The first few hours of consciousness were a disorienting, hazy affair. I lay on a rough cot in the dim, torch-lit common room of The Grey Anchor, the familiar sounds of Port Varrick's restless streets a distant, muffled hum. My body was a landscape of deep, profound aches, the phantom pain of a gut wound and the searing memory of erupting scales a ghost story told by my own screaming nerves. But I was whole. Alive. The fragmented, nightmarish memories of the battle, of the Huntsman's death, of turning on my own allies—they were a toxic sludge at the back of my mind, a truth too horrifying to fully confront just yet.
I had pushed everyone away. Leo, recovering in his own room under Garrick's watchful eye. Rolan, whose fear was a palpable thing every time he entered my presence. Even Seraphina, who tended to my needs with a quiet, heartbreaking efficiency, her usual warmth replaced by a fragile, cautious distance. She was still loyal. But now, she was also afraid of the monster she had seen wear my face.
Alone in the quiet of the evening, I finally looked at it. The ring. The simple, matte-black band the winged woman had given Seraphina. It sat on my finger, cool and heavy, absorbing the faint light of the room. It felt inert, a simple piece of metal. I pushed my Mana into it, a gentle, probing current. Nothing. I tried to sync the flow with my Two-Heart Cadence. Still nothing.
Frustration prickled. Was this some kind of cruel joke? A useless trinket? I thought back to what Seraphina had said the winged woman had told her. Not a weapon. Not a shield. But something that would help. What had my problem been? A loss of control, a surge of raw, untamed, primal energy. What if the ring wasn't meant to react to my controlled, human-guided Mana?
I took a breath, closing my eyes, and did something that terrified me. I stopped controlling. I let go of the rigid discipline of the cadence and allowed a sliver of the raw, untamed, draconic energy that now simmered beneath my skin to surge forth. It felt like holding a live wire, a spark of the same fury that had consumed me in the ruins. I let that chaotic, primal energy touch the ring.
It responded instantly. The matte-black surface shimmered, and I felt a distinct, sharp click not in the physical world, but within my own soul. It wasn't a pull, not a drain. It was an unlocking. A key turning in a lock I never knew existed. The ring itself did not change, but a flood of pure information, cool and clear as mountain water, poured directly into my mind. It was not a voice, not a vision, but a torrent of pure, conceptual understanding. The ring was not a container; it was a cypher, a key designed to translate a truth my mind could not otherwise grasp.
In that instant, the chaotic energy in my veins didn't vanish, but it suddenly had context. My mind, armed with this new information, could finally perceive its shape, its nature. The storm hadn't been calmed; I had just been handed a map of its currents.
And with that map came a book. A perfect, eidetic memory of a book materialized in my mind, as if I had read it a thousand times. It was small, bound in a material that felt like shed dragon skin, its cover bearing a single, complex symbol of a dragon coiled around a star. It had a title, and the title alone sent a shiver of recognition down my spine: On the Burdens of Inheritance.
The book, now a permanent part of my memory, laid out the truth. It spoke of beings like me. 'Inheritors'. Mortals who, through ritual, accident, or fate, had their souls fused with the power and essence of a profoundly different, inhuman species. It detailed the immense power such a fusion could grant, but also the terrible, fundamental price.
'The Inheritance is not a gift,' I read from the pages in my mind, the words stark and clear. 'It is a war. A war for sovereignty, fought within the vessel of a single soul. It is the clash of two distinct wills, two fundamentally different natures vying for control of a shared existence.'
The book described two paths for every Inheritor. The Path of Domination, for those born with a will of such singular, unyielding force that they could utterly suppress the inhuman consciousness from the outset, treating its power as a mere tool. This, the text noted, was the path of legends, of those whose human identity was so powerful it could not be questioned. 'The path of the original Lancelot,' I thought with a sickening lurch of my stomach. His soul, born of this world and forged in its hardships, had possessed the right temperament to simply command the dragon.
And then there was the other path. The Path of Integration. 'For those whose will is not inherently dominant,' the book explained, 'the war cannot be won through suppression. To try is to invite madness, to have one's soul fractured by a will that is not greater, but simply far older and more primal. For these Inheritors, the only path to survival is one of harmony, of a slow, arduous, and painful integration. They must not command the beast within; they must learn its language, understand its nature, and from the two warring halves, forge a new, unified will.'
My hands were shaking. This was it. An explanation. My soul, that of a 21st-century office worker, was not the soul of a fantasy hero. It lacked the inherent, unyielding dominance of the original Lancelot. I was not built for suppression. My only path forward was this terrifying, uncertain integration. I was on the Path of Integration.
The text then laid out the stakes, as cold and final as a death sentence. 'This trial, the Trial of Wills, must be completed before the Inheritor attempts to breach the Second Wall, the Soul Forge that separates Grandmaster from Archon. To attempt the Soul Forge with a fractured, warring will is to guarantee annihilation. Should the Inheritor fail in their Integration before this point, should they repeatedly surrender to the primal will, they will be consumed. The human soul will be erased, leaving only a mindless, raging beast, an 'Echo' of the creature it once hosted. For a Dragon Inheritor, this results in a gradual, horrifying transformation into a Wyrm—a lesser, devolved dragon of pure, mindless instinct.'
I slammed my eyes shut, the book in my mind snapping closed. A Wyrm. A mindless beast. That was the price of failure. That was the monster I had almost become, the monster I would become if I could not win this war for my own soul.
"I will not," I whispered into the silence of the room, the words a fierce, desperate promise to myself, to my own fracturing soul. "I will not be erased." I would tame the dragon. I would learn its song. I would achieve harmony.
It was in that moment of grim, terrifying resolve that the world intruded. A commotion from downstairs—shouted commands from Garrick, the heavy thud of armored boots, and a voice, high with frantic worry, that cut through my haze of self-discovery like a blade. My mother's voice. She was here.
Before I could even process the impossibility of it, my door burst open. Countess Eleonora Ashworth stood there, her fine traveling clothes spattered with road dust and mud, her usually perfect coif escaping its pins, her face a mask of sheer, unadulterated panic. She was flanked by two of our House's most elite guards, their faces grim. She must have ridden non-stop, day and night, from the moment some garbled report of the "gang attack" had reached her.
"Lancelot!" she breathed, her voice cracking with a week's worth of held-back tears. She rushed forward, pushing past my stunned silence, her hands immediately fluttering over me, checking for wounds her eyes couldn't see, her gaze frantic. "Oh, my boy. My foolish, brave boy. I came as soon as I heard. Attacked in the streets… I imagined the worst… that Huntsman…"
She pulled me into a fierce, trembling embrace. She smelled of the road, of horses and rain, but also of the familiar, comforting scent of home. She held me at arm's length, her eyes welling with tears as she took in my pale face, the bandages peeking from beneath my tunic, the haunted look in my eyes she couldn't possibly understand.
"You are too thin," she declared, her panic shifting instantly into a mother's fierce, practical authority, a force of nature in its own right. She turned to her guards. "Unpack the provisions immediately. I brought blankets from his own bed, broth from our kitchens. This city's water is filth." She turned back to me, already beginning to fuss, to straighten my tunic, to brush a stray lock of hair from my forehead as if I were still a boy of ten. Her love was a force of nature, an overwhelming, unconditional wave of normalcy that crashed against the shore of my secret, monstrous reality.
I stood there, stunned into silence, the ancient, terrifying truths of the Inheritor's Burden swirling in my mind, while my mother, blind to the dragon battling for her son's soul, worried only that he was not eating enough. The sheer, profound absurdity of it, the collision of these two worlds, was almost too much to bear. It was a stark, painful, and deeply welcome reminder of exactly what I was fighting for. Not just my own soul, but for the simple, precious right to continue to be her son.