The jungle air was thick with breath—moist, heavy, and wild. Deep in the Verdant Maw, where sunlight broke through in scattered spears and vines draped like nooses from ancient trees, Druun Vaelok moved like a beast among beasts.
Mud caked his boots, and sweat ran down his back in rivers. But his eyes—sharp, gold-flecked, and steady—missed nothing.
He wasn't running anymore.
Not like he used to.
Here, among the tangled roots and hissing ferns, he hunted himself.
Every footstep echoed with memories: of blood, of teeth, of a scream he hadn't meant to release when his strength first broke a man's spine without trying. Of the village elder who looked at him like a monster. Of the friends who no longer played with him. Of the whispers—beastspawn.
He didn't want to be a monster. But he didn't want to be weak either.
He had come here for one thing: to find Tyrakka, the Earth Serpent. The guardian of the Maw. The one who could kill him… or crown him.
He didn't know which he wanted more.
He passed cracked stones etched with runes older than language, and trees whose bark hummed softly in his bones. His own rune—a jagged spiral along his forearm—throbbed faintly. It had glowed since his tenth year, the same day his roar frightened off a jaguar and split a tree.
A growl rolled from his throat. Something stirred beneath the earth.
He stopped.
Then the world shifted.
The ground cracked—no, peeled open. A great coil of stone and scale surged upward from beneath, hurling vines and earth into the air. Trees shattered like twigs. Druun dove, rolled, rose—only to be faced with a head the size of a boulder.
Eyes like molten emeralds stared into him.
Tyrakka.
The serpent god of the jungle. A beast older than empires.
Its voice thundered—not through sound, but into his mind.
"Flesh and fury. You seek power, but power breaks. Are you ready to be broken?"
Druun bared his teeth. "If it means I can protect those I love—break me."
The serpent lunged.
Fangs slammed into the earth beside him. The impact sent a quake through the jungle floor. Druun leapt onto the serpent's coil, clawing upward with bare hands, roaring. Vines lashed out. Branches snapped under pressure. The beast coiled around him like a vice.
Bones groaned.
Muscles burned.
His breath caught—and then—stillness.
Crack.
Something inside him shattered.
Not a bone.
Not a thought.
But a limit.
The rune on his arm flared blinding green, spreading like veins up his neck, into his eyes. The earth responded—stones rose from the soil around him, hovering. And the serpent froze mid-coil.
Literally.
Turned to stone.
Druun fell to his knees, gasping. His fingers trembled. His breath came in growls.
Then the stone cracked—and the serpent's stony hide melted into movement again. It rose, slower now, head bowed.
"You have touched the Petrastone," Tyrakka said, voice low as the earth's core. "You are mine now."
A mark—shaped like an ouroboros of stone—appeared on Druun's chest.
"Your will shall weigh like stone. Your gaze shall hold dominion. You are no longer prey."
Druun rose slowly.
His eyes glowed with emerald fury. The jungle shifted around him, leaves rustling in strange reverence. Even the beasts in the canopy watched in silence.
He clenched his fist—and a stone beside him cracked into dust.
"I didn't come to rule," he whispered. "I came to end the hunt."
Far across the mountains, a phoenix screamed into the firelight.
In the far north, a frozen wolf stirred beneath a starlit sky.
And in the heart of a shadowed city, a raven's wings cut the air.
The storm was coming.
But this time, the storm had teeth.