The can was still cold.
Icaris turned it over in his claws again, steam curling off the metal from where his fire threatened to melt it. Whatever had been in the drink, it wasn't just sugar and bubbles.
He could feel it humming inside him—something subtle, like the click of a locked door finally opening. Not a new power, exactly. More like… a key.
He didn't know who that guy was or where he went. The Dr Pepper Man had showed up, handed him a drink, and dropped two mages like a sack of charred boar meat. No words. No explanation. Just... fizz and violence.
And somehow, it worked.
Icaris exhaled slowly. The Wisp he'd caught was still pulsing in a flame-formed cage nearby, glowing faintly. It flinched every time he looked at it. Smart.
"Right," he muttered to himself. "New power. Old forest. Crazy soda god. Definitely time to rethink priorities."
The idea of going back to the others—his siblings, the cave, the half-warm nest—felt small now. Like a fire burning down to embers.
He wasn't meant to stay tucked away in shadows. He was a dragon. A real one. Not a hatchling. Not prey.
And dragons didn't hide.
They hunted. They learned. They conquered.
He turned his gaze eastward, toward the deeper part of the forest. The trees were thicker there. The light barely made it through the canopy. Rumors—even in ancestral memory fragments—called it The Hollow Heart. The Aether ran dense there. Warped things grew in that soil. Ancient beasts slept under that bark.
Dangerous?
Absolutely.
But Icaris grinned.
"Sounds perfect."
The deeper he moved, the more the forest changed.
The air was heavy with Aether. Not like before—this wasn't just ambient magic. This was alive. Breathing. A pulse under the ground.
His claws sunk into moss that glowed faintly with every step. His scales prickled, like his own fire was reacting to something unseen.
There was a crack in the air, subtle but real. A shift in the wind. Even the trees leaned a little too far in, like they were eavesdropping.
And then he saw it.
A stone monolith, half-buried in roots, standing in the middle of a clearing that shouldn't have existed. It wasn't tall—barely twice his height—but it felt like it had weight. Not just physically. It pressed on the world around it.
Symbols were carved into it. Old. Faded. The kind that felt wrong just to look at.
Icaris stepped forward slowly. "Okay, creepy rock in the middle of nowhere. This is either a bad idea or a fantastic one."
The Aether here was thick—too thick. He flexed his claws. Flames sparked, but then flickered oddly. The fire bent toward the monolith, like it was drawn to it.
He didn't like that.
Not one bit.
"Alright. Let's test something."
He stepped closer and reached out with a tendril of flame—not an attack, just a touch.
The moment it connected with the stone, something inside him jerked.
He saw flashes—an ancient battlefield, skies torn open, dragons screaming as golden chains bound their wings. A man in robes, eyes like cracked glass, standing at the edge of a shattered continent. Then... black.
Icaris stumbled back, claws digging into the dirt. The Wisp behind him screeched and collapsed, its light flickering violently before vanishing.
Silence.
The monolith pulsed once. Faint. Then quiet again.
Icaris's heart pounded. "Okay. So… that's a thing."
It wasn't just a rock. It was something sealed. Or something remembering.
Either way, it wasn't meant for hatchlings.
But something in him had responded. That part of him—the part the Dr Pepper Man had sparked—was tugging at the edges of his thoughts, urging him forward. Like the world had just peeled back a layer and said, "There's more."
And dragons didn't ignore that kind of call.
He didn't know yet what this monolith was, or what the visions meant, but he knew one thing clearly now:
This forest wasn't his home. It was his proving ground.
And out here, power wasn't given.
It was hunted.