Darkness surrounds me, and I feel myself just barely holding on to my conscious thoughts.
I feel myself being pushed around slowly and gently like I'm floating in a gentle river.
I try to open my "eyes", but I cannot, it seems I have none.
I try to move my "body", but again there is no response.
"Well, I'm dead." I thought.
"So, this is what the afterlife is like."
"I don't think I have a body anymore, or at least I can't feel it."
"Feels like I'm in a warm bath, but the water is always moving."
"I don't know how long I've been here but it's not like I care much for how long it's been."
"Surprisingly I don't desire to leave, as long as I can stay comfortable like this."
A deep voice enters my mind, "Do you wish for another chance at life?"
The voice vibrates and reverberates all around me.
I pondered.
I thought.
All the things I could remember playing out in my head.
Betrayal.
Injustice.
Weakness.
A whole slew of terrible things flashes past my eyes as I recall my past life.
Childhood.
Family.
Love.
Warmth and familiarity fill my "heart".
Many things happened, I met many people and lived a fairly peaceful life.
"I have lived already, I thought I would only get one chance." I ponder to myself, unaware that I was projecting my thoughts onto the entity.
"Why are you asking me this?" I tried.
This Entity took a moment to think and then answered.
"Your spirit is a little special, you have nearly limitless potential and a good temperament."
"Think of this like me giving you a new life where you will be useful, and you will balance a world."
The voice's pitch and tone seemed to constantly shift, sounding like individuals sometimes, or like a choir of thousands of voices other times.
…
"Woah, wait for a second, can you give me a new life? And with limitless potential? What does that mean?" Surprised I actually got an answer I replied soon after.
"Yes, I have come to give you a new life, and as for your second question. Let's say every soul has a certain hard limit to how much power it can contain, yours isn't infinite, but it's large enough to never be full either." I could almost feel the mirth in the entity's tone at the end of that sentence.
There are some concepts I don't quite understand for now. "Alright, I'm gonna pretend I get what you're saying for now, But what did you mean about "balance a world"?''
"Ahh, yes, there is a world out there that is in dire need of someone like you, This is a different world to the one you lived in the past. It's full of magic and amazing creatures and it is very peaceful, too peaceful."
"The biggest problem is that there is no conflict, no driving force, no goal for the people there. Most of the monsters are scattered and the ones that gather are weak. I need you to be the pillar, the life, and the climax and reignite everyone's thirst for adventure and power."
"I will give you the strongest combination of bloodlines and talent the likes of which this world has never seen. You will be born with the full powers and abilities of the greatest of all dragons, the primordial dragon bloodline, and the bloodline of the infernal sovereign. So won't you go forth and have some fun in this world?"
…
…
....
"WHAT?!" I exclaim.
"How can I help the world prosper and get stronger if I become a dragon and an infernal?!" I always thought dragons were cool, but they are more often than not the "bad guy", and an infernal has to be some kind of demon.
An eye roll and a sigh from my visitor
"Don't be wary of the names of things, they may sound scary but they shouldn't influence you to become something you are not. That being said, it is without question that the kingdoms in place will be threatened by you and try to defeat you regardless of how you act, that is the nature of people."
"I need you to become the new apex of life, a goal for others to strive for! I want you to be the inevitable final confrontation that the world musters to vanquish."
"So, what say you, will you start a new life?"
"Or will you stay here in limbo accomplishing nothing forever?"
"Choose!"
…
I find myself seriously considering the whole conversation we've just had. I never even considered how ridiculous this whole situation had become already. It's too much energy to try and rationalize it all for now.
Thinking back on all I had done and been through before, the most common mistake I ever made was to not take action. I would do what I wanted without being considerate from now on. I'm tired of waiting around.
"I will start my new life! I want to be reborn!"
I could swear for a second I saw the darkness in front of me twist into a toothy smirk. "So you have chosen, so it shall be."
The current of darkness around me grinds to a halt and cools down significantly. I feel that I am sitting in the palm of an enormous hand that surrounds me with its fingers.
Just as it gets painfully cold and I begin to lose consciousness, the hand pushes me very quickly in a direction and I see little lights all around.
A bright light shone in front of me, as my form rushed toward it with haste.
I start to get squeezed from all sides, almost crushed by the pressure.
The light gets bigger and brighter.
And then it's bright everywhere and my new body hurts all over.
I scream in pain and try to open my eyes but can only see lots of dazzling colors.
Something is holding me, I'm wrapped in something soft, and warm. Everything's happening too quickly. I hear voices for a moment. "#&% *@&# %& BAELOTH"
When I hear the last word I feel a searing pain in the front of my skull and seven words flash in my consciousness with the last being the only word I heard at the end. I'm suddenly exhausted, there's darkness at the edge of my vision, and I pass out.
…
My days are pretty peaceful but very hard to understand given my knowledge of my previous life.
Things are very different, first off, I am not even close to being human. I have small batlike wings and two small nubs on either side of my forehead that I think are supposed to be horns. My skin is scaly and a dark obsidian color, I also have a tail with a hooked tip. It's kind of hard to tell because I now have a forked tongue, but I think I have three sets of teeth, and they're super sharp. All of that being said, most of my general features seem mostly human. I only have 2 legs, my skin is scaly of course but it's human shaped mostly, particularly my face which must be my most human feature.
All this and I'm only a month old. It's also hard to tell how big me and my parents are, but I'd have to wager we're pretty big with the shaking whenever my father walks past my crib as an indication.
My father seems to be where my demon side comes from. He is large and very muscular, he has crimson skin, a pair of wings that seem to radiate heat, and dangerous-looking horns on his head. He doesn't have to duck under any doorways though so our house was made for large people, I think.
Mother is only a bit shorter than father, her height is about up to his eye level. Her skin is a radiant azure, she has scales that seem to be much sturdier than mine. Spines run along her back and all the way down her spine which turns into a tail with a hooked spine on the end. Mother also has wings similar to father, they are almost translucent though with dancing lights along the membranes.
I noticed that I haven't felt hunger or the need to sleep which is very confusing for me. Most of the time I spend just laying and staring at the ceiling or crawling around my crib to look out across the room. The most I can see is a few chairs and a table in the center of the room, the other wall has a bookshelf with twenty, or so, books in it.
One more very important thing I've been seeing lately, my parents have been using magic, and it seems common enough to make chores more convenient.
I can feel something different inside me too like I'm being filled with something that should have been there in the first place, this must be mana or magic power. I can also feel that same feeling in the air around me and within the ground beneath me. If I reach out with my senses I can gather that feeling in the direction of my body.
Whenever I do this my parents look at me with odd expressions, but this is a thing that feels natural to me so it can't be that unnatural.
Speaking of my parents, they don't talk to me very often, it seems they don't expect much of a conversation? Well, that's alright, they do rarely talk to each other but I can't really understand much of what they are saying for now. I'll just keep listening and try to pick up the language slowly.
Sometimes my mother carries me outside of our house to look at the night sky and the moon, it feels good to do so, especially if there is some mist or light rain, it feels great. The first of these moments was when I discovered that we are not in a full house, it was just a small rock structure. Though there are stairs leading to a library underneath that I am interested in exploring. My parents think it's okay though and they have everything they need so I don't question them too much.
And so, my days continue this way, peaceful and nice for the next six years.
…
Spending many years in this new place let me get used to it, even if I was surprised at first by how fast I learned everything, I let go of those feelings eventually and started getting very curious. I started getting an insatiable curiosity. I wanted, more than anything, to learn as much as I could. After a while of thinking, I concluded that this insatiable desire was alien to me.
Not that I hadn't wanted something before, but this felt more like a need for food than wanting candy, for example. Even knowing that it was alien to me didn't get rid of the feeling, so I decided to ignore it for now and just let the desire overcome me. My parents have many books, and when I learned to speak and read at 3 months, books became my best friend.
Learning the rest of the language and history was pretty fast and easy, for whatever reason this body has amazing comprehension skills and the ability to memorize almost anything I read instantly. I spent a little bit of time with my parents and got to know them little by little. But I mostly just read and learned about magic. After reading most of the library my mother had gathered I ran into a slump.
There were no more magic tomes and I had only read up to the third level of elemental magic, even though the tomes reference magic that goes incomprehensibly farther than that. Filled with more desire than ever before, I plead with my mother for more. Smirking, my mother looks down at me with the same look she always does. It's like she knows something I don't and I hate it when she does that. It means that there is a "lesson" on the way.
"Have you grown bored of the library my little Baeloth?" She says.
"..."
Not sure what to say I just stay silent.
"You have read every book in the library and I can't help but think you have memorized it all."
"I don't know what to do mother, I can't stop myself from searching for more. It's never enough, when can I be satisfied?" I plead.
Mother seems to think for a bit, and after a while, she looks down at me.
"It's normal for demons to have Greed or Gluttony show itself very early in life. You are probably either greedy or gluttonous for knowledge. That's a good thing for a dragon, don't you think? Dragons are strong and so are demons, but the knowledge you gain will be your advantage against others moving forward."
"..."
"I think after having learned enough theoretical knowledge we should see about a practical lesson. Would you like Mamma to show you how to use magic?" My heartbeat started to speed up and I felt a slight buzzing at the base of my skull. Without wasting another second I said. "Yes please, teach me how to use magic."
She looks at me with a slight smirk and beacons me to follow. "Come along then, let's give it a try." We pass through the door outside and get a dazzling view of the sunrise glinting off the purple-tinted ocean in the distance. The red sunlight lit up the blue grassy hill we lived on and filled the red pine trees with life.
We walked into the red and blue forest at the base of the hill and continued along the path that led deeper. There were calls of animals and little insects floating about here and there, and the leaves swayed with the breeze but mother continued on as if she had seen this beauty and peaceful atmosphere for ages.
I turned and saw her pulling away and rushed a little faster to catch up. After a moment we entered a clearing with a suspiciously slow waterfall into a pond that looked completely still. There were three large, smooth stones that shone out of the surface of the water. Father was there and he sat in a meditative pose on one of them and mother soon jumped to another and sat the same way. "Jump to the last stone and sit in a way that is comfortable for you." I did as she asked and sat the same way they did.
"Okay, now I want you to remember back when you were still in your crib and were exploring your surroundings using magic back then. You're going to notice that it's a little different now, this place is special, we call it a dragon vein. Dragon veins are areas in the world where mana pours out from the world itself and into the surrounding environment."
She paused for a moment and let me give it a try. I closed my eyes and attempted to probe around the rock I sat on. Almost immediately I am overwhelmed by the density of the mana in the air and especially in the water below. The mana is so thick it's like my probe of mana has to fight rapid waters using a spoon to reach out.
Mother looked at my shock with a quiet nod and prepared to show me a whole new world of knowledge to taste.