Chapter 13 Ruin
RUIN
Darkness hurtles towards us as the Soulstone resonates with something ancient in the Void.
I realize our vast mistake as the Ancestors previously drawn by our power shriek and depart, flashing away.
Because we haven’t drawn someone to talk about the Black Rift as we used the Soulstone’s energy.
We’ve drawn something, as I feel an utterly dark, immortal energy drawn right to us.
The endless energy of the Black Rift itself.
We fight for our very lives now, far up in the stars. Darkness inundates my drakes and me in the vast ring of star-stones, as that terrible energy claims us, ravenous.
As if the taint of the Black Rift multiplied a millionfold, we are seized by countless tentacles of diabolical midnight now, as that indomitable power hauls us apart.
We’re separated by that most terrible magic, incarcerated, as it rips energy from us. It eats holes in us, sending our soul-essences back to the everlasting stars, as my drakes and I shriek.
That undoing energy divides us even from ourselves now, as it tears our very souls apart. Shredding us back to the stars, it devours us. I realize too late that this is the exact same division energy Hedda used to shred her sister Aesa’s soul back to the everlasting universe.
Now, the same force that infected Hedda claims us, too. We’ve done this to ourselves, as we mistakenly invited the same cosmic division energy of the Black Rift right to us by using the Soulstone as our focus.
Worse, as that black energy pours right through myself and my drakes into the Soulstone, I feel how it eats the Soulstone from the inside out.
I feel the Soulstone beginning to weaken.
I hear the ear-splitting shriek of the Black Dragon and its sonic boom of power, as it attunes to what’s happening here out in the stars.
It feels Hedda’s wights trapped in the Soulstone; as they give screeching shrieks of eagerness now, fighting to get out, I feel Baldur’s binding sigils on them weaken.
The Black Dragon is calling them home, and the wights are responding. I roar, caught in countless ropes of midnight darkness, unable to get to the Soulstone to stabilize it.
Neither can the rest of my drakes. Only Baldur holds that line now, as he grips the Soulstone tight in his auric dragon-jaws.
Snarling to the entire universe, he gives his everything to his determination not to let our enemies out. Writhing in agony out in the cold emptiness of the stars, my drakes and I pour every iota of power we have now into Baldur to hold the line with the Soulstone.
It’s just not enough. Our auric fire gutters out in the cosmos, even as it gutters out in the cavern far below. Not just separated in the stars, our mortal bodies have been shoved apart even in the cavern.
I feel our bodies rush down, back to human, as we writhe and scream upon the cavern’s dimming star-stones, undone by this terrible force assailing us.
I’m not in my body, however; I’m caught up in the Void. All my drakes and I are trapped here, our consciousnesses held prisoner, and we can’t get out.
Worse, we can see the entire world from where we’re trapped. We see not just our bodies writhing in the cave, but also the Black Dragon now as it roars, aware of our vast mistake.
The Black Dragon calls the wights with its indomitable roar. And Hedda’s wights call the Black Dragon, as I feel Hedda’s own soul answer now in the Void.
Somehow, she still exists here, even though she’s poured most of her everlasting self into her creation. The piece of her still in the Void gives a vast cry of triumph now as her wights shriek in glory, soon to be liberated.
Hedda turns towards us now in the Void, and I feel her excitement. She knows what is happening within this ring of star-stones; she knows we have overstepped with what we believed our powers could do in the Void.
And she knows it’s time to make her next move, as I feel her call to Lithava through their bond.
As my everlasting soul is devoured by this endless midnight, never-ending pain coursing through me as my essence bleeds back to the cosmos, my eternal gaze is drawn right to Lithava in the mortal world below.
She shifts up, using Hedda’s energy to rip open a gargantuan portal, and I see a tremendous army all around her, waiting to move out. That army includes the Black Dragon, as Lithava ushers her army through the portal now.
Right to the Old Palace.
As Lithava, her drakes, and their army of False Knights and allies pour through that tear in space, along with the Black Dragon, they engage in a massive attack upon our stronghold.
The True Knights, the Eriksson clan, and our other allies pour from the Old Palace in a hurricane of dragons and bitter magic now, to engage them.
Power explodes through the night, even as the first hint of day lights the rim of the sky. But there’s enough light to see this terrible battle, as everything inside me screams to be trapped in the stars, unable to roar up into my own mortal dragon to join the fray.
I can’t protect those I love as the battle begins; neither can Bjorn, Strom, Mikkel, and Baldur, as they all echo my scream, watching the battle engage.
Thousands of massive Magnussen dragons fight against our allies, along with the highly accomplished brigades of the False Knights.
It’s a battle of Magnussen versus Eriksson, bitter clan rivals for millennia, in addition to False versus True Black Dragon Knights, opposite in their ideals of protecting our world.
Lithava’s forces have the Black Dragon, however—and I am not there to waylay it as it wreaks ruin now, decimating the dawn skies.
As the Black Dragon lays waste to the Old Palace, I see how much it has regenerated.
The first ceremony to restore it has already taken place.
Most of the creature has been repaired now, from the glossy oilslick black of its scales to the powerful sinews and tendons beneath its skin.
Killer talons tear from its feet, as viciously serrated spines protrude all over its skull and back. Every scale is utterly deadly, as the diseased oilslick runes of the Black Rift course all over it in whirling, flowing patterns.
Those ancient curses of Hedda’s, coupled with the Rift’s power, ripple and flow with the creature’s every movement now. Finally restored all over its ungodly, gargantuan body, those terrible back sigils burn a caustic violet-crimson as it streaks through the skies, shedding ruin.
The only thing still not alive about the Usurper is its eyes. Bone-white and filmy, they’re still dead as dead can be—the only thing that tells me the behemoth is not back to full power yet, as it terrorizes the dawn.
My drakes and I watch helplessly from the Void, fighting our own life-or-death battle, as a similar one takes place below.
As the True Knights and Eriksson brigades engage the Magnussens and False Knights, the lithe green and red dragons of Strom’s sisters, his aunts and uncles, and his grandmother Annika fight in close formation with the small green and crimson dragon that is Jarl Jorg.
My stepfathers fight with them, plus Svanhild Magnussen, Captain Olander Mortensen, and Mikka Halsbrand.
My gut churns now to watch them barely miss getting caught in a volley of seething acid-ropes from the Black Dragon, only to get hit hard by the Magnussens as they rush and dive through the skies.
It’s not a raid; it’s a full-on war, as the Magnussen clan finally has the advantage over their neighboring Erikssons. Coordinated brigades of Magnussen dragons follow every flood of cursed black ropes from the Black Dragon.
As Lithava and her First Bloodmate, Jarl Oggi Magnussen, marshal their forces in a one-two punch, the False Knights are wielded by Lars Dure and Arvid Fenstrom from the High Council of the False Black Dragon Knights to clean up whatever’s left.
It’s not much, as Strom screams now in the stars, watching his kinfolk fall like wheat to the scythe. We can do nothing, trapped by the diabolical energy that holds us, though we roar and writhe, trying to raise our auric fire and burn this terrible energy off us.
My drakes and I are separated, though, and cannot raise enough energy to feed my Bloodwalker power and hurl this leviathan taint off.
We watch the Old Palace and city burn now as the Black Dragon opens its great maw, spewing forth black flame filled with its cursed acid, burning everything it touches.
Strom’s scream becomes ballistic then, his heart torn to pieces as Bjorn’s shreds also, rage consuming him from what his father has done. We thrash and fight, but we are weak; our very soul-essences are nearly gone to the stars now, thanks to whatever this sundering energy is doing to us.
Hedda just laughs through it all, her infernal voice ringing in my ears. The Soulstone’s containment runes are nearly gone; I barely see them blaze at all now, as its fiery starlight gutters, weak.
Hedda’s drakes thunder, heaving against their failing containment; it’s only a matter of time before their containment breaks, as we watch the decimation of the Old Palace, everything burning now.
But a terrible shudder through the stars suddenly makes me focus on one particular area of the battle. Far below, the Magnussen contingent has gotten a small group of Eriksson dragons separated from their kin, surrounded.
In that tight group, I recognize four of Strom’s sisters with Mormor Annika, fighting like banshees now to protect another youngling. But even the old Bloodwalker Matriarch is not strong enough to weather the thirty Magnussens that entrap them—including Jarl Oggi.
As I watch in horror now, three of the younger Erikssons go down, felled by the Magnussen Jarl. Strom wails in a way I’ve never heard from him, as I understand those were three of his sisters.