Lukas stood upon the elevated platform of solidified water, the currents bending and folding beneath him like a living throne. The Divinity of the Seas surged, its magic manifesting in the countless humanoid figures of water that surrounded the marines. Each one moved in perfect synchrony, their edges rippling with the faint shimmer of reflected light, their bodies sculpted from the ocean’s memory.

  Before them, the Admiralty of Nozar stood frozen, knowing that Lukas had meant those words. Their formation had broken, discipline abandoned, and what remained were men and women realizing that their ranks, titles, and fleets meant nothing before a sovereign authority of power itself.

  Lukas could feel their fear, could almost smell it in the air.

  He could kill them.

  He knew that without a single doubt in his mind.

  With a thought alone, Lukas could command his own soldiers made of water to collapse upon the Admiralty, extinguishing every life before another heartbeat passed.

  He could end Nozar’s naval power in an instant.

  The realization rose in him like a tide—cold, powerful and highly intoxicating.

  For a moment, the idea lingered on his tongue, sweet and dangerous.

  This was justice, wasn’t it?

  To answer cruelty with the same cruelty that had been inflicted upon his own people?

  But then he remembered all that he had been through, all the lessons that he had learnt.

  If Lukas killed them, erased this Admiraly from the face of Hiraeth, would that make him any different from the King of Nozar? Would this be any different than what Daerion had done to those who stood in his way?

  He saw the way the old man had justified every atrocity as necessity, every act of domination as rightful rule. That sweet taste of victory turned bitter in an instant as Lukas wondered if he was now standing on the same precipice as Daerion had when his empire of control had finally spread to every corner of Hiraeth.

  The Tournament of Khaitish had perhaps forced him to confront one of his greatest enemies, not the Monarch, but the hatred and anger that his grandfather represented. Lukas had almost returned to the life he had once lived in the worlds within the Crest, where strength became permission and victory became identity. Rage had been his only companion, whispering seductive promises that he simply needed more power to stand in the face of his enemies.

  He had already learnt that path led nowhere but ruin.

  Lukas could not change the future of this world by embodying the worst of its past.

  So, standing that platform of water with the seas itself awaiting his command, the King of the Dragons made his decision.

  The Crown’s magic pulsed once more, extending outward in shimmering strands that rippled through the air before sinking silently into the minds of every single soldier who bore the symbol of Nozar's Admiralty on their uniforms and into every single noble who lived within the Inner Cities of Nozar. The Legacy formed a connection, a bridge between their minds.

  Suddenly Lukas felt the Admiralty’s panic as if it were his own heartbeat. Felt the shock and terror of the nobility in the Inner Cities, who had fled their palaces only to witness the collapse of the world they had built their lives upon.Through that connection, Lukas understood the magnitude of what they saw when they looked at him.

  To them, he was no longer a mere king.

  He was a force of nature.

  He was a being who allowed them life only because he chose to.

  Their fear washed over him like a riptide, and with it came something dangerous, a sense of might unlike anything he had known in battle.

  This was what it felt like to be a god.

  Lukas could still erase Nozar exactly as they had once tried to erase Linemall, the Kingdom that he and all of the draconic kind called home. The thought resonated through him, heavy with temptation. But he knew that the cycle would never end if he gave into that urge to unleash destruction.

  The cycle had to end with him.

  So Lukas Drakos chose differently.

  He chose to be better.

  “There is no victor in battle. There are only survivors.” The words rolled from Lukas not as sound, but as a voice that echoed through every connected mind. His voice crashed like a wave against the consciousness of every marine and every noble who stood within the shattered grandeur of Nozar's Inner Cities.

  Many recoiled from the truth, others remained frozen beneath it.

  “Whether you believe it or not, you are all blessed with power,” Lukas continued, the tidal cadence of his voice unrelenting. “You think this power allows you to rule over those who were not as fortunate to receive those very same blessings."

  The Dragon King shook his head.

  “But you are wrong.” The declaration struck hard, a sudden crack of judgment that reverberated through every skull it touched.

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  “This power that I have…I am using it to set my people free, to put an end to their suffering.” The glow of the Crown pulsed faintly above his head, mirroring the sincerity that surged within him. “This power that we have been given, it is to serve.”

  The last word was one that many of them had forgotten, assuming they had ever known it at all.

  “And…it is time for you to serve your people."

  Below him, the subtle but unmistakable change began to spread across the minds that heard his voice.

  Marines lowered their weapons not in defeat, but in unsteady contemplation. Their eyes, once hard with trained resolve, now carried bewilderment, like children hearing a story that contradicted everything they had been taught. Nobles, dressed in garments meant to represent dignity and superiority, clung to his words as if trying to decipher a language they had never needed to learn. Confusion contorted their expressions, a dawning awareness that their world may not be what they believed it was.

  Lukas allowed the truth to sink into each and every mind.

  But his attention drifted below to where he had rose.

  There, beneath the towering Citadels of the Capital, Daerion Ittriki still knelt. The King of Nozar, this proud ruler of a kingdom built on dominion, now reduced to a grieving father clutching the frail body of his dying son. Even from where he stood, he could still see the old man’s bowed head, the tremor of his shoulders.

  Perhaps Daerion could not hear him.

  Perhaps grief had drowned out any other sound, including the voice of reason.

  Lukas had told himself that there was no realm of possibility in which Daerion would ever choose to change. But he spoke anyway, for truth did not need willing ears, only a voice brave enough to carry it.

  “You may wish to wage war against me, against my Kingdom. You may wish to do this for the sake of vengeance and to take back what you think is rightfully yours.” His tone was neither mocking nor cruel, simply honest. “If it is war that you want, then I will give you war. But have seen what I can do, you know what you will have to face if this is the choice you make.”

  The figures of water all around them shifted slightly, their presence a reminder of the simple fact that he could deliver on that promise.

  “Yet it does not have to be that way.” Lukas’s voice softened, though its reach did not falter. “How many more need to die? How much more blood needs to be shed for you to realize—for all of us to realize—that we must be better?”

  He did not expect them all to understand.

  Lukas knew the weight of hatred passed down through generations, the bitterness carved so deeply into history that logic could not hope to uproot it. But if his words reached even one person—just one—then that single spark was enough.

  Because change only needed a single catalyst for it to become real.

  “I do not know if these words matter to you,” Lukas admitted to them all, and perhaps to himself. “But I have to try.”

  He had to.

  Lukas’ gaze lifted beyond the marbled avenues and towering structures of the Inner Cities, beyond the chaos and trembling uncertainty of the humans who stood beneath him.

  His eyes sought the horizon where his people moved like a living constellation.

  Dragons soared in sweeping arcs, their wings carving through the air with a freedom they had been denied for generations. Others glided across the ocean’s surface, their serpentine forms weaving gracefully through the waves.

  Whether they had taken to the seas or the skies, they were safe.

  For the first time in two hundred years, his people were free.

  “It is your choices,” Lukas spoke, and the Crown carried his words once more through every mind, “and your actions, that will dictate the future—not just yours…but the future of your children and every generation to come.”

  He smiled then.

  Because once, Lukas too had been defined by all the things he wished he could've done, defined by regret itself.

  “You are more than just your failures.” The Dragon King said to them, speaking from the heart and brushing against the raw remnants of guilt lingering in the minds of the marines and nobles. “You are more than just your sins and you far more than just your past.”

  The pain of centuries following the Great War had not been forgotten, the memories of the suffering his people endured and the injustices they were forced to accept forever persistent in his mind.

  Yet Lukas did not allow vengeance to poison his heart.

  The temptation had been strong, but this moment—this fragile instant where choice hung suspended between two vastly different outcomes—held too much importance for it to become corrupted by hatred.

  “We must be better.” Lukas felt the truth swell in his chest, and as he spoke it again, the words became a promise. Not just for Nozar, but for himself. It was a promise that he could not break.

  “All of you think it impossible but we are all more than capable of change. Because, in truth, we are simply who we choose to be. But that choice? It is yours.”

  Those were the words he left them with.

  That was the seed he chose to plant.

  One by one, the army of water surrounding the Admiralty began to dissolve. Their edges softened, their forms wavered, and then they melted back into the air, vanishing as seamlessly as mist touched by sunlight.

  It was like they had never existed at all.

  Shouts erupted almost immediately.

  High-ranking officers barked orders, their voices cracking as they demanded the marines reform their ranks and prepare to strike. Panic and habit propelled them into old routines, shouting orders designed to keep the draconic kind trapped. But even as commands echoed across the courtyard, not everyone obeyed.

  There were marines whose fingers did not curl around their weapons.

  Lukas saw those who did not avert their eyes or force their gazes downward. Instead, they looked up, their gaze following the rising figure of the Dragon King as he ascended slowly higher into the air. Their expressions were carved with uncertainty, but beneath the confusion flickered something dangerous, something…revolutionary.

  That something was hope and Lukas felt that through his connection.

  He had not expected to change all of them. He had not even expected to reach many. But he had reached enough. And that was all the world ever needed for change to begin.

  As he rose higher, the wind brushing against him like a greeting, Lukas took one last look at the kingdom below.

  In the years to come, they would give him many titles woven from fear and reverence.

  One title would stand above them all.

  They would call him Pallas, a God of War because of all the battles he had fought and the victories he would one day carve into history.

  But not today.

  Today, as the King of the Dragons soared upward to rejoin his people—the draconic kind filling the skies in radiant liberation—they remembered him not as some kind of deity or a force of nature who could have annihilated them all.

  Today, they would remember Lukas Drakos.

  They would remember him as the Warrior of Liberation.

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