Chapter 0 - The Dragon

  ***

  They were crying. Everyone he ever knew. They were all crying, or dead.

  He had lived for eighteen years, but no amount of experience could have prepared him for the carnage surrounding him. His home lay before him, engulfed in flame, crimson tendrils of heat rising from bodies and lapping the air, as if they were the tongues of hellhounds, begging for morsels from Heaven above. However, the sky did not even respond with tears of pity, only cold, gray indifference. Metronomic, drumming beats reverberated through his ears as if they were the death knells of his people.

  His demesne, a bastion of hope for his people, now stood on its last legs, besieged by the sky and conquered by flame. Around the boy were mangled corpses, strewn among a variety of mismatched limbs, torn from other bodies. He was paralyzed. It was as if the boy was being pulled every which way by chains woven from his heartstrings, binding and drawing him to the corpses of the ones he grew up knowing, holding him in place under astronomical pressure.

  He felt like such a coward- why was he standing by the high walls of his citadel, when he could run into the open courtyard to save the few he could still find alive?

  An explosive charge fell with the sound of thunder and struck the ground before him, leaving a flaming crater in its wake and flinging even more debris around the scene.

  A sudden strike hit his leg, a blood-red feeling dripping up his body.

  A flying piece of broken stone had lodged itself in his inner thigh, causing him to keel over.

  His chest shook desperately as he grasped for any breath which could come his way. Tears fell from his eyes as the pain from his affliction spread through him from his leg up to his head. Though the boy yelled at the top of his lungs, he could not hear his own voice over the incessant ringing in his ears. And then—clarity. But that clarity came only with the worst sound he had ever heard.

  A shrill scream traveled through his ears and echoed in his mind. The sound came from the open court before him. There lay his younger sister, beneath the corpse of her personal guard, crying out for her older brother as tears streamed down her face on one side and blood down the other. One of her eyes had been blinded from the strike of one of the courtyard pebbles, which had flown about the scene like shrapnel. These pebbles, meant to protect her by alerting her guards’ ears to an assassin’s footfall, now took their mistress’s eye as their price.

  He could not comprehend what he was seeing, much less what he was doing.

  His arms and working leg had begun dragging him into the manic hellscape to the beckon of the girl’s voice.

  He stumbled on, his mind spellbound by her agonized visage. As he painstakingly clawed his way forward and his hearing unblocked, he heard those horrid drums once more from over the walls of the fortress. It was the wings of the dragon.

  Following each metronomic pulse, hundreds, or maybe thousands of whistling balls of flame rained from the leviathan past the walls into his home. Those dewdrops of the sun floated down and burst as they hit the ground, crackling and sputtering, splintering every which way to all else it could set aflame.

  Visceral yells of pain came from the top of the crumbling walls. The corpses of the loyal men littered the decrepit battlement. The cannoneers lay limply beside their copper cannons, blackened and torn apart from usage. They still clutched their twisted muskets with the remnants of strength in their bodies. At least, that was the case for the unlucky few who still had hands to hold them in, who had perished in drawn-out agony. The lucky ones had been the ones whose torsos were blown apart on immediate impact, their burst organs peppering the ground, and their blood raining from the sky with each infernal shelling.

  Despite it all, the boy waded to his sister through the destruction. Each tread of his produced a deafening crunch from the stones beneath his feet. He hoped he was not stepping on the bones of those he once knew. He paid no attention to the wailing of the guards he passed, nor the bewildered stares of the servants hidden by the outer wall. Not even to the children he grew up with, weeping over their lost loved ones. None of it mattered at all. He had to keep moving, onward to his younger sister, trapped in the blazing courtyard.

  Fire burst around him, obscuring his sight and clearing his ears with the cries of his dying people.

  No, he couldn’t think about that. He just had to keep marching forward.

  A bone-chilling shriek echoed through his head, elicited from a woman familiar to him.

  “Young master!”

  He turned to the wall he had left to search for that voice. It had come from his maid. Horror was chiseled into her ashen face, resembling a marble statue. He looked above himself and saw another wave of blaze coming down from the sky. He closed his eyes, and his vision faded to black.

  ***

  Drip. Drip. Drip. Splash.

  He could hear the sound of… what was it again? He felt like he knew the noise so well, yet he could not remember it at all. It sounded almost cold to him.

  He wanted to shiver, yet he couldn’t. That cadenced dripping, that small, frail sound expanding into a grand roar every few seconds, beckoned his focus to each one as the meter by which he could sense time’s passage.

  He could not open his eyes. He could not move. Maybe he couldn’t move at all. Why did he think he could? He didn’t want to think. It was too painful to think. Yet, he couldn’t help it at the same time. It hurt too much not to know. Someone spoke.

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  “Wake up.”

  If his body could run, and if his voice could cry, he would have long done so. Every inch of him wanted to run away from that noise, which disrupted the din around him, which was, in retrospect, symphonic to him. Never had he heard such a loud noise as that simple voice. Never had he heard a noise so close to him. Never had he heard something aside from the constant, peaceful racket from before. And why did he know it meant something? Or that it was even a voice? For that matter, why did he know what a voice was?

  Suddenly, light peaked through the dark in his eyes, revealing a blurry, cold image that he could liken nothing to.

  How did he know the meaning of the sounds the voice made? How could he understand the words of this voice so lucidly? How did he know that it was a command? How did he know what a command is? Why was this, among all that he had heard, the most sure and reliable to him?

  He was exhausted, desperately desiring to rest. Yet as he laid on his back, his mind raced leagues beyond what his body could ever hope to run.

  He was lying down, face up, his nostrils filled with the twisting, mixing stenches of earth and death. They smelled... cold.

  He was cold.

  He tried opening his eyes a bit more. He could see, but not far enough to perceive his hand, even if he could be permitted to lift it.

  All that worked were his ears.

  The only indicators he had that time could have been passing were the constant dripping echo and a more intermittent, much louder sound he could not begin to identify. As time passed, the silence grew louder and louder to him, and the constant sounds began to become pleasant moments of respite. They distracted him from the hasty, shaky exhales of the one who spoke before.

  He mustered all the strength of his body to call out to whoever had spoken to him.

  His mouth did not open. He made no sound.

  He tried to move his right hand.

  It did not respond.

  He tried to lift his right leg.

  It did not obey his will.

  The cold enveloped and slowly constricted his heart, crushing it to a bloody pulp incapable of operation. All his instincts screamed at him to move, yet he could do nothing to obey them.

  Terror had taken hold of him.

  He heard the voice again, a nigh-indistinct twinge of emotion beneath it this time.

  “You may speak.”

  His mouth burst open, and he began to yell, crying out.

  The voice spoke again, colder.

  “You can't, can you?”

  He continued to scream, hyper-aware of anything he could hear, even his own breaking voice.

  A loud shuffling echoed from a distance, along with clattering, clinking, and tacking, each sound reverberating just as his beloved cadence had. Then, silence.

  Once more, the droplets around him were all he could hear. And yet, there was no comfort for him in them. After all, the source of the alien noises was still at large, somewhere out there.

  He heard a sigh from the one who spoke before, seeing its blurry visage shake its head.

  He began to hear more of those strange noises from before, approaching once more. He feared each moment he could hear them as they came closer.

  The figure’s voice trembled a bit, seemingly sharing his sentiments.

  “...Live well.”

  Live… well?

  Woosh.

  His eyes slowly scanned the room, trying to spot the one who spoke. He found nothing. He was alone.

  He slowly clenched his hand. He… could move his hand? In it was a strange, granular yet wet element, different in texture from his skin. He raised it slowly, and splotches of it slipped out of his hand, onto the stone pedestal, camouflaging with it as soon as it landed.

  It was supposed to be there. What he just lifted was supposed to be below him. It was mud, a part of the ground.

  And yet, it felt like it was in his veins, and his body was as heavy as the stone he sat on.

  A snap struck him with panic.

  He slowly rose, and sat up straight. He was sitting on a rudimentary pedestal made from two large, smooth stones, one stacked on top of the other. Around him was a damp, dark place, with many stone blades reaching out to one another from the ceiling and the floor. Much of the ground had smaller spikes, making it hazardous to walk on. Small patches of cold-colored clumps slightly lit the place, though the amount was so little and sparse that the patches of light could not even touch one another. His torso was clothed in lustrous satin, and his legs were covered by burlap. Between his knees lay a patternless white mask with holes for the eyes, but nothing for the mouth or anything else.

  On his left was a vast, shallow pool of water which reflected the bioluminescent moss. At its center, large outpourings of water crashed onto a small jagged stone horn, submerged in the basin.

  The manic clanking sounds were getting louder, louder, and louder still from the hole in the ceiling from which the pool’s water came.

  The sluggish mud in his veins turned to stone and then began to flow like a torrential waterfall.

  He had to hide himself. Now.

  He rolled off the pedestal to his left, putting himself between it and the wall, away from the approaching sound. On his way down, he nearly impaled himself on the ground’s blade, but missed it slightly and instead scraped his right arm on it, landing in a puddle of water beside it.

  He screamed, holding the gash with his other arm, stamping his feet on the ground and lifting his pelvis. In his wanton thrashing, he lifted his body with his good arm and saw his reflection in the pool.

  Perhaps it was an instinct inherent to all creatures, perhaps it was one unique to him, but such questions were for a different time.

  After one look at his reflection, he knew that he was dead.