Rain lashed against the city streets, washing the neon signs into streaks of red and blue. James Evans hunched under his thin jacket, his shoes soaked through, his breath visible in the cold night air. The clock on the corner tower struck midnight. Another day gone. Another meaningless shift survived.
He crossed the road, phone in hand, scrolling through messages that never came.
A blaring horn split the air.Headlights bloomed, white, merciless.For a heartbeat, time froze.
Then came the impact.
The world went silent.
No pain. No sound. Just… stillness.
James blinked, or thought he did. The world around him dissolved into an ocean of black. He tried to move, but there was no body to move. Panic clawed at his fading mind. Was this it? The end? No grand revelation, no tunnel of light, just nothing?
But then, something shimmered in the void.
A light. Soft. Warm. Alive.
It pulsed like a heartbeat, each rhythm sending waves of colour through the darkness. A voice came with it—neither male nor female, but vast, echoing with the weight of eternity.
"You died, child of Earth."
James's thoughts flickered. Died? The word sank into him, heavy and real.
"Y-yeah… guess I did."
"Do you wish to fade? Or do you wish… to begin again?"
He hesitated. This had to be a dream. A dying hallucination. And yet, deep within, a tiny spark, the same one that had kept him alive through all his lonely, unremarkable days, flickered to life.
"What do you mean, begin again?"
The light brightened. Within it, shapes began to move, mountains floating in the sky, seas of fire, vast shadows of creatures whose wings blotted out suns.
"The world beyond yours is in silence. Its gods have fallen to sleep, wounded from their endless wars. Mortals tremble beneath their absence. The divine thrones lie empty. Yet… divinity does not wait forever."
The words struck something primal in him. Gods asleep? Thrones empty?A chance to become something more than human?
"Why me?" he whispered. "I was no one. Just... James."
The light pulsed with what might have been amusement.
"Even the greatest dragons and gods began as sparks within chaos."
The void trembled. He felt something pulling at him; an invisible current tugging his very soul.
"You will be born anew, in a world where strength is truth and faith shapes reality. Rise, mortal. Seize the name that echoes in eternity."
The light flared blinding white. His consciousness fractured—scattered through time and space.
In that final instant before rebirth, he heard the name whispered, not by one voice but by a thousand.
"Tiamat."
And then came fire.
He fell through a storm of crimson and gold, through the cries of dragons and the roar of oceans. His body, new, powerful, alien, coalesced from divine flame. Scales shimmered across wings vast enough to darken continents. His heart thundered like a god's forge.
He screamed, not in pain, but in awakening.
Thus began the story of James Evans, the man who died on Earth...and rose as Tiamat, the Dragon God of a sleeping world of gods.