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I was originally the prince of the City of Josai, formerly the Seijo Empire, but I inherited the throne at age eighteen after my parents' untimely deaths.

Iwaizumi was the Commander of our kingdom's order of knights known as the Royal Crownsguard. Matsukawa and Hanamaki were both knights under his command.

The Oikawa family was host to a bloodline curse that began with some of its earliest ancestors. The curse was that, after knowing true love, we would awaken within ourselves a transformation. This transformation manifested in the form of a dragon, different for each accursed member of the bloodline, which would trigger immediately after awakening and every subsequent month on the same day. Transforming back into our human forms was only achievable through total peace of mind, which normally only happened once we fell asleep as doing so was extremely difficult.

The curse was placed upon the bloodline by a witch scorned by the royal family in a bygone era.

My mother and father had both died in battle, for the City of Josai had been at war with the Shiratorizawa Principality.

Kyotani was a mercenary sent to assassinate me. When he attempted to infiltrate Aoba Castle in the dead of night, he encountered Matsukawa and Hanamaki first, and though he was able to best them and get through their guard, by the time he reached my bed chambers, Iwaizumi was already there waiting for him. When Iwaizumi defeated him, having awoken me during the scuffle, he commended Kyotani for his strength and gave him a choice: accept his demise in the bowels of the castle dungeons to await his execution the next day, or train directly underneath Iwaizumi in preparation to join the ranks of Seijo's knights. Kyotani accepted the latter option, practically under duress and much to my own apprehension, but he would turn out to be quite the powerful and loyal asset.

Kageyama was a young usurper of another, smaller kingdom, who made a name for himself as the Crow King. He commanded an elite group of warriors who specialized in different forms of combat. Hinata was his right-hand man and most lethal soldier.

Ushijima was the prince of Shiratorizawa, though his father still ruled above him for a time until Kageyama slew him, albeit underhandedly. It was for this reason that Ushijima later proposed a truce between Shiratorizawa and Seijo in order to battle against Karasuno's forces. While I was reluctant to accept, the Council who acted as a sort of royal advisory committee convinced me that it would be a beneficial alliance in the long run.

The Miya twins were bounty hunters, and bloody good ones at that. They had a hit on Hinata that drove the three of them into the Nekoma Clan's territory within the Cattswood forest, coincidentally at the same time that I was traveling through it on the way to the neutral territory that served as a meeting point for all the nations without fear of bloodshed, where I was to meet with now King Ushijima to discuss the details of our treaty.

Hinata and the Miya twins crossed paths with our caravan, resulting in a bout of fighting between the three factions until clansmen of the Nekoma intervened, warning us of disturbing their forest. While the Cattswood wasn't exactly part of the neutral territory, its residents defended it furiously, and demanded to "escort" the unlikely group to the borders of the forest without incident lest they finish the jobs themselves.

There was a certain, strange camaraderie that developed amoung us in the day's time that it took to reach the edge of the forest that bordered the neutral territory. Along the way, we were accompanied by the chief of Nekoma himself, Kuroo Tetsuro, who, while gruff and off-putting, also had a sense of humour and cut right through the tension with ease. We also caught a glimpse of the cat-and-mouse dynamic the twins had created with Hinata throughout their chase.

The Nekoma were, in essence, a clan of ailurianthropes—those with the ability to shapeshift into cats—who occasionally bartered out their services as mercenaries to the nations that neighboured the Cattswood. They had serviced the City of Josai a number of times in the past, but so had they serviced Karasuno and Shiratorizawa, amoung others, which meant they were neither friend nor foe. After traveling with them for a time, however, I couldn't help but view them as promising potential allies, if not friends.

The meeting with King Ushijima also included the likes of the Fukurodani Republic, who bordered Seijo to the north. The nation was represented by its president, Bokuto, his two older sisters who served as his guard, his witch Akaashi, and his close advisor Yukie Shirofuku. I myself was accompanied by Iwaizumi, Kyotani, Hanamaki, Matsukawa, and my advisor Yahaba, who was in training with the Council. Ushijima brought along a scrappy-looking right-hand man (Tendo), his guards Semi and Shirabu, and Goshiki, who was supposed to be some sort of scribe, I guess.

Fukurodani wanted in on the alliance as well, despite having no direct grudges with Karasuno. They wanted to offer their magical forces, the existence of which had been the primary cause of tension between Fukurodani and Seijo for many generations. I was reluctant to accept and highly uncomfortable with the witch's presence. Similarly, Ushijima's entourage didn't hesitate to voice their reservations about allying with Seijo.

The conference lasted three days, during which time we could do nothing but argue. It didn't help that we were sharing quarters with the bounty hunters and the Karasuno warrior, whose constant antics offered no respite, seeing as they were forbidden from attacking one another on neutral land. In the end, none of us could come to an agreement other than to adjourn the conference and reconvene in a fortnight for reconsideration.

The finer details of what followed are a bit foggy, but I do remember reluctantly marching into war with Fukurodani and Shiratorizawa forces alike at our side to face Karasuno, who was flanked by Inarizaki and Itachiyama troops.

Sometime in the in between, I had fallen for Iwaizumi. A part of me always knew I would, but having been raised by my parents' insistence on political marriages and urging against "selfish love", it took me far longer to come to terms with it. We had grown up together, never apart, always destined to be the prince and his royal commander. Such was our bloodlines' decree. I realized the depth of my feelings the night a formal declaration of war was announced, when the weight of knowing what I would have to do as the city's fledgling king broke me down to my core and Iwaizumi sat by my side through it all, secluded in the castle gardens with nothing but the moon's glow to witness our tender first kiss.

...And then I changed. The Oikawa bloodline curse took root and sincere vulnerability twisted into shock and horror when my body mangled itself into that of a dragon, none too painfully. The scariest part was that I was still me, I could still think and feel as I always had, but none of it made any sense in the form that I had taken. What hurt the most, though, was not the transformation itself. It was the fear and ensuing rage in Iwaizumi's eyes when he drew his sword and convinced himself he had been tricked by a shapeshifter of some sort hellbent on attacking the castle and its throne.

I fled into the mountains far to the east of the City of Josai that night, the rest lost to history after I woke up the next dawn naked and stranded and human again. Well, as human as a cursed dragon shapeshifter could be. Except I wasn't entirely stranded. I was in a large cave, but it wasn't abandoned like one might find meandering about in the wilderness. It was well-kept, lived in, but still undeniably wild. Something lived there, but it wasn't human.

It was another dragon, a real dragon, the first one I had ever seen. I, like everyone else in the world, was certain that my ancestors had hunted the creatures to extinction some years ago, the last sighting during my grandfather's reign, still recent enough to bleed into whispers and rumours in pubs and plague the nighttime stories parents told their children to scare them into staying in bed, but distant enough that people chuckled at the notion that any could still exist.

I was still so stricken by the sight that I barely even questioned when the beast began speaking and I could understand it, respond without thinking, and only then blanched in realization. The dragon spoke of the curse, laughed at the irony of those who hunted its kind for sport now destined to change into the very things they feared and loathed. It spoke of the witch who cast the spell in the first place and how dragonkind had been forced into hiding in spite of the pride and honour they carried. The dragon called it deplorable and all but spat on me with a quip about how it was much more satisfying to watch an Oikawa wither in their curse than put them out of their misery.

I remember crying. Not out of shame or despair for my fate, but out of sadness, out of pity, lamenting what had become of such proud and legendary creatures that once ruled the land, the sky, the sea, that once enjoyed the worship of temples that regarded them as nothing short of gods. I wept for that dragon and all of its kind, and I remember making an oath to myself that I would see to it that dragons would once again reclaim their rightful place in the world if it were the last thing I did. The dragon was shocked, and it scoffed, clearly skeptical, and told me to prove that I could possibly make something like that come to pass with my own two hands. I remember leaving that cave with every intention of doing exactly that.