The silence that had enveloped our walk to class was a fragile thing, thick with the unspoken understanding between Cain and me. It was a truce built on shared grief, not friendship, and it felt as stable as glass. We filed into the lecture hall, the usual pre-class chatter conspicuously absent from our group. We took our seats, the rustle of parchment and the scrape of chairs the only sounds. The air still felt heavy with the ghost of Cain's sobs and the raw confession I had laid bare on the training grounds.
Then Professor Ironwood entered, and the very atmosphere of the room shifted. He did not stand at his podium. Instead, he sat on the edge of his great oak desk, his gnarled hands folded in his lap. He looked older somehow, the lines on his face deeper, as if the lesson he was about to impart had physically weighed upon him for centuries. His voice, when he spoke, was low and intimate, a stark contrast to his usual booming lectures. It was the tone of a man sharing a secret that could shatter the world, and every one of us leaned forward, caught in its gravity.
"Forget your tidy categories," he began, his ancient eyes, like chips of flint, scanning our faces. He seemed to look right through me, through Cain, through all of us, seeing the childish notions of conflict we carried. "Forget good and evil. The oldest stories, the true histories, are not so simple. They are stories of choice."
He leaned forward, and the weight of his words pressed down on the room, making the previous hour's tensions feel small and insignificant.
"There was once a Dragon. Not a mere beast, but a concept given form. The concept of Avarice, of Hoarding, of taking all that was and storing it away in a vault of silence. His name was Aethelgard. He was a Primordial, one of the five wanderers of the void. His breath did not burn; it erased. It unmade magic, history, and matter, adding their essence to his cosmic collection. He, along with his kin Behemoth, Phoenix, Ziz, and Leviathan were coming to our world to add it to their troves. To unmake it."
The statement was so blunt, so devoid of theatricality, that it was chilling. This wasn't a myth; it was a historical report of an impending apocalypse.
"But something happened here that had not happened on a thousand other worlds," Ironwood continued, his voice gaining a subtle, awed intensity. "We do not know why. Perhaps it was the stubborn vibrancy of life. Perhaps it was a song a mortal sang, or a single act of selfless courage witnessed from the void. But Aethelgard, the Great Devourer, the Embodiment of Want… hesitated."
I felt a shiver run down my spine. Hesitated.
"He looked upon our world," Ironwood said, his gaze distant, as if seeing the event itself, "not as a treasure to be consumed, but as something more. A story he did not wish to end. A value he could not quantify by simply possessing it. And in that moment of hesitation, a new concept was born within him: not Avarice, but Stewardship."
I glanced at Cain from the corner of my eye. His head was bowed, but he was listening, his fists clenched tightly in his lap.
"He saw his kin descend Behemoth to crack the world's bones, Phoenix to scour it clean, Ziz to claim its skies, and Leviathan to dissolve it into chaos. And Aethelgard made a choice. He turned. He placed himself between our world and the other four."
The image was staggering. A dragon of cosmic greed, its nature the very essence of taking, suddenly becoming a shield. A protector.
"He could not defeat them. They were his equals. So, he did the only thing he could. He opened his vault, not to take, but to give. He unleashed every story, every spell, every shred of reality he had ever consumed in his aeons of hunger. He wove it all into a net of sealing, a prison of stolen histories and erased magics." Ironwood's voice dropped to a whisper, forcing us to strain to hear. "But it was not enough. The prison needed a lock. A key that could never be found."
A profound silence gripped the hall. We all knew what was coming.
"So, he gave that too. He gave his name. He gave his will. He gave his very consciousness. He used the last of his power to thrust the other four into a dimensional prison, and then he sealed himself in with them, becoming the living lock on the door." Ironwood paused, letting the magnitude of the sacrifice sink in. "The ultimate hoarder, who finally hoarded something to protect it, rather than to own it. He hoarded our future."
He gave his name. The words echoed in the stillness of my mind. I thought of my own guilt, my own fear. It seemed so petty in the face of such a sacrifice.
"The Dragon King is not a separate being," Ironwood said softly, his gaze sweeping over us once more, now filled with a fierce, proud light. "He is the title we gave to Aethelgard in that final, sacrificial act. The king who gave his kingdom to save another. The Primordial who chose us over his own nature."
He stood up, his old frame straightening, seeming to draw strength from the story itself.
"But his ancient underlings, the echoes of his original nature the Thunderbird, the Kraken, the Grendel, the Ōmukade they remain. They do not seek a king to serve. They seek the Devourer to awaken. They want to break the prison and restore Aethelgard to what he was, to complete the consumption of this world that was so rudely interrupted."
His eyes found mine, then Cain's, then Kael's, holding each of our gazes for a moment.
"So you see, you are not training to fight monsters from a storybook. You are training to defend a choice. You are the legacy of a dragon's impossible, world saving change of heart." He let his words hang in the air, a final, defining pronouncement. "The greatest power in the universe is not destruction. It is the ability to choose to be something more than your nature. That is the lesson of Aethelgard. And that is the standard you must now strive to meet."
He dismissed us with a slow nod. No one moved for a long moment. We rose slowly, filing out of the hall not with the weight of a terrifying history, but with the profound, staggering burden of a priceless debt.
As I stepped into the corridor, the weight of the story settling in my soul, a familiar, shimmering script materialized before my eyes, its letters burning with a faint, ancient gold.
[Memory Fragment Attained.]
[Synopsis: "The Hesitation of Aethelgard" assimilated.]
[Unlocking new skill...]
[Dragon Soul Ignition has been added to your skills.]
[ ??? ]
The message faded, but a new presence lingered in my chest, a dormant heat that felt both alien and intimately familiar. The memory of Cain's tears and my own failure was still there, but now it was framed by a much larger story a story of a dragon who hesitated, and in doing so, taught us what it truly meant to be a hero.