The wooden door of Dak'nor's scribing estate was bolted shut, sealing him away from the politics of the mountain. Even through a foot of solid stone, the brutal mid-summer sun baked the laboratory into a stagnant kiln.
Dak'nor swiped the back of his wrist across his brow, letting out a frustrated breath as he caught a bead of sweat just before it could drop and ruin the ink on his ledger. The windowless room smelled of that stale, unwashed heat, mingling heavily with the lingering, metallic tang of dragon's blood.
In the center of the room, clamped within a bronze vice, was the crystalline organ he had torn from the beast's chest.
Dak'nor looked terrible. He hadn't slept in three days. The skin around his eyes was bruised with exhaustion, and his scholar's robes were stained with a mix of dried fluids and fresh alchemical burns. He had subjected the prism to every test he could conceive. He had boiled it in the beast's own blood. He had held it over hot coals. He had bathed it in corrosive, sulfurous gases.
Nothing had worked. The crystal absorbed every extreme without a single flicker of change.
But the physical failures were nothing compared to the agonizing mental toll. The true torment was the resistance. Dak'nor found that the closer he physically stood to the vice, the more his thoughts seemed to fray and scatter. It was as if the prism emitted—static that fought his mind, making it difficult to hold a tight focus.
A hesitant knock shattered the quiet of the study.
Dak'nor flinched, stepping back from the workbench. The oppressive static quickly lessened. An elderly scribe shuffled into the room, keeping his eyes averted from the alchemical chaos as he set a simple wooden tray on the edge of a cleared desk. It held a small bowl of spiced lentils and a steaming cup of dark, bitter root tea.
"Good evening, Lord Dak'nor," the scribe murmured before hastily retreating and pulling the wooden door shut.
Dak'nor stared at the tray. I hate it when he calls me Lord. His mind snagged on the greeting before he forced himself to engage with the reality of the room. He grabbed a soiled rag from his belt, aggressively scrubbing the stubborn black ink and soot from his fingernails. Moving to the desk, his hands mechanically squared off a stack of tax ledgers, aligning the leather spines until they were perfectly flush with the wood.
The simple, physical shapes of the books helped clear the fog in his skull.
He picked up a flint striker. His hands shook slightly as he struck it against a piece of steel, struggling for three strikes to light a stubborn candle wick beside the tea.
Finally, it caught.
Dak'nor dropped the striker. He picked up his cup of tea, letting the ceramic warm his palms as he stared blankly at the dancing flame of the candle. He watched the fire melt the tallow, drawing the liquid wax up the wick to fuel the burn. The heat transferred into the oil, converting it to energy.
His mind flashed to the elemental reactions mapped out in his texts. He thought of the immense energy produced the exact second sodium blocks broke the surface of water. The sodium wasn't the energy itself. It was the catalyst.
Dak'nor slowly lowered his tea, the bitter drink completely forgotten. He turned his eyes back to the black crystal sitting in the bronze vice.
It is a conduit, his mind moving in sharp strikes as he fought through the mental fog. The dragon channeled the light of the gods to produce its flame. But why can't I reach it myself? What unlocks it?
He gripped a razor-sharp obsidian surgical blade, his knuckles tight. The crystal pulsed with that impossible, fractured energy. It was hypnotizing. It felt like it called to him, even as it pushed his mind away.
The lattice is a shield, he deduced, his scholar's instincts focusing on the source of the resistance. If I can breach the outer shell, perhaps the interference will vanish.
It was a risk. One wrong slip of the blade could shatter the only specimen in existence. But after three days of maddening failure, caution had burned away, leaving only obsession.
Dak'nor raised the obsidian blade to the glass-like organ, forcing his mind into alignment as he matched his breathing to the rhythmic thrum of the fractured light. He stepped into the crushing pressure of the crystal's aura, fighting through the mental static.
Using the blade to make the incision, Dak'nor focused his thoughts into a single, piercing point. The obsidian slipped inside, phasing through the physical barrier to touch the energetic lattice beneath. The sensation was exhilarating; there was no resistance. It was like cutting water.
Almost instantly, Dak'nor's mind was pulled into the crystal. His physical body went rigid, his eyes rolling back as his consciousness was thrown into an infinite dark expanse.
Though he had left his flesh behind, a phantom chill gnawed at his legs, and his bones ached with the deep stress of a long run. His skin tingled sharply as if being bitten by a thousand tiny insects. Slowly, Dak'nor adjusted to this expanse of nothing. It required immense focus to contain his state. The frantic, questioning mind of the scholar had to be quieted, and the brutal training he was forced to endure as part of the 'nor family took its place.
The voice of his father echoed in his thoughts. "A man is unable to scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned. Accept the heat and numb the pain."
Dak'nor focused his will on the blackness of his surroundings, aggressively pushing doubt and fear away. He ignored the aches of his bones and the stinging of his skin. Slowly, he was no longer blinded by the darkness of the expanse.
Kal'nor's words echoed again. "Set your mind, child. See the strike before you move. You must remove the thought of remorse in battle. Become only the blade. Allow it to wield you."
In the infinite dark, Dak'nor's spirit shifted. His stance became The Dragon Descends, both hands extended above his head as if gripping a longsword in a penultimate strike.
With his mind anchored by the martial form, a flicker in the darkness came into focus. Deep within the blackness, there was a speck of light. It radiated a profound warmth. Dak'nor's mind, having shut off the emotion of pain and fear to survive the dark, almost missed the heat of it.
This is the power of the dragon... no, of Creation itself, Dak'nor thought, the concept echoing through the emptiness like a spoken word as he slowly lowered his arms. The breath of a god. It is the power that allowed a beast of flesh and bone to exhale a star. He surged forward. But as he reached for the warmth of creation, an ocean of cold slammed into his mind, pushing him back.
He fought it. He poured his willpower into the effort, straining to touch just a single beam of that divine warmth, but the pressure was agonizing. The more he struggled, the harder the darkness resisted him. Dak'nor poured all that he was into the moment. The light in front of him didn't evade him; rather, the darkness actively tried to drag him away from it. The pressure popped his ears, staggered his breath, and crushed his chest. His mind began to fracture.
The toll was too much. In the physical world, thick, dark blood began to drip from his nose.
Defeated, exhausted, and gasping for air in the deep, Dak'nor stopped reaching. He surrendered to the fatigue.
And the moment he stopped fighting, the crushing pressure vanished.
Dak'nor realized the dark wanted to keep him. Without the burning desire to reach the light, the surrounding infinite shadow didn't fight him. It welcomed him. It required no struggle, no strain. It simply required him to be still. The mind of a warrior—one trained to feel no remorse and no pain—thrived here.
Cautiously, he let his awareness drift into the cold, away from the light.
The sensation was intoxicating. The Void was not warmth; it felt like the inverse. In this darkness, there was no pain, no fatigue, no fear. He felt the cold seep into his marrow, realizing with a dark fascination that the shadow was infinitely easier to reach than the light. The weight of that discovery caused the focus he fought to gain when entering the darkness to wash away, allowing his scholarly mind to take hold.
It was a mistake.
That sudden shift in focus snapped his tether to the crystal. With a violent gasp, Dak'nor was thrown back into his physical body. He collapsed to his knees on the stone floor, the experience draining him physically as well as mentally. Above him, the obsidian blade remained embedded in the crystal. But the rainbow that once shined within it had receded, replaced by moving shadows of darkness that now writhed across its interior.
Dak'nor wiped the blood from his nose, staring up at the dragon's crystal. A thrill of manic excitement filled him. The scholar in him was already racing. Was this cold expanse a pathway to the time before creation?
The possibilities were endless. His mind ran wild.
The Victors Escape
The victory gala in the upper levels of the palace was a stuffy sea of expensive wine and hollow praise. O'nor endured it for exactly an hour—just long enough to let the perfumed lords clap his bruised shoulder, and to flash his signature, careless grin at the cluster of noblewomen who kept finding poor excuses to brush against the 'brute of the trenches.' Even Councilwoman Len'zel had lingered a moment longer when offering him a goblet. She was clearly his elder by a decade or more, yet she carried a lush fullness in her hips and bosom that still commanded the gaze of nearly every man in the room. She was a striking sight in her draped silks—a temptation O'nor might have happily entertained, if only she didn't so clearly favor Tor'val's political views. He was the first known dragon slayer, but he was not a creature of marble and politics.
Slipping past the infantry guarding the gala, O'nor bypassed the grand staircases and took the servant's descent into the royal stables. The air here was instantly better—thick with the honest, grounding smell of hay and horse sweat. He didn't care that his military boots tracked fresh dung out into the cobbled, unlit alleyway. To O'nor, it was the smell of escaping the web of schemes from the Council.
He followed the winding, grease-stained path down into the lower city until he reached The Bellows.
Pushing open the wooden doors, he traded the sterile sanctuary of the upper palace of the Val'dora for a wall of heat and noise. The Bellows was chaotic, like a vibrating heartbeat of a panicked first-year infantrymen on the front lines. It was a place where off-key soldiers drowned out the clatter of dice, and where soot-stained iron smiths rubbed shoulders with off-duty spear men. The floor was buried in sawdust to soak up spilled ale and fresh blood, and the air hung thick with the stench of cheap liquor, roasted meat, and unwashed bodies.
Here, in the dim, lantern-lit humidity of human sweat, he wasn't a political piece on the Val'dora board. He was just a soldier.
"Slayer of Myth! Killer of Dragons, and fucker of whores!" a slurred, booming voice echoed over the din, accompanied by the heavy slam of a tankard on wet wood.
O'nor grinned, spotting Teff, a veteran spear-man with the frame that made the mountain jealous. He leaned precariously over a wet, sticky table while raising a sloshing wooden tankard in salute.
O'nor pushed his way through the crowd, matching Teff's volume. "Drinker of ale, father of piss, and fucker of whores! I return."
The surrounding tables erupted into cheers, mugs slamming against the heavy oak boards in a deafening rhythm. This was the chorus O'nor lived for. His father, Kal'nor, wanted him to be a champion for these men in the senate—a polished leader to secure their family's legacy on the Val'dora. But looking around the room, feeling the raw, unfiltered loyalty of the infantry, O'nor let the deafening roar wash over him, happily letting it drown out his father's suffocating aspirations of leadership.
Let Dak'nor have the dusty books and the existential dread. Let Kal'nor have the treacherous politics. All O'nor wanted was a good fight, a willing woman, and to drink until his vision blurred with the men who had bled in the dirt beside him.
The roaring chaos of the tavern faded into the background as O'nor sat cornered at a sticky table. "I'm telling you, the quartermaster is actively trying to kill us," Teff grumbled. He twisted on his wooden stool, wincing as the rigid leather of his cuirass shifted against his tunic. "These new pauldron straps are completely raw. Two more drills and they'll saw clean through my skin to the collarbone."
O'nor took a long, slow pull from his flagon. "You sweat too much, Teff. The salt shrinks the leather."
"I sweat because I don't sleep!" Teff shot back, his words thick and slurring as he waved his empty cup at the ceiling. "Sergeant snores like a suffocating Kudu. The entire barracks shakes. And then they feed us that salted gray-meat to keep our strength up. I chewed on a piece for a solid hour this morning before I realized I was eating the bottom of the ration crate."
O'nor laughed, a deep, rumbling sound that vanished into the ambient roar of the tavern. "You ate the crate because you're too drunk to find the plate."
Teff joined in on the laughter, the sound coming deep from the diaphragm in his chest. "The ale is the only thing that doesn't sour or dry out to the point it tastes like drought-stricken sand." Teff's eyes suddenly locked onto something behind O'nor. Moving like a panther stalking a bird, he slowly placed his tankard down onto the table, as if trying not to scare hunted prey away. He leaned across the scarred wood. His bleary, bloodshot eyes slowly tracked across the smoky room. "Do you see her?"
O'nor followed his gaze. "Half the garrison is looking at her, Teff. How can I miss her?" The question was fused with a half-rhetorical laugh.
"The Angel of the Bellows," Teff muttered, wiping a fleck of ale foam from his chin. "Poured my drink an hour ago. Didn't even glance at my face. Hasn't looked at yours, either." Teff's lopsided smirk widened into a drunken, reckless challenge. "Fifty silver marks says the great O'nor can't bed her. You might be a legend in the sands, but in here? She hasn't paid you a single second of attention. To her, you're just another dusty soldier with a sword."
O'nor's eyes locked onto the barmaid navigating the chaos. A slow, predatory grin spread across his face.
"Keep your silver, Teff," O'nor said, pushing up from the table. "Just watch."
He dropped onto a stool at the bar, the wood groaning under his weight. Almost immediately, a young barmaid materialized through the throng. She was younger than O'nor by a few years, but she moved with a grounded confidence. Her stained tavern gown was pulled tight, barely containing the soft, generous swell of her breasts, and she had to turn sideways just to navigate her wide hips through the narrow pathways between the packed tables.
"Would the Slayer care for a drink?" she asked, her voice a breathy purr over the noise of the tavern.
O'nor leaned against the sticky bar, flashing that effortless grin. "Why, yes, I would."
She turned to retrieve a jug, but O'nor reached out, his calloused fingers wrapping gently around her wrist. He merely stopped her momentum, his thumb brushing her pulse. With his other hand, he slid a heavy, faceted diamond mark onto the wood of the bar. It caught the dim candlelight, gleaming like a fallen star in the muck.
The girl's eyes widened. "Sir, that is far too much for a mere drink."
"You misunderstand my payment," O'nor said softly, leaning closer. "It is for all the men here to share in a drink with me."
She blinked, looking at the fortune resting on the table. "But, that is still—"
"—and," O'nor interrupted smoothly, his eyes dropping to her lips before meeting her gaze again, "to spend a few hours upstairs with you, the Angel of the Bellows."
A furious blush rushed up the girl's neck, turning her cheeks crimson. O'nor watched her eyes dart from the fortune on the wood—enough to feed her family for a year—up to the effortless grin of the mountain's dragon slayer.
The hesitation melted slowly, replaced by a spark of pride. She met his gaze, her spine stiffening.
"I doubt you have enough coin for that, Slayer."
O'nor smoothly replied without hesitation. "I might be short on coin tonight, but I am incredibly rich in ambition."
The calmness of his reply triggered a small smile from her as she slowly leaned in, inspecting him further.
"Then let's skip the coin," O'nor continued, his voice dropping to a low, intimate hum beneath the roar of the tavern, "and see if my conversation is worth your time instead."
The Angel of the Bellows slowly shook her head, though the smile remained. She placed a slender hand over the diamond mark. "You still must cover the tab of these men's drinks. A man of your word, are you not?"
"A man of my word? Always. Consider it an investment in the best conversation in this tavern."
"Oh, the best..." A curious, challenging smile blossomed on her lips. "So, what should I expect?"
"How about a story?" O'nor offered, leaning his elbows on the sticky wood. "A tale about a creature that lives deep in the canyons. The locals say it is beautiful but moves like a shadow between men, speaks with a melody that makes you forget your own name, and lures men in just to take everything, including their bodies."
She paused, the rag in her free hand going still on the bar, visibly drawn into the cadence of his voice.
"They say a warrior fled the stone of Beh-REET," O'nor continued, his dark eyes locking onto hers. "He sought refuge in the chaotic mud of the canyons, dragging a pack of hounds with him. He fed and watered them. He thought himself unmatched by any predator in the sands—the apex predator of the night."
She leaned closer, arms crossed on the counter as she listened to his story.
"But then," O'nor whispered, "the warrior separated from the pack. He wandered blindly into the territory of the dark. A creature of the shadows, who traps men's spirits with a single glance and steals the breath right out of their lungs. Before he knew it, his pockets were completely empty, and he was entirely at her mercy. I always thought it was just a campfire myth... until about two minutes ago."
She blinked as the metaphor clicked into place.
She threw her head back, letting out a loud, genuine laugh that cut sharply through the tavern's din. Realizing her composure had broken, she quickly brought a hand to cover her mouth in surprise, her cheeks flushing a deep red.
"You are good—at conversation," she admitted, her eyes sparkling with newfound heat as she slipped the diamond mark off the bar.
O'nor leaned marginally closer, his voice dropping to just above a whisper. "That's not my best skill."
She smirked, trailing a single finger along the scarred wood between them. "The blade?"
O'nor held her gaze, a slow, wicked grin spreading across his face. "That would be my second-best skill."
After an hour of deafening toasts, spilled ale, and a tangled, breathless retreat to a cramped, drafty room upstairs, the Angel of the Bellows pressed a reverent kiss to the cheek of the man who had just delivered on the promise of his skill. She slipped quietly back out into the hall, leaving him alone to reminisce on the night.
He sat bare-chested against the white linen of the bed sheets, pouring himself another glass of amber spirits from a jug next to the bed. The quiet of the room was a welcome relief. He was tied to no one. Love, to O'nor, was just another word for a cage.
"Trading imported wine for tavern swill, O?"
The voice was pure velvet, laced with an amused, dangerous edge. He closed his eyes, lowering his head in exasperation, his grip tightening on his chipped cup. She was the only person in the capital, other than Dak'nor, who called him that. She deliberately severed the 'nor from his name—stripping away his father, his bloodline, and the political war that raged between their families.
He raised his head, setting his cup on the bedside table and leaning back against the wooden headboard. His breathing paused in his throat exactly as it always did.
She was a masterpiece, entirely out of place in the grimy tavern room. Her skin was the breathtaking color of sun-warmed beach sand, radiating a flawless, natural heat. She wore a dress of sheer emerald that clung to every curve, but it was her hair that always captivated him—a dark, heavy cascade that flowed down her back, extending past the flare of her hips.
"You shouldn't be here," O'nor said, his voice rougher than he intended. He refused to say her name. Saying Jo'val made it real. It brought her father, Elder Tor'val, and the bitter blood-feud directly to his door.
She ignored the warning, stepping out of the shadows. She moved with a slow, liquid elegance, her bare feet making no sound on the uneven floorboards.
"I heard the great dragon slayer was exhausting himself with the common folk," she purred, stopping at the foot of the mattress. She looked up, and those eyes locked onto his. They were eyes that didn't just look at a man; they stared directly inside of him, stripping away the armor and the swagger until all that was left was the beating heart beneath. "I thought you might need... real tending to."
O'nor tried to summon his usual resistance, trying to hold the line of the cocky soldier who never let a woman get too close. "If your father finds you in the slums with Kal'nor's son, he will have a stroke. And my father will finish the job."
"Let them die of it, then," she whispered seductively.
She climbed onto the foot of the bed, straddling his legs. She crawled slowly toward him, her movements fluid and deliberate, like a feline stalking a mouse. As she closed the distance, her body brushed against his. Her touch was agonizingly gentle, her skin as soft as the finest spun silk. The heat of her touch unraveled his discipline in a matter of seconds.
Jo'val's manicured fingers trailed lightly over the fabric of the bed sheets, tracing a slow, deliberate path upward. As her hand slid past the ridge of his hips, moving toward his bare stomach. O'nor shifted his weight on the drafty mattress, pulling his torso back just a fraction to break the contact.
He remembered when that pull had first taken root. Before he was a dragon slayer and she was an Elder's asset, they were just two wild children navigating the gardens of some forgotten Val'dora member. He remembered the sharp crack of wooden swords, scraped knees, and how Jo'val was the only girl in the capital who would throw a punch back when he pushed her too far.
O'nor's mind flashed to a stolen hour beneath the floorboards of his family's estate, just weeks before he first joined the infantry.
"O'nor, what if we get caught?" Jo'val breathed.
"Nobody would think to look under their feet," he replied with a smile that stretched from ear to ear.
It was his first kiss—clumsy and tasting of stolen wine. In that single collision in the dark, O'nor had realized with certainty that he could easily drown in her.
But when the bitter blood-feud between Kal'nor and Elder Tor'val finally reached their children, O'nor walked away. He was bound by a fierce, unbending honor to his father and his bloodline. Instead of fighting for her, he buried that connection under years of battlefield mud, cheap ale, and the fleeting warmth of a hundred tavern whores. It was infinitely easier to enjoy the meaningless company of all women than to admit he might be haunted by one.
He caught her wrist, holding her hand against his chest to stop the agonizingly slow caress. "I can't do this," he lied, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "I don't want this."
She smiled. Instead of pulling away, she crawled perfectly into his space, the heat of her body pressing flush against his. She tilted her head up, her lips parting slightly. They were a plush, perfect pink, practically begging to be tasted.
"What do you not want, O?" she asked, her breath washing over his mouth. "My father is not here. Only me."
The last thread of O'nor's resistance snapped. He could throw himself onto the back of a myth and sever its head, but he could not fight this one woman pressing against him.
O'nor's hands tangled in the impossibly long, dark silk of her hair. He pulled her flush against him, his mouth crashing down onto hers in a bruising kiss.
She let out a soft sound of triumph, her arms wrapping around his neck as she opened to him. The kiss was a collision of fire and gravity, wiping away the politics, the senate, and the tavern around them. O'nor lifted her effortlessly by the thighs, shifting their weight to lay her back against the creaking bed of the rented room.
He stripped away the sheer emerald dress with frantic haste, leaving nothing but the breathtaking contrast of his battle-scarred frame against the sand-colored silk of her skin.
He kissed her cheek, her neck, the hollow of her collarbone, drinking in the scent of her like a man dying of thirst. Every touch, every shift of her body beneath his, pulled him deeper into the one trap he had tried to avoid.
As she pulled him down, her fingernails biting into his shoulders, O'nor surrendered entirely to the current. He was the hero of the empire who had slain a winged myth, but in the dark of that tavern room, he was completely and hopelessly hers.