The False Hero

The False Hero: Chapter 7

The Sounds of War

By Raymora Mayven

The shaking wouldn't stop, what started as a small tremor quickly grew into a violent storm. For whatever reason, Raymora found himself outside, in a hellstrom of burning buildings and lost within a sea of corpses. His vision was hazy and distorted, like he was watching this take place through a veil of water. Nevertheless, one thing was clear: the village was under attack.

It was ominously silent

To his left, he could see the clear ruins of the guildhall, the once majestic structure reduced to nothing but ash. A pile of bone and fur littered the floor, from people Raymora once may have known. He didn't know how he got here, or how everything happened so fast. What he did know was that he shouldn't be standing so still. Yet, no matter what he told himself, how much his body tried to run, he couldn't move himself one bit.

"Help," he screamed but if anyone heard him, they made no response. He couldn't see anyone else, anyone alive that is. Burned and mutilated bodies were his only companions.

Abruptly, that world seemed to fade away, and a new scene took its place.

Raymora was in a small house, everything was still blurry so he couldn't quite make out the details of his location, nor the strange dragon looking silhouette that stood beside him. It brandished a sharp silver knife, and crept up to Raymora., who was distracted by the massacre outside. While he could not see the danger that slowly crawled it's way to him, he knew it was there. He knew that it was reaching behind him, he knew that it had opened his maw to say something-even if no words could be heard- and he felt the cold embrace of death as the blade plunged into his own heart.

He was startled awake, stumbling backwards onto his wings. His heart was racing, hammering his chest as cold sweat ran down his body. Shaking vigorously, he tried to calm his breaths to no avail. A sense of panic ran across his body as he swiftly checked his body for any signs of injuries, but found none.

As a matter of fact, he found no signs of what he just saw. There were no new injuries on his body, the ground was still and the air was calm. Whatever he had just seen, didn't happen.

Yet.

He didn't know why he thought so, and the idea sounded crazy in his own mind, but he was convinced he had witnessed a vision of the future. Even just thinking about it, he felt as if he was losing his own mind.

In all of Variauna there was only one species that held such mystical powers. Everyone knows that the only species that can read minds or predict the future is the mysterious ravens. More feared than the dragons, ravens are exiled from their own homelands, the Windlands.

Before all this, Raymora didn't believe any of those stories. Most dragons didn't, for they didn't want to believe that any race was stronger or had more powers than them. So he grew up believing that the raven's were a bunch of lunatics that wandered away from their homelands, casting fear on to the other species.

That was what he believed since he was a whelp.

That was what he believed before he met the Shadowtalon. After reading about the shadowtalon, and comparing it to what he remembered from their previous encounter; Raymora fully believed that ravens do in fact have mystical powers.

"And now the most dangerous raven in the entire world is after me."

Blue iridescent light simmiered from his mark, a light that he no longer tried to hide. There was no point in trying to deny that he was the Matriarch. And if that really was a vision of the future, he knew what he had to do.