My Infinite System.

The skies over Earth had been quiet for a generation. The great monster incursions were fading into history, something grandparents told wide-eyed children about. The massive defense cannons that dotted the cities were silent, their barrels slowly rusting.

Then Kaelis came.

He didn’t mean to cause a panic. He was simply following a scent, a faint thermal signature laced with Thorne magic and a familiar, bitter pain. But when a creature the size of a battleship, with scales of obsidian and wings that blotted out the sun, suddenly descends through the cloud layer, people tend to notice.

Sirens that hadn’t wailed in twenty years began to scream across coastal cities. News channels broke into their broadcasts with shaky, zoomed-in footage of the dark shape moving with impossible speed and grace. Social media exploded. The word on everyone’s lips was the same, whispered in terror and disbelief: ”Kaiju.”

Is it back? Are they back?

Kaelis paid the buzzing, panicking world below him no mind. His golden eyes were fixed on a trail only he could see—a fading ribbon of heat and heartbreak leading south. Further south than most humans ever went.

He flew over crashing oceans and then over endless, blinding white. The air grew thin and bitingly cold. The Antarctic ice sheet stretched beneath him, a barren, frozen desert under a pale blue sky.

And there, in the middle of nowhere, a single, dark speck on the infinite white.

Kaelis descended, his vast wings sending plumes of snow swirling into the air like a localized blizzard. He landed with a soft thump that still resonated through the ice, folding his wings and tucking his great head low to peer at the figure.

Marc lay on his back in the snow, his good arm tucked behind his head, the other still bent at that sickening angle. He didn’t look up as the dragon’s shadow fell over him. His eyes were fixed on the featureless sky, his face a mask of empty exhaustion. The cold didn’t seem to bother him; a faint, subconscious thermal aura kept the ice from claiming him.

For a long moment, the only sound was the Antarctic wind whipping around Kaelis’s scales.

”Brat,” the dragon rumbled, his voice a low vibration in the frozen air.

Marc’s eyes didn’t even flicker. ”Come to finish the job?”

”Tch. If I wanted you dead, you’d be a stain on Eron’s floor,” Kaelis snorted, a puff of steam billowing from his nostrils. ”I came because you are surprisingly difficult to find. And because your brother is losing his mind.”

That got a reaction. A faint tightening around Marc’s eyes. ”What’s it to me?”

”Your sister,” Kaelis said, the words dropping like stones. ”Lucy. She’s gone. Taken from the Citadel’s sick bay by something old and powerful. Lucian is... not handling it well.”

Marc was silent for a beat. ”Again, what’s it to me? He has you. He has his team. He doesn’t need the weapon his parents threw away.”

Kaelis let out a sound that was half-growl, half-sigh of profound annoyance. ”You are so wrapped up in your own pity, you can’t see the truth if it bit you on the nose.” He leaned his massive head closer. ”Listen, you stubborn fool. I know you have no relationship with your brother. I know you think your family abandoned you. But this guilt you’re wallowing in? It’s misplaced. That was Eron’s poison in your veins. He kidnapped you. He twisted you. The things you did, the hate you carried... it was his design.”

Marc finally turned his head, his black eyes meeting the dragon’s golden slits. ”And that makes it okay?”

”No,” Kaelis said bluntly. ”It makes it understandable. Lucian understands that. He doesn’t blame you for it. He sees the puppet, not the strings.” The dragon’s voice lost some of its edge. ”He’s carrying the weight of two lost siblings right now. One he just found, and one who was stolen. He’s running on rage and fear, and he’s about to do something very, very stupid.”

Kaelis shifted his weight, the ice groaning beneath him. ”I cannot talk him down from this. I am a creature of fire and impulse. But you... you are his blood. The big brother he never knew he had. He doesn’t need your power right now. He needs your presence. Someone to stand beside him so he doesn’t lose himself in the dark.”

He looked down at Marc, who had turned his gaze back to the sky, but the emptiness was now fractured by conflict.

”Your brother is about to walk into a storm,” Kaelis said, his tone final. ”He might not make it out. The choice is yours. Stay here and freeze in your self-pity, or be the brother you were supposed to be.”

With that, Kaelis pushed his great body off the ice. He beat his wings once, twice, lifting into the air in another whirlwind of snow. He didn’t look back. He had delivered his message. The rest was up to the broken boy on the ice.

The sound of the dragon’s departure faded, leaving only the relentless wind.

Marc lay still for a long time. The cold was beginning to seep past his thermal aura, a deep, biting chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. He saw Lucy’s face in his mind—a little girl from stolen photos Eron had shown him, a ghost from a life that wasn’t his. He saw Lucian’s face in the vault, not with hate, but with a cold, weary resolve.

”He doesn’t blame you for it.”

The words echoed, battling the two decades of Eron’s lies cemented in his mind.

Slowly, stiffly, Marc pushed himself up into a sitting position. He looked at his broken arm, then out across the endless, barren white. He had come here to disappear, to be as empty and cold as the landscape.

But the world, it seemed, wasn’t done with him yet.

With a grunt of pain and effort, he forced himself to his feet. He stood alone in the vast emptiness, a single, dark figure against the blinding white. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do. But staying here, frozen in the past, was no longer an option.

The storm was coming. And for the first time, he wondered if he was meant to be in it.