A great black orb rested upon the bottom of a lake, like a pebble in a pond, located between mountains that were ten times the size of the lake. The mountains curled overhead and the sky was rainbow fabric. The sun was somewhere in the sky, sitting right beside the moon.
The black orb rocked back and forth, like something rolling within a soft shell, the black distending just a bit here and there. That arc of black looked almost like a tail slithering through the dark. Something like the sails of a ship pressed out here and there.
A snout nipped at the interior of the shell.
The shell broke and reformed into the spikes of a dragon. Ten thousand small monsters, each the size of one of the dragon’s claws, darted away from the darkness, from the vast release of air that bubbled upward. The dragon looked small compared to the lake because he was small compared to the lake.
The dragon was a kaiju. The lake was the size of the entire North American continent.
The dragon shook itself off, breathing in the water and snorting out light—
The dragon paused.
The dragon looked at itself.
“Oh fuck, what did I do?”
The dragon looked outward.
“Oh fuck. I’m a dragon.”
Sloane Addashield shook his head—
And the dragon was awake. And maybe Sloane wasn't real anymore.
Addavein flashed his wings out, chuckling like an underwater earthquake. He had still been asleep, dreaming he was a human, but he wasn’t a human at all. As Addavein floated up out of the waters of the lake, he wondered what had happened while he was asleep.
Perhaps Mark was still alive! That would be nice.
No big deal if he wasn’t, but hopefully Mark was still among the living. And if he wasn’t… Well.
Addashield had already planned to truly explore Endless Daihoon for a bunch of magics that he had never managed to find in life, and he couldn’t do that alone. If Mark was dead, then he could leave to search for his brother, and when he returned with Mark and thousands of other people in tow —all the ones he killed over all of his long life and even during his near-Fall— then there would be no one who could have called him a stain upon humanity. Addashield could clear his entire name, and—
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Addashield gasped.
He could bring back Yunthal Brightwind, too. His true talzarki, from when he was a kid and he had come out of the Thresher and gotten Kanda, right alongside Yunthal, who acquired Adank, the both of them ascending to archmages. It was the perfect plan. He could get back everything.
Of course, there would be rashes of copycats trying to become a dragon like him, but Addashield could...
Wait.
Addashield?
He was calling himself ‘Addashield’, wasn’t he.
Addashield blinked his large draconic eyes, and swam through the waters with wings held close and his tail swishing particularly hard, propelling him forward. He looked at himself again, and he knew his name once again.
Addavein shook his head. He was Addavein. Not Addashield.
But…
Was he?
Perhaps it was getting harder and harder to pretend he was Addavein, when he remembered nothing of Kanda’s life at all. Now, in the wakefulness of a fresh sleep, Addavein recognized that he did not have any of Kanda’s memories at all. Not really. Vague impressions did not count. He was Addashield in all but form...
Sloane Addashield, as a dragon, maybe, rose out of the waters of some random river in Endless Daihoon, and turned his flight toward the human lands, once again.
He would be able to pretend he wasn’t Sloane after a few weeks of being awake… Probably. If he pretended well enough, it would become the truth, and Sloane could avoid thinking about all of the horrible things he had done to survive.
… Maybe the elves had some body transformation magics. Something that would allow Sloane to regain a human form, for at least a short while. The ancient dragons, the ones from history that seemed more myth than real, in that ancient world that had once been whole and unbroken, before the Magefalls that caused Daihoon to become little more than scattered empires and hovels in the ground, those dragons were supposed to be able to transform into humans for short times. Not a single, true High Dragon like Addavein, was able to become small. Only the malformed dragons, like the Fates and the Guardians, were small things, and they had always been small things. Addavein wasn’t a malformed dragon, though. He was power incarnate.
Power incarnate had a way of getting murdered when put into smaller boxes, though, which is why that ancient magic had been lost. Or at least that’s how the story went.
Addavein would have to go exploring to find out the truth, and it would be nice to have some partners to explore with...
Sloane missed Yunthal. His old friend, born alongside him in the orphanage, and raised with Kanda's rival demon inside of himself, both of them had been archmages making Daihoon live for a long time. Yunthal had mostly retired a long time ago, but... But then Sloane had killed him, and Yunthal had allowed himself to be killed by Sloane, so that Kanda didn't get Sloane's body.
... Addavein left that behind, though. That was Sloane's life. Not his.
... Right?