Drakovitch rose slowly from his knees, the violent sound of bones snapping and resetting echoing across the freezing, lightless summit. The air itself seed to vibrate with a sudden, localized pressure—the intense, sickening shift of mana that signaled a rebirth.
"No... way..."
He stood frozen, his hand not even reaching for the black sword behind him. His gaze was locked on the swirling wall of violet mist. Confusion, anticipation, and a sudden, cold seed of doubt swirled through his mind.
"Did... soone... actually succeed?"
Suddenly, the right side of the fog was violently displaced, as if struck by a shockwave. Out of the mist erged a limb that defied every known law of human anatomy: a massive, obsidian scaled hand tipped with razor sharp black claws.
But there was no arm to support it. The hand was the apex of a leathery, midnight-blue wing, its phalanges elongated into terrifying, structural weapons.
"A—a dragon wing?"
Before Drakovitch could even gasp, a second wing hand shotted out from the left, slamming into the stone with enough force to crack the plateau.
WHOOSH—!
With a single, thunderous flap, the wings spread wide, the gust of wind deleting the fog in an instant. The King’s breath hitched, his lungs seizing in the sudden vacuum of the storm.
There, in the center of the crater of blood, was the "Seventh Batch’s Brat."
"That... boy."
That spiky hair—the trait his siblings had nad him for—was still there... . It was the only human thing left. And with that, Drakovitch knew it was the sa boy he had spoken to. From the crack he had glimpsed before the fog swallowed the view, those were the Clawed Wings that had sprouted.
"N-NGAAAHHHH—!"
As if Spike had heard his father’s voice, his head snapped upward. His spine arched with a violent, sickening crack, his body bending backward like a bow under terminal tension. His face was thrust toward the sky, allowing Drakovitch to see his features.
Every part of Spike’s body scread in agony, cracking and shaking from the intense transformation. Every fiber of his body was being replaced by the blood of the Eleven Dragons.
Spike’s skull cracked upward, his jaw unhinging to form a maw of serrated teeth. From his cheekbones and jawline, massive horns erupted—not curving toward the sky like the King’s, but sweeping horizontally back toward the nape of his neck.
"GRRRR... GAAAAHHH... HAAAH!"
His pale white skin began to smoke, hissing as it was consud from the inside out. In its place, a new armor surged—scales of shimring black infused with veins of deep midnight blue. The pain was a physical weight, a tidal wave that Spike could not contain.
His body thrashed with a violence that shook the plateau. As his new clawed wings flailed behind him, he slamd both of his extra limbs, the massive, wing tip hands, into the freezing ground. He used them as anchors, bracing himself against the earth as if trying to keep his own soul from being blown away by the sheer pressure of the transformation.
KRK—KRAAACK!
Both of Spike’s arms shot skyward, the shoulders dislocating with a sickening, wet pop as the limbs twisted unnaturally in their sockets. He watched, conscious but helpless, as the bones and flesh of his hands warped and lted. Fingers fused and lengthened, tendons snapping until his human hands were gone, replaced by dragon claws.
Below him, his feet suffered a similar, brutal fate. They twisted violently, mimicking the worst, most agonizing cramp imaginable, but with a structural finality that shattered the arches of his feet. The bones reford into digitigrade haunches, ending in heavy, scaled talons.
The scream that left from his throat was no longer a child’s plea for rcy or a brother’s cry for help. It was a dual toned roar. At the top was the high pitched frequency of human agony; beneath it, vibrating in the very stone of the summit, was the sub bass rumble of a Primordial.
Drakovitch felt the Golden Scar on his chest flare with a blinding heat. He stared into the eyes of the creature before him. From the white eyes of the child, Spike’s gaze shifted into a deep, abyssal midnight blue, glowing with the fierce intensity of a Dragonborn.
The vertical slits of his pupils locked onto the King. The air around Spike began to distort, the sheer heat of his presence lting the stone beneath his claws into glowing magma. Finally, the intense pain of the transformation ended...
Spike breathed heavily. His entire body was smoking—not from burning to death, but from the surge of his new dragon power. His massive clawed wings went limp, dragging across the cooling lava as he fell to his knees, his new weight too much for his mind to carry.
From his point of view, everything was still confusing. Everything was hazy, as if he had just been born again.
"Wh-what happened... D-did I..."
Before he could finish, an unexpected warmth enveloped him. It wasn’t the searing heat of Tiamat or the cold of the mountain. It was the arms of King Drakovitch, pulling him into a tight, trembling embrace from behind.
"My son... my first ever... Dragonborn. You succeeded. You are the 0.1 percent. The one true quality distilled from a thousand lives."
Spike’s chest heaved as he tried to breathe through the lingering fire in his lungs. The world spun in fragnts—ash, stone, the scent of burnt blood. His claws dug into the cooling magma beneath him.
"F-father...?"
His head turned weakly, eyes scanning the empty summit.
"I thought... I thought I would burn too..."
Drakovitch slowly turned the boy to face him, placing both hands on Spike’s shoulders. His cold silver eyes studied the transford child—those abyssal blue pupils, the obsidian scales, the enormous clawed wings.
"Of course you thought you would burn. I felt the sa when I first endured Tiamat’s blood... and so does every new Dragonborn. That is the nature of the Dragonrite. The fire of the Eleven Dragons devours the weak and purifies the worthy."
His silver eyes glead, he whispered.
"The "Quantity" had been burned away. The "Quality" had finally arrived."
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