm, centering him in a body that felt like wearing someone else's skin.
Because it was someone else's skin.
His family was dead. He was dead. And yet he was alive, trapped in a Church dungeon in the body of a tortured thief, with a mysterious voice in his head talking about cultivation and dragons and truths he didn't understand.
The prisoner across the cell had gone quiet, probably assuming he'd finally lost his mind.
Maybe he had.
But the fang was warm, and the system messages still glowed in the darkness, and somewhere deep in this borrowed body, something ancient and reptilian stirred in response.
Ronn Ashwood—or whatever he was now—took a shuddering breath.
"Yes," he whispered to the glowing text. "Show me."