Frostbound Dragon's heir

The air in the Sanctum of the Frozen Dragon was thinner than anywhere else on the glacier. I understood deeply that it had to be. To bind an ice dragon’s spirit, which is unleashing a god-tier entity to a mortal body, required a space of complete stillness and calm.

My grandfather, Alros, knelt across from me, his presence radiating the suffocating weight of three centuries of Vornic history. He was the anchor of the North, the Warden who held the Empire at bay with nothing but a gaze and the soul of the dragon, Kyzyl-Vorn, shackled to his heart.

"You are the second son, Evander," he rasped, his voice a dry rustle of dead leaves. "By tradition, you were meant for the sword, not the mantle. But the frost demands a vessel, and my time is leaking out into the permafrost."

He reached out, his hand shaking as he grabbed mine. The air between us shifted slightly and my heart hammered furiously.

He was about to bind me to the most powerful dragon spirit in the entire nation and be the vessel that protected our people from all sorts of danger.

 Inside his chest, deep behind his ribs, a pale, pulsating blue light flickered like a dying star. That was the soul of our house. It was the reason the Vornics were feared, why the Empire stayed behind the southern mountain ranges, and why our stronghold, carved into the heart of the great glacier, remained the final bastion of the old world.

"The pact is the only thing keeping the world from tilting into the Sun-King’s fires," Alros whispered, his eyes locking onto mine with a terrifying intensity that made me breathe hard. "If this fails, then the ice melts. And if it is stolen, the Empire gains a god. So you take it, Evander. You don't just inherit our power; you inherit our cage."

I felt the weight of it—the thousands of lives protected by this single, agonizing ritual. If I succeeded, I would become the Warden. I would be the shield for the North. It was scary to think about at my age; I was just sixteen, but I felt the pride swelling in my chest, the solemn duty of a Vornic son. 

My family stood in the shadows of the pillars, my mother’s hands clasped in prayer, my brother Damien watching with the fierce, silent pride of a warrior witnessing a coronation.

Everything was perfect as much as it was sacred.

And then, out of nowhere, the world ended.

There was no sound at first, just the instantaneous, violent rejection of reality that hit us. The massive, enchanted iron doors of the Sanctum shattered with a loud bang that rang in my ears harshly.

The heat of the one thing we feared the most hit us before the soldiers did. It was a searing, oppressive wall of sun-forged energy that turned the sanctuary’s eternal frost into a boiling steam.

My mother screamed, a sharp, shattered sound that was silenced a second later by the hiss of a sun-spear. I turned, my mouth opening to call out, but the sight of my mother’s spilled blood froze the breath in my throat.

It all happened too fast for me to process. The stench of blood filled the room and the horrific scenes made my insides curl with fear and shock.

"No!" I lunged forward, but Alros caught me. He was dying, his life force bleeding out as the ritual was forced to its conclusion in the middle of a slaughter.

"Take it!" he roared, his voice cracking. He didn't offer me a choice at that point as he shoved his palm into my chest, and the dragon spirit—raw, incomplete, and screaming—was ripped from his fading heart and flooded into mine.

The agony that ate its way into my body was fierce and unbearable. It felt like being burned alive by the very fire of the dragon’s breath and a sharp scream tore out of my throat.

I collapsed to the ground, my vision fracturing into distorted shards of blue. As I just watched my family die, I felt the dragon spirit tear my own soul to ribbons as it struggled to inhabit a body that wasn't ready to take it in.

I crawled with everything left in me, my fingers digging into the blood-slicked ice. I reached for my mother, my hand trembling, but my fingers were already turning to black frost.

The Sunfire Commander stepped over my father’s body, his boots clicking on the ice. He didn't look like a warrior, but rather like a bureaucrat closing a ledger. He stood over me, his eyes burning down at me with hatred and the light from his blade caught the crest on his armor.

It was a serpent devouring the sun.

I stared at it, my mind stalling for a split second until the realization suddenly hit me. 

That was the Royal Crest! This wasn't an invasion, it was an attack with orders straight from the Empire! 

The King carefully orchestrated not just our death, but extinction of our house and entire lineage.

"It’s incomplete," the Commander noted, looking at my seizing, frost-bitten form with nothing but utter disgust. "The spirit is dying with the boy. There is nothing left to do here."

I groaned in pain and looked toward the back of the room. My mother’s eyes were open, staring at nothing. Damien’s hand lay palm-up near the drain, completely covered in blood. The silence that followed the initial carnage was worse than the fighting…it was the silence of a grave.

My lungs seized all of a sudden and I gasped for breath desperately. The ice was moving up my throat, a physical block of death. I couldn't even scream or cry out for help. I could only helplessly watch as the commander turned his back on me, convinced I was already a corpse, and began to loot the remnants of our legacy.

I was the last Vornic. I was the keeper of a dying god. And as the ceiling of the stronghold began to groan and collapse, burying the bodies of everyone I had ever loved under a million tons of tomb-ice, I realized I had nothing left to lose—not even my own soul.

The cold finally took my heart, and as the darkness swallowed the room, the last thing I felt was the crushing, hollow weight of a vengeance I was too weak to even imagine.