Blood soaked the sky. An agony toured through me as I stared at the heavens. Crimson offered no surge of passion, no sense of glory. At one time, I could think of nothing more beautiful than the streaks of red and orange and purple exploding across the early morning sky and leading the sun into a glorious day. But now the red never ceased, stretching between the mountain tips.
So much of the world resided under their chosen shade, their banner of victory over conquered land. The scarlet stain sickened me. The only sweetness in scarlet remaining came from an enemy’s broken body, a shining pool of ruby majesty covering the scorched ground.
I hobbled across the crisply charred soil, pain slicing down my right leg each time my foot touched the earth. As much as the wound screamed I was surprised the leg didn’t fall off. I almost wished it would. Several days on foot lay ahead before blue skies would sooth my eyes, more if my leg didn’t get any better. I couldn't allow myself to slow. Anger rose at the thought of such pedestrian travel, but there wasn't much to do about it now. Defeat never allowed for ease. No reason it should now, I supposed.
The time beat against me endlessly. Hour after hour with nothing to do but walk and reflect, to grieve. Brittle stone crushed beneath my feet like blades of dry straw. I stared at the once rich earth, now charred to ash, a reminder of why to keep fighting. This is all they would leave: an ocean of blood above and a desert of ash below. How could we not war against them?
It was so beautiful once. There was a time I longed for nothing more than long hours on the coast, gliding through the water, feeling the sand slide from under my steps. Such simple things. Simple pleasures. What happened to simple pleasure?
I kept thinking to myself, the world would heal. There would be green and white and blue again. The deer and elk would return, the peoples would be at peace again. It all seemed so unlikely as I glanced around at the wasteland about. It hurt to see the gray and black lifeless cinders spreading out like a sea.
Thoughts of lost times weighed as heavy as any burden. How many times today alone have I yearned for what was ‘one time’ I wondered. Too many. So many moments wasted on old thoughts, pain wasted on scarred earth. One didn't go to war for the dead, but the living, protecting those in need. Death was not worth fighting for and death was what lay before me here. It was nothing more than a broken landscape, a destroyed masterpiece. Misused energy given to fruitless effort.
Even hate was more productive than longing. Hate gave focus, gave desire: ferocity provided a means to take another step under a red sky.
Cresting a small hill showed no relief from the red and black. The outstretched ruin provided a dose of wrath, enough energy to force a few more miles out of me before a rest. A cavern a few hours out shone in the distance like a pocket of silver across through bedrock. A good enough place as any for respite.
A loud crackle invaded my ears from the sky, igniting a score of rancid memories. I felt my lips pull up from my teeth without thought or guidance.
Not now. Not here!
Crouching, I glared up at sky. Black lightning tore at the clouds as the sky itself was cut open like a wound in the heavens, fire pouring out. Like a canyon out of empty space, the lesion mutilated the red sky. Flame erupted over the blood, licking at the wound as they started to stream from the rend. Like an infection, hundreds of them, their black wings spreading out in silhouette peppering the glowing blood sky, bodies as black as coal, and hard as rock.
"Not Here!" I screamed, air racing in and out of my chest.
Rage tore through the fibers of my being, removing any semblance of restraint that gilded a tattered heart. All thoughts of a world that was beautiful were forced from my mind. The feeling of sand beneath my feet was drowned out in the torrent, thrown from me like the crest of an exploding volcano.
I could sense it, physically feel it happening. Vehemence scorched my soul, blasting away the memories I held dear. My pain and dreams, my faith and fear, my love and loyalty. Every fond thought, every kind word ever shared flew at my consciousness, desperately trying to keep my sense of reality, my hope. They broke like water upon rock and retreated back into the depths, unable to breach the inundation of fury. Rage burned and every shred of sanity fighting it simply fueled the fire.
Wrath consumed each part of me as bleak shaded wings covered the crimson. My soul, I realized, the last thing they could take from me was gone. It didn’t matter anymore. Just another casualty. This war had brought about losses more dire than the death of a single soul. It was a strange thought to accept. Every part of me I once held dear failed at last. Care dispersed like water on hot stone, leaving only hate. And I wasn’t about to take one more step.
This is not their sky. This is not their land and if they want to own the air, today they’ll have to take it. I braced my three good legs hard on the ground and pushed off into the sky, spreading my wings to their full width.
Cries roared from above, half rage and half fear as they saw me twisting through the air, barreling towards the center of the cut. The wail punctured straight to the heart, cutting through mind and logic and found a primal thread. It was a sound that incited absolute panic, but there was no thread to catch in me anymore, no fear to incite. The fire shimmered off of the silver scales of my limbs, making me as red as the sky, red as blood. I raised my front talons and snarled, flashing teeth as I closed on the army that dove towards me. One thought kept echoing in my mind. This is not their world.
Striking their line like an arrow into flesh, I tore through them, my wings stealing their wind, my claws their blood. Each talon struck against a black fiend, knocking one to the side, and tearing into the gut of another. Slashes racked at my sides from all directions. With a snap, my jaws clenched around a hard black torso, crushing bone and muscle, leaving the demon broken as a shaken rat.
The winged beasts closed in behind, following in the wake of my passing, using the draft to change direction. Eyeless heads stared up, little more than giant maws. My lower leg crashed hard on one, my tail whipping up and to the left to cover my wounded leg, swiping at three more and knocking them from their path.
Thrusting my wings down I pushed up higher, gaining altitude over the legion of brutes and turned like a hawk on a flock of sparrows. They fanned out like a banquet prepared. Their eyeless faces showed an instant of fear as I craned my neck and spewed forth blue flame. The fire blazed with otherworldly heat, something beyond that of earth and hell, burning straight to the bone and blood. A devil of hell was no more immune than dry kindling.
The blue wave crashed into them, a boiling tide forcing the beasts into piercing shrieks. The brutes never died easily. A fair number crumpled and collapsed to the charred earth they had created, black on black. As for the survivors, I didn’t even wait for the flame to clear. Wings tucked, I dove into them shredding everything I could reach. Staggered by the flames and wounded, most didn't manage to react before I reached them with talon and teeth. A score or more of the demon fell in pieces before the blue dissipated, leaving the blood red sky clearer and a perfect silhouette for the beasts who remained, still more than I could count in a quick pass.
A dozen near the tear in the sky hesitated for a second, considering a retreat. With a rush I dove straight for them, turning wildly between the dozen, every blow tearing flesh. I felt cutting paws rip into me, handfuls of flesh being torn out, but pain was an annoyance. The agony was as potent as a soft scent, just something to notice on the journey, no more conspicuous than the black rain falling to the ground in flesh and blood from the soulless devils torn apart by my hands.
A score more closed in tightly, talons tearing at me. Four fell lifeless from the skies just as quickly as they arrived, the last being crushed in a bite between my jaws as it tried to escape with the others in a dive. With a thrust of my massive wings, I threw myself down with speed they couldn’t match and knocked several off their path with another stroke from my tail, leaving only two or three within range to counter. They bore in hard, and a four-armed monstrosity nearly my own size struck hard enough that I felt bone crack on my left side.
I wheeled, shredding one with a swipe. The second I crushed in my maw, and for the insolent miscreation who struck my ribs, my left front claw clasped around his torso, above and below his shoulder. Claw pierced into bone thick hide. His limbs flailed helplessly incapable of the leverage needed to break free. I stared down into his eyeless face and raked him with my good lower leg, tearing him open from sternum to tail. His legs and lower body twisted towards the earth. Even without eyes, I felt him gawking at me as he fell, broken and shocked, to the earth.
I turned to see no more than fifty left. They stared at me with a sense of shock like I was some kind of monster, that I visited this war upon their home, their lives. Or maybe their eyeless sight was able to see deeper into me. Perhaps they saw what they killed inside, the simplicity of what remained.
It terrified them.
I roared, a thunder to be heard from the blue skies days away, and the tears and breaks along my flesh closed in upon themselves, not restoring me wholly, but granting a semblance of it. The taste of their fear was in the air, their fear!
A sad reality came to me then, or it seemed it should have felt that way. The hated took the skies, not by their strength or numbers, but by our weakness. I killed more today than in a weeks battle with wingmen supporting me, fighting in order. Then, so much got in the way. I couldn’t really recall what it was, but the hindrances were gone. Nothing existed more than endings to be made.
Racing like a shark riding the tide, I slammed into the nearest demon and ripped him to shreds before he laid a claw upon me. They came now, but in scattered groups. For the first time, they seemed reticent, unwilling to swarm on and share the fate of so many others. It made it unbearably easy to wade through, crushing those with the courage to fight alone, to later turn on the spineless mongrels.
Half of the remnants were crashing to earth before they finally struck me at once, coming in from all sides. With a swift push of one wing I turned and threw myself left and lashed out a quick gout of flame from my rested lungs in a circle. They separated from the small flame, not wanting to burn again, maybe ten separated to one side of the fiery disk. By the time the flames faded, the last of the ten fell, lifeless, shredded by Talon and teeth.
I charged.
Rage, the utter freedom of it was exhilarating, the entrapment of it undeniable. It was inescapable. A prison of freedom and destruction filled my being and I reveled in it. Somewhere, I thought I heard a voice scream from within, but it was pushed aside. Nothing could interfere.
Another and another and another were destroyed before the last few turned to run back into the tear, that blasphemous abomination breaking a hole through our world. Fresh fury blossomed at the sight of it.
I roared, sending every inch of rage into the call. The sound poured out, racing for miles into every ear. I wanted them to hear, to know what it is they caused, what they brought upon themselves. I wanted them to feel every inch of pain and torment they had visited upon my friends, my family, my kind. I wanted them to know that they their only knowledge would be the devastation they brought out of us and the ruin will leave will be their history. The roar blasted out through the dark. Finally out of breath, I stopped, letting the echo keep the message spreading.
They scurried like bats into a cave at dawn, but their sanctuary could not save them. They had torn the hole much too large for that. I stared at the black world behind the rend, their path to our world, to our skies. I showed my fangs as I swooped up high and dove through the broken soul of the world and into its wound. I could taste the fear in the air.
Through the breach, light died away. The cavern was absolute silence, the only glow coming from my world behind the breach. I looked down below me at a wavering sea… not water. An ocean of wing and talon, of bone and death paced below me. They stared up without eyes again as though I was the monster.
There were more than I could count, of all sizes and types. Each shared several traits, the black carapace, eyeless large-mawed heads, but no two looked exactly alike. The stink of outright terror was unmistakable. Something inside me tried to flicker to life, but whatever it was wavered, unable to find ground on my soul, my broken landscape.
Pushing my chest out, I forced as much air into my lungs as possible and dove. Their shrieks were ignored as the blue flame ripped loose, a stampede of molten tendrils. The flame raged unending, longer than any I ever considered. Thousands took to the sky, tens of thousands burnt to ash, staining the ground of their world like my own. Blue, bright blue flame now burned on the ground fueled by their dead.
I turned the flame skywards at the last second, flinging thin gouts across half the sky and cut the stream. Gasping for air, my vision blurred. The burn in my throat fueled my hate as I soared towards the largest beast in flight I could see. The mongrel brought down a blade upon my shoulder, trying to ground me. I tucked my wing in and drifted back for a moment, grabbing his foot and turning him upside down. With a second claw, I grabbed both his wings, crimped them together and pulled. The leg came free first.
“Keep Your Wings!” I cried, raking a good claw across one, tearing and breaking every piece of bone and sinew in reach before throwing him at one of his nearest comrades. They fell like wounded deer before a wolf, and after that first, none had the nerve to attack head on, giving me freedom to maneuver.
Still they came. Seven charged from the left. Four died outright, leaving three biting and tearing into me. Eight more struck before the last of the three tumbled from the skies. My skies. Ripping talons tore open my sides to the point where I felt on fire, so to fire I went. Diving down, eleven of them clinging to me, we raced to the blue flames now charring the flesh of the carrion.
Absolute terror took them and they fled from my back. I turned, slapping three down into the flames with talon and tail and breaking a fourth with my jaws. I let out another roar, my torn flesh again tried to close, but the throb of countless wounds still wracked my body. Blood slowed it's flow, but did not stop. I was losing time, and they were still coming.
I felt the tremble in the air caused by their swarm. They let out their shrieks again, hoping to inspire something dead inside me to force me to run. All that was stoked in was the tyrannical rage, the utter ferocity which had destroyed all that lived, destroyed in the name of the hated.
I let out another roar, whether it would heal me or not. They would know my own hate, my resolution. I flew into them, trying to break through their lines, but no end existed. They swarmed around me as deep as they were tall, tearing at my flesh. Where three died, thirty flooded to replace them. As the attacks shredded my body I knew I could not win, but I had known that before the start. I was dead long before my talons left the broken earth this morning.
These are still not their skies.
I yelled it. I yelled it in every language known and tore back at them, pushing them near the floor, near the blue flame. I felt my wings stopped as I was forcefully pulled up, six to a wing dragging me from the floor. Given the opportunity to rest, I used it, filled my lungs and blasted the molten blue across them, their eyeless faces contorting in abject horror.
I wouldn't stop. I willed my body to keep moving, past the concern of muscle or sinew, heart and soul. Taking half a breath I turned and sent another blast covering a third of the sphere surrounding me. Something struck my leg, I lashed out with talon without thought and pushed off from the ground flying towards the tear.
Fearing my escape, something laughable in itself at this point, they raced to the tear in front of me. They closed in again so tightly as to make flight nearly impossible. I took in all the air that I could and I reached, I reached for all that was burned and charred and broken in my soul, that which was despised and reviled. I fed it all to an inferno and launched all that was in me back at them.
The fire burned white straight from my throat, reducing everything in its wake to ash. Bodies, caught off guard by the quick return of another gout tried to dive out of the flames, but the wake of heat charred them to cinder. I poured out flame as hard and as long as I could. Nothing was untouched. As far as my unnatural eyes could see my fire destroyed this world, reducing it to light gray embers and sparkling carrion.
I marveled at the grim spectacle formed by my wounded body and lifeless soul. Dimly I realized how the demons were taking our world. We didn’t have the stomach for this. The unflinching destruction. The pain inflicted here had been unimaginable to me only hours before. Whispers of a distant wailing screams touched my ears. It should have meant something, but it didn’t. I felt a spark take hold inside of me, indistinct, but burning and growing. In the rivers of rage, I could hardly sense it, but somehow it tasted of sorrow.
A distant figure silhouetted by white flame emerged, looking out at my creation, the uninhibited devastation of life and land. Size seemed immeasurable, something else which lost meaning somewhere along this journey.
I stared back, blasting out a howl, with wings spread, letting the challenge be felt by any alive. The promise rang through the air, pledging a fate that no lord of hell could prevent if they ever rent a hole through the blue souls of the heavens again.
With a last push of my wings I turned from the wasteland and back towards the ravaged skies of my world. My skies. The tear had already began to close. I raced out of it, trying to breathe. I whipped my tail through with a flick as it sealed, with a sound beyond sound, one that racked every bone in my body.
Air couldn’t be taken in quick enough. The rage failed, unable to hold without any strength left in me or any enemy to drive it forward. My right shoulder was cleaved to the bone, making that leg also useless. Every limit I had ever pushed, had been my starting point this day. My body felt shredded beyond all repair, and my being lay as wasted as the scorched land. And I had done more to stop the enemy than any dragon ever dreamed possible. The greatest day of my life, talons down.
I only had minutes. Rage was all I had left and it had burnt out completely, a fire deprived of air. Without a doubt, I knew my end was coming. It was not as difficult as it might seem to recognize Death’s approach. He calls for you clearly, and as I heard his nearing somber tones, a strange occurrence happened. With that realization, those parts I believed slain started to return.
It began with care and devotion, followed swiftly by longing and pain. I pushed my wings towards the earth and agony racked every inch of me. I screamed, crying out with anguish for what I had done, what I had become. Once again I could see the charred earth and bloodied sky. And with a bittersweet understanding, I felt my presence, my soul, refill the carapace which I called my body.
They couldn’t take it, I realized. They couldn’t kill my soul. A smile stretched itself above my fangs as hope returned. It may be in tatters, tortured by their deeds and my own but my soul lived. The hated will never forget this day, what they brought upon their kind. and neither will my own kin. My story will be written upon the blue skies by the sun’s hand…
The strength to press my wings against the winds failed. I spiraled downward towards the ground, staring up at the wounded heavens, at the blood red sky. I thought about the power of a dragon’s soul, what mine had been shaped into and the destruction created. I mourned that evil flowing through me, no matter who had received it.
If my soul is still my own it will have its own way.
A final roar left my lungs, every muscle in my body tightening hard enough to thrust me back up a score of feet. The roar continued, pouring out all my strength, all that I was, all that I am. In all directions, as far as my slitted eye could see, blue flowed like a river from me lashing out, washing the blood away. Even blood is washed away in the river.
I watched my lifeless body crash against the ash as the last bits of my sentience faded. Death meant little. The loss of one of the protectors, one of the Dracarans would be felt, but that did not change reality. One fewer dragon upon the world was a small price. A pittance for a blue sky.