In the primordial dawn, when the world was a seething cauldron of molten stone and the skies bled rivers of starfire that scorched the heavens, the First Dragon, Azraeth, rose in brazen defiance of the Creators. His wings, vast as tempests woven from midnight and obsidian, unfurled to eclipse jagged peaks, casting shadows that writhed like living voids across the land. His scales gleamed with the molten fury of a thousand suns, each one a prism of iridescent flame, and his eyes blazed with an unholy inferno—twin furnaces that seared the very fabric of existence. Azraeth's ambition was a cataclysmic blaze, a molten hunger that gnawed at the divine tapestry, threatening to unravel the celestial order. He sought not merely to rival the Creators but to dethrone them, to forge a dominion where rivers of lava sang his name, where the heavens themselves knelt beneath the thunder of his roar. Yet the Creators, eternal and unyielding, gazed upon his rebellion with eyes like cold, distant stars. In a cataclysm that splintered the earth's bones and set the skies ablaze, they struck him down. Azraeth's molten blood erupted in crimson geysers, carving jagged scars into the land—chasms that still whispered his defiance in their smoldering depths.
Their vengeance was a curse as cruel as it was eternal, woven with threads of divine malice. No female dragon would ever draw breath again, their absence a wound that bled dragonkind's future dry. The great wyrms, whose bloodlines once shimmered boundless as the constellations, were doomed to wither, their roars fading into hollow keens that haunted windswept crags. Their primal fire, once a beacon across the ages, would gutter out, generation by generation, until only silence remained—unless a miracle, bold enough to defy the heavens' wrath, could shatter the curse's iron grip.
Yet one goddess, Serethine, whose heart trembled with forbidden sorrow for the proud, broken beast, could not endure such annihilation. In the shadowed folds of her celestial sanctuary, she wove a clandestine mercy. From her tears, luminous as moonlit pearls and heavy with divine grief, she crafted a singular female, cloaked in the fragile guise of a mortal witch. This *Hatcher*, born once every five hundred years beneath a blood-red moon that pulsed like a wounded heart, bore a heart-shaped sigil upon her womb—a mark of rose petals entwined with tongues of flame, glowing faintly as if kissed by embers. She alone could bear a dragon's heir, a child destined to carry Azraeth's unquenched legacy, a solitary spark to rekindle the dying pyres of dragonkind. But Serethine's gift was a cruel paradox, a half-curse draped in the guise of hope. The Hatcher was one, a solitary flame in a world of shadows, while dragons were many, their souls gnawed by centuries of solitude, their primal hunger a ravenous beast clawing at their hearts. To find her was to glimpse salvation through a veil of torment; to love her was to risk her fragile mortality, her body a brittle vessel for their fire; to lose her was to plunge their kind into an abyss where even embers dared not linger.
Bound by the Creators' wrath, the dragons learned to shroud their scales in mortal flesh, their fire caged within human hearts. They became shapeshifters, their forms a restless dance between man and beast, their eyes betraying glints of molten gold when moonlight struck them true. Their claws retracted but never vanished, their roars softened into whispers that rattled windowpanes in forgotten villages. Their societies fractured into clandestine enclaves, hidden in mist-choked valleys and storm-lashed cliffs, where ancient oaks groaned under the weight of their secrets. Their politics wove a labyrinth of ambition and betrayal, as covens of witches—clad in cloaks stitched with starlight and bone—chanted prophecies of the Hatcher's coming. Some witches swore to shield her, their spells woven from ivy and moonlight; others hungered to wield her power, their cauldrons bubbling with visions of dominion. Clans of shifters, their territories marked by claw-rent stones and scorched earth, forged brittle alliances, their gazes ever fixed on the horizon for the sigil that promised redemption—or ruin. To possess the Hatcher was to cradle the key to dragonkind's future, to command the allegiance of fire-born kin, and to tempt the wrath of gods whose eyes glittered like frost in the starry vault above.
The Hatcher's birth was a cosmic upheaval, a beacon of hope swathed in torment, her arrival heralded by storms that split the heavens and rivers that ran red with reflected moons. Each time she emerged, the world shuddered, its pulse quickening as if sensing her fragile power. Dragons, driven by an instinct older than time, hunted her across continents and centuries, their wings slicing through clouds heavy with omens, their roars a distant thunder that woke slumbering forests. Yet the gods' curse lingered, a shadow that twisted fate against them. Wars erupted in her suitors' wakes, their flames reducing cities to pyres of ash and bone. Blood soaked the earth, pooling in valleys like offerings to forgotten altars, each drop a testament to the audacity of hope. The Hatcher herself, often ignorant of her destiny, walked a path of peril, her sigil a hidden flame that drew moths of devotion and vipers of destruction. Her dreams were haunted by visions of wings and fire, her heart a crucible where mortal love and divine purpose clashed. Some dragons swore to guard her, their vows carved into stone with claws trembling from restraint; others sought to claim her, their hunger a wildfire that spared neither friend nor foe. And above it all, the Creators watched, their gazes cold as glacial voids, their fingers poised to snuff out any spark that dared to rekindle Azraeth's flame.
Thus, the saga of the Hatcher unfolded across the ages, a legend etched in fire and sorrow, where love was a blade as sharp as any sword, and hope was a curse heavier than divine wrath. Azraeth's dream endured, a smoldering ember carried by those bold enough to defy the heavens, even as the gods' unyielding gaze promised retribution. The world turned, its skies scarred by the memory of wings, its earth trembling beneath the weight of a legacy that refused to die.