(A teensy bit off prompt but i was inspired!)

As a young wizard, I found a spell.

It was a strange thing. By itself, in an otherwise completely unnoteworthy cave. Written on parchment so ancient it crumbled somewhat to the touch. The document itself was worn and missing segments, and my best translation was rather imprecise. Still, I could intuit what it was meant to do. It was an ancestor resurrection spell.

At the time I had no use for it. I’m sure some of my ancient ancestors would have liked to be resurrected, but I wasn’t willing to risk piercing the veil for people I had never known. That changed when my mother got sick.

It was a gradual thing, the sickness that killed her. At first she only started to feel tired. Then she began to cough. And as years passed, she became more and more brittle, more and more frail. I tried every healing spell I knew, and learned half a hundred new ones, but it wasn’t ever enough. It never made her better for more than a few weeks.

Finally, I turned to the resurrection spell.

I thought I understood it enough. I thought I would be able to tweak it to summon forth the ancestor I knew, the one I wanted. I spent the final months of my mother’s life, when I wasn’t by her side, collecting the ingredients and preparing the summoning circle. She kept telling me I shouldn’t put my hopes in it, that I should prepare to let her go. Spells don’t always work, after all.

But I was determined. When the moment came, I laid her old body to rest and I set to work. I covered over my etchings with salt and blood. I set my components out in bowls, which I worked over with incantations. With careful precision I anchored the spell to the mountain. For a moment all was still. And then… there was a horrible rumbling sound from deep within the earth.

As it grew louder, the ground began to shake. Rocks and gravel began tumbling down the slope, trees swayed and branches snapped. And it kept growing louder. The shaking grew so violent I fell to my knees, cutting myself open on the shifting terrain. The horizon heaved, the sky spun. Helpless, with nothing to hold on to, I was tossed like a wretched rag doll by the violent tremors. Through streaming eyes, I saw the mountain shift. At first I thought it was the swaying, my eyes couldn’t focus, I was disoriented. But the mountain was bulging. What started as a protrusion grew into a large ridge, rock screaming in protest all the while. Something was pushing it from the inside. Something was coming out of it.

Too late I realized, that ancient language I had translated was draconic. Too late I realized this trick must have been how she returned from death the first time, and the second. Lyraxa, the World Breaker, she had been called. All I could do was stare in terror and dread as the first talon, thick as a tree trunk, broke the surface. The great creature kept scrabbling at the small hole it had made until first its hand, then its arm, broke through. And finally, with one last, shuddering heave and a shower of boulders, it birthed itself from the rock, leaving the mountain to collapse, hollow, behind it.

The dragon shook herself off, her wings spreading impossibly wide as she stretched. Her great head swiveled around, sunlight glinting golden off her deep red scales. Her teeth were as long as a man is tall. If the trees had still been standing, they wouldn’t have even come up to her shoulder. Her gaze caught on me. I stopped breathing. And then, in a voice full of thunder and smoke, she spoke.

“Son?”

Perhaps I hadn’t gotten the spell entirely wrong, after all.