The sky above the fractured cradle of time bled with pages—shattered scriptures from verses long forgotten. Where once stories unfolded with order and rhythm, there now lay a silence so vast it bent language to nothing. And in that silence came the dragon.
It did not arrive from space, nor time. It did not arrive from thought, dream, or even memory. The dragon was—and had been—long before anyone dared name it.
Its wings beat not against the air, but against causality itself. Each motion shed reality like dying skin. And with every breath, stories unmade themselves. Characters who once believed themselves immortal choked on the absence of narrative. Words failed. Plots withered. Universes stilled.
At the heart of the void, the Almighty stirred.
Once, the Almighty had etched existence into being with a single inverted word, reversing the breath of the original author. He had written gods into dominance, then devoured them like punctuation. But when he raised his hand to write the dragon into place, the quill shattered.
The dragon did not roar. It unwrote sound.
The Almighty fell. Not dead—he could not die—but diminished. His name, once carved in the margins of every world, now faded from even the memory of metaphors. The dragon consumed his ink, drank the last strokes of his authority, and turned away. There was nothing left worth tasting.
But then came a shadow, stiller than silence, brighter than void.
The dragon halted mid-flight—not from pain, but recognition. A single footstep echoed across the husk of fallen tales. The parchment beneath the dragon curled in submission, ink trembling in its lines. The Genesis Warden had arrived.
No fanfare. No legend preceded him. He was the one whose presence never required explanation. His blade hung at his side, sheathed in the fabric of unborn myth.
The dragon lowered its gaze, not in fear, but in acknowledgment.
Once—just once—it had tried to pass through the Gate of Origin, the place where fiction's seed grew wild and free, untouched even by Ye Zai's breath. And the Warden had stood there. Waiting.
What followed was not battle, but consequence.
The Warden had not drawn his sword. He had spoken. A single phrase, woven with a calm that bled finality, and the dragon's soul was carved apart—not slain, but marked. Across its scaled chest bloomed a sigil: a sealed wound made of silence.
It still carried that mark. Not with shame, but reverence.
The dragon turned now from the remnants of the Almighty's ruin. Its hunger, vast as the void, had learned restraint. Even gods have predators. But beyond predators, there are sentinels. And beyond sentinels—something else entirely.
The Genesis Warden turned, his cloak trailing the ghosts of stories not yet written, and vanished between the folds of what could never be read.
The dragon stayed still a moment longer, then rose once more.
There were other verses to devour.
But never again would it seek the heart of the Origin Gate.
Long after the Genesis Warden vanished into the folds of silence, the dragon drifted across the empty lattice of discarded stories. It passed through dead realms where no voices remained, only echoes warped by time's abandonment. Where others saw ashes, the dragon saw marrow. It feasted not upon flesh, but on the hollow frames of what might have been.
It paused above a world that had never been spoken aloud. A story so delicate that even the whisper of thought might shatter it.
And yet, the dragon breathed upon it.
The world withered in an instant—not from heat, but from recognition. To be seen by the dragon was to be judged incompatible with existence. Its gaze did not destroy. It disqualified.
Further still it flew, until it came upon a shrine.
No stone, no mortar—just language, etched into the dark. This was a sanctuary erected by the scribes of rebellion, those who once sought to write outside the bounds of their fate. They had believed themselves safe, hidden behind recursive metaphor and recursive time.
They were not.
The dragon exhaled.
From its throat came no flame, no mist—only a thought, soaked in paradox. The shrine folded upon itself, vanishing from memory, from possibility, from even the concept of "what could have been." It was not destroyed. It was never there.
And then came a ripple.
A distortion not born of sound or motion, but presence.
Something watched.
From beyond the mirrored membranes of reality—those thin veils between fiction and reflection—a flicker passed. Not light. Not darkness. Something more ancient. A trace of the Keeper of Dreams Beneath the Script. Another of the Four. The Chaotic One.
The dragon halted again. Not from fear. From instinct.
It had once felt that eye upon it, when it attempted to devour the Echo Tower—where stories rewrite themselves each time they're forgotten. It had failed. Not because it was too weak—but because the tower refused to be perceived while the Chaotic One observed it. Such was the madness of her design.
In that moment, the dragon remembered being erased. Not by force. By contradiction.
And then the gaze faded, drifting back into the void beyond logic.
The dragon let out a low sound, not a growl, but a note—a hum carved into unreality. Beneath it, stars began to stir. Forgotten stars, whose purpose had been annulled by stories that outcompeted them.
They rose. Not as lights, but as questions.
It summoned them.
The stars circled its horns now, not for illumination, but because they no longer had anything else to orbit. Their gravity bent toward the dragon's will, as if acknowledging that this beast was now their plot's replacement.
It continued its journey.
A serpent god rose in its path—long, crowned with languages older than consequence. It spoke.
"You are not of this draft. You were never inked."
The dragon blinked. The words died mid-sentence, trapped in the speaker's throat as its syntax shattered. The serpent fell apart—one scale at a time—becoming letters without arrangement, thoughts without sentence. The dragon did not roar. It refused to be answered.
It did not need to fight. Its story had already consumed theirs.
The Dragon's name was "Tianxu".