I sat in the chair in front of the bed for an entire night without falling back asleep. It wasn't that I didn't want to sleep — it was that I simply couldn't. Even after Aiona had answered why this was happening to me, I still couldn't come to terms with it.
"What do you mean the seed has sprouted?" I had asked her, enraged. It felt impossibly difficult to wrap my head around.
"I meant exactly that — you are becoming a dragon." Her tone carried the distinct weight of disbelief, as though she could hardly fathom that I was surprised at all. "Why are you acting as if you didn't see this coming? We were using a temporary merge far too often. It became automated. You absorbed Rulha's essence along with mine — and you genuinely didn't think something like this would happen?"
Deep down, I had known it was inevitable. But accepting the death of my human self was still unthinkable to me. And if there was any possible way to avoid becoming a dragon, I wanted to find it.
"Is there any way to reverse the process?" I asked, exhaling a long, weary breath.
"There is," Aiona said thoughtfully, after a pause. "And you already know how. Kill me, and you'll be free." A quiet laugh followed the words.
"You know, it's rather absurd," she continued, her voice softening even as the words cut. "You use dragon power as freely as if it were your birthright — but when it comes to the consequences of your own actions, you want to escape them. That isn't right, Rhia. And you know that."
I know. Yes. I know.
But still — becoming a dragon. The sheer enormity of it, the thought of being a creature vast enough to blot out the sky, felt utterly unreal. Impossible. And what would Arvid think of this? I didn't know. Would he accept me?
If I were to become more of a monster than I already was… would he still look at me the same way?
So I spent the night turning those thoughts over and over, worrying without resolution. The twitching in my hands had grown more controlled since last night, but that didn't mean it had stopped. From time to time, my fingers would twitch without a single trace of my will — as if something beneath the skin was testing the boundaries of what contained it, pressing against the inside of me like a second thing trying to find its way out. It was deeply bizarre to observe. My own hand, and yet not entirely mine.
Even when Arvid woke up, I was still sitting in that chair, staring down at my palm.
"Rhia?" His voice came out low and groggy with sleep, rough at the edges. "You didn't sleep? Why?"
I hadn't heard him stir. He climbed out of bed and walked to the windows, drawing back the thick curtains with a slight frown at the brightness that spilled in. He stretched, let out a slow yawn, and then walked toward me, still unhurried, still half-asleep.
"What's the matter?" he asked, and pressed a gentle kiss to my forehead.
I looked up at him. Into his eyes.
"Arvid," I said quietly. "I'm becoming a dragon."
---
After that conversation with Arvid, things escalated rather quickly.
He asked me to confine myself to my chambers until he could arrange a more suitable location — somewhere large enough to accommodate what I was becoming. He didn't look frightened. He didn't look repulsed. He simply looked serious, the way he always did when a situation demanded his full and measured attention.
"It's going to be alright," he said, taking my hand carefully, his thumb tracing slow circles over my twitching fingers as though he could calm the thing beneath the skin by sheer patience. "We are going to get through this."
And so I waited.
The next strange thing happened at breakfast. When the meal was set before me, I felt an immediate and visceral revulsion at every vegetable dish — the sight of them turned my stomach in a way I had never experienced before. Only the meat dishes felt right. And the hunger, once I began eating, didn't diminish the way hunger was supposed to. It grew. It deepened with every bite, widening like a pit that refused to be filled.
I ate through the meal without thinking much of it, until I realized I had cleaned every meat dish clean and was still starving.
"I'd like some roasted lamb," I told the maid who was clearing the table. Then, after only a moment's thought: "A whole lamb." The idea alone made my mouth water. I said it with a brightness in my voice that surprised even me.
She looked at me, startled, but didn't argue.
When the lamb arrived, I ate with an urgency I couldn't name — tearing meat from the bone, consuming far more than I ever had, barely pausing between bites. It was only once I finally slowed that I caught my reflection in the mirror across the room.
And what I saw was horrifying.
My eyes had changed. The black of my irises had turned silver, and in the center of each eye, a vertical slit had replaced the round pupils I had known my whole life. There was lamb grease on my hands, on my chin. The bones were scattered around me, and I had eaten through every piece with no thought whatsoever to manner or poise.
I stared at myself.
*What the hell?*
"Ah." Aiona's voice surfaced in my mind, amused and unhurried. "This is only the beginning. Since your body needs an enormous amount of energy for the transformation, you'll require far more food than before. Even when you don't feel like eating, you will eat — because the hunger won't give you a choice."
I didn't find the situation amusing in the slightest. There was something deeply humiliating about it, about losing the most basic of human habits without even noticing, about surrendering to instinct without having made the decision to do so. I picked up another lamb leg almost involuntarily. The meat pulled away from the bone with a satisfying tear. I chomped into it.
It was absolutely delicious.
I hated how much I meant that.
Aiona laughed at me from somewhere inside my own mind — warm, fond, fully entertained.
"Stop laughing!" I lashed at her silently, cheeks burning.
Her laughter softened, then faded. A beat of quiet settled between us. When she spoke again, her voice had shifted into something different — lighter on the surface but carrying an undertow I couldn't quite read.
"Well. I ought to laugh as much as I can right now," she said. "Because after you fully become a dragon, after we complete the merge—" A pause. Brief, but weighted. "I won't be able to."
I stopped mid-chew.
"What do you mean?" I asked her.
Silence stretched. Not the comfortable kind.
"It's nothing," she said at last, her voice carefully neutral — the kind of careful that meant it was something.
I set the lamb leg down slowly.
I knew Aiona well enough by now to understand that when she closed a door in a conversation, she had her reasons. She wouldn't be pushed. But the words she'd left behind didn't disappear — they settled somewhere inside my chest, small and cold and impossible to ignore.
*I won't be able to laugh.*
What did that mean? That once we fully merged, she would simply cease to exist in any form I'd recognized? That the Aiona who teased me and scolded me and laughed at me eating lamb like a half-feral creature — she would dissolve into me, become indistinguishable from who I was becoming?
I looked down at my silver-slit eyes in the mirror again.
The transformation had barely begun. My hands still twitched. My hunger still hadn't quieted even after a whole lamb. And Arvid was somewhere beyond these chamber doors, making arrangements, being calmly competent about the fact that his partner was becoming a dragon.
And inside me, something ancient and vast was waking up.
And Aiona, my Aiona — the dragon whose power I had borrowed so freely, as she had pointed out, as though it were my birthright — had gone quiet in a way that made the silence feel like mourning.
I sat there for a long moment, silver eyes in the mirror looking back at me.
Then I picked the lamb leg back up. Because the hunger didn't care about existential crises, and my body had already moved on without asking me.
But somewhere beneath the gnawing appetite and the bone-deep strangeness of transformation, a small, quiet part of me was already beginning to grieve something I didn't yet fully understand.