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The first month nearly killed him. Kael had survived the Red Zone for thirty-one days on instinct alone — hiding in lava tubes during the day, moving through the sulfur fields at night when the temperature dropped enough to bear. He had eaten things that still woke him in nightmares: pale cave worms that had to be bitten in half before they could escape, eggs from creatures he had decided not to name, a snake that had tried to constrict around his arm and which he had killed with a rock before it could finish the job.
But he had done it while carrying Verath’s words like a coal in his chest: return here. Survive. Learn.
By month two, he had found a rhythm. He built a shelter in the walls of an old volcanic fissure, lined it with the dry ash that accumulated in the deeper zones, and discovered that the sulfur vents produced enough ambient heat to keep him warm through the brutal nights. He learned which water sources were safe — there were three springs deep in the Zone where rainwater collected in natural basins, filtered through layers of volcanic rock until it was almost clean. Almost.
He started practicing. Every morning, he carved channels in the glass the way he had for Verath, first with the knife and then with his bare hands once the blade cracked. His palms became leather. Then leather that split and bled and healed and split again. He watched the lava flows and began to understand their logic — where they pooled, where they accelerated, where they could be redirected by the right shape of stone and patience.
By month four, he had killed his first predator. Not with the knife — with a trap, a pit he had dug over three days in ground that looked solid but was not, covered with a lattice of branches and ash. The creature was the size of a large wolf, with six legs and no eyes, and it had been hunting him for a week before it fell into the pit and broke its back on the stones. Kael had climbed down and cut its throat with the knife and then sat beside it for an hour not moving, trying to understand what he had become.
I am learning, he told the empty air. This is what learning looks like.
By month six, he had killed six more. He had built a second shelter deeper in the Zone where no predator knew to look. He had found a source of igneous glass that could be shaped into cutting tools far sharper than his knife. He had stopped dreaming about his mother and father on the mountain — stopped dreaming about anything except the path back to Verath.
And then, on the first day of month seven, he found the egg.
It was buried in a nest of volcanic fiber and old bones, nestled in a cave he had discovered while chasing one of the six-legged predators to ground. The egg was the size of his torso, deep bronze in color, and when he touched it, it was warm.
Kael stood very still. No dragon had nested in the Red Zone in over a century. The Zone was dying — the priests said so — and nothing living came here anymore.
Except, apparently, this.
He left it in the nest. He left the predator bleeding on the cave floor. He walked back to his shelter and sat in the dark for six hours, his hands shaking, trying to decide whether the egg was an answer or a complication.
Verath had said: return here. Verath had not said: bring an egg.
On the morning of the seventh month, Kael walked back to the place where he had first met the dragon. Verath was still there — still dying, still impossibly present — and the ancient creature’s mismatched eyes opened when Kael approached.
You survived, Verath said.
I survived.
And you found something. The great head turned slightly. Something you did not bring with you. Something you left behind.
Kael felt the ground shift beneath him. How do you know that?
Because I have been watching you since the day you left, child. I told you I could wait. I did not tell you I would be idle. Verath’s broken wing shifted. Bring it to me. Now. Before whoever else knows about it finds it first.
Kael did not ask who else. He ran.