Keiser didn't have the luxury of thinking, only moving.

Steel clashed around him, and he cut his way through the front line, blade flashing through smoke and blood. The surviving knights kept a shaky formation, ragged and exhausted after days of fighting without sleep. Some of them glanced his way, doing a double take.

Compared to them, Keiser looked small, a boy swallowed whole by armor that didn't fit. The plates pulled awkwardly at his limbs, too big at the shoulders, too heavy at the hips.

The set had been standard issue for the knights, and since the day he was deployed, he'd had no choice but to wear whatever they handed him. It had nearly gotten him killed more than once.

He'd learned to make it work.

He stripped off what he could, ditched the excess plates that slowed his swing or caught the wind of an explosion, and kept only the pieces that mattered, the ones protecting the parts of him he didn't have time to think about. It wasn't proper, but it kept him alive.

And that was the only rule that mattered here.

Even without mana, without the ability to wield a single drop of it, Keiser had managed to survive. He fought like he always did, stubborn, precise, breathing through pain. When the front collapsed, he was still standing. When others fell, he didn't stop.

His only moments of peace were the seconds he spent standing over the corpses of the enemy, sword braced in the ground, lungs burning for air that wasn't thick with the stench of fire and rot.

He tried not to think about the smoke that curled around him, the smoke from burned beasts, burned men. After a while, it stopped mattering which was which.

He'd realized just how far gone he was the night he'd eaten a piece of real meat. One of the knights had managed to trap a wild boar and cook it over the fire.

Keiser had taken a bite without hesitation, only to feel his stomach twist with a strange, detached realization, he couldn't tell the difference anymore between the smell of roasting flesh and that of burning bodies.

That was Sheol for him.

Beasts lurked in every shadow, in every patch of sand. They'd marched through forests that never slept, where glowing eyes blinked between black trees, waiting for the night to fall.

They'd crossed deserts that seared their skin by day and swallowed their dead by night, the sands turning soft, almost like water, as things slithered beneath, waiting for the next body to drag down.

It was there, in that cursed desert, that Keiser first met Aisha.

She'd been just as out of place as he was, too young for the war, too sharp-eyed to die. She was stationed with the academy mages, her task to stabilize the floating platforms that kept their battalion from sinking into the water-sands below.

He'd seen her then, her hands glowing faintly blue, jaw tight as she anchored a platform of hardened sand that could barely hold them afloat for hours.

They hadn't spoken much that day, just exchanged a look, two kids had to mature early in a place built to devour anything. He hadn't realized back then that he'd still be running into her years later, in messes even worse than this one.

They had passed through the northern range only briefly, just a few days, before the cold began claiming them. The snowstorms cut sharper than any blade, and the mountain beasts there were worse than the weather.

Enormous, beast with hides too thick to pierce and flesh that wouldn't burn even under fire made by mana. They'd lost nearly half their numbers in that frozen hell before command pulled them back.

So they turned south again, trudging through the endless desert until the dunes gave way to cracked black earth, the border between Sheol and the Sacred Lands.

It was a place of division, even among beast.

On one side, the beasts were wild, creatures of pure instinct, driven by hunger and survival. On the other side, they were something else. Beast that could think.

The beasts beyond the border were intelligent, some even capable of speech, of crafting their own forms of order and rule.

No one had told them that before they attacked.

Their first assault was a disaster. They charged in expecting mayhem and met structure, cunning, and coordination. The knights had no idea that the border wasn't just a line on a map, it was a boundary between instinct and understanding. Between killing to survive and killing with purpose.

That was when Keiser learned what it truly meant to be small.

For the first time, he felt the weight of being human in a world that wasn't made for humans. Standing before those sacred beasts, some vast as fortresses, others deceptively humanoid, he'd realized how insignificant his sword really was. Even his courage felt meaningless before that kind of presence.

Aisha had fared worse. He remembered seeing her kneel in the dirt, clutching her bleeding hands after being bested by one of the beasts, a creature that had laughed at her. Not in cruelty, but in genuine pity. It had mocked her magic, called it "a child's toy," and told her to go home before she was devoured.

But Keiser, he'd been beneath their notice. No mana. No threat. To them, he wasn't even worth killing.

He remembered slipping past their ranks, feeling the tremors of their voices in the air more than hearing them. He was less than an ant, so small, so unimportant that the sacred beast didn't even glance his way.

And maybe that was why he survived.

Because in that insignificance, in that near-invisibility, they'd stumbled upon it, the hatchling.

The dragon egg lay nestled in the shards of a shattered crystal, half-buried among the ruins that marked the broken border between Sheol and the Sacred Lands.

Keiser had paused when he saw it, at first out of disbelief.

'A dragon's egg? Here?'

It shouldn't have been possible. No one sane would abandon something like that in this dead zone. But there it was, smooth and fractured, the shell glimmering faintly with dark veins and deep scarlet.

What caught his attention even more was its size.

It was smaller than he imagined a dragon egg to be, closer to the size of his torso than a boulder. And yet, from the cracks in the shell came movement. A slow, pulsing sound. Then, a sound like the tearing of flesh and crystal.

The thing that emerged wasn't the fragile hatchling he'd expected. It was already the size of a young child, its limbs too long and strong, its thin tail thrashing with instinctive fury.

Its scales were dark red, slick with fluid that steamed off in the cold air. And its eyes, those eyes, burned brighter than any ember, slit-pupiled and molten, watching them.

Even the most hardened knights hesitated. Some whispered scriptures. Others saw only a chance for glory.

Keiser remembered the way one of the knights stepped forward first, drawn like a fool toward the promise of a relic, or maybe a weapon. The instant his gauntlet touched the cracked crystal, the air screamed. A pulse of heat tore through his had, his arm and when the light faded, the knight was gone, ripped into ribbons of blood and steel.

The others tried to retreat, but the hatchling was already roaring, no it was crying. It was a sound that crawled into the skull and made the heart seize.

And Keiser, reckless, stupid, desperate, had been the only one who moved closer.

He could still remember the searing air cutting into his face, the way it felt like hundreds of tiny blades made of nothing slicing into his skin. His armor burned where the mana touched it, glowing red before splitting apart.

Still, he walked.

He didn't know why, maybe instinct, maybe some suicidal urge. Maybe because the thing's trembling, smoke-slicked body didn't look like just a beast to him. It looked alone.

So he threw his cloak over it.

The mana backlash tore into his arms. He hiss as his vision blurred, half-blinded by the burn, the smell of his own flesh crisping under invisible fire. But he didn't stop until the hatchling stopped thrashing, until its body pressed, feebly, against his chest.

When the others finally dared to look, Keiser was on his knees, bleeding, his cloak half-melted and smoking as it wrapped the sacred beast within it.

He carried it out himself.

Keiser wanted to bring the hatchling back to the Sacred Lands, away from the borders and the endless war.

He tried, Gods, he tried. He marched for days beyond the line, dragging the hatchling in his arms while Aisha shouted that he'd lost his mind. But by the time they reached the threshold, the gates had already sealed.

The Sacred Land was closed.

One of the academy mages, face pale, robes torn, had explained that the lands opened only once a year, when the mana tide allowed passage. Until then, no mortal could pass through. So they were stranded, pushed back into the dead soil of Sheol.

So, reluctantly, he brought the dragon back with him to the capital.

At first, its scales were a dark, burnished red, but as the days passed, they deepened into something almost black, shimmering faintly with crimson undertones when it caught the light.

It perched on his shoulder like a smug, little flame, chirping and flicking its tail. Aisha couldn't stand it. She said its mana made her skin prickle, that it was wrong, that no being should hum like that.

When they finally returned, the court of nobles was already making decisions. The surviving knights were too few, the casualties too high. And when they saw the dragon, saw what he had carried back, they panicked.

They called it a threat. A curse. A beast that would bring ruin to the kingdom if left alive.

They tried to execute it.

Gideon had been furious with him, furious for bringing the 'thing' back, for not obeying orders, but he thought his words had struck something in the fourth prince.

"The sacred beast needs to be returned," he told him. "Not chained. Not slaughtered for spectacle. You can't justify all those deaths with another meaningless one."

For a long moment, Gideon had said nothing. Then he sighed. And for the first time since the war began, he smiled.

Keiser still remembered that smile, it didn't fit him. It was too soft, too light, like it belonged to someone else. After that year, he began to smile more.

He'd handed the dragon over to him then. Watched Gideon take it in his arms, the sacred being curling up against his chest, purring softly. Something about that image, the blood on Keiser's armor, the calm on Gideon's face, felt wrong.

He looked down at his hands.

Blood still slicked his palms. An arrow shaft was still lodged through one, and a knife wound split the other open.

The sigils carved into his arms, etched from bloodscripting, glowed faintly beneath the grime. He could feel them burning under his skin, up his shoulders, crawling down his spine, wrapping his back, his legs to his calf. It all hurt.

Then, someone grasped his hand.

He looked up and saw Muzio.

The boy's posture was slouched, his movements quiet, timid, unlike Keiser's hardened stance. His skin was clean, his eyes darker than what he had saw from the reflection he remembered, lacking that red glint on their eyes.

"…Go back," Muzio said softly.

Keiser blinked. "What---"

Before he could finish, Muzio shoved him.

The world tilted. The ground fell away.

He reached out, searching for the dragon, for Gideon, for himself, but they were gone.

All of them were gone.

And he was falling into the dark that was turning red once more.

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