Ughh!
Why is it dark? Why does it feel like my body keeps getting dragged?
A lucid dream?
Darkness didn't cling to Aris—it entered him. Grave-mold in his lungs, in the spaces between his thoughts. Pain didn't grind through him; it unraveled him, fiber by fiber, as something ancient dragged his consciousness through a void that tasted of rust and aborted prayers.
His eyes cracked open.
Not because he commanded them. Because the thing wearing his nerves decided it was time.
Green glow. Faint. Threading between colossal roots overhead. Moist air clung to his lungs, carrying earth and moss—and something beneath, patient and starving, recognizing its kin.
Move!
His arm twitched. Fingers grasped only dark. His neck shifted, vertebrae grinding against absence, against the hollow where something else had nested. Stone pressed cold against his side. He tried to roll, and the motion felt wrong—too heavy, rebuilt with unfamiliar weight.
His vision cleared.
Scales.
Dark metallic scales covered the arm before him. They caught the green glow in dull, shifting patterns—not armor, but occupiers.
His breath caught.
That's not…
He forced his hand—claw to move. It scraped stone with a harsh metallic sound. Curved talons. Thick scales. Joints that didn't belong to any human body.
This… isn't my body.
He pushed himself up. Limbs trembled under the weight that felt enormous, wrong. Something heavy dragged behind him as he shifted.
A tail lashed the stone floor.
The impact cracked through the cavern.
Aris froze.
No…
His breathing deepened. Heat stirred in his throat—small, uncontrolled, surprised. Not embers waking. Something that didn't expect to find him there.
Flesh erupted, bulbous and urgent. Rot-black scales hatched, punching through dermis with wet pops, knitting over sinew like mouths closing. He gasped, and smoke curled between his teeth—not flame, not yet, just the threat of it, acrid and confused.
Neck vertebrae crunched. Reconfiguring. Wounds soldered shut, molten metal cooling to mirror sheen. Silver-gold plates armored his chest, arms, and his tail—the word a scream as the appendage thrashed, heavy with hungers not his own.
Wings unfurled.
Not unfurled—unzipped. Membranes stretched between bone-fingers he hadn't possessed moments ago. They quivered with anticipation, veins filling with something too thick for blood.
Aris tried to scream. His throat produced a hiss that steamed in the green dark.
He dragged himself upright. Four legs. The number was wrong before he counted them, unsteady beneath a frame that cast shadows too large. He reached a shallow pool beneath the roots.
The reflection was not human.
Massive draconic form. Scaled hide. Horns sweeping back like crown-bones. Eyes slitted gold that saw heat before shape.
The creature moved when he moved.
Waited when he waited.
I… became this.
But the corpse was still changing.
Panic surged, hot as swallowed coals—and the coals whispered back. Good. Burn. We need the heat.
Sword clashes roared through him—not heard, inhabited. Steel vibration in the wrong bones. Arrows hailed against scale, and he felt impacts, bruising, the fury of pain taken in defense of—what? Territory. Pride. Draconic war, sacred to no one but the ash it fed. No guardians. No temples. Just teeth and flame and the silence after wings stopped beating.
The word rose unbidden from his stolen tongue: Contest.
It tasted of old hatreds. Of binding flame and territory marked in blood. Of duty to self, not others, continued even in death because the meat remembered burning.
His—no.
This body's.
Rage boiled up, alien yet familiar, steeped in the copper reek of sand drinking blood, blood feeding sand. Not his rage. But it wore his scales now. It flexed his talons. It tasted the air with his forked tongue and found nothing—emptiness, the cavern's end, the hollow where prey should be.
The rage had teeth.
And it was hungry.
A rasp escaped fanged maw—the sound of meat tearing to make room. Golden flame spurted, unbidden, weak, scorching only moss before choking out. Lungs heaved like bellows manned by something else, body thrumming with frequencies that made his teeth ache.
He looked at his hand talons. Curved. Serrated. Efficient.
Claw tightened on something cold.
He hadn't known he held anything. Yet his grip was desperate, familiar, as if his fingers—human fingers, distant now, before—had clutched this very object in final terror.
Dull crystal, many-faceted, pressed against a scaled palm. Each facet a window. Each window is a wound.
Touch sparked an echo.
Not infection—return. His own hand on glass, slender and desperate, the last human sensation before the unmaking. Blood-drop, red as warning, smearing across sixteen perfect surfaces. Shattering light that wasn't light but passage, his soul dividing like a cell, like a lie he told himself until even the darkness believed it.
I found this. Before. In the ruin. I touched it and—
The memory fractured, incomplete. The prism had taken him. Stored him. Fed him into this waiting meat, this warrior-corpse that had died screaming in draconic war.
He hadn't stolen a body.
He'd been installed.
Weakness lingered—inherited, the exhaustion of dead nerves he wore like a thief. He braced four legs against stone that remembered other feet, other claws, centuries of warriors who had stood here and fallen and risen wrong.
Flame built in his throat.
Not his will. The body's. The dragon's. It remembered burning. It wanted to teach him the flavor of war, of territory defended with teeth, of hunger that outlasted death.
He let it.
Or it let him believe he had a choice.
Aris stood in the dim green glow, wings folded heavy against his back.
Alone.
Confused.
A thief in a soldier's skin, wearing a war that wasn't his.
And far above, where the cavern opened to sky, a distant roar answered—old, patient, and interested.
The roar did not fade.
It lingered above the cavern like distant thunder rolling across stone. Not close enough to threaten. Close enough to be marked.
Aris did not look up.
Instinct told him not to. The dragon inside him understood that sound in ways his mind could not access—parsed distance, direction, weight carried in vibration. Calculated without thought.
Older.
Bigger.
The concepts surfaced without language, raw as hunger.
Predator.
Aris forced his breathing to slow. Smoke leaked between his teeth with every exhale, thin and acrid. The heat in his chest had not vanished; it coiled there now, watchful, waiting for permission he refused to give.
Move.
This time, the command was his.
One step.
Stone groaned beneath his claws. The motion felt slightly less alien. The body still carried too much power, too much mass, but it obeyed. Muscles flexed beneath scales like coiled cables. His tail shifted behind him instinctively, correcting his balance before he realized he was leaning.
Another step.
Then another.
The cavern stretched outward from the root-choked chamber, descending into a passage where green glow thinned to weak veins of luminescence. Massive roots twisted overhead like petrified serpents, disappearing into a ceiling that seemed to breathe down at him.
The air changed as he moved.
Colder.
Sharper.
Something else lived deeper in the cavern.
He smelled it before he heard it.
Rot.
Not quiet rot of soil and leaves. This was fresher. Meat left too long in damp stone, still sweet enough to draw scavengers.
Aris slowed. His claws tapped softly now, steps careful without conscious effort.
The dragon knew how to stalk.
A faint scraping echoed ahead.
He stopped.
His eyes adjusted—not to light, but to heat. To motion. The darkness peeled back in layers of temperature, revealing shapes that pulsed with life or cooling absence. The tunnel widened ahead, opening into a hollow chamber.
Something moved inside it.
Small.
Thin.
Too many limbs.
The creature crawled across the stone, dragging itself in jerking movements. Pale skin stretched across ribs, almost translucent. Long claws clicked as it tore at something on the ground.
A corpse.
Another creature lay half-eaten beneath it, heat already leaking from the remains.
Aris inhaled slowly.
The scent flooded him—blood old and new, layered like sediment. His throat tightened. The heat in his chest stirred, interested.
No.
He stayed where he was.
The creature's head lifted suddenly. Milky eyes—wrong, cataracted, yet somehow accurate—snapped toward him.
For a moment, neither moved.
Then the thing screamed.
The sound ripped through the cavern like rusted metal scraping bone. It lunged.
Fast.
Too fast for the starved frame it wore.
Aris reacted—
—and collided with himself.
The dragon surged forward, wings bursting open, claws tearing the ground as they launched toward prey. But Aris pulled, human will slamming against instinct, and the body stuttered, one leg buckling, momentum ruined.
The creature hit his shoulder instead of his throat.
Pain flared—bright, shocking, scales parting under claws that found the gap between plates. The creature shrieked, latched on, teeth scraping for purchase as Aris twisted, trying to throw it off without killing it, without—
The dragon would not wait.
His tail lashed, not his command, cracking against the creature's spine. The grip loosened. Aris saw his own talons rising, watched them close around the creature's skull, and screamed inside—
No no no—
The impact cracked like splitting timber.
The creature went limp. Settling—the way dead things do when the struggle finally stops.
Silence swallowed the cavern.
Aris stood frozen. The corpse hung from his claws. Blood—his blood, thick and dark, almost black—traced slow lines down his shoulder where the creature had found him.
He had not wanted this.
But the dragon had hungered, and the creature had wounded, and the meat had learned its lesson: threat plus pain equals death, delivered without hesitation.
His grip loosened. The body dropped.
Aris stepped back, each motion suspect, examined. His shoulder throbbed, the cut shallow but present, proof that this flesh could be opened, could bleed, could die again if something found the right angle.
The dragon inside felt satisfaction.
Not joy. Not cruelty. The quiet certainty of threat is removed. Territory—his now, by default of slaughter—safer.
Aris swallowed hard. The pain in his shoulder pulsed with his heartbeat, grounding him.
"I'm not…" The words rasped as a distorted hiss. "…that."
The cavern did not answer.
The body did. The heat inside settled, appeased.
Aris forced himself to look around. More bones are scattered across the stone. The tunnel continued, sloping upward.
A faint current drifted down.
Fresh.
Wind.
He stared at the tunnel. Did not know where he was. Did not know what had happened to him. But the cavern was a grave, and graves were meant to stay closed.
The dragon's body moved with him more easily now, sometimes of its own will. Step by step, he climbed, leaving a green glow behind, ceiling lowering until horns scraped rock, marking passage.
Then—
Blockage.
The tunnel narrowed to a choke point where roots had broken through the ceiling, weaving a lattice of stone and wood that left gaps too small for his frame. Cold air whispered through from beyond, carrying leaf-scent, freedom—unreachable.
Aris stopped.
He pushed against the barrier. Roots groaned, held. His claws found purchase on stone, pulled—and the lattice shifted, grinding, shedding dust and pebbles. Not enough. He needed to break it, force it, and the dragon knew how: wings half-furled, body tensed, coiling muscle for a charge—
No.
Not brute force. Not the dragon's way.
Aris studied the weave. Found where a root had rotted, where stone had cracked. Pressed claws there, carefully, and twisted.
The lattice screamed, stone grinding stone, and collapsed inward.
He squeezed through, wings scraping, tail dragging, and emerged—
Light.
Faint.
Silver.
Moonlight spilled through the jagged opening, sharp and foreign.
Cold air flooded his lungs.
Too much scent. Too much information.
Aris stopped just short of the exit. His heart pounded. Slow. Heavy. Wrong rhythm.
Slowly, cautiously, he stepped forward.
The dragon's massive head emerged from the cavern's mouth.
The above-stretched sky he had never seen. Strange stars burned—wrong constellations, wrong colors. And beyond black silhouettes of trees, something moved through clouds.
A distant shadow.
Winged.
Watching.
The forest beyond had gone quiet.
No insects. No distant calls. Just the weight of presence pressing through leaves, the silence of creatures that recognized predators.
The forest was not empty.
And it had already noticed him.