# 1. Hatched, Hungry, and Already Overconfident
The first thing I did after being reborn as a dragon was calculate my promotion timeline.
Eight levels. That was the standard corporate hierarchy. Hatchling → Juvenile → Young Adult → Adult → Elder → Ancient → Wyrm → God-King. Eight promotions, and I was already ahead of schedule. Back on Earth, that would've taken me thirty years and three nervous breakdowns. Here? I was ten minutes old and already had a better benefits package.
The beast hit the ground like a landslide, and I — a green dragon, roughly the size of a well-fed hound — was standing on its skull.
Four paws planted, claws still sunk deep into flesh the size of a carriage. Blood ran in slow rivulets down the beast's flanks, pooling in the cracks of the cave floor. My wings were half-spread. My tail lashed behind me like a victory banner. By any objective measure, I looked magnificent.
I struck a pose. Head high, chest out, chin angled precisely for maximum dramatic silhouette. The whole terrible-apex-predator routine. If there'd been a bard nearby, he'd have wept into his lute.
"Mrah!"
I looked down.
A white hatchling sat at the base of the beast, both hind legs splayed forward like an overfed cat, her fat tail — still a chubby little cone, really — thumped on the cave floor behind her. She was covered in scratches — scales cracked along her left flank, a raw patch above one eye, the kind of damage you get from being in the middle of something you had absolutely no business being in the middle of.
Around her, half a dozen other hatchlings in various states of battle-weariness sprawled across the stone. Two blues huddled together, whimpering. A black one lying very still, breathing but clearly rethinking its life choices. A green one pressed into a crevice, eyes wide. All of them looking like they'd lost an argument with a very angry mountain.
"Mrah! Mrah!"
The white one tilted her head at me. Round snout. Round body. Round eyes that held exactly one thought behind them, and that thought was food.
"Munch," I said. "Can you let me have my moment? I just pulled off a mid-level management kill."
She put a stubby paw on her round belly and rubbed it. The universal sign language for I am starving and you are standing on dinner.
"Mrah," she said again. Softer this time. Almost hurt. Her ears — little translucent flaps still soft with hatchling membrane — drooped.
I felt the tiniest pang of something that might have been guilt if I squinted at it. I chose not to squint. Guilt was for people who didn't have OKRs.
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Behind her, the other hatchlings had gone quiet. Not the good kind of quiet. Not the awed-by-my-magnificence kind. This was the kind where every living thing in the cave had simultaneously decided that breathing too loud was a death sentence. The blues stopped whimpering mid-whimper.
Something moved in the deeper dark beyond them. Something bigger than me. Bigger than the beast I was standing on. The air changed — went cold and heavy, like the cave itself was holding its breath.
I caught a flash of red. Not hatchling red. Not cute-and-round red. Red like the last thing you see before the world goes dark. Red like a performance review from hell.
Then the dark swallowed me whole.
That was later. Let me start at the beginning.
***
Viscous. Stinking.
That was the first thing. The smell — thick, organic, like something that had been sitting in a warm place for too long and had developed opinions about it.
My eyes wouldn't open. Or rather, they opened and the world was still dark — a warm, muffled dark that tasted of copper and salt. My limbs wouldn't move. My brain was running at the speed of cold honey, thoughts sliding into each other and losing their shape.
I remembered whiskey. Cheap whiskey, the kind that comes in a plastic bottle and burns on the way down. I remembered a client who reeked of expensive cigars and droned on about "synergies" for three straight hours while I nodded and pretended to care. I remembered thinking if I have to sit through one more team-building dinner I'm going to face-plant into the garlic bread.
Had I blacked out at a bar? Was this some kind of hospital? Was I in a coma?
I opened my mouth to say something — probably "nurse" or "bill, please" — and liquid poured in.
I snapped my jaw shut, coughing, or trying to. But — wait.
That wasn't bad.
It smelled like a swamp and tasted like warm honey. Sweet. Rich. Something in my chest — something with a heartbeat and opinions — purred. Actually purred. I felt it resonate through my ribs.
A trickle of warmth spread from my stomach outward, like someone had lit a candle in a cold room. My limbs tingled. The fog in my head thinned, just slightly, enough to let one coherent thought through:
More.
I opened my mouth again. Deliberately this time. The liquid flowed in, and my body drank it down like it had been waiting its entire existence for this exact meal. Each swallow sent another pulse of warmth through me. Strength seeped back into muscles I hadn't known I had.
Okay. Whatever this was, drinking it made me stronger. Or at least less likely to die in the next five minutes. Those were decent odds. Better than any startup I'd ever worked at.
I drank until my belly felt like a water balloon at capacity, until the warmth became a furnace, until my eyelids — heavy, scaled, unfamiliar eyelids — started to droop.
I'd been a corporate drone, once. Key word: been. Eighty-hour weeks, microwave dinners, a studio apartment that smelled like my neighbor's cat. I'd traded all of that for… whatever this was.
Promotion, I guess.
I slept.
***
The dream was vivid.
I stood on a vast plain under a sky the color of deep water, and I was big. Not big the way a tall person is big. Big the way weather is big. Big the way consequences are big.
I looked down at legs like pillars, sheathed in emerald scales that caught the light and threw it back as polished green fire. Each scale was the size of a dinner plate, overlapping like armor forged by someone who really, really cared about both protection and aesthetics. My claws were curved obsidian hooks, each one bigger than my entire egg-self, and when I flexed them they left furrows in the stone.
My tail stretched behind me, thick and powerful, ending in a ridge of spines that rattled when I moved. My wings — I had wings — folded against my back like a king's cloak, the membrane between the finger-bones shimmering with iridescent green.
I lowered my massive head. Between my forelegs, nestled in the grass, stood an hourglass.
The name settled into my bones like it had always been there.
Sylvaros Veyrn.