Richard woke with a start, all around him he could feel a pulsating rhythm. It called to him at a profound level. His senses slowly expanded as he gasped in fright. He could feel it all around him, his room, the warn down carpeting, the old stone hallways. He closed his eyes and followed the expanding feeling through the old family manor, going past old worn areas that were no longer in use. He went past the old servants’ quarters, a bittersweet reminder of glory long past. As his senses expanded to encompass a sphere of 100 meters he just sat there in wonderment. He didn’t know what was happening, questions raced through his mind. “what is going on? I can feel it all around me, the house the floor the dirt. Almost as if I am touching it with my hands but only if my hands were calipers.” He felt it then more clearly than ever, the pulsating rhythm that had woken him from his slumber was pushing and pulling at his very soul like the tides.
As the rhythm vibrated his very being he could feel a power coming at him from the west slowly expanding. As soon as it touched his body it started being absorbed into him, permeating through his essence. His body drinking the energy almost as if he was dying of dehydration and he had finally come upon a stream of clear crisp water. He could feel the energy slowly building inside of himself, the feeling he got was euphoric, an ecstasy the likes of which he had never known.
Time passed slowly for Richard as his body acclimated to the new sensations. He lay on the bed going through his newfound senses, he focused on a line of ants as they were crawling through a hole in the old walls of his compound. He saw a bat flying in pursuit of an insect he did not recognize. He could see his old car, a classic by age alone, sitting in the front of his small manor. He could feel the smoldering fire still alive in his hearth in the room.
The fire called to him, it was as if alive slowly dying in embers, it touched him at his core as he watched it slowly fade away into nothingness lonely and cold. “ha, a cold fire who would’ve thought” Richard joked to himself as the last embers faded away. He felt lonely then as his friend that had kept him company finally winked away, only a few smoking remains as testament to its existence. Then he finally focused on himself, Richard Somerset lay there with his eyes closed staring at himself from above. He could see himself as he had never seen himself, it was like the first time you investigated a mirror and realized that it was you starring back. He lay there in his pajamas, nothing fancy just warm pants and a shirt to help keep the cold away, it was a cold night in January in the British Isles.
He noticed it then that energy that had suddenly come at him had stopped flowing through him and had filled his body to near bursting. He could still feel the energy flowing like a steady stream coming from the west but it was no longer invading his body. He felt the energy that filled him and noticed that it was not just inside of him it was now a part of him. As natural as breathing he started to move the energy through his body. He wondered how he was doing this, it all just felt so natural. As he moved his energy slowly through his body in a seemingly random pattern he felt it start to change properties. The random pattern was not random at all, it was an instinct held back since the dawn of his first day. He could feel the fire now burning and alive again in the hearth. The flames hotter than they had a right to be.
The energy having finished the pattern he had instinctively created started to burn, getting hotter and hotter until the newly lit fire in the corner felt cold in comparison. He was startled and scarred, this energy could kill him, it was too hot. He realized then that it was doing no harm to him, in fact he felt more comfortable with the blazing heat than he had ever before. He opened his eyes for the first time since he awoke in fright and noticed his once brown eyes where now a blazing crimson glowing softly with a promise of heat and power.
He could still feel the energy in him blazing in heat slowly getting hotter and hotter. His skin started to steam as the energy kept building. His pajamas burned away from the heat as he got out of bed and stood in the plain stone floor. For once he was glad that his room, like much of the house, didn’t have any carpeting. He feared what the heat would’ve done to a carpet. When he could no longer hold the heat inside of himself he opened his mouth and exhaled a long held in breath. The fire escaped from him then, it blew from his mouth with his breath. A hot searing plasma came out of his mouth instead of air. It blew hot in his room and hit the window opposite him. He watched in horror and excitement as the plasma hit the window and kept going outside.
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“I’m a fucking dragon!!” he whooped to himself. He didn’t even care about the broken window or the stone all around him that glowed in heat. He didn’t care that the last portrait of his ancient ancestor Henry Somerset the Duke of Beaufort had burnet in the adjacent room. He didn’t even care that half his house was now smoking from the ruins of the last bits of carpeting igniting. Then again why would he care for such trivialities he was now a dragon, he controlled heat, fire, and plasma.
Richard was the last living descendant of Henry Somerset the Duke of Beaufort. His parents had died when he was 18 and left the entirety of their fortune to him, an old car and a decrepit manor. He remembered how he had cried at their graves and made them a promise he now intended to keep. He told them with bated breath and tear stained eyes “Mom, Dad, I promise you. One day I will fulfill the generational wish of our once great name. I will bring our house up from ruin, I will fight for the honor of our name and claim back our peerage. I will become a dragon among men and make the queen recognize our nobility.”
Richard was so excited at his new power and the realization that he could finally fulfill his promise to his parents that he did not notice he had used all his energy in that one breath. He finally realized he was out of energy when he tried to do it again. He panicked then, the energy that was going to change his life, the energy that would allow him to gain back his peerage from the hands of the queen was gone.
“NO NO NO NO NO, this cant be. I used my one shot to burn my house?” he panicked quietly to himself.
In a desperate attempt at regaining his draconic powers, as he was starting to refer to them, he focused back onto his small sphere around him. He could still feel everything around him, the bat was gone probably scarred away by the fire. The ants where in disarray as they tried to run from the now fully aflame compound. Then, “yes!! It’s still there. I can feel it still pulsing around me filling the air, it’s even denser now.” He tried to pull at the power around him that would allow him to use his draconic fire.
“I, I can’t use it. Why before it just came at my body by itself. Why won’t it come now?”
He kept trying, he kept pushing and pulling the energy around him trying to gather some. He noticed that his body was very slowly filling up with energy. “There has to be a better way to get this.” He then recalled the pulsating rhythm that had awoken him originally. He tried to mimic that rhythm to gather the energy, he used his sphere to push and pull in accordance to the rhythm he remembered. “It’s working, the energy is coming much faster now and is filling up. But, what is this?”
As he kept staring at himself and focusing on the pulsating rhythm around him. It was becoming faint now, barely a whisper from the loud crescendo that had awoken him. He noticed that the energy would gather towards his cells and some would fill him but about half would just flow out of him. “That’s such a waste, if I could hold onto that I’m sure I could become much more powerful. But where can I store it? My body can only handle so much before I feel like I’m about to burst open.” He started to think about this energy and what he could do with it.
He stared at himself trying to figure out why he couldn’t hold in all of the power that was coming at him. “Maybe I have to turn it into draconic energy first then I can absorb more.” With that thought in mind he directly gave up the pulsating rhythm and started to circulate the energy that was within him once again. Moving it in that mysterious pattern he had discovered. He held it in but instead of focusing the energy he tried to disperse it back to his cells. Meeting with mediocre results he decided to try something else.
Now that he understood how he could gather more, albeit very slowly, he was more inclined to experiment with the storage. He knew instinctively that the energy could not harm him while it was within him, so he was not scared to try a few things.
He started by concentrating the energy like before but instead of blowing it out from his mouth the tried to compress it. “yes, this could work. Now I just need to compress it some more and” Richard started to cough and wheeze uncontrollably, he had lost control of the compressed heat energy and it had detonated inside of himself.
“ok, so maybe compressing superheated energy was not the best idea let’s try something else.” He just stood there for hours gathering energy, experimenting, losing the energy then gathering some more. This cycle kept going until he noticed it was close to noon. He was surprised that he didn’t feel hungry or tired but decided to ignore that for now.
Full of energy and an understanding that had eluded him before, he could now gather his entire pool of energy from zero in just 2 hours. He was still looking for a way to store more energy and make the gathering process much quicker, but he knew it would take time and patience. Two things he was not sure he had. Someone must have noticed the light show coming from his manor and would come to investigate.