The words hit Keiser like a hammer to the chest. For a heartbeat, his pulse spiked, loud and frantic in his ears. His breath caught halfway through, and his hand, still hovering over the bars of the cage, froze in place, fingers curling uselessly against the air as if even touching it might set the whole place in fire.

A dragon.

Not a beast.

Not even a child.

Something far, far worse. Something sacred and dangerous.

Keiser's gaze darted back to the small figure within the cage, the dim light flickering across a face half-shrouded by tangled red hair. Too red. Not the copper or auburn, but a deep, burning hue, like coals that refused to die out.

The air around the cage hummed faintly, the mana sigils along the iron bars pulsing in irregular waves, reacting to whatever was inside.

He took a step closer despite himself, his throat tightening.

"…No way," he muttered, almost a whisper, almost a prayer.

It couldn't be.

The memories came unbidden, mud, rain, and smoke. A knight barely in his twenties, still too idealistic for the world he served. He remembered the wounded creature in the ravine outside the Sheol border, its wing pierced by a ballista bolt, its eyes burning with fury and fear all at once. He'd drawn his sword that day, ready to finish what the others started… but he hadn't. Instead, he lowered it.

He had helped it.

He could still feel the heat that nearly blistered his skin as he pressed his cloak to its wound, the heavy breath that rattled the air as the dragon's head lowered close enough for him to see his reflection in its molten eyes. And afterward, after he had asked Gideon's help, he thought the dragon will be given freedom back to the sacred lands, only to be handed by Gideon himself a sword at his 25th birth day.

A blade forged from "a dragon's gift," they'd said.

The Dragonhilt.

His sword.

Keiser's stomach turned, nausea creeping up his throat. His eyes flicked to Tyron, whose trembling hand still clutched at his cloak. "Are you… sure?" His voice was low, strained.

Tyron's wide, sky eyes met his, unflinching for once. "I can feel it," the boy whispered. "That heart, its mana, it's the same as my mother's."

Keiser's pulse pounded harder. He looked back at the cage. The child stirred slightly, a soft sound escaping from within, a whimper, or maybe a growl too faint to tell.

The sigils along the metal glowed faintly brighter, responding to the movement.

Keiser stepped back, instinctively reaching for his dagger, his mind a storm.

If this really was the dragon, if the same creature that had once trusted him, was now trapped in a human shell and being sold to nobles like a trinket, then they were standing on a fuse, ready to burn the whole capital.

"…shit," he hissed under his breath, heart still hammering. "Of all the gods-damned things to find down here…"

He looked again at the boy beside him, who was now staring at the cage not with fear, but something closer to sorrow.

Keiser exhaled sharply, forcing the tremor out of his voice. "We need to move fast," he muttered. "If that really is a dragon, then the moment it wakes up…"

He didn't finish the thought. He didn't have to. The faint hum from the runes was already deepening, the glow crawling up the bars like veins of molten light.

Keiser's breath caught, a tight, sharp thing that refused to move past his throat. He crouched lower, boots silent against the dirt, eyes narrowing as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

Never, never in all his years in the Royal Brigade, had he encountered anything like this.

The lists they he had as Sir Keiser, the coded parchments he'd pried from Genevra's couriers, the whispered exchanges between nobles and brokers, all of it pointed to the same predictable depravity. The auctions were vile, yes, but consistent.

Cursed relics. Smuggled Sheol artifacts. Mana-rich organs bottled for sorcery. Rare beasts, stripped from their habitats, half-starved to make them docile. Sometimes bloodline remnants, vials of diluted foreign royal or divine blood traded like fine wine.

But this… this wasn't on any list.

He inhaled slowly, jaw clenching. "No one mentioned a dragon," he muttered under his breath, almost to himself.

Tyron, kneeling beside him, said nothing. The boy's fingers had tightened around his cloak again, trembling slightly.

Keiser's gaze drifted back to the cage. His heart hammered, steady and cold. No matter how cruel or twisted these underground auctions had become, there were still lines even the most corrupt collectors wouldn't cross. Selling sentient beings was one of them, especially this.

Never a child.

Never a sacred beast.

Never a dragon.

Because dragons weren't beasts, they were ancient, sacred beast, a remnant of the gods' war. A dragon wasn't something you trapped or sold. It was something you worshiped or feared.

He leaned closer despite the tight coil of unease winding through his gut. The lamplight above them flickered, shadows stretching and swaying across the floor. He adjusted his stance, lowering further until the faint glow of the sigil wards reflected in his eyes.

Through the gaps of the heavy cloth, he caught sight of the cage's interior. The runes pulsed faintly, reacting to something inside, soft, rhythmic, almost like breathing.

And then he saw it.

Curled in the center of the cage was a small figure, frail and still, limbs drawn close to the chest as if warding off the cold. Bare feet. Thin wrists. A tangle of hair, red, deep as molten iron, spilling across the floor. The faint shimmer of scales glinted beneath the light before fading again beneath skin.

The body inside the cage lay unnervingly still, too still. Knees drawn tight to the chest, thin arms wrapped around themselves as though trying to keep out a cold. Tangled strands of hair spilled across the floor in a matted halo, their color catching even the faintest light. Red, no, not just red. It shimmered like fire.

Keiser's breath hitched. That wasn't ordinary hair, it burned with the hue of molten coals, glinting and alive under the dim glow of the hanging lamps. He clenched his jaw. No creature he'd ever seen, none catalogued in the beast ledgers of Sheol or the royal archives, bore such a mark.

Not even among the cursed beast. And yet, deep in the recesses of his mind, memory stirred, a sacred beast, rumored to take a human form, bound by oaths older than the Kingdom itself. He had dismissed those stories as superstition. But now, staring into that cage, he wasn't so sure.

The dimness made it impossible to see clearly, the shadows swallowing everything but that spill of red and the faint, shallow rise and fall of breath. The child, because that's what it looked like, a child, was alive, but barely.

Keiser felt his chest tighten. "Gods…" he murmured, barely a sound.

A child.

Just a child.

But the air around the cage was wrong. It thrummed, heavy with a pressure that prickled against his senses, mana so dense it felt alive, like the entire space was breathing with it.

And now a dragon was trapped here, just a young one, being sold like a novelty to nobles who couldn't possibly fathom what they were tampering with.

Keiser exhaled slowly, a curse slipping past his lips, barely audible. "…You've got to be kidding me."

For a moment, all he could do was stare, at the cage, at the dim flicker of light beneath the child's skin, and at the dozens of crates around them holding horrors less dangerous, yet infinitely less sacred.

Because this wasn't an auction anymore.

This was blasphemy.

And if that dragon woke up before they got it out, the entire capital would burn.

"…What in all the hells…" Keiser's whisper rasped out, rough and low, the words tasting like ash. Disbelief warred with fury, and for a long moment, he couldn't move. His hand hovered near the draped cloth, every instinct screaming to rip it away.

He turned sharply toward Tyron. The boy stood frozen, eyes wide and fixed on the cage, their usual dull glow now trembling like a dying ember. His hand was pressed tight over his chest, where his vial used to hang, his fingers digging deep as though to keep his heart from leaping out of his ribcage.

Keiser swallowed hard. This wasn't part of his. This wasn't supposed to happen now.

And yet, here it was, something that shouldn't be his concern yet, hidden in plain sight, tucked between auction crates and relics, too large, too carefully covered, too deliberately excluded from any list or record of he had a hand of finding.

"Why…" Keiser's voice cracked, the words barely more than a growl. "Why the hell would they put a young dragon in here?"

He edged closer, lowering himself into a crouch beside the massive cage. The cloth rippled faintly as the air shifted, and the sigils flared for a heartbeat, burning with a dull, angry red before dimming again. His fingers hovered an inch from the bars. He could feel the heat bleeding from them, contained, waiting, like his two curses on both wrist.

The faint glow of the runes etched into the bars pulsed like a heartbeat, a silent warning. He knew better. Those wards weren't meant to keep something in, they were meant to keep everything else out. Touching them would mean pain enough to strip flesh from bone.

Whoever had built this cage hadn't just wanted to restrain a beast.

But they had imprison something far worst.

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