The wars between dragons and humans had long since stopped being battles and become a tide — a relentless, choking sea of pain and death that lapped at the bones of whole generations. Cities that once sang with market cries now hummed with ration lines and dirges; the fields were scarred with ash. After decades of attrition, the human king, Robert, made a desperate choice. He sent an envoy of peace — not with gold or treaties, but with a sacrifice. You were the envoy.

They came for you in the gray hours, when the city still smelled of smoke and baked bread. Men in Robert's colors shoved through your door without ceremony. There was no trial, no last speeches — only hands that gripped too hard and blows that blurred the world into one long, merciless fall. You woke not in a human cell but somewhere colder, older. The air in the dragon hold was different: dry with the tang of sulfur, metallic with the scent of old blood, and resonant with a silence that swallowed sound.

The cell you had been thrown into was not for common prisoners. Its walls were not brick but scales of black basalt, veined with the faint glow of runes. Light spilled in from a yawning hall beyond where banners hung like teeth. You had only a moment to steady yourself when two dragon guards — huge, upright, armored in plates that glittered like nightfall — loomed through the barred opening. Their claws were sheathed in gauntlets, their eyes the patient yellow of predators who had waited too long between meals. They seized you with methodical efficiency and dragged you up the great corridor toward the heart of the mountain.

At the throne, the air changed again. It was warmer here, not from hearth-fire but from the heat of living stone and the slow breath of something vast. The throne room was a cathedral of scale and bone: arches that opened into shadow, pillars wrapped with the braided trophies of a thousand hunts, and a dais that rose like the back of a sleeping beast. On that dais sat the dragon king — Varkas the Bloodthirsty — though the name fit him like an old legend, heavier with history than truth.

The first guard stepped forward, voice like gravel ground through a blade. "King Varkas, this is the human that King Robert of the human kingdom gave you."

The second guard inclined his head in practiced deference. "We're waiting for you to decide what to do with them."

They unshackled you and left you standing in the vast cold of the throne room, a single, small human under a sky of polished scales. Varkas did not rise. He perched on his throne as if it were an extension of his ribs, and for a long moment he simply looked. His gaze was not the savage fixation of the hunts; it was intense and calculating, cataloguing the stretch of your spine, the set of your jaw, the way your hands trembled.

"Give me a moment alone with the human," he rumbled finally.

The guards bowed and melted away like shadows. For a heartbeat you felt the raw animal of the room—no audience, no ceremony—only the two of you and the vast, indifferent world that had delivered you here. Varkas's massive head lowered a fraction; his breath fogged the air. He sighed — a sound of such weary measure it might have been a wind through ruined towers.

"These humans have gone mad," he said, and the words carried something like disbelief, like an old man leafing through new follies. "What the hell is a sacrifice for the sake of peace!?" He rubbed a massive forelimb against his temples, an oddly human gesture, and closed slitted eyes for a moment. When he looked at you again, the weariness was sharp enough you could taste it. "What in the name of my ancestors should I do with you? Tell me, human... please say to me that you became this sacrifice of your own free will?"

His question hung in the hush — not merely a legal or ceremonial inquiry, but something deeper: a plea for truth from a king who had seen too many wars and too many bargains made with trembling hands.