In the lord's bedchamber of the Lion's Den, the midday hour was quiet.
Solomon rolled up the last small parchment of Evelyn's Laws of the Domain. Her footsteps had long since faded down the corridor.
Suddenly, an overwhelming, unnatural wave of exhaustion swallowed him whole. His body collapsed backward onto the soft, silk-stuffed mattress Evelyn had so carefully procured. Yet, his consciousness did not immediately sink into the dark.
His knuckles turned stark white as his hands gripped the bedsheets. Something is wrong.
His heart was hammering wildly against his ribs. He dragged in huge, ragged breaths. He tried to open his mouth to call for Evelyn, but his throat refused to produce a sound.
He could hear his own heartbeat. Thump. Thump. It sounded exactly like the heavy, rhythmic striking of a war drum he had once heard on a battlefield.
Then, the world shattered.
He was no longer lying on a bed. The unyielding stone of the mountain vanished, replaced by an omnipresent, buoyant pressure—a feeling of being lifted, weightless yet immensely powerful.
Solomon opened his eyes. He did not see the familiar stone ceiling of his chamber. He saw the boundless expanse of the night sky.
Below him stretched a jagged, endless mountain range. Moonlight spilled down like quicksilver, tracing the ridges in pale silver light. The Mountains of the Moon.
He could feel massive wings unfurling from his sides. Every single fiber of his body thrummed with explosive, world-breaking power.
The wind howled beneath his wing membranes, carrying the thin, biting chill of the high altitude and the damp scent of the clouds. He was flying. Unbound. Unrestrained. Or rather—he was flight itself.
He lowered his head and saw the colossal shadow he cast against the earth. It moved like a dark storm cloud, blanketing the peaks below.
The absolute mastery of the sky. He was a dragon.
Directly ahead of him, a massive, mud-brown dragon was fleeing in a panic. Its wings beat like two gigantic, withered leaves—frantic, clumsy, desperate.
The brown dragon was somewhat smaller than him, but highly agile. Solomon felt no anger. He felt no hatred. There was only one single, overriding command echoing from the absolute deepest trench of his soul.
Catch it. Eat it.
An unprecedented, agonizing starvation had seized him—and the creature he inhabited. It was a hunger that bored straight into the marrow of their shared bones.
It was not the hollow ache of an empty stomach. It was a terrifying "hollowing out" of his very life force.
Solomon and the dragon could feel it with crystal clarity: their life, the core magical energy that sustained their existence, was bleeding out into the thin, magic-starved air with every single beat of their heart.
They were like a block of ice left out under the blazing sun, slowly, inevitably melting away.
If they did not find a source to replenish it, they would die. The realization was as cold and absolute as winter iron.
With every beat of his massive wings, with every draw of breath, the sensation of life draining away grew sharper.
The sky was no longer a realm of freedom. It was an infinite desert, and he was a traveler seconds away from dying of thirst.
The brown dragon ahead of him was the only oasis.
He narrowed his vision. Now he saw it clearly. Sitting astride the back of the brown dragon was a figure.
It was a small, petite woman. Her skin was a healthy, sun-baked brown, her long black hair whipping violently in the gale.
He could not make out her features, only the flash of wide, terrified brown eyes looking back over her shoulder.
Dragonrider.
The word flashed briefly across his consciousness, but it failed to ripple the surface of his mind.
Solomon had lost the capacity for human thought. Or perhaps the dying dragon he inhabited was simply bleeding out too fast, leaving nothing behind but raw, primal animal instinct.
He did not even pause to consider who she might be.
If I do not eat it, I will die.
That single thought crushed everything else into dust. He unhinged his massive jaws and let loose a roar.
The sound was nothing like the scream of a man. It was pure, sky-shattering thunder that set the valleys below vibrating in terror.
He beat his wings with explosive force. His colossal black body tore through the sky like a loosed siege arrow. The air ripped apart with a deafening crack as the distance between them evaporated.
Faster! Solomon's mind roared. Faster!!
The cloud layer rolled and boiled beneath them like an ocean as the two behemoths engaged in a beautiful, lethal dance of dragons high in the stratosphere.
This was a primal, savage struggle for pure survival. Solomon opened his maw and spewed a torrent of green dragonfire. The flames surged like a tidal wave, sweeping toward the brown dragon's flank.
The brown dragon executed a bizarre, twisting roll, barely dodging the inferno. It beat its wings to retreat, yet it never fully committed to fleeing.
There was a desperate, protective hesitation in its movements—it was trying to shield the fragile human on its back, preventing it from fighting with its full, unchained savagery. Claws met scales. Fangs sheared through flesh. Boiling dragon blood rained down through the clouds. Sparks and fire exploded with every collision. Every strike carried lethal intent; every dodge drained their stamina.
Solomon realized he had absolute, terrifying mastery over his massive new body. Because the brown dragon was handicapped by the rider on its back—unable to commit to a true beast's death-match—he held the absolute advantage.
But he could feel his own strength hemorrhaging faster now. The hollowing sensation was a black hole, threatening to swallow him entirely.
I have to end this!
Solomon abandoned the ranged fire breath. He surged forward in a brutal burst of acceleration, intending to use his sheer weight and talons to crush the other dragon out of the sky.
The brown dragon anticipated the strike. In the exact fraction of a second Solomon lunged, the brown dragon suddenly dropped its altitude, executed an impossible lateral barrel roll, and unleashed a point-blank torrent of fire.
The brown dragon's fire blasted squarely against Solomon's armored scales. It was a brilliant trap. But it also left the brown dragon's throat utterly exposed.
A cold, ruthless instinct flashed through Solomon's colossal form. He ignored the searing flames washing over him. He ignored the glinting talons raking at his belly. He unhinged his bloodstained jaws and clamped down savagely on the brown dragon's exposed neck.
A memory from his human life flared—a nature documentary about crocodiles.
Solomon instantly mimicked the motion. He locked his jaws shut and threw his massive neck into a violent, thrashing death roll.
He ripped and tore, thrashing his tremendous weight side to side, refusing to let go. Dragon blood sprayed across the sky in geysers.
Who would have thought, a stray, delirious human thought crossed his mind, that watching the animal kingdom would actually save my life? Who ever thinks they're going to turn into a dragon and fight another dragon?
Locked together in a death grip, the two dragons lost the ability to fly. Tangled in a burning, bleeding knot, they began to plummet from the sky.
"Ah—!!!"
A short, piercing human scream was instantly swallowed by the roaring wind. In the sheer violence of the death roll, the brown-skinned dragonrider lost her grip on the saddle.
She was violently thrown from the dragon's back. Her tiny, fragile silhouette painted a brief arc against the sky before she was swallowed whole by the thick cloud layer below. She vanished like a speck of dust dropped into a stormy sea, without the time to utter a final word or a lingering cry.
"ROAR—!!!"
The brown dragon, having lost its rider, let out a heart-shattering, agonizing shriek. For one single fraction of a second, its struggles ceased. It was the absolute paralysis of grief and despair.
Now!
Solomon seized the fatal opening.
Summoning every last drop of his fading strength, he lunged forward, sinking his razor-sharp fangs deep into the root of the brown dragon's wing, tearing backward with devastating force.
Green dragonfire erupted from the deepest pit of his throat at point-blank range, utterly engulfing the brown dragon's body.
Simultaneously, the brown dragon's dying breath blasted Solomon with its own fire.
Flesh charred and blackened under the unimaginable heat. Scales popped and cracked like gunfire. Yet neither dragon stopped.
Gods, the pain! It hurts!
But Solomon did not loosen his jaws. Compared to dying, any amount of pain could be endured.
Finally, the brown dragon let out one last, defiant wail. The aura of life rapidly drained from its colossal form.
Two burning leviathans, locked together like a single falling meteor, dragged a long, black trail of smoke across the sky as they plummeted toward the earth.
With an earth-shattering boom, an entire swathe of forest was leveled instantly. Splintered tree trunks exploded outward like shrapnel. A massive cloud of dust and smoke choked the sky.
Solomon slowly recovered his senses through the dizzying concussion of the impact. One of his wings throbbed with blinding agony. But the lethal, hollow starvation inside him left no room to care about broken bones.
He felt the last shreds of his human consciousness slip away. The capacity for thought was gone entirely.
There was only one thing left.
Eat! Eat! Eat!
EAT IT!!
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