The world had been dying for a long time.

Not suddenly.

Not violently.

But slowly—a lingering decay that drained the land, the sky, and even the air itself.

Once, this realm had been a place of great power. Kingdoms rose and fell. Empires waged war. Cultivators climbed toward godhood, carving their names into the heavens.

But they were not alone.

There had been dragons.

True Dragons.

Not the corrupted beasts that humans tamed. Not the lesser creatures that called themselves their descendants.

Real dragons.

Eternal. Supreme. Unchallenged.

And among them, there had been a king.

Akarion, the Eclipse Dragon.

A being whose wings could shroud the sky, whose breath could erase mountains, whose power could warp reality itself.

He had ruled—not as a tyrant, not as a god, but as a force of nature.

Unstoppable.

Unyielding.

Until they came.

No one knew their true names.

Only their purpose.

To end everything.

The gods called them the Calamity Bringers.

The mortals called them the Devourers.

And the dragons knew them as Extinction.

No one remembered how it started.

The war had lasted centuries.

Akarion fought.

His kind fought.

But even True Dragons were not infinite.

One by one, they fell.

Their blood scorched the land. Their bodies shattered realms.

Until only one remained.

Akarion—the last dragon king.

Alone.

Dying.

And yet, before the final battle, he had done one thing.

He had hidden his last egg.

He had taken it far, far from the war.

Beyond the collapsing empires.

Beyond the battlefields soaked in the blood of gods and monsters.

Beyond the reach of those who sought to erase his kind from existence.

He had carried it to the Graveyard of Kings—the ruins of a lost civilization, where the bones of ancient rulers lay buried beneath the earth.

A place where nothing lived anymore.

Where nothing should live.

And there, with the last of his strength, he had sealed the egg away.

Not to protect it.

Not to hide it.

But to give it time.

To let it grow.

To let it awaken when the world had forgotten dragons.

When it could rise without chains.

Without expectations.

Without the mistakes of the past.

Akarion's last breath had been a whisper of power, sinking into the shell of the egg, leaving behind one final gift.

A whisper that would only be heard when the dragon inside was ready.

And then—

The last True Dragon fell.

His body became stone.

His soul became ash.

And his child slept beneath the ruins of a world that no longer remembered what True Dragons were.

For thousands of years, the egg remained undisturbed.

The world moved on.

The gods believed the dragons were extinct.

The mortals turned to new powers, new rulers, new paths.

And the Graveyard of Kings became just another ruin.

Forgotten.

Lifeless.

Until the egg stirred.

Until the being inside felt hunger for the first time.

Until Kael'thir opened his eyes in the dark, trapped within his shell, his instincts screaming—

Break free.

Devour.

Rise.

And so, he did.

A dragon was born.

A dragon that had never known his kind.

A dragon that had never heard their history.

A dragon that had nothing but hunger and instinct.

But that did not matter.

Because he would carve his own path.

He would rise, higher than the gods who had let his kind die.

And he would remind the world what it meant to see a dragon take flight once more.

The last gift of the Eclipse Dragon had been given.

And soon, the world would understand what it had lost.

Or what it had unleashed.