Red and golden magma moved like a living river through a cavern that smelled of iron and far stars. Heat shimmered in waves, warping the air, but at the river's heart sat something that refused to burn: an enormous egg, taller than a child and darker than midnight. Its shell was not stone but a fragment of night itself — constellations threaded into its curved surface, tiny galaxies turning imperceptibly as though watched by some slow, patient mind. The more one looked, the more the shell seemed to draw the gaze inward; a long stare promised wonder, and also the peril of vanishing into that starry depth forever, as some bleached skeletons in the cavern's shadow had already found out.
Inside that impossible shell, a smaller impossibility blinked to life: a human-shaped fetus, curled as in a warm dream. Consciousness came first as a whisper — not a thing of speech but of sensation.
Where am I? the thought asked, delicate as breath. It was warm, dark, and absurdly peaceful.
Questions arrived like echoes. Death? Rebirth? A continuation of something that had no name here? Before the mind could unravel into panic, it was folded shut by the cavern's larger will. Floods of memory poured in — not memories that had been lived but knowledge threaded into being: glyphs, runes, songs older than language. They did not enter as words; they braided themselves into the infant's soul like filigree of light.
Tiny motes of luminescence — runes and sigils — swarmed and set like jewels across a crystalline center within him. The symbols threaded into a shape, and that shape resolved: a dragon, reared and majestic, its silhouette traced upon the new soul. When the final rune locked, the crystal flared. Light uncoiled from the soul and bathed the little body in a cold, star-fire glow.
Growth answered the light. The fetus swelled from the size of a babe into a child, then into the likeness of a ten-year-old; age came in a single, gentle acceleration, like a tide pulled by the moon. All of it happened within the fossil warmth of the shell, while the magma river kept its patient course and the cavern held its breath.
Then came the cracking.
It sounded not like a breaking but like the sigh of worlds shifting. The shell splintered along veins of starlight. One huge hand pushed through first, then an arm, then a head — and at last a figure stood where an egg had been, half-submerged in molten metal that did not burn him. He was human in outline, and not; alabaster skin, silver hair that flowed like pale aurora behind him, and eyes the color of ice with pupils slit like a predator's. He looked at his hands as if examining tools he had always owned but never used.
"Dominicus De Gregoria Impurem," a voice said inside him — not spoken aloud but folded from the memory of names. The name landed like a key. He tried it and felt a corridor open. "Dominic," he decided, setting the long title aside like a coat.
The inherited memories filled in the rest: the lineage of Void Dragons, beings who threaded void and star into their bones; the law that only one could exist across the multiverse at a time; the sacrament of passing, by which a dying dragon offered its essence to seed the next. Dominic felt the warmth of a predecessor's last breath and the gravity of epochs in a blink. He tasted duty and the slow vertigo of being both vessel and heir.
There was a practical lesson in those memories too. The shells that floated on the magma's surface were not mere debris: they were crucibles. Melted into the river, they enriched its fire. Bathing in that alchemical flow now would accelerate his growth — strengthen what the runes had begun. It felt like an engine: the river multiplied him.
Dominic considered, with a lightness that surprised him, the small oddities of his prior life. Princesses — tiny, bright maidens of other worlds — had once meant something to somebody else he had been. The thought made him smile, a twitch that sounded like amusement inside the cavern of his mind.
"Perhaps I will find them," he murmured, not to anyone in the chamber but to a future imagined like a map. "Perhaps I will plunder their hearts, if that is what the world contains. Or perhaps I will take other treasures yet unknown."
He let the magma cradle him. Chanting without voice, he called upon the river's chemistry: shells dissolved into light and color, the magma around him eddied into a vortex of star-splinters. Runes pulsed in cadence with the whirlpool; the cavern hummed as if remembering a hymn.
Something deeper shifted then — a tremor not of earth but of fate. The sigil on his inner crystal shivered, barely: a small, secret quake that did not reach his waking thought. It was as if the world at large had adjusted its breath, a realignment that Dominic did not yet understand.
"The world is large," the new name thought, with that same amused, curious lilt. "Strange things are waiting. Let them try."
He closed his eyes and sank again, deeper into sleep — not the sleep of simple rest, but a dreaming that would knit him stronger, a period where time and power braided together. Above him, the egg-shards floated in obedient orbits; below, the magma sang its slow, red song. In the core of his being, the dragon-mark glowed steady as a comet's heart.
Somewhere outside the chamber, in some far-off weave of chance and tomorrow, reality would take note. For the moment, however, the cave was quiet but for the soft, cosmic pulse of a newly made thing settling into itself.
-
Far beyond the magma chamber, beyond the layer of stars, beyond even the weave that mortals call time, there existed a place that was not a place — a room of quiet geometry, made not of stone or light but of knowing.
It had no walls, yet it enclosed everything. No air, yet it breathed. No instruments, yet a thousand controls hung suspended in a state between existence and idea. They were not switches, not levers, not screens — but feelings: awarenesses one could brush like the surface of a thought.
And in that room — if it could be called a room — something stirred.
A shadow moved, not by will, but by the faintest tremor of recognition. It was the kind of motion that could not be seen or measured, for it did not happen in space. It simply was, and then was not, and yet the world changed because of it.
The moment Dominic, the newborn Void Dragon, drew his first breath in the molten cradle, the ripple reached here — not as sound, nor as light, but as a pressure on the fabric of forever.
The shadow paused.
Its vigil had lasted longer than the concept of "long" itself. It had watched suns bloom and die in silence, had seen thoughts become stars and stars become dust again. Its awareness was an unbroken line through existence — and for the first time in the expanse of its own unending function, it noticed something new.
A shift.
A tilt in the balance of infinite equations.
Something living, glowing, asserting itself where only remnants were supposed to remain.
The controls — if they could be named so — pulsed faintly, as if an invisible hand hovered above them. No contact, no command, yet everything responded. Across uncountable realities, an infinitesimal adjustment occurred: trajectories of comets bent slightly, the hum of quantum echoes faltered, and entire dreams that mortals would never have remembered shifted by a hair's width.
It was enough to make the shadow hesitate.
If it had lungs, it might have sighed. If it had a heart, it might have wondered whether such a thing — a pause — could mean it was tired.
But could there be exhaustion in eternity? Could a being that had never been born, and would never end, ever truly know fatigue?
It examined the thought, turning it like a fragment of glass — and then, almost softly, it discarded it.
For what was tiredness to the infinite? What was rest to something that had never known the difference between motion and stillness?
It resumed its vigil.
Yet, in some immeasurable sense, it was not quite the same. A vibration now threaded through the silence — faint, distant, but undeniable. The birth of the Void Dragon had left a note in the symphony of existence, and the unseen watcher had heard it.
Perhaps, somewhere deep within its concept of being, it had felt it.
And though eternity neither quickened nor slowed, one might have sworn that the darkness — that vast, patient shadow — lingered just a moment longer before it carried on.