Rhyka didn't remember closing his eyes.
There was no moment where things faded to black, no point where exhaustion crept in and lulled him to rest. One second, he was staring at the stained ceiling of his small, broken home, pain thudding in his ribs, frustration lodged like a stone in his throat. The next, that reality was simply… gone.
There was no falling sensation, no jolt, no warning. Just a sudden, eerie disconnection.
His chest still rose and fell, but it didn't feel like his. His breath echoed like it belonged to a different body in a different room. His fingers wouldn't twitch. His legs didn't ache. All sensation faded, peeled away like an old bandage. What replaced it wasn't emptiness—it was stillness.
But not a peaceful stillness.
This was something more absolute. Like the laws that governed thought, time, and weight had been paused. It wasn't silence like in a cave or a heavy room it was silence like the kind you'd find in a vacuum, where sound doesn't exist at all.
Then something changed.
A presence.
Thick, invisible, almost gentle but unrelenting. Like being slowly dragged underwater by a current you couldn't see. It didn't hurt. It didn't frighten him. But it made him feel very small, and very far away from himself.
Then came the light.
It didn't flicker on It didn't rise It hit
A brutal, unfiltered brilliance exploded through his skull. His eyes snapped open—or maybe they were already open—but the light was so intense it didn't matter. It pierced through his retinas like needles of fire. He cried out, his voice swallowed instantly by the brightness around him. Instinctively, he raised a hand to shield his face, but the light wasn't coming from a single direction. It was everywhere—above, below, behind his eyes.
It wasn't sunlight.
It wasn't like anything natural.
It felt like staring into the center of something alive and old and furious.
For a long time, there was only that—light and pain and a growing sense of exposure, like every part of him was being peeled open and inspected by something he couldn't see.
And then, suddenly, there was ground beneath his feet.
Cool. Solid. Smooth.
He blinked rapidly, and the light dimmed just enough to make out his surroundings. He was standing on a path—a wide, straight strip of something like glass, but with a faint pulse of light running through it. It felt warm under his feet, and with each second, the pulse grew stronger, like the path itself was breathing.
He turned around. The path continued behind him, exactly the same. He looked left and right, and again, there was only more of the same.
No edges. No landmarks. Just an endless stretch of shimmering, quiet space.
Above him, the sky wasn't black, and it wasn't blue. It wasn't even sky. It was… pressure. A massive, blank ceiling that shifted slowly, like something immense pressed against a sheet just out of reach. There were no stars. No shapes. Just movement.
Then, without warning, the world started asking questions.
Not in sound, not aloud, but directly inside him.
Are you satisfied with your life?
Is this what you were made for?
What meaning has your pain served?
The voice wasn't cruel. It wasn't even aggressive. But it hit hard—cold and precise, like someone had dug their fingers into the back of his mind and squeezed. Each question seemed to press on things he didn't want to look at. Regrets. Wounds. Words he remembered too clearly.
He remembered being told he had no potential.
He remembered being laughed at.
He remembered how often he told himself he didn't care—how badly he wanted to believe it.
He remembered how often he still hoped something would change.
The path beneath his feet began to change too. The pulse of light dimmed. The clean glow faded into a sickly gray, and hairline fractures began to snake across the surface.
From those cracks, something began to grow.
Black vines.
At first, they seemed like roots—thin and scattered—but then they thickened, curled, and bloomed.
Roses.
Dozens of them.
Then hundreds.
They were beautiful, at a glance. But as they opened, Rhyka realized there was something off. Deeply off.
They absorbed the light rather than reflected it. No color glinted from their surface—no shine, no depth. And they were missing something vital: red. No matter how many bloomed, not a single petal showed even a hint of crimson. It was as if red itself had been erased from the world.
Then the roses moved.
Not the way flowers sway in wind—but with intention.
They twisted. They spiraled. The petals began to detach, spinning up into the air like blades of paper, surrounding him. They didn't slice, but they circled with increasing speed, faster and faster, until he couldn't see beyond the storm of motion.
And in the middle of it all—something appeared.
No. Revealed itself.
It had been there the whole time, crouched beneath the questions, behind the pressure, inside the silence. The roses were just its skin.
The sky split open down the middle like torn fabric. Something vast pushed through a body composed entirely of those black roses, shaped into limbs, claws, wings. It didn't fly. It didn't walk. It existed, and the world made space for it.
It was a dragon, but not like in fairy tales. No scales. No fire. No roar.
It moved like a thought given form.
Its wings, when they unfolded, stretched across the sky and back again. Its body was too large to measure. It bent gravity. It warped the air.
Then its eyes opened.
Two black pools. Wide, slow-turning spirals of lightless color Not dead aware.
Rhyka stared. He couldn't not. It was like being watched by a concept. Like if time had eyes and chose to look at you.
And from those eyes came the voice.
Not sound. Not vibration. Not language.
It became truth.
Do you want to be strong?
That was it.
No offer. No promise.
Just a question.
But this time, it was a real one.
It didn't judge.
It didn't mock.
It waited.
And the world waited with it.
Rhyka didn't answer right away. His throat was dry. His body felt numb. But his heart was still beating. Not calmly, not weakly furiously.
He looked down at his hands. The same hands that had been useless in class. The same ones that had trembled when he'd fought back tears. The same ones that had clawed at the door when no one would let him in.
He clenched them into fists. They shook.
The dragon said nothing more.
It didn't need to.
The storm of petals slowed.
The light under his feet flickered again—waiting, ready to react.
This was his moment.
Not anyone else's.
No instructor. No goddess.
Just him.
And a choice.
And something older than any world, watching.
Listening
Waiting.
For him.