After that, nothing made sense to the sergeant.
For a few suspended seconds, all Chagrin could see was a storm of gold. A small hurricane of luminous blood spiralling violently above the altar. It roared without sound, each drop burning like molten light as it carved through the night air.
At its centre stood the priestess.
She was unmoving, untouched by the storm, her silhouette carved in shadow and moonlight. In her hands she held a jagged black stone, its surface swallowing light rather than reflecting it, as if the darkness itself had condensed into solid form.
Chagrin lay pinned to the altar, barely conscious. His blood spilled freely beneath him, soaking into the stone, turning its ancient grey-white surface into a deep, living red. For a heartbeat, he thought it was over, that this was simply how he would die, bled out beneath ruins older than the Empire.
'Not a bad way to go' thought Chagrin to himself, but in his eyes, there was the fear of death flowing in he form of one single tear, from his eye to his check finally falling to Altar ground.
Then the altar answered.
A low hum vibrated through the stone, deep enough to be felt in bone rather than heard. The carvings beneath Chagrin's body ignited, glowing lines crawling outward like veins awakening from a long sleep.
The golden hurricane faltered.
Its rotation slowed — then stopped entirely.
The storm collapsed inward, flowing not through the air, but into the altar itself, pouring along the intricate channels carved into the ruins. The stone lit up, revealing a vast image hidden beneath centuries of erosion:
A human figure knelt beneath a suspended sphere.
From the sphere dripped a radiant liquid.
The human drank.
Red blood — Chagrin's blood — stained the figure below.
Gold — the Dragon's blood — flowed from above.
The world seemed to hold its breath.
"No… no," the Night priestess whispered. Her composure shattered.
Every eye across her body snapped open at once, red veins spider-webbing through them, each pupil burning with the cold light of a blood moon. The black stone in her hands vibrated violently.
"I checked this altar," she snarled, rage cracking through her voice. "Again and again. It was inert. Dead. Fate..." Her gaze locked onto Chagrin. "—fate has interfered."
The Veins beneath the ruins screamed in response.
And the ritual began.
Chagrin did not scream at first. Shock robbed him of that mercy.
The altar rose, stone petals unfolding beneath his broken body, lifting him into the storm of gold and shadow. The spear was still lodged in his chest going through lung, through muscle, through what little breath he had left. Each shallow inhale bubbled wetly, red froth spilling down his ribs.
Then the pain arrived.
Not all at once. Pain never was that kind, and chagrin wasn't going to be an exception.
It crept in like a tide that had waited patiently for the shore to forget it existed.
The Veins ignited.
Blue light surged through the stone beneath him, racing along carved channels like living arteries. The air thickened, vibrating with a low-frequency hum that rattled his teeth and made his skull feel too small for his thoughts.
Chagrin's body arched involuntarily.
Bones cracked. Not snapped—unlocked.
He felt his ribs separate from each other, felt the pressure release as his skeleton began to lift out of alignment. His spine pulled free in slow, horrible increments, vertebrae stretching apart as if invisible hands were testing how much a human could be undone without dying.
He finally screamed.
It tore out of him raw and animal, ripped from a throat already filling with blood.
Above him, the Mad Dragon watched.
Its panther form hovered at the edge of the storm, gold light flickering like a dying star. When it spoke, its voice slid directly into Chagrin's skull, bypassing sound entirely.
"Ah," it murmured, ancient and amused. "There it is. The song humans always sing when they finally understand."
Chagrin's vision fractured.
The ruins blurred, dissolving into something else—somewhere else.
For a heartbeat, he saw Terra.
A city of impossible height stretched beneath a silver sky, towers of glass and stone spiralling upward until they pierced the clouds. The Veins much older, much brighter, ran openly through the streets like rivers of light. Humans screaming as shadows fell across the city, vast wings blotting out the sun.
The sky cracked. It fell inward.
Chagrin convulsed.
His bones shattered. Not metaphorically.
Literally.
His arms disintegrated into floating fragments, each bone crushed into fine white dust, suspended in midair. His legs followed, pulverised joint by joint. He felt everything. Every rupture. Every separation. His nerves screamed until they burned out—and then screamed again when something rewired them.
Golden blood poured down from above.
The Mad Dragon's blood.
It flowed like liquid sunlight, thick and heavy, splashing against the powdered remains of Chagrin's skeleton. Where it touched, the dust moved—reassembling, knitting together into something denser, sharper.
Stronger.
"You asked earlier," the Dragon said softly, mockery wrapped in something like nostalgia."Why my blood is gold."
Chagrin couldn't answer.
He didn't have a mouth anymore.
The altar responded anyway.
Runes flared to life across its surface, ancient glyphs depicting a human kneeling beneath a sphere—drinking light, burning from the inside out. Chagrin's red blood streamed upward, mixing with the gold, painting the carvings anew.
"Gold is the colour of memory," the Dragon continued. "Of worlds that refuse to stay dead."
His organs followed.
Chagrin watched very aware, horrifyingly aware of his heart being pulled free from his chest, veins stretching like screaming threads before snapping loose. It hovered in the air, still beating, each pulse splattering blood into the storm.
Then it stopped.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Then gold flooded in.
The heart reformed—larger, denser, threaded with glowing filaments that pulsed in time with the Veins. His lungs followed, rebuilt from nothing, reshaped to breathe air that no longer existed on Zues. His stomach burned as it was dissolved and remade, nerves laced with unfamiliar pathways.
His brain was last.
The altar hesitated.
Even the priestess trembled.
"No," she whispered, her voice suddenly fragile. "That part… that part should not—"
Too late.
Chagrin's skull split open. Not violently.
Precisely.
His brain unfolded, layers peeling back like pages in a book written in pain. Each section was stripped bare, rewritten with gold and blue light. Memories surfaced—his father's fists, the barracks, the screams on the battlefield—then sank again, branded deeper.
The Mad Dragon leaned closer.
"You survive because you are empty," it said, voice lowering. "And emptiness is easy to fill."
Chagrin's thoughts screamed.
Why me?What are you doing to me?Am I dying?
The priestess stepped forward, her monstrous form casting impossible shadows.
"You are being witnessed," she said gently. "That is all fate ever promised."
"What—what happens to me?" Chagrin managed to think, his mind barely holding together.
She regarded him with something like pity.
"You will hear the world," she said. "And the world will never let you sleep again."
The altar began to lower.
Chagrin's body reassembled itself in reverse order—skin knitting over muscle, muscle wrapping reinforced bone, nerves slotting into place with agonising precision. When he finally slammed back down against the stone, whole again, he screamed one last time—
—and then darkness took him.
...
When he woke, he was sitting in a chair.
Soft leather.
Warm light.
The smell of ink and old paper.
Kohler's office.
Monica was in front of him, eyes wide, foam gathering at the corners of her mouth. When she met his gaze, she screamed.
"He—he has the eyes," she gasped, stumbling back. "The eyes of the Mad Dragon."
Kohler appeared at her side, hand already on his weapon.
Then he froze.
"Well," the Magister said quietly, studying Chagrin with naked awe. "I'll be damned."
Later—much later—when Chagrin was alone, the memory returned in fragments.
The ruins.
The dawn.
The priestess standing beside him, human once more, exhaustion etched into her bones.
"I'm no one now," she had said softly. "Fate needed a witness. Not a survivor."
She had pressed a smooth grey stone into his palm—warm, humming faintly with life.
"When the world forgets you" she whispered, "this will remember your name."
Now, in the office, Chagrin looked down.
The stone rested beside his hand.
He hadn't brought it.
Outside, the sun climbed over the capital's domes, washing the city in gold. The air shimmered faintly, like reality hadn't finished settling after a dream.
Chagrin laughed weakly "Guess it's a new day," he muttered.
His voice echoed. As if someone else had spoken with him.