Rise of the Demon Dragon

Year 1125,

The rain had finally ceased, leaving behind a field strewn with the bodies of fallen soldiers from the day’s brutal clash. The Kingdom of Sumerion, under the command of King Mithras Arion, had claimed victory over the Aetherion Kingdom.

This victory marked the beginning of King Mithras’s quest to reunite all of Sumerion’s fragmented territories, which had been split into Sumerion and Aetherion by his late father to quell any potential power struggles for the throne.

Amidst the countless fallen, one soldier still clung to life. Hidden beneath a mound of blood-soaked corpses, he fought to survive.

His name was Zyren Drakos. A soldier of Aetherion, he had been defeated in the battle that day.

The young man’s eyes fluttered open. For a moment, he believed he had crossed into the afterlife, but the sharp, relentless pain coursing through his body revealed that he was still very much alive.

His body was a tapestry of sword wounds, and an arrow had embedded itself in his left leg. Summoning the last of his strength, he struggled to free himself from the grim pile of bodies.

Every movement was a torturous ordeal. The agony in his limbs was unrelenting, and his left leg felt like a dead weight.

Unresponsive.

Numb.

With a sense of dread, he contemplated removing the arrow.

Using strips of cloth torn from a nearby corpse’s, he fashioned a makeshift tourniquet and tied it around his injured leg.

He forced the arrow through the flesh, and the pain intensified, radiating through his body. Shivering uncontrollably, he was overwhelmed by a fever.

Exhausted, he collapsed to the ground. His tear-filled eyes stared blankly at the sky, uncertainty clouding his thoughts. He wasn’t sure if he would survive the night. Soon, darkness closed in once more as he lost consciousness.

Dead. 

Maybe not.

An orphan, Zyren’s life had been shaped by tragedy. His biological parents were murdered by his adoptive father, Carthas, when he was just a baby.

At the time, his parents were traveling to the capital of Aetherion, their journey taking them through a dense forest—home to a band of ruthless robbers led by Carthas.

The robbers spared no one; they slaughtered everyone in their path. But when Carthas heard the cries of a baby clutched in the arms of his dead mother, something stirred within him. For reasons unknown, he took the child and raised him as his own, naming him Zyren Drakos.

Growing up under the care of a bandit leader, surrounded by merciless thieves, Zyren naturally became one of them.

In fact, he was even more brutal than his adoptive father. Perhaps the memory of his parents’ massacre had left an indelible mark on his unconscious mind, fueling his violent tendencies.

The day he learned the truth about his origins was the day he killed Carthas. One of Carthas’s drunken subordinates accidentally let slip the story, and in a fit of rage, he murdered his adoptive father. He was only seventeen.

With Carthas dead, he took over as the leader of the bandits.

His large, imposing figure, combined with the powerful talismans he inherited, commanded the respect of Carthas’s former subordinates.

Despite the knowledge he had gained from his father, he was still a teenager—bold, brave, and reckless, but far from mature enough to lead a gang of bandits.

Within a year of taking command, he and his gang were captured by the forces of Aetherion. Zyren was imprisoned alongside his surviving followers.

After two years behind bars, a changed he was offered a path to freedom: become a soldier of Aetherion.

This offer was a clever ploy to keep the prisoners from reverting to their old ways. Eager for freedom, he agreed to the terms.

He followed orders, but only out of necessity. The fear of being thrown back into a cell kept him in line.

He knew better than to try and escape; his superiors were far more powerful and would surely hunt him down and kill him.

As a new soldier, he carried out his duties with precision. But the ruthless killer within him still lurked beneath the surface.

In every mission, particularly when tasked with taking down bandit gangs, he showed no mercy. Despite his comrades’ pleas to spare lives, he slaughtered every opponent without hesitation.

He didn’t care. He savored the moments when his enemies fell at his hands.

When tensions between Aetherion and Sumerion escalated into war, he found himself on the battlefield. He cut down countless Sumerion soldiers, fighting with a relentless fury until his own wounds became too much to bear.

He collapsed, unconscious, buried under the bodies of the fallen.

***

Zyren slowly regained consciousness, his body trembling from the fever that had set in. He felt an overwhelming cold seeping into his bones.

“Am I going to die here?” The thought crept into his mind as he lay motionless, staring up at the sky, trying to muster the strength to escape the gruesome pile of corpses surrounding him.

A metallic clink echoed nearby, the sound of a sword or some other weapon hitting the ground. He turned his head towards the noise, hope flickering briefly in his chest.

“Whoever’s there, help me... I’m still alive...” he whimpered, his voice barely more than a whisper.

But fate dealt him another cruel blow. It wasn’t a rescuer he saw, but a pack of wild wolves, already feasting on the sea of bodies scattered across the battlefield.

Panic surged through him, snapping him back to life. He couldn’t let himself be devoured by wolves while still breathing. Summoning every ounce of strength, he began to crawl, dragging himself forward with his hands and his left leg. His fingers found a long stick, which he clutched like a lifeline, using it to push himself upright.

With the stick as his crutch, he hobbled away, fear driving him forward, numbing the pain that shot through his battered body. 

The wolves, luckily, paid him no mind, too engrossed in their grisly meal to notice his feeble escape.

As he staggered past the carnage, a faint groan reached his ears. Zyren paused, scanning the bodies strewn around him, searching for the source of the sound.

There, among the dead, he spotted someone else still clinging to life—an enemy soldier clad in the battle armor of the Sumerion kingdom.

His heart wavered. The man was his enemy, yet they were bound by the same grim fate. But Zyren was weak, barely holding on himself, and the wolves were still dangerously close.

In that moment, something within him shifted.

Near-death experiences had a way of changing people, and Zyren was no exception.

“I’ll help you,” he finally said, making up his mind. “But don’t make too much noise. There’s a pack of wolves nearby.”

The soldier was in bad shape, his body covered in cuts and his stomach torn open, his face ghostly pale from blood loss. 

Despite his own pain, Zyren helped the man to his feet, and together, they limped away from the blood-soaked battlefield, supporting each other with every unsteady step.