The sun over the Celestial City of Helios was a tyrant. It did not warm; it branded. Its light was a judgment, pouring over marble so white it hurt the eyes, glinting off golden armor, and illuminating the one patch of shadow in the Grand Agora—the execution platform.
Kaelen felt that light sear the scales along his spine. They were the color of tarnished silver and twilight, the only visible inheritance from his mother. The rest of him—the shape of his face, the build of his body—mocked him with his father's human lineage. But it was the two massive, mangled stumps on his back that drew the hungry eyes of the crowd. His wings had been sheared at the root yesterday. The pain was a constant, screaming chorus, but he refused to give it voice.
Chains of sun-forged ore bound his wrists and ankles, their heat a low-grade burn against his skin. He knelt, not in submission, but because the weight of the chains and the guards' halberds on his shoulders left no choice.
"Behold!" The Herald's voice, amplified by magic, thundered across the silent thousands. "The abomination! Kaelen, so-called son of the traitor-king Orin and the draconic witch Xyrthana! A living blasphemy against the natural order decreed by our God-King Solaris!"
The crowd roared. It was a sound of fear, channeled into hatred. Fear of the unknown, of the monsters that lurked beyond the God-King's light. Fear he embodied.
Kaelen lifted his head, his slit-pupiled eyes—another gift from his mother—scanning the dais. There, on a throne of living light, sat Solaris. His form was perfection, radiating a warmth the sun lacked, but Kaelen saw the glacier in his gaze. To his right stood his three sons, proud and pitiless generals. To his left…
Her.
Princess Lyra. Her hair was a cascade of spun sunlight, her eyes the serene blue of a high mountain lake. She was clad in a gown of celestial silk that seemed woven from moonbeams and starlight. She watched, expressionless, a porcelain monument to divine indifference. Yesterday, when they had broken his wings on the wheel, her gaze had been the same. Clinical. Observant. As if studying the mechanics of a broken toy.
"The sentence," the Herald boomed, "is absolute. Total eradication. Body, soul, and legacy. Let the light cleanse this stain!"
The Executioner, a giant of a man in enchanted plate mail, stepped forward. In his hands was not an axe, but a spear of pure, condensed sunlight—the Sunlance. A touch would incinerate Kaelen from the inside out, unravel his very soul to prevent any chance of afterlife or rebirth.
This was it. The end of a failed rebellion. The end of a half-blood prince who never fit in any world. Rage, cold and dense as a neutron star, filled him. Not just at Solaris, or the crowd. At her. At her perfect, unflinching calm. He locked his eyes with Lyra's across the distance.
You watch, he thought, pouring every ounce of his fury, his pain, his cursed existence into the glare. You watch, and you do nothing. Remember this face. Remember that you were here.
For a flicker—so fast he thought he imagined it—something shifted in her lake-blue eyes. A tiny ripple. A fracture in the ice. Then it was gone.
The Executioner raised the Sunlance. The tip blazed, a miniature sun born to kill him. The crowd held its breath.
Kaelen did not close his eyes. He filled his mind with the memories he had: his mother's low, rumbling lullabies in a tongue of fire and shadow; his father's calloused hand on his head, promising a kingdom where all bloodlines could be free; the scent of pine and frost in his mountain home, now ash.
The lance descended.
Agony. Not of impact, but of unraveling. The light tore into his chest, not burning, but dissolving. He felt his heart vaporize, his bones turn to light, his consciousness fraying at the edges. The world dissolved into blinding gold and screaming silence.
But in the very core of that dissolution, something answered.
From his mother's blood, a final, dormant ember flared. Not fire, but something older. Aethel. The primordial clay from which gods, dragons, demons, and reality itself were sculpted. The Sunlance's power, meant to annihilate, instead struck that ember.
KAELEN.
A voice. Not a sound, but a tectonic shift in his soul.
MY SON. THE DOOR IS OPEN. FALL NOT INTO LIGHT. FALL INTO THE DEPTHS. CLAIM WHAT IS YOURS.
The golden light of his execution twisted, darkened, became a vortex of impossible colors. He was no longer rising into some celestial afterlife. He was plummeting. Down, through layers of reality, through the foundations of the world, past the realms of men and gods, into the choked, silent dark beneath all things.
The last thing from the world above was not the crowd's cheer, but a single, sharp sensation—a tug, like a silver thread connected to his soul, pulling taut from the direction of the dais. From her.
Then, cold. Wet. The smell of stagnant water, ancient stone, and profound, cosmic decay.
He hit shallow, icy liquid, gasping a breath that was half water. He coughed, agony blazing from his back anew. He was alive. Whole. But the light was gone. Above was not sky, but a cavern roof so high it was lost in gloom. Phosphorescent fungi dotted the walls, providing a sickly, greenish bioluminescence.
He pushed himself up, his chains gone, his execution rags replaced by strange, fibrous garments. He was in a cavern of impossible scale. And he was not alone.
All around the subterranean lake's edge, figures watched. A creature with skin of bark and eyes like glowing coal. A woman with diaphanous wings and a mouth full of needle-teeth, hovering just above the water. A massive, shadowy form with too many limbs, crouched in the darkness. Their gazes held not pity, nor malice, but a deep, weary curiosity.
From the darkness, a new figure emerged. Tall, elegant, pale as a corpse, with eyes the color of old blood and an aura of ancient, melancholic power. He moved with silent grace, stopping at the water's edge.
"Welcome," the vampire said, his voice a dry whisper that echoed strangely in the vast space. "To the Abyssal Pits. The dumping ground for all the God-King's… inconvenient truths. The home of the forsaken. I am Valerius, once-lord of the Crimson Court. And you…" He inhaled slightly, as if tasting the air. "You smell of dragon-god. And fresh vengeance. An interesting combination."
Kaelen tried to speak, but only a rasp came out. He forced the words, each one a stone dragged from the ruins of his soul. "Where… is this?"
"The underside of creation," Valerius said, gesturing vaguely upward. "The realm where things that cannot be destroyed are imprisoned. Titans who challenged the gods. Demons who lost the ancient wars. Monsters too unique to kill. And now… you. The Draconian who would not die."
Kaelen looked at his own hands. They were shaking. Not from fear, but from the raw, screaming power now simmering in his veins—the Aethel, awakened by his death. He felt the ghost-pain of his wings, but also a new, terrifying potential.
"Why am I here?" Kaelen demanded, his voice growing stronger.
"Because your death was a key," said a grinding, stony voice. The bark-skinned creature stepped forward. "It cracked the door. Your blood is a bridge. Dragon. Human. Aethel-touched. You can walk where we cannot. You can gather the power they fear."
Valerius nodded. "The Pits are not one prison, but many, layered like a rotten onion. At its heart are chained powers that could shatter the heavens. But the passages between layers are… contested. You wish revenge against the God-King?"
Kaelen thought of Solaris's light. Of his brothers' scorn. Of Lyra's eyes. The cold star of his rage burned brighter. "Yes."
"Then survive," the vampire said simply. "Grow strong. Make pacts. Learn the rules of this dark place. The first rule: Nothing is given. Everything is taken, bargained for, or earned in blood. The second: Trust is the quickest path to a second death."
A guttural roar echoed from a tunnel mouth behind them. Something massive, multi-limbed, and hungry scraped its way closer. The other inhabitants of the cavern melted into the shadows, watching.
Valerius didn't move. "Your first lesson begins. That is a Skarn, a soul-hunger from the deeper vaults. It should not be this high up. It has been attracted by the scent of your rebirth. You have no weapons. No wings. Only your will and the strange new power in your chest. What will you do, Draconian?"
Kaelen looked at the approaching horror—a mound of armored plates, barbed tentacles, and a single, gaping maw lined with spiraling teeth. Fear, animal and absolute, clawed at his throat. But beneath it, hotter and fiercer, was the rage. The memory of the Sunlance. The image of a princess's perfect, unmoved face.
He let the rage rise. He felt the Aethel in his core—a tiny, chaotic spark—respond. It reached out, not to the world, but to the very darkness around him, to the latent energy of decay and despair that saturated this place.
His hands curled into fists. Shadowy vapor, streaked with hints of tarnished silver, began to weep from his scales and his skin.
He did not know what he was doing. He only knew he refused to die again.
"I," Kaelen snarled, the word echoing with a faint, draconic resonance, "will take its head."
And as the Skarn charged, the first true Aethelborn in millennia took his first, unsteady step into the dark, his journey of god-forged revenge and empire-building finally begun.