It began slowly — so slowly that for a moment it was almost imperceptible. Not that I was in any condition to notice subtlety. I was already deep in a world of pain, every nerve overwhelmed, every thought reduced to the single fact of how much everything hurt.
But I noticed this.
It started at my fingertips. Fine lines, like cracks spreading through porcelain — delicate at first, almost ornamental, as though the skin were simply giving way under pressure too long sustained. Then those lines raced outward across my palms with terrifying speed, branching and multiplying, and the skin began to part. To tear. Peeling back as it pleased, following its own logic, indifferent to what I wanted.
The pain that came with it was extraordinary.
It felt like someone working across every surface of my body with the sharpest blade they owned — precise, deliberate, unhurried. I screamed. I had been trying not to, but there was no longer any point in trying. The sound tore out of me and filled the hollow tower and I didn't hear it, because I was somewhere past hearing, somewhere past everything except the sensation of my own skin splitting open.
And it was not only my hands. It was everywhere. Every inch of my body at once, the skin parting and falling away like a mask being removed — except this was not a mask. This was my real skin, the only one I had ever known, and it hurt like nothing I had words for.
But that, terrible as it was, turned out not to be the worst of it.
The worst came from inside.
It began deep in my chest — a sensation I had no framework for, nothing in twenty-odd years of living that had prepared me to understand it. My heart. I felt my heart tearing at itself. Not stopping, not failing — growing. Splitting. Straining against its own walls as it expanded, as it fought to become two where there had only ever been one.
I had read about this. Somewhere in the ancient texts at Draga, a line about dragon anatomy — two hearts, the passage had said, with the casual certainty of recorded fact. I read it and moved on without pausing.
Reading it and living it were not remotely the same experience.
I vomited — blood and bile and whatever remained in me — and barely registered it happening. Every organ in my body felt as though it had been set alight. Everything expanding, everything straining outward toward new dimensions that my human form had never been built to accommodate. The fire moved through me in waves, and between the waves were only the echoes of the last wave and the anticipation of the next.
And then the bones began.
A deep, resonant creaking from somewhere beneath muscle and organ and everything else — the sound of the scaffolding of my entire body deciding it was no longer the right shape. At places, bones split. At others, they fused together. They elongated, thickened, reorganised themselves with the slow and merciless patience of architecture being rebuilt from the foundation upward. The skeleton of a human being, rearranging itself into the skeleton of a dragon.
The scream that came out of me then was not something I chose. It was simply the only response available.
As the bones grew, the skin tearing accelerated. I was shedding, in the most visceral sense of the word — the way a snake leaves behind the casing of what it was, except that a snake, I assumed, did not feel it. The old skin fell away in pieces around me, revealing what lay beneath.
The first thing I saw clearly through blurred, tear-stung vision was a claw. Taloned. Enormous. Black scales catching the faint light from the tower windows, each one edged with a faint silver sheen that shimmered as I moved.
I stared at it. Then I stopped staring because the pain pulled my attention back and refused to release it.
I was crying — not from grief, not from fear, but simply from the sheer physical overwhelm of it. The floor around me was a mess of gore and shed skin and things I would prefer not to examine too closely. There was nothing majestic about this. Nothing that resembled the way dragons appeared in the old stories — mighty, sudden, glorious. This was brutal and biological and deeply, inescapably undignified. I had become a spectacle of my own unmaking.
But I had been right earlier, in the back of my mind where the part of me that was Aiona's knowledge had already settled in: the worst was still coming.
It came gradually at first, and then all at once.
At the base of my spine — or near where my spine had been before the bones began their rearrangement — something new was growing. On either side, symmetrical and insistent, pushing outward through muscle and skin with a pressure that built and built without plateau.
*What is that?* The thought moved through me in pure animal panic. *What in every god's name is that?*
The answer came through instinct before it came through thought — memory that was not quite mine, inherited from the soul that had just become part of me, rising up to name the thing before the terror could fully take hold.
Wings.
The bone structure came first — emerging and expanding and branching with mechanical inevitability, then the muscle layering itself along those bones, then the skin stretching to cover the whole structure, and still they grew. Larger and larger, unfolding, demanding space the tower barely offered, the wingbeats of their own growth stirring the stale air.
And then my head snapped backward.
The bones of my face were changing. Merging, extending, enlarging, splitting — my skull reshaping itself with the same indifferent thoroughness as the rest of me. I was aware, distantly, of saying something. *No, no* — or something like it. A last reflex of refusal from the human part of me that still existed and was watching all of this happen and could not stop any of it.
The face I had worn for my entire life peeled away. It simply fell, like wet paper losing its grip, like the last page of something finally turning.
The scream that came out of me was not a woman's scream.
What filled the tower and shook the air and went outward through the stone walls and across the grasslands and into the village of Fonta, rattling the windows of houses and waking children from sleep and sending birds up from every tree in the surrounding woods — that was a dragon's roar. Full-throated and enormous, a sound that belonged to a different category of living things entirely.
My vision changed. It sharpened beyond anything I had ever experienced — details resolving at distances that would have been invisible to me a moment ago, colour and depth and movement registering with a clarity that felt almost violent after a lifetime of seeing the world through human eyes. And my vantage point had shifted several metres upward. I was looking down at the floor of the tower, and it was far below me, and I was the reason for that.
Voices came from outside the metal doors.
"Did you hear that?" A soldier's voice, tight with alarm.
"The whole of Fonta heard that," came the answer.
*No. No.*
The doors were about to open. I could hear the hands on the metal, the scrape of boots on the hill path. And I was — this. I was standing in a ruined tower in a body I had possessed for approximately three minutes and had not yet learned to operate, and if those doors opened the first thing Arvid's soldiers would see would be—
*Up.*
I looked up.
Far above, where the tower's hollow interior tapered toward its summit, open sky was visible. Dark blue and fading fast as the last of the twilight surrendered to evening. An opening. Freedom.
I had wings. I knew how to use them — not from experience, but from something deeper than experience, the inherited memory of five hundred years of flight pressing up through me like water finding its level.
I moved.
The wingbeats in the enclosed space were deafening, a concussive rhythm that struck the stone walls and came back redoubled, dust and fragments of old mortar raining down from the heights. I was moving upward, fast and faster, the opening at the top of the tower rushing toward me —
The metal doors groaned open below just as I cleared the top.
Cold air. Open sky. Wind.
I was out.
The sensation of it was indescribable — and I mean that precisely, not as embellishment. There are things that exist outside the reach of language, and flight was one of them. The wind was not something that touched me from the outside. It moved through everything, around every scale, under every wingbeat, a full and immediate conversation between my body and the air that I had no idea how to have and found myself having anyway. The weight of this vast new body — which should have been a burden, which should have dragged downward against all reason — became instead the very thing that made flight possible, the mass and the wingspan working together against gravity with a logic that felt like joy.
I climbed higher.
Below me, the hill fell away. The tower shrank. The grasslands spread outward in every direction, grey-green and vast in the deepening dusk, and across their surface moved my shadow — enormous, colossal, the shadow of something that had no business existing if you held it against the ordinary scale of the world.
I banked east. Rice fields stretched below in neat, ordered squares, the last light of the day lying flat across them in long amber lines. Tiny figures moved between the rows — people finishing the last of their evening work, small and unhurried and completely unprepared for what they looked up to find above them.
The screams reached me even from that height. Faint, thin, numerous.
The sky had turned the colours of Aiona's sunset — deep orange at the horizon where the sun had finally gone, darkening to purple overhead, a few early stars pressing through. And moving across all of it, enormous and dark and unmistakable: me.
I thought about hiding. The impulse rose and fell in the span of a single wingbeat.
No.
Not anymore. Not ever again.
This was who I was. This was what I was. There was no fold in the sky large enough to hide a dragon, and I no longer wanted one. I had spent enough of my life concealing things — power, history, the blood running in my veins, the creature that had been living inside me since the moment Aiona and I were bound together. I was done with concealment.
Below me, the world was afraid. And I understood why. And I did not apologise for it.
I turned south. The salt air was already reaching me — the ocean closer than most people in Fonta probably realised, just past the farmland, past the furthest edge of what had been cultivated and settled. I could smell it clearly, that clean, ancient smell of deep water.
I opened my wings fully and rose higher into the cooling dark.
I was Rhiaenne Sarenna Draga. Northern dragon-seed. Queen. Empress of Selon. And now this — whatever this was, whatever name the histories would eventually give to what had happened in that crumbling tower on a small hill outside a livestock village on an ordinary evening in late autumn.
The age of dragons had returned.
And I intended for every living thing under this sky to know it.
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