There was a time before names learned how to hide.
Before light learned how to pretend it did not cast shadows.
Before creation convinced itself that absence was accidental.
This was not a memory preserved by history.
This was a memory that had survived because no one wanted it remembered.
Kryndor Solathis watched the stars from a balcony that did not exist on any chart.
The space around him was still—unnaturally so. No stellar wind. No radiation shimmer. No background hum of cosmic noise. The void here was curated, folded inward upon itself until even entropy hesitated to intrude.
He preferred it that way.
Silence was not emptiness.
Silence was control.
His obsidian scales did not gleam. They absorbed. Light bent subtly toward him and never quite returned the same way it arrived. Even the stars behind him looked dimmer when framed by his silhouette, as if reality itself were unsure how much illumination he was meant to receive.
Kryndor folded his wings with deliberate care and rested his hands on the balcony rail.
He was thinking—not scheming, not plotting—but evaluating.
Danny Dravokar was moving faster than expected.
That was… inconvenient.
But not catastrophic.
Nothing ever truly was.
Creation had always been misunderstood.
Even by its creators.
Especially by them.
Kryndor remembered the early days—when the Dragons still believed creation was about addition. Add light. Add matter. Add life. Add complexity. Keep adding until the universe was full enough to justify its existence.
They had been wrong.
Creation without subtraction was not harmony.
It was rot.
Kryndor had realized it first.
Not through rebellion. Not through corruption. Through observation.
Worlds that never lost stagnated. Species that never faced extinction calcified into inefficiency. Civilizations that never collapsed became tyrannies of comfort, choking innovation beneath excess safety.
Balance did not come from peace.
It came from tension.
And tension required pressure.
Someone had to apply it.
Bones had been the first proof of concept.
Not a monster.
A variable.
A synthesis of destruction given will—not chaos, but purposeful collapse. Bones was meant to prune creation where it grew too dense, too self-satisfied. A living entropy engine that would keep existence dynamic.
The Golden Dragons had recoiled.
They called it a mistake.
Kryndor had called it inevitable.
They sealed Bones away not because he was evil—but because he forced them to confront something they despised.
That creation was not inherently good.
And that destruction was not inherently wrong.
Kryndor turned his gaze inward now, through layers of time and forgotten laboratories, remembering the others.
Orcs had not been born of savagery.
They had been designed for endurance—bodies capable of thriving where softer creations failed. Aggression was not a flaw; it was a stabilizer in hostile environments.
Goblins were not accidents.
They were adaptability distilled. Intelligence without sentiment. Survival stripped of moral friction.
Shades were not ghosts.
They were absence given form—what happened when light was removed deliberately instead of naturally.
Screamers were resonance weapons.
Fear was one of the most efficient shaping tools the universe possessed.
Monsters—true monsters—were ecosystem checks. Apex disruptions meant to prevent any single form of life from achieving irreversible dominance.
And vampires…
Kryndor smiled faintly.
Ah yes.
The vampires.
Vampires were never meant to rule.
They were meant to remember.
They were memory predators—beings that persisted across generations, feeding not only on blood, but on continuity. They observed civilizations rise and fall, ensuring no narrative ever achieved total erasure.
Sareth Nevermore had been one of his finest creations.
Too fine, perhaps.
Given enough time, even tools developed opinions.
Kryndor lifted one clawed hand, and the void responded—subtly reshaping, forming faint echoes of forms long gone. Bones' skeletal silhouette flickered briefly, then dissolved. Sareth's pale features followed, his smile frozen in reverence and malice.
"All of you," Kryndor murmured, "were necessary."
Danny would never understand that.
Danny believed creation required care.
Attachment.
Responsibility.
Those were dangerous beliefs.
Beliefs that led to stagnation.
Beliefs that led to gods refusing to let go.
Beliefs that led to Aelithra Gwynsár.
Kryndor's expression hardened—not with hatred, but with resolve.
She had been the first crack.
The first voice to suggest creation should feel.
That was unacceptable.
Below Kryndor's balcony, space rippled.
Not visibly.
Conceptually.
Bones stirred somewhere distant, his whispers intensifying as the sigil stones aligned more tightly around his conceptual prison. He could feel the cage drawing closer—not in space, but in possibility.
Kryndor allowed himself a moment of contemplation.
Danny assembling a coalition.
Planet spirits awakening.
Memory returning.
Yes.
This would require intervention.
But not directly.
Not yet.
Better to let pressure build.
Let Sareth strike.
Let Danny believe he was winning.
The best collapses always happened right after hope solidified.
Kryndor turned away from the stars.
"Proceed," he said quietly.
Across the multiverse, Sareth Nevermore felt the permission ripple through him like holy fire.
And the House of Whispers opened its doors.
Sareth Nevermore did not announce the strike.
He never did.
Announcements created witnesses, and witnesses created narratives. Narratives were dangerous. They propagated memory. Memory had weight, and weight slowed erasure.
The House of Whispers preferred efficiency.
The first disappearance occurred in a place no one was watching anymore—a waystation orbiting a dead red star, decommissioned decades earlier and left to caretakers who maintained systems no one remembered to shut down. The caretaker on duty that cycle was a woman with copper-brown hair and a laugh that came too easily, a descendant three times removed from a Golden Dragon line that had once chosen to live quietly among mortals.
She was cataloging dust.
The security feed recorded her pausing mid-step, head tilting slightly, as though listening to something behind the walls. Her mouth opened—perhaps to speak, perhaps to ask a question—and then the feed glitched.
When it returned, she was gone.
No struggle.
No blood.
No damage.
Her datapad lay on the floor, still warm, the last entry unfinished.
Across the multiverse, similar moments unfolded.
A young archivist on a ring-world vanished while reshelving planetary histories that had not been accessed in centuries.
A traveling healer never arrived at her destination, her ship found adrift with life support humming peacefully.
A planetary spirit's emissary dissolved into static during a communion ritual, their words cut off mid-phrase.
None of it was loud.
None of it was dramatic.
That was the point.
Sareth watched the reports accumulate from a chamber far beneath the House of Whispers, his pale fingers steepled beneath his chin. The room was lined with mirrors—not reflective, but interpretive. Each surface showed a different angle of reality, filtered through sigils that translated absence into data.
"Good," he murmured as the counts rose.
The disappearances were not random. They followed a pattern so subtle only Sareth and his masters could see it: converging lines of resonance, bloodlines brushing too close to remembrance, planetary nodes beginning to hum with awakening.
He was cutting the threads before they could be woven.
One mirror flared brighter than the rest.
Sareth leaned forward.
A Golden Dragon descendant—male, mid-twenties by mortal reckoning—stood on a balcony overlooking Buddies HQ, staring out at the stars with an expression that suggested he was feeling something he did not yet have language for.
Mavryn Solthar.
Sareth smiled.
"Not yet," he whispered.
Patience.
The strike had to feel like coincidence. Like bad luck. Like the universe's usual indifference.
Too many disappearances too quickly would invite scrutiny.
Instead, Sareth focused on something far more dangerous than bloodlines.
Planetary anchors.
The first anchor was hidden deep within a gas giant's moon—a crystalline core left behind by an ancient world spirit that had sacrificed itself to stabilize the system during a stellar collapse. It had lain dormant for millennia, its resonance faint but persistent.
Sareth arrived alone.
The cavern welcomed him, crystalline walls refracting pale light into soft, shifting hues. He inhaled, savoring the faint echo of creation still clinging to the stone.
"You should have stayed asleep," he said gently.
The sigils embedded in his gloves flared, and the crystal screamed—not audibly, but structurally. The resonance collapsed inward, folding into itself until it became a single point of silence.
Sareth closed his fist.
The anchor was gone.
He did not destroy it.
He removed it from context.
One by one, similar anchors vanished across the stars. Worlds that had begun to stir fell quiet again, their nascent awakenings smothered before they could spread.
In Draxen, Nyxira gasped.
She staggered, clutching her chest as a sharp pain lanced through her core. The city responded instantly—lights dimming, pathways shifting, creation magic flowing toward her in concern.
Danny felt it at the same moment.
He was in the lower terraces, speaking with emissaries from the Beast Men, when the ache hit him like a sudden drop in altitude. His breath caught, and he gripped the railing, knuckles whitening.
"Danny?" Elysara was at his side in an instant.
"Something just went quiet," he said, voice low. "Something that was… awake."
Nyxira's voice echoed through the city, carried on resonance rather than sound. He's cutting them off.
Danny closed his eyes, anger flaring hot and immediate. "Where?"
Nyxira's response was fragmented, strained. Everywhere. Nowhere. He's moving between places that aren't meant to be mapped.
Jimmy appeared moments later, datapad already scrolling with alerts. "We've got missing persons reports coming in," he said grimly. "Nothing obvious connecting them yet, but—"
"But they're all close to us," Danny finished.
Jimmy nodded. "Yeah."
The coalition was assembling faster than expected.
And that was exactly what Sareth wanted.
In the House of Whispers, Sareth stood before the mirrors again, watching the ripples spread. His movements were precise, ritualistic, each strike a calculated subtraction.
"You're rushing," whispered a voice from the shadows—not Kryndor's, but something older, thinner.
Sareth inclined his head slightly. "He's accelerating."
"Yes," the voice agreed. "He always does."
Sareth's smile returned, sharp and devout. "Then let him. The faster he gathers them, the fewer places they'll have to hide."
The mirrors shifted.
Danny's image appeared again, this time surrounded by allies—wolves, dragons, soldiers, spirits. Determination radiated from him like heat.
Sareth traced a finger along the glass.
"You think you're assembling a rescue," he murmured. "But you're really building a stage."
He turned away as alarms echoed faintly through the House—alerts not of intrusion, but of readiness. Ancient mechanisms hummed to life, corridors aligning, defenses unfolding.
The House of Whispers was preparing for guests.
And far away, in a place where chains remembered their purpose too well, Aelithra Gwynsár felt the strike ripple through the fabric of creation.
She closed her eye again—not in fear, but in sorrow.
"They're thinning the choir," she whispered.
The chains tightened in response.
Not because they had to.
But because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn't.
Bones did not feel fear the way mortals did.
Fear required uncertainty.
Bones was certainty given bones and flame.
He was not an animal that wondered if the hunter was near. He was the hunter. He was the hunger. He was the inevitable ending that waited patiently behind every beginning.
And yet—
In the quiet between destroyed worlds, where ash drifted like snow and stars looked dimmer through smoke, Bones paused.
Not because he was tired.
Because the universe had tightened.
He stood on the shattered ridge of a dead continent, green fire pouring from his ribcage and eye sockets, licking the air as if tasting it for information. Beneath him, the remains of a city lay flattened into indistinguishable layers—stone fused with metal, glass turned to slag, bodies reduced to pale traces of carbon and bone dust.
His Dark Buddies moved across the ruin in squads, collecting artifacts, siphoning lingering terror, feeding the destruction into resonators that hummed with stolen despair. They were efficient. Loyal enough. Disposable.
Bones watched them without interest.
He was listening for something else.
A whisper that wasn't his.
A pressure that didn't belong to destruction.
He turned his skull toward the horizon. There was nothing there. No army. No fleet. No Dragons descending from the sky with blazing judgment.
And still—
The cage drew nearer.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
The sigil stones were indestructible, immutable anchors of a single purpose: to form the plated meteor-like prison around him when attached in the proper constellation. They could not be broken. They could be drained. They could be dormant.
But they could not forget.
Bones had always despised that.
He could erode civilizations. He could corrupt minds. He could turn heroes into traitors with a single well-placed sentence.
But those stones?
They did not care.
They did not bargain.
They did not hate.
They simply waited.
Bones lifted one clawed hand and clenched it, green flame thickening around his knuckles. He felt the pressure again—like an invisible hand tightening a net, knot by knot, across the multiverse.
He turned and began walking, boots crunching through ash.
The air around him shivered with whispers. His whispers.
He sent them outward, lacing them through the cracks between realities, searching for ears to settle in. Searching for minds to lean into.
You're tired.
They don't appreciate you.
They're using you.
You could be free.
He always did this. Always had.
But now the whispers encountered something new.
Resistance.
Not wards. Not shields.
Awareness.
Living worlds beginning to hum again. Planet spirits stirring. Resonance forming connections that made it harder for his whispers to land unnoticed.
Bones stopped.
The green fire in his skull flared.
"Oh," he rasped, voice like grinding stone. "So you finally decided to sing."
He did not need to ask who.
Danny.
The Golden Dragon of Creation.
The anomaly.
The young dragon who had once been human enough to hesitate, to doubt, to rage like a mortal. Bones had enjoyed those early years—watching Danny flail through grief and confusion, watching him build fragile little lives only to have them shattered.
It had been… entertaining.
It had been useful.
But entertainment always ended.
And utility always shifted.
Now Danny was closing the net.
Bones could feel it.
Not through sight, not through scouts.
Through the way possibilities narrowed. Through the way escape routes that had always existed as options began to vanish—not sealed by force, but by coordination.
Bones did not like coordination.
Coordination was how cages were built.
He turned sharply, eyesockets blazing, and his gaze landed on a Dark Buddy operative kneeling near a cracked monument. The creature looked up, startled, green flame reflecting in its visor.
"Tell me," Bones said softly, "how many sigil stones do they have?"
The operative hesitated—then answered quickly. "Six, my lord."
Bones' jaw tightened.
Six.
One more and the constellation would be complete under a single roof, a single command.
Not permanent, not eternal—the lattice was gone, consumed by B.L.O.B.—but complete enough to form the prison again if they could stun him long enough to attach them.
Bones laughed, a harsh sound that echoed across the dead landscape. "They think they can catch me."
The operative swallowed. "They—"
Bones lifted a hand, silencing him without touching him. "No," he said. "They can."
Silence fell.
The Dark Buddy trembled.
Bones' voice lowered, strangely calm. "That's the difference now," he continued. "Before, they wanted to. Now they are capable."
He stared up at the sky.
The stars above seemed slightly dimmer.
Or perhaps it was his perception shifting, tuned now to the tightening cage rather than the pleasures of destruction.
Bones' green flames pulsed, then steadied.
He did not panic.
He adapted.
He always had.
"Send word," Bones said, turning back to the operative. "To Sareth."
The Dark Buddy's visor flickered. "Lord Sareth is… occupied."
Bones' skull tilted slowly. "Then interrupt him."
The operative hesitated. "He—"
Bones stepped forward. The ground beneath his foot blackened, ash melting into glass. His voice was gentle now, and that was far more terrifying than rage.
"Interrupt him," Bones repeated, "or I will use your spine as a flute and play a song that makes your entire squad forget you ever existed."
The operative bowed frantically. "Yes, my lord."
Bones watched it scramble away.
Then he looked into the space beyond space, where whispers traveled.
He could feel Kryndor there.
Not present.
Not visible.
But watching.
Bones' flames flared again, annoyance sharpening into something closer to resentment.
Kryndor had always been… complicated.
The creator who refused to claim him publicly. The Dragon who called him an inevitability but treated him like an experiment left running too long.
Bones did not like being treated like a tool.
Tools were meant to be held.
Bones was meant to be free.
He whispered outward again, but this time the whisper was not for mortals.
It was for Kryndor.
If you try to cage me again, Bones sent, I will burn every variable you've planted until the universe has no pressure left—only emptiness.
For a moment, nothing answered.
Then, faintly, like the sensation of a smile in the dark, a response came—not in words, but in approval.
Kryndor was not threatened.
He was intrigued.
Bones hissed.
He did not like that either.
He turned away from the dead city and walked toward the horizon, leaving green flame footprints that burned and healed the ash simultaneously—destruction and creation twisted together in mockery.
He would go dark.
Not because he feared capture.
Because he understood the game was changing.
The longer he remained free, the more of his original power returned. Years free would make him uncatchable by anyone except the original Dragons.
And the original Dragons were slow.
Danny could move fast.
But Danny was not the entire universe.
Not yet.
Bones stepped into a fissure where reality thinned, vanishing into a corridor of shadow and crackling green fire.
As he disappeared, his whisper lingered over the dead world like a curse:
"Come then, little King of Creation."
"I will show you what it costs to tighten a cage around a god."