Kaerix Thal’Vor: The Inheritance of Fire Unclaimed

The first thing Kaerix Thal’Vor remembered was fire that did not burn.

It coiled beneath his scales in slow, deliberate pulses, a heat that carried weight rather than pain. He stood at the edge of the Dracorith Wastes where obsidian ridges split the horizon like the ribs of a slain god. Ash drifted sideways on a wind that tasted of old thunder. Above him, the sky fractured into bands of copper and violet, as though the world itself had been struck and never healed.

Kaerix flexed his clawed hand and watched faint runes glow along the dark crimson of his scales, marks older than his name. Dragonlords called them blood-signs. Elders whispered that they were echoes, impressions left behind by those who had ruled before memory learned how to forget.

He had never asked for them.

The summons had come in a dream, carried by molten rain and a voice that spoke from beneath the world. Not a command. An invitation. Vorn’Kazir awaited him, the Burning Throne rising from the mountains like a crown forged from punishment and pride. The Dragonlords had felt the stirring. They always did.

Kaerix did not walk toward the citadel.

He turned instead toward the Ashen Maw.

The rift yawned open in the earth, a wound that glowed with molten light and whispered with the voices of dead wyrms. Bone spires jutted from the slag, remnants of titans and dragons alike, their remains fused together by ancient wars no song could fully remember. Here, the air bent strangely, heavy with pressure and expectation.

This was where truth hid, beneath thrones, beneath banners, beneath stories told too often to remain honest.

As Kaerix descended, the heat deepened. His blood-signs flared brighter, reacting to something below. The ground trembled, not violently, but with the slow certainty of a heartbeat resuming after a long silence.

He reached the cavern at the rift’s heart.

A massive shape lay coiled within the magma lake, half-submerged, its scales blackened and cracked, glowing faintly between fractures. Not dead. Not alive as mortals understood it. A dragon from before the Dragonlords named themselves kings.

Zaerthos, Stormborn King.

Kaerix felt the recognition snap into place like a lock turning. This was not ancestry.

This was inheritance.

“You carry the fracture well,” the ancient dragon rumbled, its voice echoing inside Kaerix’s chest rather than the air. “Better than those who crowned themselves after my fall.”

Kaerix did not bow.

“I didn’t come for dominion,” he said, his voice steady despite the pressure pressing against his thoughts. “Or judgment.”

The magma shifted. A massive eye opened, luminous and tired.

“Good,” Zaerthos replied. “Those who seek crowns are already broken.”

Images bled into Kaerix’s vision, cities forged of obsidian and flame, Dragonlords kneeling not to kings but to balance, skies unscarred by conquest. Then came the fracture: betrayal, ambition, the Burning Throne rising as law replaced wisdom.

“The Dracorith Wastes are dying,” Zaerthos continued. “Not from war. From stagnation. Memory sealed too tightly becomes rot.”

Kaerix felt the truth settle, heavy and unavoidable. The blood-signs along his scales cooled, no longer burning, but anchoring.

“What would you have me do?”

The ancient dragon’s gaze softened, not kind, but deliberate.

“Refuse what they will offer you.”

Silence followed, thick and absolute.

When Kaerix climbed back toward the surface, the sky above had shifted. Storm clouds gathered in strange, spiraling patterns, lightning tracing runes he almost understood. Somewhere far above, horns would soon sound from Vorn’Kazir, calling him home.

He did not answer.

Kaerix Thal’Vor stepped into the storm instead, carrying not a claim to rule, but a truth that would fracture the Burning Throne itself:

A world cannot be ruled forever by those who refuse to remember why they were chosen in the first place.