Chapter 83
[Flashback]
In every war, there are consequences.
In every victory, there are ghosts.
And in every silence that follows... something breaks forever.
The skies of Draconis Vale once shimmered with light.
Dragons soared through gold-tinged clouds, their wings scattering scales that fell like jewels across the valleys. Ancient mountains hummed with mana, the air itself pulsing with life. The kingdom of dragons — proud, eternal, untouched by mortal hands — was alive.
And among them was a boy.
Dracan.
The youngest prince of the dragon line.
He wasn't like the others. While the elder dragons cloaked themselves in glory and flame, Dracan had always been different — curious, fragile, always staring up at the heavens beyond the stars, wondering what existed beyond the boundaries of their world.
He had the rare gift of shapeshifting, his body flowing like silver between dragon and human form at will — something even his father, the Dragon King, envied. But for all his strength, Dracan had one weakness his kin called unforgivable.
He had a heart too human.
"Dracan! Come inside, the storm's beginning again!"
A soft voice called — his mother's, the Queen of Flames. She was radiant even in sorrow, her golden eyes filled with warmth.
Dracan smiled faintly, his smaller human form running through the corridors of crystalline stone. The walls themselves breathed — veins of mana glowing faintly as he passed. Outside, thunder rumbled like the roar of gods.
It had been months since the War of the Heavens began.
What started as a quarrel between the divine had spilled into their dimension — their sacred home, a realm forged by dragons themselves — now dragged into ruin by those who called themselves gods.
The sky was torn.
Rifts gaped open, leaking rivers of celestial fire.
Dracan had seen the battlefield from afar dragons falling like stars, their bodies turning to stone mid-flight, shattered by divine spears. The gods and the dragons were ancient rivals, and now the end of both races was written in blood and flame.
"In every war… something precious dies first — innocence."
Dracan's mother knelt before him that night.
Her golden armor was cracked. The scales on her wings were dull.
"Mother… are we losing?"
He asked it so softly that his voice trembled.
She smiled, even then. "No. Dragons don't lose, my child. We… endure."
But the way her eyes flickered said otherwise.
Suddenly the ground shook — an echo of thunder, deeper and colder than before. The walls of their palace splintered. Cries echoed from beyond — dragons roaring, flames cutting through the night.
Then came the screams.
Dracan turned toward the sound, but his mother seized his shoulders, her eyes fierce. "Dracan. Listen to me. You must flee. Now."
"But Father—"
"Your father fights the gods themselves. You cannot help him. Please… go!"
The palace split open. Light — no, something brighter than light — tore through the roof. A spear of divine energy, blinding, deafening. The Queen of Flames shoved her son aside, her wings unfolding to shield him.
The world exploded.
When Dracan awoke, there was only silence.
The palace was gone. The sky was ash.
The once-living mountains were broken bones scattered across a gray wasteland. The rivers boiled with mana, their glow fading into darkness.
And in the distance he saw them.
The gods.
Vast, shapeless beings cloaked in divine brilliance, walking through the ruins like indifferent titans. Every step they took crushed what little remained of his world. Dragons rose to meet them, only to be erased . burned to dust by divine radiance.
Dracan staggered to his feet, smoke filling his lungs. He could barely stand. His once radiant scales were blackened, cracked with blood.
"Mother…? Father…?"
There was no answer. Only the whisper of wind over ash.
And then he saw her.
His mother's body lay before him. Her wings broken. Her golden armor shattered.
Her hand still reached forward… as though she had tried to touch him one last time.
The boy fell to his knees. His throat burned. He tried to scream, but no sound came.
The only thing that answered him… was the echo of his own heartbeat.
"In every silence, grief is born."
He didn't remember how long he wandered.
Days? Weeks?
Time had no meaning anymore. The sun was gone. The stars were shattered.
He walked through ruins that once sang with life. The bones of his kin littered the ground, their once-immortal essence fading into nothing.
Then, when even tears refused to come — he heard it.
A voice.
Soft. Dark. Familiar, and yet unknown.
"Do you wish for power, little prince?"
Dracan froze. The air grew colder, heavy with something ancient. From the shadows between crumbled spires, a figure emerged cloaked in darkness so deep it seemed to devour the light around it.
He could not see its face. Only two eyes, faintly glowing ... not red, not gold, but the color of void.
Dracan's voice cracked. "Who… are you?"
The figure smiled, though he couldn't see it.
"I am nothing. I am everything. I am the shadow that lingers when gods forget what light means."
"I can give you what you desire most. Strength enough to destroy them all."
Dracan's hands trembled. "Power…?"
"Power enough to unmake the heavens that took your world."
There was a silence. The boy looked down at his trembling claws, at his mother's pendant still hanging around his neck.
"…Even if it costs me everything?"
The figure's voice was a whisper of eternity.
"It already has."
The darkness rose like a tide.
It seeped into his scales, his blood, his soul. It burned — not like fire, but like emptiness. It tore at him, hollowing him out, filling him with something far older and colder than rage.
The world shook.
Dracan screamed as the light in his eyes turned black, as his heart split open, as his soul merged with something beyond comprehension.
When the darkness faded, the boy was gone.
Standing where he once knelt was something else .. a being cloaked in shadow, his body outlined by threads of blue fire. The once-golden scales were now black obsidian, shimmering with galaxies.
Dracan opened his eyes.
He felt everything.
Every heartbeat of the void. Every whisper of the dying stars. Every scream from his broken world.
And for the first time — he felt nothing at all.
"Power is never given. It is carved out of despair."
Years passed — or centuries.
Dracan no longer knew. He wandered between dimensions, stepping through the corpse of one world after another. He learned to open gates with his will alone — tears in reality that bled shadow instead of light.
He devoured fragments of mana, absorbed remnants of fallen gods, studied the patterns of destruction itself.
His power grew. But so did his emptiness.
There were times he returned to the ashes of Draconis Vale — not to grieve, but to remember what grief once felt like.
He knelt before the ruins of the palace — where his mother's wings still lay, preserved in black stone.
"Mother," he whispered, his voice nothing but a growl of thunder, "I will build something they can never destroy again."
A thousand years later, in the silence of the void — Dracan found it.
A fragment of a universe untouched by gods.
Raw. Empty. New.
There, with his own hands, he forged it — the Gate of Gealgilmesh, a dimensional fracture that connected countless worlds. A prison. A sanctuary. A monument.
A dungeon.
It was not built for mortals. It was built for remembrance.
Every floor reflected his agony — his loss, his despair, his wrath. The beasts he created were born from fragments of his memories — shadows of his people, of the gods who killed them, of the screams that once filled the skies.
And in its deepest chamber, he placed himself ..
not as a king.
Not as a god.
But as a knight guarding the threshold between light and darkness.
His armor forged from the bones of fallen stars.
His sword from the heart of his world.
And his eyes .. those dragon eyes still burning with the sorrow of a thousand years.
"He was called many things in the ages that followed ..the Knight of the Void, the Dragon of Shadows, the Guardian of the Forgotten Gate."
But to himself… he was still only that boy.
The prince who lost his home.
And so the darkness slept until a human named Renji Kurogane descended into his dungeon.
And for the first time in ages, Dracan's eyes opened again.
A faint smile crossed his lips beneath the helm.
" what's this? ,Another fool who seeks power… or perhaps…"!
His gaze softened, remembering the past.
"…or another boy who's already lost everything."