A Light Not Extinguished

Dragonslayer

The doom of Man has come.

There is only the laughter of one's hunger being sated. Men, women and children tossed up into the air by flickering storms, thrown into the maw of a thirsting beast exercising its appetite. Cities fall. Towns are razed. Entire tribes gone from the surface of the earth as a great calamity stalks the land.

There is resistance, of course. Arrows. Catapults. Fanatics armed with swords and steel. Even a handful of mages that only have the faintest idea of what they are doing with the energies of the aether. Magic was young in those days of Terra, raw and untamed. The bones of the earth creak in protest. The proto-spirit that lingered in the heart of the world howls in defiance at this aberration of nature. But it is useless.

The Dragon is a god. A constant. It will not be swayed by such pitiful efforts. It ignored them all, as it churned the sky into black ash and the plains into molten stone. It would feast, and have its due.

Then another came, and the Dragon became wary.

The wayward Warrior shone with the light of the sun, descending from the heavens astride a winged charger of darkest obsidian, the scattered soldiery parting ways before him in awe. Taller than any man and clad in burnished bronze armour, the Warrior dismounted, the steed evaporating into a puff of smoke. In one hand he carried a blade of flame-touched silver burning with the same light as he, and in the other a simple lance that still drips fresh blood, that radiated an altogether different light.

The Dragon looked at the challenger, and it remembered things. Of battles fought in the heart of suns, empyrean storms devastating star systems. It remembers ripping out entrails of god-flesh, and feasting with relish. The radiance of the being before it reminds it of those god-thralls that it has fought in the past.

The Dragon rises from the ruins of a city, spreading wings that block out the sun in their breadth, eyes locked on the Warrior. There is no exchange of words. They did not need them.

The Warrior struck first, the spear transforming into a lance of lightning as it left his hand. It pierced one of the Dragon's wings, and the Dragon bellowed. Something changed then, in the Dragon's eyes. The acknowledgement that it is not facing a particularly troublesome specimen of prey, but a fellow predator.

A great claw of twisted space lashed out, smashing into the side of the Warrior and sending him flying beyond the horizon. The Dragon takes flight, fire and echoes of cosmic wind trailing in its wake as it lunged, teeth bared.

The Warrior called the spear back to him as they crossed blades in earnest, sword and lance against talons and spike. They moved, parrying and striking from the highest mountain to the lowest point of the oceans. Both wielded powers different to each other; one carrying radiant soulight within himself, while the other shaped the nature of the fundament to its will, for it was part of the fundament itself.

Forests burned. The icy plains of the north and the south melted. Storms of ice and sleet bore down on the world. Mountains shattered. The waters turned to mercury, then sap, then liquid crystal, then back to water again.

Mankind huddled in their cities and huts. These are the end times, they said, as the sky bled white and red and violet. The gods march to war, the prophets screamed in the street.

Time fluxed around them, as the Warrior and Dragon clashed again above the clouds. By now, they had both realized that their opponent was quite unlike any that they have ever faced before; the Dragon has never faced any spawn of the aether that wielded such a golden, searing light, and yet the ability to warp the fabric of the universe without the aid of the Empyrean was also quite unfamiliar to the Warrior as well.

The golden armor of the Warrior was cracked and battered; the Dragon was not a mindless beast, and it had retained the memories of the terrible war that it had fought in before, despite being a shadow of a shadow of itself. Even now it drove the Warrior back, hurling spikes of matter dense as the cores of stars while buffeting the Warrior with waves of entropy from its wings.

The sword of the Warrior blurred, a hundred afterimages in its wake as he defended himself against the onslaught. Against such a mighty foe, even his vast reserves were pushed to the limit, his great strength failing him. Never had his raw might been unable to fell any foe in singular combat, and the Warrior grew afraid.

But there was a way to victory, however slim it is.

He saw the grievous wound in the side of its flank, dripping liquid metal. It was not his doing; it had already been there when he first laid eyes upon the monster. Every cut he had made upon the Dragon closed in a matter of seconds, and minutes at most- and yet this one did not close. The Dragon seemed to shield it from him, always draping one of its wings in front of it.

The movement of his sword arm slowed, if only for the tiniest fraction of a millisecond. But even that was enough for the Dragon, and a beam of antimatter roared forth from its maw, severing the limb from its owner with a mighty explosion as the Warrior tumbled down from the sky, the blade slipping. The Dragon let out a triumphant cry-

Which turned into a howl of agony as the sword disappeared into the Warp and reappeared, shooting forward with the velocity of a comet into the Dragon's gaping wound. Even as it shrieked, the Warrior rose up, eyes glowing like twin stars and ichor flowing freely out of his stump, and stabbed the wound again with the lance in his remaining hand.

And Mag'ladroth screamed.

The Warrior raised his lance, and struck the Dragon with all his remaining strength in a series of earthshattering blows. Silver blood pooled around the barely-moving body of the Dragon, and the Warrior drew back his arm to deal the final blow when a terrible vision struck him.

He saw the Dragon die, its heart burned to cinders. The moment the light in the Dragon's eyes faded, a great cataclysm struck; the seas boiled away, the sky torn in half. The stars themselves spiraled away, as Sol became a shrieking singularity.

The flow of time splintered in a thousand places; like a ripple spreading out from the corpse, points in space melding together into something wholly incomprehensible as time advanced and retreated and slowed to a dull halt all at once. He saw pieces of the Earth hurled into the aether and beyond; other fey, alien dimensions that he could only see jagged reflections of.

Exhaling, the Warrior stayed his hand. The Dragon could not be killed, at least not now. But it had to be moved somewhere else; He looked up at the dark sky, and saw the red star in the distance.

Casting a rubric of binding upon his spear, the Warrior jabbed his spear deep into the Dragon's forehead, golden chains bursting forth from the shaft to wrap around the Dragon's colossal bulk in its entirety. Grabbing hold of the Dragon's neck, he summoned his steed to his side, and mounted it as the spirit-beast spread its wings. The pegasus and its rider took flight towards faraway Mars, and that would be the last humanity would see of them for a very long time.