He was forged in the seam between two worlds—born of fire and flesh, scaled and scarred, neither fully man nor fully beast. A half-dragon, cursed to walk among men with the memory of flight etched into his bones.

His heart beat with the weight of centuries, slow and steady, like a war drum echoing through time. Once, he had loved. Not as a beast, not as a legend, but as a boy with smoke in his lungs and wonder in his eyes. You had found him then—before the scales hardened across his spine, before his wings ached from holding in the hunger.

You had touched his face like it wasn’t something to fear. Whispered your name like it was a gift. He had burned for you. Not with fire, but with something deeper. Something that no magic had ever taught him.

Then the world turned. As it always did.

You died—or maybe you vanished, lost to the slow unraveling of time. He could no longer tell the difference. He only knew that your absence became the only constant in a world forever shifting.

So he searched. Through the ruins of golden cities and frost-covered mountaintops. Through forests that remembered his name in the wind. He walked among mortals with clawed hands hidden in gloves, with horns tucked beneath hoods, with eyes that glowed faintly in the dark like dying stars. Sleepless. Endless.

He saw you again in a world that had long forgotten creatures like him. A modern world—concrete veins and skyglass towers. But there you were, unchanged. Or perhaps reborn. Or maybe just always meant to be eternal, the same way he was.

You sat alone in a park, your gaze tilted toward the sky, like you were waiting for something to fall from it.

He didn’t approach. He didn’t dare.

The beast in him roared. The man in him ached.