Titus Tanner lay on the cold hospital bed, staring at the ceiling as the steady hum of machines and the faint beeping of the heart monitor filled the room. The once-proud heir to the Tanner fortune was now a shell of his former self. His once-athletic frame had withered away, reduced to bones wrapped in fragile skin. The illness that had ravaged his body over the past year had finally brought him to the edge of death, and there was no one left to mourn his passing.

His thoughts drifted to what once was. Born to wealth, luxury, and opportunity, Titus had always been the golden boy. His parents, both powerful business moguls, had given him everything—except the one thing that mattered most: time. They had died in a tragic accident when Titus was 18, leaving him alone to manage the vast empire they’d left behind. It wasn’t long before his life began to spiral out of control.

He had tried to carry the weight of his family’s legacy, but every decision he made seemed to push him further into a pit of failure. Friends drifted away, his family’s fortune slipped through his fingers, and eventually, even his girlfriend left him, unable to watch him sink into despair any longer. It felt like the world was punishing him, stripping away everything he loved, leaving him with nothing but regret.

“Why…?” he whispered hoarsely into the silence of the room. “Why does everything I love get taken from me?”

The answer, as always, was the hollow echo of the machines. No words of comfort. No answers. Only silence.

As his vision blurred, the room began to fade into darkness. The end had come, and all Titus felt was an overwhelming sense of loneliness. He closed his eyes, accepting the inevitable. The weight of life left his body, and soon, the beeping of the machines slowed… until it finally stopped.

Titus Tanner was dead.

But death was not the end.

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When Titus opened his eyes, he expected to see nothingness, perhaps a tunnel of light leading to whatever came after. Instead, he found himself floating in a vast, endless void. The darkness stretched on forever, an abyss where time and space felt irrelevant. There was no up, no down—only the suffocating silence.

Titus was a soul now, disembodied and adrift. He had no form, no sense of his old body, only the faint echoes of the life he once lived. Confusion swirled within him.

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“Am I… dead?” he thought, though no words left his lips.

There was no answer, just the endless void. For what felt like an eternity, Titus floated, isolated and lost. He had no idea how long he had been there—seconds, minutes, days, years? It was all the same in the void. There was no sense of time here, only an oppressive silence and the cold weight of emptiness pressing in on him.

And then, it came. A feeling—a new sensation creeping into his awareness. At first, it was faint, like a dull ache in his chest. Then it grew, becoming something primal and raw.

Hunger.

An insatiable hunger gnawed at him, unlike anything he had ever felt before. It wasn’t the kind of hunger that food could satisfy; it was deeper, more fundamental, as if his very soul was starving. The emptiness within him begged to be filled, but with what?

As the hunger intensified, Titus noticed something in the void. Far in the distance—or was it nearby?—tiny glowing orbs floated aimlessly through the abyss. They were small, faint lights, barely noticeable against the vast darkness, but they called to him, pulling him closer.

Instinctively, Titus moved—or maybe he was drawn—toward the orbs. As he neared one, the hunger inside him swelled. He couldn’t stop himself. He needed it. Without thinking, he reached out with his soul and consumed the orb.

The moment he did, power surged through him. The hunger eased, if only slightly, but what replaced it was something far more intense—raw energy. It pulsed through his being, filling the empty void that had been gnawing at him.

“What was that?” he thought, his mind racing.

But there were no answers, only more orbs drifting in the distance. And the hunger returned, more intense than before. Titus felt it clawing at him, demanding more. Desperately, he reached for another orb, then another. He consumed them, one by one, and with each, the power grew. His senses sharpened. He could feel the energy of the orbs as they entered him, filling him with fragments of knowledge and memories—ancient memories that were not his own.

Dragons.

The word echoed in his mind as the truth slowly began to dawn on him. These weren’t just random orbs of energy. They were the shattered fragments of ancient dragon souls, broken and scattered throughout the void. And he was consuming them, piece by piece.

The power surged within him as he devoured more, each orb adding to the growing storm of energy inside him. But with the power came chaos. The memories, the raw emotions of the dragons, the fragments of their essence—Titus wasn’t ready for it all. It was too much. He felt like he was about to explode, his very soul stretching to its limits.

Just as the overwhelming power reached its breaking point, something changed.

The void shifted.

A powerful vortex appeared, a swirling maelstrom of energy that sucked him in without warning. Titus could feel himself being pulled, torn from the void and into something new. The sensation was both exhilarating and terrifying, like being ripped apart and rebuilt at the same time.

And then… everything went dark.