He woke without knowing how long he had been unconscious.
There was no dream. No vision. No revelation.
He simply opened his eyes.
For a moment, he lay still inside the hollow ribcage of the dragon, staring upward at the curved bones arching above him. His body felt… normal. There was no lingering pain. No visible change.
But something was different.
His hunger.
It was there always there but no longer frantic. It had sharpened, deepened, become heavier. Instead of constant clawing, it now felt like something vast and patient waiting inside him.
He stood slowly.
The world felt clearer.
He could hear more distinctly the faint scraping of insects across bone outside, the distant wings of birds cutting through air. He could see further across the battlefield when he stepped out from the dragon's mouth. Even the wind brushing against scattered remains felt sharper against his skin.
His senses had improved.
But he did not care.
Awareness meant nothing to him if it did not quiet hunger.
So he continued as he always had.
He finished the dragon.
Methodically. Completely.
When nothing remained inside but bone and dried membrane, he left it behind and moved to the next.
Only now did he begin to notice something he had not cared to observe before. The dragons were not the same.
Some were red, though the red had darkened with age.Some were pale, almost silver beneath dried blood.Some were smaller, their bodies slender.Others were massive.
And then there was the black dragon.
Even in death, it felt different.
Its scales were darker than night itself, absorbing light instead of reflecting it. It was larger than the rest, its skeletal frame alone towering above the others even as decay slowly consumed what remained.
It was the hardest.
Even after years, its body had barely changed.
He worked through them one by one.
Time passed again.
The sun rose. The sun set. Over and over.
He grew.
When he first began eating the dragons, he had been four. Now, without knowing how years were measured, he had reached seven. His limbs had lengthened. His movements were steadier, more deliberate. His once small frame had begun to take on the shape of a young boy rather than a toddler.
Yet his eyes remained the same.
Pitch black.
Empty, but not dull.
At some point, he noticed something strange.
The human bodies were gone.
Not entirely gone but reduced to bones. Cleaned by time, by birds, by weather.
Yet the dragons' remains had persisted far longer. Even after he consumed them from within, their outer frames resisted decay in a way the others had not.
He did not question why.
He did not know enough to question it.
Eventually, there was nothing left.
No elephants.
No horses.
No dragons with flesh.
No humans with anything more than skeletons.
The battlefield that had once been red was now pale and gray. Bones lay scattered across miles of land. The wind moved freely without obstruction. Only a few birds still visited, disappointed by the absence of sustenance.
He stood in the middle of it.
Alive.
His body had changed subtly over the years. His skin no longer looked like a child's, though it remained smooth. There was density beneath it now, a coiled strength that did not match his size. His frame was lean but unnaturally resilient. Cuts that once would have crippled him barely marked him anymore.
He never noticed these changes.
Change requires comparison. He had nothing to compare himself to.
One evening, he climbed atop the skeletal remains of the black dragon. Its ribcage rose like the ruins of a fallen fortress. He sat there, looking at the sky as it shifted from gold to deep blue.
For the first time, something stirred inside him that was not hunger.
A question.
How did this begin?
He did not remember clearly.
When he tried to look back into his own past, his mind felt blurred. There were fragments not images fully formed, but impressions.
He remembered searching.
For someone.
He did not know who.
He remembered a sound.
A woman's voice.
Soft. Faint. Calling something.
He tried to hold onto it, but it slipped away like mist.
There had been faces too, but they were smudged, shapeless. Whenever he tried to focus, they dissolved into nothing.
He sat quietly, staring upward.
Why was he here?
Why had everything been asleep when he arrived?
Why was he the only one still moving?
The battlefield no longer felt terrifying. It felt empty.
The wind moved through hollow bones, creating low, whistling sounds. A few birds circled lazily in the sky. Beyond that, nothing.
There was nothing left to eat.
Nothing left to hunt.
Nothing left to consume.
For the first time in years, he did not immediately feel hunger gnawing at him. At some point, without him noticing when, it had lessened. It no longer ruled him completely. It sat deeper inside, quieter.
He looked toward the horizon.
He had never left the battlefield.
Not because he feared what lay beyond, but because there had always been something here to sustain him.
Now there was nothing.
He sat on the bones of the black dragon a while longer, watching the sky darken.
Then he stood.
If there was nothing here, he would walk.
He did not know what lay beyond the edge of the battlefield. He did not know how large the world was. He did not know whether others like him existed.
He only knew one thing.
Staying meant emptiness.
So he began walking toward the horizon, toward the place where the field of bones met the unknown.