Time was meaningless in the crypt that forged him. Only the pain marked its passing. And pain had become sacred.
Samael floated still, soul chained to the altar's sleeping body, forced to watch his own becoming with the helpless ache of a ghost. He no longer wept. The fragments of who he had been—from that distant, mythless world—were growing silent. Not gone, but fading. Blurred. A girl's laughter. A school hallway. The metallic tang of blood after a fall on pavement. Distant echoes now, waterlogged memories beneath a rising tide of magic and agony.
The body stirred.
The wings had not retracted. They wrapped the boy like a funeral shroud, still twitching in dreams of storm. The eyes, silver and open, no longer gazed—only waited.
And the man came again.
His robes now scorched at the hem, his hair matted with sweat and old blood. His eyes were not triumphant. They were hungry. The look of a dying thing too stubborn to collapse before its work was done.
"There is power in fire," he rasped. "Not the fire of spells or stars, but the flame of dragons. Of tyrants. Of the world's first fear."
He placed the heart upon the altar.
It was not warm. It burned.
Even as it sat inert, preserved in ancient rune-salve, the dragon heart pulsed with molten memory. Samael saw it—not through eyes, but through soul. He saw the beast it once belonged to: a serpent of smoke and iron, eyes like molten gates, wings that turned cities to ash. It had died in battle, not slain by a hero, but sacrificed in secret by the man before him—its heart harvested before its body cooled.
"This will be your core," Ekrizdis said. "Not a mere enhancement. A replacement."
The scalpel returned.
But this time, it was not ethereal or alchemical. It was real—an obsidian blade soaked in wyrm-venom, its edge honed by goblin stone-rites.
The chest was opened.
Samael screamed—again.
This time, it was worse. The pain was not spiritual or mental. It was visceral. His heart was removed. Torn free. The absence of it was a cold he had never known, deeper than death. For a brief moment, he felt nothing. And it was not peace. It was the void.
Then the dragon's heart touched the altar.
It beat once—and the entire room shook.
The runes flared red.
It beat again—and lightning danced across the ceiling.
The man did not smile. He did not dare. With a tremor in his voice, he uttered the final word of binding and pushed it into the chest cavity.
The heart accepted the body. Or perhaps, the body submitted to the heart.
Samael felt it ignite.
Not metaphorically—truly. Magic, pure and unbound, surged through bone and vein, liquefying all resistance. The boy's flesh did not char. It adapted. It thrived. The marrow sang. The spine arched. The silver eyes flared. The wings lifted once in convulsion, then stilled.
The fire settled in him.
And Samael knew then that he no longer required a wand.
The instinct was enough. The will was spell. The incantation—obsolete.
But the ritual was not done.
Ekrizdis turned to the last of his abominations.
From a shadowed urn, he pulled the shivering black silk of the Lethifold.
It hissed, not with voice, but with memory. The air grew heavier. Colder. It wrapped around his hand like liquid night, seeking prey, seeking heat. It was hunger incarnate.
"Shroud," he said, as if naming a child.
Samael felt its hunger long before it touched his body.
It was not a beast of flesh. It was will given darkness. It had devoured innocents. Wanderers. Dreamers. Now it would be bound to him—not as cloak or tool, but as spiritual parasite. A second skin.
Ekrizdis drew runes upon the boy's chest, just above the newly grafted heart.
With an incantation older than Azkaban's stone, he pressed the Lethifold to the body.
It resisted.
It screamed.
It tried to escape.
But the dragon's heart pulsed again, sending a command through the flesh. The Lethifold curled around the body, then dissolved—not into cloth, but into shadow. It soaked into the pores. Into the soul.
Samael felt it enter.
Like ink into water, it spread. Cold. Intelligent. Predatory.
It moved with thought. It breathed with his unbreathing chest. It listened.
Then it spoke—not in words, but in alignment.
He was no longer alone in himself.
There was another. Watching. Waiting. Loyal only to power.
And Samael was that power.
The body convulsed, then lay still.
Ekrizdis collapsed to his knees, exhausted. "It is done," he whispered. "You are complete."
He was wrong.
Samael—the soul—knew it.
Because something else stirred.
The Shade.
The fusion of magic and grief and silence. It had been dormant until now. But with the Lethifold joined, and the dragon's fire coursing through his bloodless veins, the Shade awoke.
It drifted through his arm, a cold tide forming the vague suggestion of a raven's beak, etched in shadows along the skin.
Not yet devouring.
Not yet rising.
But watching.
Waiting for the moment the boy would choose.
And for the first time, Samael felt something beyond pain.
He felt hunger.