“William?”
Oberon’s eyes were suddenly open, and he had become aware of surroundings; the light was gone in his world, and darkness seeped through his door, filling in the cracks and sneaking through his window. He had trouble for a moment, trying to question, why he was here, back at home, in his bed stuck with his wallows. Why am I back here of all places…? Was my whole escape just a dream?
The images he was saying widened, folding the village into a tableau of ruin. Faces blurred into one another—Draken and human alike—until identity meant nothing; limbs fused and colors ran together like spilled paint. Mothers pressed children to their chests, eyes wide and white, while men tried to form lines that dissolved into panic. The air tasted of iron and rot; every breath felt like swallowing hot metal. Oberon watched as what seemed to be his skin bubble and peel in slow, obscene ribbons, as if the world itself were unmaking its own flesh. The sound was worse than sight: a wet, tearing chorus that seemed to come from everywhere at once, a chorus that made his teeth ache.
“William?”
He walked outside, and surely enough, everything was going as it usually would— his people training, teaching, and shuffling around. The weather was fantastic, thick, and crisp, and the clouds did not speak trouble. There was a fine sun glaring across the expanse as his father and mother talked with some others, and he got a sense of relieved dissonance. But… I thought everyone died. This experience was not something he thought he would ever see again, after all that had happened. I do not know why I am here, but I need to get out. Everything about the exam did not appear to be fake. He began running like he did last time out of the village, reaching the outer gates. The Knight ran faster, and faster, not caring to stop anytime soon as he gasped for air.
He saw the Draken that had visualized in his mind, over and over, at the gate—its hide a sick, glossy green—move through the crowd with a patient, indifferent hunger. Wherever it passed, armor and bone softened and sagged; hands that had once gripped spears melted away like wax. Men screamed and then went silent, their mouths open in the same frozen shape. Oberon felt a cold, animal panic crawl up his spine; he tried to run, to pull someone back, to do anything, but his limbs were lead. The thing’s eyes, dull and button-like, found him more than once, and each time it was as if it catalogued him for some future cruelty.was a gooey substance that flopped around, almost as if it were water to its own degree.
The Knight gasped and turned around, but he was stuck in the moment, unsure of what to do. His inhibitions were struck with confusion, and his limbs were sent into chaos. I am unable to move! Help! Pain flooded his insides, his outsides, his everything: or what he even had left as it faded into tar and pink mush. He called out, desperately seeking help. But not even his mouth could speak as it ran soggy with the rest of his body. People ran in fear, and suddenly everything was chaos while guards rushed to his aid before the Draken made any more hostile movements. They prepared for combat, launching powerful punches at the creature. The warriors thought that they were dealing damage, seeing as some of the small fragments of the Draken’s body separated and flew into the grass. But the Draken remained unmoving, the cause of this being the Draken's knowledge of his own power and his pride... And The Knight learned why that Draken was proud when one of the guard’s fists connected. It did nothing except make his skin turn a terrible hue of red. Everyone was partaking in this battle as they landed their jabs on his slimy body. But nothing continued to happen as he was stuck to the ground, paralyzed with fear and by something else that he had no idea about.
Suddenly, one of the men screamed as his hand began to melt, and the others tried helping him, but they soon realized that their hands and arms were melting as well. The skin was becoming redder and redder until Oberon could see the flesh that remained on the bone, but in just a matter of a couple of seconds, the flesh began to fall off as well. It was like leprosy but sped up, and to a degree that was far too severe. All of them collapsed in pain soon enough, and the shadowy Draken began killing them with powerful slices to the head. The Knight now recognized that everyone was dead. What seemed like a regular day had suddenly become a nightmare as he realized something.
But stranngly enough, in his ungodly pain and terror, he realized something… the slime that was around Brody, the adventurer who had scouted his village was not coated in just any regular slime, but it was almost identical to this terrorist, albeit he did not know it was this dangerous to touch. Even though the warriors had refined skin that served as well as iron armor, it melted in only mere seconds. The Draken’s gaze turned to him, the only living, breathing soul left in this sector of life, barely hanging on by what seemed to be his dream placing him in some kind of tartarus.
“You are mine,” the dark villain denoted. Soft paws grabbed him, and malleable skin as the overwhelming weight of his predator crushed him. His brain’s power diverted throughout his body wildly but to no avail. His mind was fully conscious, but his body was long gone as Oberon lost everything else that made him human, and he screamed in agony. He could feel his heart pulsing faster, but that did not help him as the rest of his organs lit on hellfire, and he could not do anything but scream as the pain reached the soul of his vessel. The corrosive acid spread everywhere on his acid as the only sight he could see was a deformed excuse of an animal, looking him in the eye as he suffered through the torture. Even then, his eyes crumbled to dust as he felt his skeleton being exposed to the light and his voice reduced to nothingness. His brain was beginning to stop its functions as he witnessed his last moments on this earth.
No, I- I… cannot.. He faded out into nothingness as he could not hear anything. It was pitch black, total darkness. Nothing he was not familiar with, but he wondered why he was still thinking. Left out of agony, but in a state of judgement to think about his choices and his weakness. Is this the afterlife? All he was glad about was that he was not suffering anymore.
Suddenly, he felt a child’s voice rang in his ears, and he searched for them frantically in the void, swimming through the deep abyss. He felt a deep paternal feeling as it got louder, but then it got softer, and through it all, he could not tell if it was a boy or a girl. Maybe, it was both? And it all stopped for a moment, it stopped, and he became more perplexed than he was before. Everything told him this was not right, that this was not a place and feeling that existed. But it was all true. This child, who cried in the void, was existent. The Knight could not prove it by any logical means, but it existed.
“William?” The child’s voice said. He could not see him, but he looked into the space that the sound came from, and he cupped his hands in hopes of strengthening his voice.
At the center of the chaos a child called out—small, raw, a voice that cut through the noise. “Father?” it said, and the sound was a hook in Oberon’s chest. For a moment the nightmare shifted: he saw himself older, a hand cupping that small face, a life he had not lived spreading out like a map he had never been given. The image was a blade and a balm at once; it made him ache with a grief that was not only for the dead but for the futures stolen from them. Then the world closed in again—heat, acid, the rasp of the Draken’s breath—and Oberon felt himself falling into a darkness that was almost relief at this point.
Wait. My son? He thought, finding a discrepancy through it all. When did I have a child? Who did I have a child with? Is this even real? I need, to know, right now, I need to kn-
…
He jerked awake with a sound that was half a sob and half a gasp, the darkness of the dream slamming shut like a trapdoor. For a long second he lay still, palms pressed to his face as if he could hold the nightmare back by force of touch. When he finally peeled his hands away, they were trembling; the skin on his fingers felt too thin, as if he had watched it peel away in the dream and the memory had stuck. Tears tracked cold lines down his cheeks without his permission. He swallowed them back and forced his breath into even counts until the shaking eased.
The bell in the square tolled three times, a steady, ordinary sound that felt like an anchor. Outside, the village was waking: the clink of metal from the training yard, the low murmur of voices, the distant bark of a dog. Oberon dressed with hands that still remembered the heat and the smell of burned flesh; each movement was small and deliberate, as if he were learning to move a body that had been broken and put back together. He strapped on his pack, checked the edge of his blade, and let the familiar routine steady him. The nightmare had left a hollow ache, but it had also sharpened something inside him — a focus that felt like a blade honed on grief.
At the common table the accountant looked up and gave him a nod that was more question than greeting. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, but her voice held an unknowing pity, one only the practical concern of someone who kept the village’s affairs from falling apart.
Oberon managed a small, crooked smile. “Bad dream,” he said. “I’m fine.”
She did not press it; she only tapped a ledger and pointed toward a corner where two figures sat. “Two answered your call to join your quest for more crystal mining. They’re waiting.” He rose, the weight of the coming day settling into his shoulders like armor, and crossed the room toward them.
“Thanks,” He strolled along the wooden floorboards, finding his way to the table.
He crossed the room and sat opposite them, the wood of the table cool under his palms. Isaac’s grin was all blunt edges and missing teeth; Orn?g’s face was a pale oval, as if carved from the same stone as the cave walls. The accountant slid a cup of watered ale toward Oberon without a word, an old ritual of comfort. He wrapped his fingers around it, feeling the tremor in his hands like a second pulse.
“So,” Isaac said, leaning back and letting the canister clink against his knee, “you want the west ridge. Many a Wyvern. Dangerous work for a young man. What’s the coin?” His voice was half jest, half appraisal.
Oberon met his eyes and found the question easier to answer with truth than with lies. “Not coin,” he said. “Answers. Something up there killed my people. I want to know what, and I want to stop it if I can.” The words came out flat, but beneath them a current ran — a cold, steady thing that felt older than grief. When he spoke, the light caught the edge of his blade on the table and for a breath he saw his own face in the metal: the same jaw, the same scar, but the eyes in the reflection were darker, as if a shadow had pooled behind them. He blinked and the shadow was gone, but the image stayed like a stain.
It was true however. Oberon’s memory folded the two species into opposite halves of the same coin. Draken, in his mind, had always been the slow, patient face of the world: communal, deliberate, their long lives braided with ritual and reason, the true kindred spirits that went unrecognized. They held territory like a promise kept across generations, not with sudden violence but with laws written in color and claw. Wyverns, which came later by contrast, were a quick, sharp thing — territorial in a way that felt personal, as if every ridge and hollow belonged to a single, watchful mind. Where a Draken’s presence read like a history, a Wyvern’s presence read like a warning: bright, immediate, and intolerant of trespass.
He remembered how Wyverns marked their borders: with scent and scorch, with the oily smear of ichor and the ragged feathers of a claimed kill. They nested in narrow hollows and watched from ledges, eyes slit and patient, ready to explode into violence at the smallest provocation. Their aggression was not mindless rage but a cold, territorial calculus — a Wyvern would test, prod, and then punish, and it would do so again and again until the intruder learned to keep away. That relentlessness made them dangerous in a different register than the Draken’s tragic, slow decline; Wyverns punished the living for the audacity of being where they were not wanted.
Stolen novel; please report.
Orn?g watched The Knight with a slow, careful interest. “You carry two faces,” he said softly, not unkindly. “One that remembers, one that remembers too well.” His words were not accusation but observation, like a physician noting a fever. “That weight can sharpen a man or splinter him. Which do you want it to be?”
The question landed harder than any blow. Oberon felt the old, familiar heat rise — not the fever of anger but something colder, a precise hunger that had kept him alive in the worst nights. He had learned to name it in the dark: the part of him that would not let the dead be forgotten, that would do what needed doing even when it meant becoming what he hated. He forced a smile that did not reach his eyes. “I want it to be a blade,” he said. “Not a curse.”
Isaac barked a laugh that was more relief than mockery. “Good answer. Blades are useful. So are explosives.” He tapped the canister. “I bring the loud things. Orn?g brings the quiet things. You bring the… well, the look that scares monsters.” He nodded at Oberon with a grin that tried to be light and landed somewhere between humor and respect.
Orn?g’s gaze drifted to the window where the ridge cut the horizon like a black tooth. “The mountain remembers,” he murmured. “It keeps the echoes of what was done upon it. If something unnatural crawled from its bones, it will hum. I can hear the hum when I sleep.” He folded his hands as if in prayer, but his fingers twitched with a habit of counting invisible things.
They left before the sun had climbed high, the village shrinking behind them into a scatter of roofs and smoke. The path up the ridge was a ribbon of stone and loose earth, and as they climbed the air thinned and the world narrowed to the rhythm of their boots. Conversation fell into small, practical things: where to camp, how to ration water, which slopes to avoid. Yet between the practicalities, the talk bent toward other things — Isaac’s crude jokes about tavern ghosts, Orn?g’s quiet stories about listening to the land, and Oberon’s clipped answers that revealed nothing and everything.
At a narrow ledge, Oberon paused and looked back. The village lay like a bruise in the valley, and for a moment the old sensation rose, a double sided thing that promised both justice and a darker satisfaction. He felt it like a second heartbeat, steady and patient. Orn?g, walking a pace behind, glanced at him and then at the ridge ahead. “You must keep watch,” he said simply. “Not only for what hunts you, but for what you might become when you hunt.” The words were a warning wrapped in care.
Oberon swallowed and tightened his grip on the pick at his belt. The mountain’s shadow stretched long and black across the path. He did not answer; he did not need to. The silence between them was a pact. They moved on, three shapes climbing into a place that remembered old violences and kept its secrets like teeth.
They found the first signs of the thing quickly: a smear of glossy green on the floor, like oil left by some enormous beast. The smell hit them then — not quite rot, not quite iron, but a chemical tang that made Oberon’s eyes water. Isaac cursed softly and knelt, running a finger through the smear. It came away sticky and warm. “Not natural,” he said. “Not like anything I’ve seen.” A sound answered them from deeper in the cavern — a slow, wet dragging, like leathery wings scraping stone. The three of them froze. Oberon felt the old hunger stir, a twin-faced thing that promised both justice and a darker satisfaction. It whispered in a voice that was not his, a small, precise voice that loved the idea of endings. He swallowed it down, but the taste of it lingered like metal.
They moved as one then, boots careful, breaths measured. Orn?g’s murmurs rose and fell in a rhythm that seemed to steady the cave itself. Isaac’s hand hovered over his canister, ready. Oberon’s grip tightened on his pick until the leather creaked. When the Wyvern stepped into the torchlight, it was like a memory made flesh: glossy hide, button eyes, slime that slid and smoked where it touched the stone. It turned its head slowly, as if considering them, and the hum in the cave swelled into a note that made the hairs on Oberon’s arms stand up.
“You again,” the creature said, voice like wet cloth. It did not lunge at once. It watched, patient and almost bored, as if it had all the time in the world to decide what to do with them. Oberon felt the old, precise hunger rise like a tide. The other face — the one that remembered too well — leaned forward in his chest, whispering of retribution and the sweet clarity of final acts. He could feel it like a shadow pooling behind his ribs.
Isaac moved first, hurling a crude charge that burst against the Wyvern’s flank in a spray of sparks and green steam. The creature recoiled, a sound like a bell struck under water, and for a heartbeat the cave was chaos: light, smoke, the hiss of acid on stone. Orn?g stepped forward, hands weaving a slow, steady pattern, and the air around him shimmered with a faint, pale light. Oberon struck then, not with the wild fury of a man unmoored but with the cold, efficient force of someone who had practiced the motion until it was part of him. The pick bit into the creature’s side and found purchase in something that was not quite flesh and not quite crystal.
Pain flared, hot and immediate, and the Wyvern howled — a sound that was part animal, part machine. It lashed out, and Oberon felt the slime brush his arm; the sting was like acid and ice, and his sleeve smoked where it touched. He tasted copper and the memory of his village’s burning hands flashed through him, a blade that cut clean and true. For a moment he saw himself in the reflection of the creature’s dull eye: a man with two sides, one lit by grief, the other by a terrible, precise light. He did not know which face would win.
They fought until the cave itself seemed to protest, until the Wyvern, wounded and bleeding a dark, oily ichor, retreated into a narrower shaft and vanished with a sound like a door closing. The three of them stood panting, torches guttering, the hum in the stone reduced to a low, resentful murmur. Isaac laughed once, a raw, ragged sound that was half relief and half disbelief. Orn?g sank to his knees and pressed his forehead to the ground, whispering thanks or apology — Oberon could not tell which.
Oberon pressed his palm to his chest and felt the steady, hard beat of his heart. The ravenous personality inside him had not been sated; if anything, it had been sharpened. He had struck and the creature had fled, but the thing that watched from the dark had not been destroyed. He looked at his hands, at the smear of green on his sleeve, and felt a small, dangerous satisfaction that made his mouth go dry. Orn?g’s voice, soft and steady, cut through the fog.
“You did well,” Orn?g said. “But remember — the mountain keeps what it is given. If you take too much from it, it will take from you in return.”
Oberon nodded, but the nod was not an agreement so much as a promise. The clashing personalities inside him shifted like tectonic plates; one whispered of restraint, the other of necessary ends. He could not tell which would hold. They gathered what they could — a few jagged crystals, a scrap of the Wyvern’s hide that smoked where it had been cut — and began the slow walk back down. The mountain hummed behind them, a patient thing that had been disturbed and would remember. Oberon walked with his shoulders squared, the shadow at his back feeling less like a curse and more like a tool.
They descended with the weight of the mountain pressing at their backs, the path narrowing until the village lights were a scatter of amber below. The crystals in their bags clinked like small, secret hearts. Isaac walked with a loose swagger that tried to pretend the world had not just nearly chewed them alive; Orn?g moved quieter, as if each step might wake something sleeping in the stone. Oberon kept his eyes on the trail, but his mind kept returning to the Wyvern’s dull, reflective eye — to the way it had catalogued him, patient and almost bored. The memory sat in him like a seed that had already begun to root.
Back in the square, people glanced their way with the wary curiosity of those who had seen too many things break. The accountant met them at the door, ledger closed, face unreadable. “You look like you met a storm and came back with its teeth,” she said. Her voice was dry, but there was a softness under it that Oberon felt like a hand on his shoulder. He handed over the scrap of hide and the crystals; she examined them with a practised eye and then, without surprise, locked them away in a small chest behind the counter.
Word spread fast. By the time they reached the tavern, a small knot of villagers had gathered, drawn by the rumor of a fight and the hope that something had been done. Some faces were relief-creased; others were thin with suspicion. Oberon felt their gazes like a tide. He had expected gratitude, or at least understanding, but what met him was a complicated thing: fear braided with a hunger for vengeance, and a quiet question about what he had become in the act of fighting.
The tavern lady looked at him and smiled. “You’re alive,” she said, and the words were both blessing and accusation. “You came back.” Oberon let her touch his forearm. The contact grounded him, but it also showed him the distance he had traveled. He was not the same boy who had left the valley; something in him had been tempered in a fire that did not cool.
That night, they sat in the tavern with a low fire and a map spread between them. Isaac rattled off practical needs — more canisters, stronger cord, a better plan for luring the creature — while Orn?g traced lines on the map with a finger, murmuring about hums and echoes. Oberon listened and added what he had learned: the Wyvern’s patience, the way it tested before it struck, the smell of its ichor. He spoke plainly, but there were moments when his voice thinned and something else slipped through — a quiet, precise edge that made the others look up.
“You sound like a man who has seen the end of things and liked the taste,” Isaac said once, half-joke, half-warning. The room went still. Oberon felt the other face stir, the one that savored necessary ends. He could have denied it, could have wrapped himself in the cloak of grief and duty, but Orn?g’s steady gaze stopped him.
“Do not let the hunger name you,” Orn?g said softly. “Hunger is a tool. It can cut a path or it can eat the hand that wields it.” His words were not moralizing; they were a surgeon’s instruction.
They planned until the embers died. When they finally rose, the village was quiet and the moon had climbed high. Oberon walked outside alone for a while, the cool air a balm. He looked up at the ridge, a black tooth against the sky, and felt the twin pulse in his chest — grief and the colder thing that answered it. He did not know which face would lead him tomorrow. He only knew he would go, and that he would take his companions with him. The mountain had given them a taste; now it would have to give more, or it would take more in return.
…
Oberon had made sure to sleep early. So, they left at dawn, the village still rubbing sleep from its eyes. Isaac and Orn?g took the main trail, voices low and practical as they argued over supplies and timing; Oberon walked a few paces behind, letting their ordinary chatter wash over him like a tide. The crystals in his pack felt heavier than they should have, as if they carried not only weight but memory. At the ridge he paused, watching the two men disappear around a bend, and for a moment the world narrowed to the sound of his own breathing. He told himself he would return with them, that the three of them would be enough. The truth that sat under his ribs was quieter and more dangerous: he wanted to go back alone.
The decision came like a small, inevitable fracture. He told himself it was reconnaissance, a quick check of the cave mouth to see if the Draken had truly fled. He told himself it was prudence, that a single, silent scout could learn more than a noisy party. The other voice — the one that had learned to love necessary ends — supplied reasons that felt like tools: fewer witnesses, fewer compromises, a cleaner strike if needed. He tightened his pack, left a note folded under a stone by the path where Isaac would find it, and slipped away before the sun had climbed fully over the ridge.
Going alone changed the world’s scale. Sounds sharpened: the whisper of wind through lichen, the distant clink of a loose stone, the faint, almost inaudible hum that the mountain kept like a secret. Oberon moved with the careful economy of someone who had learned to make each step count. The cave mouth yawned like a wound; the air that spilled out was cooler, carrying the faint chemical tang of the Draken’s ichor. He crouched at the threshold and let his eyes adjust, letting the torchlight paint the walls in slow, trembling strokes.
Inside, the cave felt less like a place and more like a memory. The smear of green they had found earlier glistened in a deeper pool, and the crystals along the wall threw back the torchlight in fractured, accusing glints. Oberon traced the path the creature had taken with his gaze, following the drag marks and the places where the slime had bubbled and smoked. Each mark was a sentence in a language he was only beginning to read: patient, deliberate, not mindless. He felt the old hunger stir, but he kept it folded, a blade sheathed at his side.
He moved deeper, following a narrow shaft that branched off from the main chamber. The hum here was different — higher, threaded with a thin, metallic note that made his teeth ache. The passage opened into a small hollow, and there, half-hidden in shadow, was something that did not belong to the world he had known. It was smaller than the Wyvern they had fought, but its shape was wrong in ways that made his skin prickle: a compact, coiled body like a knot of muscle and scale, wings folded tight against its sides like a cloak. Its hide was not the glossy green of the other; this was a deeper, oil-dark color that drank the torchlight instead of reflecting it. Where the larger Draken had been blunt and patient, this one seemed keyed to a different tempo — quick, watchful, and quietly amused.
It lifted its head as if it had been expecting him. Its eyes were not button-like this time but slitted and bright, and when they met his, Oberon felt a cold recognition that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with intent. The creature cocked its head, a small, almost human gesture, and a sound like a dry chuckle rasped from its throat. The hum in the stone shifted, as if the mountain itself leaned in to listen.
“You come alone,” the Draken said, voice low and threaded with a humor that made the hair on Oberon’s arms stand up. The words were not a threat so much as an observation, and in them was the same patient curiosity he had seen in the creature at the gate — cataloguing, weighing, amused by the experiment of him. “Why not join me for a little conversation?
