ZERAVIA Book I - The Lost World Chapter 1 The Dream of Fire * * * The dream always began above the clouds. Kaelion Veyr stood barefoot upon nothing he could name, with no earth beneath him and no sky above him in any ordinary sense. All around him rolled a sea of stormlight, vast white towers of cloud opening and closing like gates. Lightning moved inside them in slow bright veins, as though the heavens possessed a hidden pulse. Wind pressed against his chest and sang in his ears, yet he never fell. He only waited, with the strange certainty that something older than memory was about to arrive. Then the fire came.It did not descend from the sun, nor rise from any visible horizon. It unfolded. A line of molten gold split the storm from one end of the world to the other, and from that line emerged a shape so immense that Kaelion could never afterward decide whether he had seen a dragon or the first idea of one. Wings wider than cities opened through the clouds. Scales burned like hammered metal fresh from a forge. A long neck curved through thunder, and two eyes, ancient and terrible and full of impossible knowing, turned toward him. Aetherion. He never spoke the name in the dream. He simply knew it, the way he knew flame was hot and the sea was deep. The name existed in him before language did. When the great dragon moved, the storm answered. Lightning gathered along the ridges of its wings. The clouds bowed outward. The whole sky seemed to remember something it had been commanded to forget. Kaelion tried to step back, but there was nowhere to step. Fire washed over him - not burning, not exactly, but entering him, moving through his bones like light through clear glass. With it came fragments. A mountain split by a cry that was not human. A ring of standing stones beneath two moons. A crown blackened by heat. Cities of white towers falling silent under a sky choked with ash. A hand reaching toward dragon fire and finding not power, but ruin. The dragon lowered its head.

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