On his screen, the "wallpaper" shifted. It wasn't a static image of a red drake; it was a live feed of a creature whose scales pulsed like cooling magma. The dragon turned its head, its golden eye focusing directly on the webcam lens. It didn't roar. It leaned in, its snout pressing against the glass of the monitor from the other side.

The monitor began to stretch. The gray walls of his apartment started to peel away, revealing a jagged, volcanic horizon that mirrored the desktop background. The 1920x1080 boundary was collapsing. Elias realized too late that the "Free Download" wasn't a gift of an image—it was an invitation for a trade.

The dragon was coming into the gray world, and Elias was being compressed into the pixels to take its place. As the light blinded him, the last thing he saw was the file size: 0kb. The dragon was finally weightless. Elias was now just data.