Year 214 - Eight Hundred Years Ago
The world was ending.
Not slowly. Not quietly. But with screams and fire and the endless march of the dead.
It started when humanity broke a promise.
They had summoned an ancient dragon to fight a demon from Hell a creature of rot and corruption that had crawled from the abyss. The dragon came. The dragon fought. The dragon won.
But humanity refused to pay the price.
When the demon survived and bonded with a girl a child with storm-gray eyes and a broken heart it demanded one thing: make her your god.
Humanity laughed.
"A girl? Our god? Never."
The demon smiled.
And the dead began to rise.
Corpses clawed their way from graves. Entire kingdoms fell in a single night. The living were chained, enslaved, forced to build monuments to the girl's twisted divinity.
The sun vanished. Swallowed by darkness. The sky bled red, and shadows wept across the land.
Humanity screamed for mercy.
The girl did not listen.
Some say she did it for love that the demon had promised to bring back someone she'd lost. Others claim she was possessed from birth, a puppet on infernal strings.
No one remembers the truth.
Only the legend remains.
One man stood at the edge of the abyss.
He had nothing left. His family dead. His home—ash. His hope extinguished.
But he had heard the stories. Whispers of a forbidden ritual written in blood on pages that screamed when touched. A summoning that demanded everything: his life, his blood, his soul.
In exchange, he would call forth the Warrior of the Blood Dragon.
His hands shook as he carved the symbols into his own flesh. His voice cracked as he spoke the words that should never be spoken.
And the world answered.
The sky shattered like glass.
Hell itself trembled.
The oceans rose and clawed at the heavens as if trying to flee.
Even the undead countless, unstoppable froze. Their hollow eyes went wide with something they had not felt in centuries.
Fear.
From a mountain of human corpses, he rose.
Not the noble dragon humanity had summoned before. Not a creature of wisdom and mercy.
This was a monster.
Crimson scales that gleamed like fresh blood. Wings so vast they drowned the sky in shadow. Eyes that burned with fury older than empires.
With one claw, he tore mountains in half.
With one breath, he turned air to poison.
With every step, the earth cracked and the world itself seemed to scream.
He carved through the undead army like a blade through paper. Thousands fell. Tens of thousands. Their bodies turned to ash under the weight of his presence alone.
And when he reached the girl the false god at the center of it all he stopped.
They stared at each other.
She whispered something. Words lost to history.
Then the Blood Dragon Warrior ended her.
Not with rage.
Not with cruelty.
With inevitability.
The undead collapsed. The darkness lifted. The sun impossibly returned.
Humanity was saved.
But the warrior did not stay. Did not accept their gratitude. Did not let them worship him.
He simply vanished, leaving only scorched earth and ash.
And a legend.
Eight hundred years have passed.
The story became a myth. The myth became a bedtime tale. Something grandparents tell children on cold nights when the shadows grow long.
But here's the thing about legends.
They have a way of coming back.
END OF PROLOGUE