Rise of the Devourer

The transition felt different from his usual arcade visits. More visceral. More primal. Instead of the familiar digital space with its glowing consoles and comfortable unreality, he found himself standing on a narrow stone platform suspended in an endless sky. Wind whipped around him, storm-scented and crackling with potential. He gripped tight to the doorknob behind him, the only anchor in a rain-slick world.

The platform was ancient, carved from obsidian-black rock covered in draconic symbols that pulsed with deep crimson light. The stars overhead felt too close, the stormclouds below infinite and hungry.

The wind yanked at his clothes, sharp and cold, and if not for the door at his back he’d have been swept over the edge. Vast emptiness waited beneath his feet, the terrifying potential energy of the fall ready to claim him.

TURN BACK, CHILD. YOU ARE NOT READY.

The presence carried no animus, no desire or ulterior motive. Ancient and impersonal, it knew everything about him and yet nothing.

“If you think I’ve ever waited until I’m ready, you don’t know who you’re talking to.”

THEN FALL. The presence carried the weight of discontent, bordering on anger. STOP HOLDING ON TO WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE BECOME.

Noah looked back, the door he stubbornly clung to as an anchor in the storm. He knew intuitively that the moment he released it, any chance of turning back would be gone forever. But was that even a bad thing?

“That’s it? Let myself fall?”

HOW ELSE WILL YOU LEARN IF YOU CAN FLY? Another gust of wind slammed into him, nearly tearing him away from the ledge entirely.

Noah steadied himself with a laugh. “I don’t get the impression I’d have much choice in the matter.”

YOU HAVE CARRIED DRAGON BLOOD. ABSORBED A DRAGON'S HEART-SHARD. BOUND YOURSELF TO DRACONIC POWER. BUT YOU HAVE NEVER CHOSEN WHAT YOU ARE.

"What do you mean? I've accepted every transformation that—"

ACCEPTED. The scorn was almost palpable. YOU HAVE BEEN ALTERED, YES, BUT ALWAYS REACTING TO CIRCUMSTANCES RATHER THAN CLAIMING YOUR NATURE. OTHER EVOLUTIONS MAY BE DONE REACTIVELY, BUT THE BLOODLINE YOU CARRY IS NO OPTIONAL THING TO BE PONDERED AND WEIGHED. BECOME, OR DEPART.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

The platform shuddered beneath his feet.

IF YOU WILL NOT TURN BACK, THEN PROVE THAT YOU ARE WORTHY.

The stone cracked. Fragments tumbled away into the infinite drop below, swallowed by the lightning-shot clouds before they fell more than a dozen feet. Noah scrambled backward, but there was nowhere to go. The entire platform was disintegrating.

He had just enough of a foothold left to throw himself back through the door if he so chose. His heart was racing, his blood crackling in tune with the perpetual storm below, but he barely considered the option of retreat.

FLY, YOUNG ONE, OR BE DESTROYED.

“No pressure, heh.” His voice was inaudible even to himself amid the chaos.

Noah let go.

He fell.

The wind tore at him. Thunder rolled around him, deafening.

There was nothing to grab, no ledge to catch, no convenient tree branches. Only the storm-lit clouds and the biting wind. He felt oddly calm as he fell, for all that his body was reacting like he was about to die.

Master!Tony will help!

Somehow, he didn’t think that would be enough.

The symbiote surged across his back, forming the demonic wings they'd used before. Dark tissue stretched between extended spines, catching the wind with desperate urgency.

It slowed him, but not by much. Mainly it turned his downward plummet into a sideways tumble as the wind caught them and threw him off in a new direction. Noah’s breath was snatched from his lungs at the abrupt change in direction, and for a moment all was disoriented.

He couldn’t tell up from down, gasping helplessly as he was thrown this way and then another. He tried flapping his wings, but he couldn’t even tell if the motion occurred. It certainly wasn’t effective.

These wings were too small, a weak and fragile substitution.

Tony is trying! The symbiote’s voice burned with frustration. The wind is too strong, Master is too heavy.

"It's okay," Noah managed through gritted teeth. “You can let go too.”

No! Tony will not let Master fall!

Lightning crackled past them, close enough that Noah felt the hair on his arms stand on end.

“I don’t think we have a choice.” He could rely on Tony's abilities all he wanted, the symbiote would try until they both shattered against whatever waited at the bottom of this endless sky. But that would always be borrowing. Adapting. Using external power to compensate for what he lacked.

Dragonspawn wasn’t a race of its own. It was a transition state, the cocoon from which a new form would be birthed. Like the ancient presence said, he needed to become something that could fly.

Noah focused inward, listened to the crackling beat of his frantic heart, felt the heat of the blood pulsing through his veins. Wyrmblood. Dragon’s heart. Shadow and storm and life and death. The potential for all things.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Now he just had to figure out how to command it. Grow wings. Transform. Change.

Nothing happened.

Master, the ground—

Tony was right. Through gaps in the clouds, Noah could see something beyond, grey and jagged, a broken plain of sharp stone littered with the bones of those who’d failed.

Panic clawed at him. He pushed harder, straining to force his body to transform, to grow the wings that would save him.

Still nothing. The dragon blood remained dormant, unresponsive to his desperate commands.

Tony is scared, the symbiote admitted, voice tiny, and somehow that was enough to shift the tenor of Noah’s spiralling desperation. Tony depended on him. His partner, a companion who’d trusted him completely since the moment they bonded. If Noah died here, Tony died with him.

He had people counting on him. He always had people counting on him. Aurelia waited in the chamber above. Zax had gone to great lengths to arrange this opportunity. Vion carried a piece of his heart across the world. What would happen to her if he let his path end here?

He couldn't die here, falling through a metaphysical sky because he didn’t understand how to control what he was meant to become.

The power in his blood, the power in his heart, it was something distinctly different from the abilities granted by his paths. Substance rather than form. He’d been treating it as distinct sections, like he was a patchwork of dragon parts and human parts and abyssal parts he could swap in and out at will. But that only worked so long as he remained formless and incomplete. To move forward required commitment.

He couldn’t keep picking and choosing what pieces of his nature to embrace at any given moment, to commit to the evolution was to change the substance of what he was.

It required surrender.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Dragons don’t do things by half measures. Let me fall.”

No! The fusion didn’t end. Tony didn’t have the strength left for words, but he stubbornly clung to the last gift he thought he could give, buying Noah time to figure it out.

But the transformation he needed wasn’t something that could be figured out.

Noah gritted his teeth and focused on Abyssal Fusion, then forced the flow of power into the transformation to stop. It felt intensely wrong, cutting off something so deeply a part of himself, even temporarily, but he had no other choice. He couldn’t transform something that was already transformed, he needed to do this in his base state.

“This is who I choose to become!” he shouted into the wind, as his abyssal wings crumbled apart and the strength Tony had been imparting left him. “I will no longer be restrained by who I used to be.”

The ground was so close now, but he closed his eyes rather than acknowledge it. He spread his arms wide, breathing in the lightning, tasting the storm on the wind. This was where he belonged. The ground was irrelevant.

Just fly.

Pain lanced through his back, tore apart his shoulders, and his spine creaked and twisted. Noah screamed, pain and defiance mingling as he continued to fall, but he was laughing through the tears.

This was right. This was him.

His spine extended, vertebrae multiplying and elongating as a tail formed, whipping in the wind to provide balance he'd never known he needed. His shoulder blades split and reformed, new joints socketing into place.

Wings erupted from his back, catching the wind with a thunderous crack that echoed through the endless sky. Unlike the flimsy things his metamorphosis form had given him, these were integrated wholly into his body. They held him in place, tilting minutely to adapt to each gust as instincts he’d never learned poured into him.

The chaos around him seemed to still as he glided, the collision never coming.

Noah opened his eyes and craned his head to look above him. His breath caught in awe. His wings were the deep blue-grey of a thundercloud, veined with purple-lined shadow, and stretched out so far to either side he struggled to get any sense of scale.

Midnight blue scales rippled across his arms, shoulders, and the sides of his neck, hard and iridescent, to protect his vulnerable body.

His eyes burned. Pupils slitting, vision expanding to encompass distances he'd never been able to perceive before. The flow of lightning through the clouds became visible in ways he struggled to understand, electromagnetic fields and currents of power lit up in waves of light before the actual lightning had time to catch up.

He tentatively flexed one wing, sending himself into a spin, and suddenly became aware of just how close to the ground he was. Four quick beats of his powerful wings, barely even thinking about it, and he climbed well above the danger threshold before tilting against the wind and letting it carry him higher.

Then he was soaring again, laughing as his heart leapt with joy and he exulted in the feeling of freedom and power. The storm held no fear now, it was his domain. The lightning only fed his inner spark, and the wind was a tapestry of shifting opportunity. He could feel exactly how to shift to rise, to dive, how to catch the gusts and turn them into his own momentum…

He spun and climbed, tucked his wings in and dove, then pulled up just short of the ground and skimmed along it, each powerful beat of his wings purposeful as he rewrote the wind to his designs.

“Come on out, it’s okay now, we’re safe.”

Tony’s presence crept back through his body, searching out and exploring all the new pieces of it. Tony can see room for improvement, the abyssal symbiote said, a little indignant.

Noah laughed. “Improve away, buddy. I’m all yours.”

Noah ascended through the lightning-shot clouds, powerful wingbeats carrying him upward with speed that would have terrified his human self. His new body moved with instinctive grace, centuries of draconic heritage encoded in muscles and membranes that had never existed until moments ago.

He banked left, testing the way the wind responded to subtle shifts in his wing angles. His tail adjusted automatically. Every movement felt natural, correct, as though he'd been flying his entire life and only just remembered.

Veins of crimson spread across his scales and twisted around his wingbones as Tony went to work. Every wing-joint grew crimson claws, long and sharp enough to tear through stone or provide an anchor in an enemy’s flesh. The scales grew blade-edged, ready to slice open anything that tried to grab him. His tail, already equipped with a blue flare ridge down its spine, sprouted a ring of sharp protrusions, then another. It shifted the balance slightly, but his new draconic instincts adapted to the change without a hitch.

He couldn’t help but notice Tony had also added a few inches of wing, as if to prove he could still make things bigger. Noah chuckled fondly. “You don’t have to compete with the dragon, you know.”

Tony knows, the symbiote replied, and this time his voice sounded smug. Master is the dragonoid now. Tony is still best Tony.

“Exactly.”

Noah circled higher, punching through the cloud layer and emerging into clear sky. Stars wheeled overhead, impossibly close, and for a moment Noah simply hovered, wings beating slowly to maintain altitude, drinking in the sensation of freedom.

This was what he'd been missing. This was what it meant to truly become his race rather than merely using it.

The notification burned itself into his consciousness.

You have claimed your draconic heritage while retaining your human core. The blood of wyrms flows true in your veins.

Race: Dragonoid Human - Level 300

Racial Attribute Modifier: All base Attributes increased by 10%

Racial Attribute Bonus: +200 to all Attributes

Racial Affinity: Effectiveness with all draconic abilities and magic increased by 100%

Noah's breath caught. The numbers alone were staggering. Two hundred points to every attribute, plus a percentage modifier on top of everything? But the notifications continued.

Dragonoid Human has unlocked the [Dragon Shift] Perk.

Dragonoid Human has unlocked the [Dragon Fear] Perk.

Dragonoid Human has unlocked the [Dragon Scales] Perk.

Dragonoid Human has unlocked the [Dragon’s Eyes] Perk.

Dragonoid Human has unlocked the [Dragon’s Will] Perk.

Dragonoid Human has unlocked the [Dragon’s Heart] Perk.