CHAPTER 98: THE FLAMEBORN

She was five years old.

Small. So impossibly small. Her body barely more than a collection of fragile bones and soft skin, breakable, destroyable. She lay on the altar, and the stone was cold against her back, cold enough to burn, cold enough to make her small body shake.

She couldn’t move.

Chains bound her wrists and ankles, carved with runes that bit when she struggled, that sent pain lancing through her bones until she went still, gasping, tears streaming down her face.

The chamber was full of people. Robed figures, their faces hidden beneath hoods, their voices rising and falling in a chant that made her ears ring and her chest hurt. The language was old, older than Solmire, older than kingdoms, older than the memory of kingdoms.

And standing above her, looking down with eyes like winter itself, was her father.

"Papa..." Her voice was so small. So broken. "Papa, please..."

He didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t reach for her.

"This is what we were made for Eris," he said, and his voice was the voice of a man performing a necessary amputation. Clinical. Detached. "You are a vessel. Do you understand? This is what you were born for. This is your purpose."

She didn’t understand. She was five. She understood that her father wouldn’t hold her, wouldn’t comfort her, wouldn’t save her.

She understood that she was alone.

The chanting grew louder.

And then she heard it.

The roar shook the foundations of the world.

Not a sound, a force. It hit her chest like a physical blow, rattling her bones, vibrating in her skull until she thought her head would split apart.

The dragon’s scream was agony given voice, was rage and terror and something far older and darker woven together into a single, endless shriek.

She saw it then.

Dragged into the chamber by chains thicker than her body, its scales glowing like molten metal, its eyes burning with a light that hurt to look at. It was massive. Too large for the space, its wings folded tight against its sides, its claws scoring deep gouges in the stone as it thrashed and fought and screamed.

Pyronox.

The Flameborn.

The god of fire and ruin and creation.

And they were going to put him inside her.

"No—" The word was barely a whisper. "No, Papa, please—"

But the chanting didn’t stop.

The robed figures moved in perfect synchronization, their hands weaving patterns in the air, pulling threads of magic from the very fabric of reality and twisting them, shaping them, compressing them.

The dragon fought, its roar shaking dust from the ceiling, its fire scorching the walls, but the chains held, the runes bit, and slowly, horribly, the massive form began to shrink.

Not smaller.

Denser. Compressed. Folded in on itself. All that power, all that rage, all that divine fire being crushed down into something small enough to fit inside a child’s body.

Small enough to fit inside her.

"Papa—Papa please—"

Her father’s hand came down on her shoulder. Not gentle. Firm. Holding her in place.

"This is your destiny," he said. "You must face it."

The final words were spoken.

The dragon screamed.

And she felt it,

The moment when the dragon entered.

Not softly.

Not as gift.

And then it was inside her.

The pain that followed was everything.

Not a sensation, existence itself. It tore through her small body like molten iron poured into a clay vessel that was never meant to hold it. Her bones cracked, breaking and reforming, breaking again. Her blood boiled, evaporating in her veins and flooding back in scalding waves.

Her skin split, peeled, reformed, split again.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything but scream.

Her heart tried to stop and was denied.

"Papa!" she screamed. "Please! Please stop! It hurts!"

"PAPA!"

The word was ripped from her throat, raw and desperate and utterly, devastatingly hopeless.

Because he was right there. Right there. And he did nothing. Just watched with those cold, dead eyes as his daughter was torn apart and rebuilt into something that was no longer entirely human.

The dragon screamed with her.

Two voices. One agony.

The sound split the air, cracked the stone, sent the robed figures stumbling back with hands clapped over their ears. But the spell held. The chains held.

And when it was done, when the last syllable faded and the last rune flared and died, there was only silence.

And a small girl on a stone altar, staring at nothing, her eyes glowing faintly with inner fire.

Alive.

Changed.

Broken in ways that would never, could never be repaired.

Her father leaned down, his voice almost gentle now. Almost.

"Good," he said. "Now you are ready."

Eris collapsed against the altar, gasping, shaking, her hands clutching the edge of the stone slab as though it were the only solid thing in a world that had come unmade.

But she wasn’t five anymore.

She was here. Now. In the present.

Except the past wouldn’t let go.

It clung to her, pressed down on her mind like a physical weight, and beneath it all, deeper than memory, the dragon stirred.

Not angry.

Awake.

It recognized this place. Knew these stones. Remembered the chains and the chanting and the moment it had been torn from divinity and shoved into flesh.

And it found the crack within the seal. Widening.

Heat bloomed in Eris’s chest. Not the gentle warmth she’d learned to control, but something volcanic, something that had been building for years, for centuries and finally, finally had permission to break free.

Her skin began to glow.

The carvings on the walls flared bright, responding to the power rising in her, feeding off it, amplifying it.

"No," she whispered, but her voice was already changing, layering, becoming something else. "No, not now—please"

But it was too late.

The dragon was awake.

And it remembered everything.

The heat surged, and Eris threw her head back and screamed.

Not a human sound.

The sound of a god breaking its chains .

Slowly.