The forest was a cathedral of whispers, its towering trees like ancient sentinels draped in moss and memory. Sunlight filtered through the dense canopy in fractured beams, painting the undergrowth in gold and shadow. The air was thick with the scent of damp earth and pine, the occasional rustle of leaves the only sound beyond the crunch of their boots on the forest floor.
Eryk Thorn walked with the dragon egg cradled in his arms, its weight both foreign and familiar against his chest. The shell was warm, pulsing faintly, as if the creature inside was listening. He couldn't shake the feeling that it knew. Knew they had taken it from its mother's corpse. Knew they had argued over whether to eat it or not.
Sera stalked ahead, her shoulders tense, her knife glinting at her hip. She hadn't spoken since their argument, but the silence between them was louder than any words.
Eryk adjusted his grip on the egg, his fingers tracing the subtle ridges of its shell.
What am I even doing?
He wasn't a caretaker. He wasn't a mage. He was a hollow thing carrying another hollow thing, both of them waiting to be filled.
Sera glanced back, her dark eyes flicking to the egg.
"You're holding it like it's gonna break."
"It might," Eryk muttered.
"It's a dragon egg, not glass." She rolled her eyes. "Besides, if it cracks, we eat it. Problem solved!"
Eryk's grip tightened. "We're not eating it."
Sera exhaled sharply, kicking a pebble out of her path. "You're unbelievable!"
"And you're heartless!"
"Heartless?" She whirled on him, her braid snapping over her shoulder like a whip. "We've got no food, no coin, and a bounty on our heads, and you're worried about feelings?"
"It's not about feelings," Eryk shot back. "It's about—about—"
"About what?" Sera crossed her arms. "Go on. Tell me why we're lugging around a future fire hazard instead of eating it."
Eryk's jaw worked. He didn't have an answer. Not a good one, anyway. It wasn't logic. It wasn't survival. It was something deeper, something that gnawed at him the same way the void in his chest did.
Because no one protected me.
The thought slipped in unbidden, sharp and unwelcome. He shoved it down.
"Because it's the last one," he said instead.
Sera scoffed. "And?"
"And that means something."
"To who? The Council? The Academy? The world already decided dragons were better off dead." Her voice was bitter. "You really think saving one egg changes anything?"
Eryk looked down at the egg, its surface shimmering faintly in the dappled light.
"Maybe not. But I'm not letting it die."
Sera stared at him for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Then she turned and kept walking.
"Ugh, fine! But when you're starving, don't come crying to me."
Eryk followed, the egg warm against his ribs.
The argument didn't end there.
It resurfaced every few hours, like a wound they couldn't stop picking at.
"We could sell it."
"To who? The same people who'd skin it alive for its scales?"
"Then we cook it now before it hatches and burns us to ash."
"You're not touching it."
"Give it here, Stray Dog!"
"No."
And then, the egg tumbling from Eryk's arms, landing in a patch of soft moss with a dull thump.
They both froze.
For a heartbeat, the forest held its breath.
Then the egg pulsed.
A single, shuddering beat, like a heart waking from slumber. The shell didn't crack, but the sound—deep and resonant—echoed through Eryk's bones.
Sera's knife was in her hand before he could blink, her body coiled like a spring.
Eryk didn't move. His pulse roared in his ears.
The egg pulsed again.
A hairline fracture snaked across its surface.
Oh.
It wasn't hatching. Not yet. But it would. Soon.
Sera exhaled through her nose. "Well. That settles it."
Eryk swallowed. "Settles what?"
"We can't eat it now." She sheathed her knife, scowling. "It's alive."
Eryk blinked. "That's what stopped you? Not morals? Not—I don't know—basic human decency?"
Sera shot him a look. "You really think I'd eat something that's looking at me?"
"It's not looking at you. It's an egg!"
"It's a dragon egg. And it's aware." She shuddered. "No thanks."
Eryk stared at her. Then, despite everything, he laughed.
Sera's scowl deepened. "What?"
"Nothing." He wiped his eyes, still grinning. "Just—you'll murder a man in cold blood, but drawing the line at eating a conscious egg is hilarious."
Sera kicked a clump of dirt at him.
"Shut up!"
Eryk dodged, still laughing as he scooped up the egg. The fracture was tiny, barely noticeable, but it was there.
~○~
Days had passed.
The forest thinned, the trees growing sparse and gnarled, their roots clawing at the earth like skeletal fingers. The air grew heavier, thick with the scent of damp rot.
The Whispering Wastes loomed ahead.
A graveyard of the forgotten.
Mountains of trash stretched as far as the eye could see—broken machinery, rusted armor, shattered spellcraft, all piled high in grotesque monuments to waste and ruin. The ground was uneven, littered with debris that crunched underfoot. The sky above was a sickly yellow, the sun bleached and pale behind a haze of smoke and dust.
Eryk's stomach twisted.
This was where Riven was supposed to be? A man who'd survived centuries, hiding in a wasteland of broken things?
Sera whistled lowly.
"Cheerful place."
Eryk adjusted the egg in his arms. "Where do we even start looking at that man?"
Sera scanned the horizon, her eyes sharp.
"We look for the one thing that doesn't belong."
Eryk frowned. "Everything here doesn't belong."
"Exactly!" She smirked. "So we find the thing that should."
Eryk opened his mouth to retort. Some half-formed jab, something sardonic to break the weight of the silence between them, but the words died before they ever reached the air.
Because he heard it.
A sound.
Subtle at first. So soft it could've been wind slipping through the jagged wreckage of the Wastes. So delicate he almost dismissed it as the ghost of his own breath.
But it came again.
Faint.
Unmistakable.
A voice.
No—voices.
A chorus, hushed and dissonant, curling around his ears like tendrils of smoke. The tone was not human, not language as he understood it—no vowels, no consonants. Just meaning, raw and unfiltered. The kind of truth you didn't hear, but felt. The kind of knowing that sank into your bones without asking permission.
And it wasn't coming from the air.
Not from the rusting towers of scrap that jutted from the earth like broken teeth. Not from the metallic wind that swept over the ruined land.
It was coming from the egg.
Eryk's gaze dropped instinctively, heart stumbling in his chest.
The fracture in the shell had widened—not by much, barely the breadth of a fingernail, but enough. Enough for light to catch along its edges, to glint like a wound in the perfect curve of its surface. Enough for the sound to spill out into the world.
He felt it in the back of his throat. In the marrow of his spine. A pulse—not physical, not visible, but present. Resonating with something buried deep inside him.
He held the egg tighter, not out of fear, but reverence. As though cradling a truth too delicate to speak aloud.
The whisper crept through him again.
No language.
No syllables.
Three notes, thrumming like heartbeats. Each one a cry from the dark.
Eryk staggered back a step, nearly tripping over the jagged scrap beneath his feet. He didn't realize he was shaking until the egg trembled slightly in his arms, mirroring the tremor in his hands. Or maybe not mirroring—maybe responding.
The ache that bloomed in his chest wasn't new. It had always been there. A familiar emptiness, dulled by years of running, of surviving, of pretending not to feel anything at all. But now, the void stirred as if the dragon's pain had echoed down into his own hollow places and called them by name.
He stared at the egg, something wet stinging behind his eyes.
Sera turned toward him, sharp and guarded.
"What?"
He didn't answer at first. His throat felt thick, as if the whispers had tangled there, refusing to let words pass.
When he finally spoke, his voice was raw.
"It's scared."
The words came out softer than he expected.
Sera's expression twitched. A tiny, involuntary shift—an instinctive recoil from the edge of something she didn't want to feel. Her mouth parted, as if to respond, then pressed shut. For a flicker of a heartbeat, she didn't look like the Sera he knew—the blade-tongued, steel-eyed, storm-wrapped Sera. For a moment, her mask faltered, and underneath it, he caught a glimpse of something too tender to name.
Then it was gone.
She scoffed under her breath and turned away sharply, her braid snapping behind her like a dismissal.
"Yeah. Well. Join the club."
Eryk said nothing.
He just stood there, the egg clutched to his chest, and listened to the silence that followed. It wasn't truly silent, not with the whispers still curling at the edges of perception. Not with the mechanical groans of the Wastes all around them, but it felt quiet.
Reverent.
Like the world had paused to let something sacred pass between them.
He looked down again, tracing the fracture with his thumb. It was small. Almost insignificant.
But it had opened. Something inside the shell had reached out, reaching through its fear, its hunger, its loneliness—not blindly, but toward him.
And he had heard it.
He held it closer, no longer out of instinct, but devotion.
"I won't let you break," he whispered, so softly even Sera didn't hear.
Not like I did.
Not like the world let me.
He exhaled slowly, as if trying to push all the noise out of his chest, clearing space for the tiny heartbeat he now carried.
Ahead, the Whispering Wastes stretched endlessly. A scab on the skin of the world. A land of broken things and buried secrets.