Starting out as a Dragon Slave-Chapter 155: Vision of an Endless Night

The night had shrouded the Palace of Blazing Fangs in a thick veil, imbued with an almost mystical silence. Sleep, usually peaceful and dreamless, seemed to stubbornly refuse to welcome Elystria into its comforting embrace. Lying on an immense bed, surrounded by black velvet curtains and silver embroidered pillows, the dragon princess tossed and turned slowly, caught in a strange state between wakefulness and sleep.

A cold sweat slowly beaded on her scaly skin, mingling with the stifling heat that permeated her chamber, fed by the magical braziers that burned perpetually. Her eyelids finally grew heavy, and Elystria finally sank into a restless sleep.

Almost immediately, she plunged into a vision, a reality so sharp, so precise, that it seemed more real than the real world itself.

She suddenly found herself standing, barefoot, in the middle of an apocalyptic landscape. Around her, immense flames rose toward a black sky, without stars or moon, illuminated only by the reddish glow of gigantic fires that blazed everything as far as the eye could see. Gusts of burning wind carried gray and black ashes, making them swirl around her like dancing ghosts.

The air reeked of death and rusted metal, an unbearable smell of burned flesh, of coagulated blood, mixed with the thick vapors of acrid smoke. Under her feet, the ground was strewn with bodies tangled in grotesque positions, their limbs deformed by the extreme violence that had been inflicted upon them. Humans, elves, orcs, trolls, creatures of multiple and varied species, all frozen in grimaces of atrocious pain, of absolute terror.

Elystria tried to move forward, her breathing accelerating, her heart beating so hard in her chest that she feared it might explode at any moment. Around her stretched immense mountains of corpses, entire piles of victims, stacked without any apparent logic, like sacrifices offered to some obscure and cruel god.

That’s when she saw him.

At the summit of this mountain of horror, standing against the flames of the ruined world, stood a solitary silhouette. It was a man, tall and strong, his muscular body marked by scars visible despite the darkness and distance. His long black hair, lifted by the gusts of burning wind, floated slowly around him like living tentacles. In his right hand, he firmly held a katana of abyssal blackness, whose blade barely reflected the glow of the surrounding flames, as if it devoured light itself.

Elystria moved forward slowly, hypnotized by this terrifying vision, unable to look away from this menacing silhouette. As she approached, she could clearly distinguish the hand that held the weapon: covered in dark scales, clawed and powerful, similar to that of a dragon, but yet... human.

Her heart accelerated even more. She could barely breathe. She slowly raised her eyes, seeking to distinguish the features of this man’s face. But her attention was suddenly drawn to two massive and familiar forms among the corpses. Two dragons, immense and powerful, their scaly bodies disemboweled, their eyes open but empty, their jaws half-open in a last silent cry of pain and terror.

Her heart stopped dead.

She immediately recognized these two dragons: Eldorath, her father, former venerated king, lying on the ground, his claws broken, his scales disemboweled by a sharp blade, his eyes extinguished by death. Beside him, her brother, Maelor, current king, struck down in turn, his body broken, his crown of gold and rubies lying in a pool of fresh blood.

Elystria stifled a cry of horror, her clawed hand instinctively brought to her mouth, unable to contain her terror at this atrocious vision.

The sound she had just made, even muffled, broke the deathly silence that reigned over this charnel house. The silhouette on the mountain of corpses slowly turned its head toward her. Everything seemed to freeze at that precise instant.

His face, half-masked by black locks, was now staring directly at her. And when he slowly opened his eyes, she felt her entire soul waver under the burning intensity of the two bright orange pupils that looked at her. Two suns of pure, incandescent, absolute orange, shining with supernatural intensity, charged with hatred, power, vengeance.

A single thought came to her mind then:

It’s him...

The vision brutally tore apart, like a veil ripped away with a violent gesture, and Elystria woke with a start, screaming with a strangled cry, covered in cold sweat and trembling with pure terror. Her sheets, soaked with her perspiration, clung to her skin.

Breathing with difficulty, she slowly sat up, her hands trembling, her heart hammering her chest with unprecedented violence. Her dilated pupils contemplated with horror the familiar darkness of her room, desperately seeking to understand what she had just seen.

This was not simply a dream. She knew it with cold and terrifying certainty. It was a vision. A warning from fate, an omen impossible to ignore.

She knew she had just seen the future, or at least, a possible future. A future where dragons themselves would be massacred, reduced to corpses by a being who seemed to belong to no fully known species. A being whose eyes burned with a familiar and terrible orange fire.

- "Mordred..." she murmured in a trembling voice, full of fear and horrified fascination.

She knew, at that precise instant, that her brother and her father were in terrible danger. That one day, perhaps soon, they would face this being, this creature whose power seemed to exceed all limits.

Still trembling, she slowly closed her eyes, desperately trying to calm the frantic beating of her heart.

But the memory of those two bright orange eyes, blazing in the darkness, remained deeply engraved in her, impossible to erase.

Elystria sat on the edge of her bed, her fingers clenched on the sheets damp with cold sweat. The room, though familiar, suddenly seemed hostile, almost foreign. The volcanic stone walls, the purple velvet curtains, the magical braziers with eternal flames... everything now seemed meaningless to her, devoid of the usual comfort.

She breathed slowly, her eyes fixed in the void. The images of the vision she had just endured came back to her in successive waves, brutal and merciless. The face masked by shadow, the black katana with abyssal reflections, the mountains of corpses, and especially those eyes... those two suns burning with bright orange, terrifying.

She knew exactly to whom they belonged. No doubt was possible.

- "Mordred..." she murmured again, as if to try to accept the reality that this vision represented. This name resonated painfully in her mind, awakening contradictory emotions that overwhelmed her from all sides.

Despite herself, she had become attached to him. From the first day, when she had glimpsed him, reduced to the state of a simple human slave in the dungeons of the Colosseum, she had felt a strange attraction. A deep curiosity, further exacerbated by her mother’s words, that troubling prophecy that had been revealed to her:

- "He is the turning point of this world’s destiny, Elystria."

She had tried to deny this inexplicable attraction, to ignore it, to bury it deep within herself. But each time she had watched him fight in the arena, each time she had glimpsed him in the dark corridors, reality imposed itself on her again, ineluctable. She had seen his daily suffering, his desperate struggles to survive, to preserve a semblance of humanity despite the cruelty he endured each day. And gradually, without even realizing it, she had learned to know him.

In the shadows, invisible and silent, she had tried to protect him, watching over him discreetly, preventing certain unnecessary cruelties, alleviating certain wounds, subtly manipulating fate to soften his ordeal. And then, there had been that kiss. That moment she had pretended was a simple joke, a power game, an almost cruel provocation to mask what she really felt. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm

But at that precise instant, she knew that something had definitively changed in her. A seed had been planted deep in her soul. A seed of attachment, a complex, deep emotion, which had never stopped growing silently in her, uncontrollable and irreversible.

The vision of horror she had just had had just torn this fragile seed apart with unprecedented violence, plunging her into an atrocious inner conflict. Two paths were clearly drawn before her: on one side, her father and her brother, her family, her blood, her heritage. On the other, this strange, complex man, this half-dragon assassin who had become a being of devastating power, but whom she now understood better than anyone, whom she wanted to protect at all costs.

She slowly stood up, her legs trembling beneath her, and painfully made her way to the immense open balcony that overlooked the exterior of the Palace of Blazing Fangs. There, under a starry sky of troubling clarity, she leaned on the railing carved in rock, vainly trying to catch her breath, to contain the tears that were slowly, inexorably rising in her.

But she could not. The weight of this revelation, of this impossible choice, was too heavy to bear. She burst into sobs, her body shaken by uncontrollable trembling. Warm tears flowed down her cheeks, falling silently on the cold volcanic stone floor, forming tiny dark spots.

- "Why..." she murmured, torn apart, her voice strangled by inner pain. "Why did you show me this? Why him? Why must I choose?"

She slowly raised her gaze to the stars, instinctively seeking in the familiar constellations the comfort she no longer had on earth. The stars shone silently, implacably, ignoring her pain, her heartbreaking dilemma.

- "Mother..." she finally pleaded, her heart crushed, addressing the sky as if she still hoped to hear the voice of her departed mother, the one who had always brought her counsel and wisdom in the darkest moments. "What should I do?"

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