Heir of the Dragon

Heart Strings and Bloody Quills

I sat in the grass of a rippling, flowing, liquid field. The light overhead was over-bright, but warmed me to the core. Nothing was constant; not the landscape, or the mountains, or the color of the sky; nothing except his golden eyes. One moment he was laughing, another he just stared, but all my world consisted of were those two orbs of liquid fire, bearing into mine. Like mirrors, they reflected the sea of emotions I was trying not to drown in. Everything felt weightless and light. No matter how the world swirled around me, I was happy in his unchanging gaze.

But suddenly everything went dark.

It was only a split second that we were encased in darkness, and then it thinned. My heart began to beat frantically as the new landscape was laid out before me. Instead of the beautiful man who had sat with me, there stood an ugly beast. Black fur and scales covered his hulking form, but that was not what made me scream. It was his eyes. They were no longer his. The beast stared down at me with bank, dead, unfeeling eyes. It was only when I tore my gaze from him that I realized the grass had been stripped from beneath me. I stood in a fright, and gaped down at the strange, flat, white earth beneath my feet.

Then a haunting, overpowering presence flooded the air.

It was her.

The image of the hulking, mindless beast was whisked away in a flurry of black smoke, but I only saw it out of the corner of my eye, for I was watching, slackjawed, as a huge quill descended out of the sky and was drug across the ground by a gigantic hand. I followed the hand to an arm, up to a shoulder, and finally to her face, looming in the sky.

Then she looked at me.

In a dizzying flash, I was drawn from her paper and into her mind. Suddenly, instead of looking into her eyes, I looked out of them as if they were windows; heard her thoughts as if the words were materializing in the air around me.

She was seated at a great stone table, and the scroll on which she wrote, was pressed against it's surface by her trembling forearm. She was afraid, but somehow I knew that she never intended to see that weakness. Her hand shook almost imperceptibly as she formed the words with anxious precision. The ink bled from the end of the quill like blood from a sword. I didn't need to be able to read the words she wrote, for I heard them hiss in the air of her mind in the voice of wind that had learned to speak.

"When the great ones shall cry,
When their blood shall wail,
From their graves will he walk,
Spawn forgotten kings."

Faster, she wrote, the words beginning to run together under her hand.

"He will cry from the hills,
Singing songs of vengeful fire,
Darkness he'll banish,
and light he will weild,
Drawing the world to it's knees."

Her scribbling slowed, and the last line she wrote in messy curving scipt. Lolled across the bottom of the scroll, in limp but determined letters appeared her final words;

"Long reign Zarkanae."

The scene flashed, and in the scroll's place stretched an endless black sea.

No, not a sea, an army. An army as vast as the landscape. Thousand and thousands of helmets like tiny droplets of water glinted in the moonlight.

Their movement stilled suddenly; stilled because she willed it so. And then in eery syncronization, every black sword in the sea of men was thrust to the sky. The faces of the men were drawn up in feirce scowls. I wondered at how I could see the hate it their eyes, for it should have been as hard as reading the facial expressions of tiny insects ---but they were as clear as day.