Nightblade (Darkest night)

The world went quiet. Reality itself snapped taut, stretched to a microscopic point where all motion ceased to exist.

"This..."

Morgan froze.

The wind died mid-gust, leaving a veil of ash and translucent dust frozen mid-air between the ruined pillars of the grand courtyard.

Nearby, the shattered remains of a gilded lantern hung suspended in time, its escaping embers pinned against the gloom like static specks of gold.

Even the blood dripping from a fallen guard’s blade hung suspended an inch above the cracked marble floor.

"How..."

Silence...absolute, suffocating, and domineering—swallowed Elaris whole.

Then, the third pulse detonated.

It did not travel through the air or ripple along the ground like the first. It passed directly through matter, space, and flesh simultaneously.

The ground bucked upward as the bedrock miles beneath the city shattered. Massive, thousand-year-old structures were violently sheared in half.

High above the plaza, the stained-glass dome of the Sanctum blew outward in a rain of iridescent dust, the sound bursting back into the world like a thunderclap that shattered eardrums.

Across the city, latent defensive wards and dormant magical formations flickered to life, blazing with frantic, involuntary light before exploding under the sheer pressure of the ambient force flooding the atmosphere.

Morgan collapsed to his knees.

"Aaaarrrrgghhhh!!!"

He failed to recognize the sound of his own voice even as a devastating pain ripped a soundless scream from his chest.

Dark, tendril-like energy violently surged from within him lashing out uncontrollably against the ambient wave of power.

He groaned even as he remembered the familiar powrr of the Void raging through jim, pushing back against the foreign presence.

"Damn it..."

Beneath his own familiar power, a cold, heavy presence crawled through his veins, an ancient, foreign current that pushed his blood aside, hijacking his body.

He gasped, but no air reached his lungs. The atmospheric pressure spiked so brutally that the simple act of breathing felt like trying to inhale molten lead.

A dozen paces away, the First Awakened were frozen still as well.

The silver light radiating from their eyes flickered violently, dimmed by a wave of pressure that dwarfed their own authority.

One of them, a towering warrior whose broadsword had cut through a dozen royal guards without breaking stride—suddenly stumbled backward.

His hand trembled as he reached out to brace himself against a cracked pillar.

His eyes were wide and filled with a primordial terror. Gone was the murderous confidence that had defined every step of the assault, now replaced by a raw, naked panic that rapidly spread throughout the legion of awakened.

At that moment, an even more horrifying realization settled in his mind.

"FATHER!!!"

King Aldren lay curled on his side, his hands pressed flat against the heaving stone.

The backlash from the harowing destruction of the wards around the city had throughly ravaged his mind and body, leaving him unconscious.

The leader of the awakened was nowhere in sight.

Morgan/Modric had spent his life watching his father stand as an immovable pillar.

Through the politics of the realm, through the brutal battles against the First Awakened, through the slow destruction of his own city, the King had remained unyielding.

Even in the battle, he had carried an aura of absolute majesty. And yet, now...he looked fragile.

"Father?" Morgan forced the sound past his constricted throat, pushing himself across the shuddering ground toward the King.

The image of the darkened king overlapped with the image of his mother’s broken bodybin his mind unearthing a deep seated hatred that Morgan buried qithin himself.

The grudge he felt resonated with Modric until...

"Don’t..."

Morgan slowly turned his head and saw it.

Out of the corner of his eye, a dark phantom stood, staring down at him with the same golden eyes.

The phantom was shrouded in veil of impenetrable darkness, his blurry form melding near seamlessly with the shadows.

"Don’t lose your sense of self, son of Thane. You are Morgan Thane. And his is simply—one of the pieces of the puzzle."

Morgan gasped, exhaling frantically then slowly calming himself. He closed his eyes.

He remembered.

He remembered drowning, again then again.

He remembered, fighting, wielding twin blades, he remembered the crimson eyed man and his confident smile.

"Luke... " he muttered under his breath.

He remembered the golden eyed man with glasses and his crooked smirk.

"Conrad..."

And there was the green eyed girl, her dark hair beautifully swaying in the wind.

"Emily..."

"Damien..."

"Scott...

He slowly opened his eyes, suppressing a smile.

" I guess I’ll play along for now..."

*****

The flow of time crookedly resumed.

The suspended marble tiles slowly floated down to the ground.

Modric/Morgan scrambled forward.

"Father?!"

Aldren turned his head. The color had fled his face entirely, leaving his skin a sickly, translucent grey.

But it was his eyes that froze Morgan in his tracks. There was no tactical calculation left in them, no stern resolve. Only an abyss of sheer desperation remained.

"Modric..." Aldren’s voice was a hoarse, ragged whisper. He reached out, his blood-slick fingers locking onto the collar of Morgan’s tunic with a desperate, crushing strength.

"Get... get to the Vault."

Morgan’s mind raced.

"The Vault? Father, the city is falling, we need to pull back to the lower gates, we need to gather the survivors—"

"No!" Aldren coughed, a thin spray of dark crimson speckling his pale lips. He pulled Morgan closer, his breath shallow and frantic. "Forget the city! Forget me! Run! You must get to the Vault before—"

A moment later, with a low groan, the ground tore open.

Morgan felt it before he saw it.

A half-mile beyond the ruined courtyard, the ridge framing the eastern side of the valley began to shift once more.

The low grinding of tectonic plates within the earth rippled through the ground with force akin to the groan of the primordial titans of old.

At first, Morgan’s mind struggled to interpret what his eyes were seeing. He assumed the mountain was giving way, that a massive landslide was sweeping down toward the outer districts.

Huge cascades of rock and ancient pine forest slid down the incline, pulverized into dust a moment later, by the sudden kinetic shock.

Then, the ridge rose, it lifted upward, pushing millions of tons of stone aside with a deliberate, agonizing slowness.

The buildings along the upper terraces of Elaris split in half as the slope beneath them buckled upward. Entire streets folded in on themselves like parchment thrown into a hearth.

Then a nebulous shadow fell over the city.

In the next moment, a physical mass rose between Elaris and the sun.

Morgan stared, his mind refusing to process the sheer, impossible scale of what was unfolding before him.

A vertical wall of sheer darkness breached the broken crust of the earth, pushing upward into the sky.

His eyes widened in disbelief.

It was smooth, dark, and matte, absorbing the faint light of the bleeding sky.

As more of the entity forced its way out of the abyss, the jagged rock face tore away, revealing the surface of the mass.

Morgan cursed, feeling his blood run cold at the sight of the giant mass.

It was a scale.

A single, obsidian plate, larger than the grandest estate in the upper district, glinted dull black as it caught the moon.

And behind it rose another. And another. A endless, interlocking armor of ancient chitin and bone, rising out of the deep earth like a continent breaking the surface of an ocean.

A single coil of the serpent’s body cleared the stone, thicker than the width of the royal district itself.

BOOM!!!

When it shifted, the displacement of air created a localized gale that flattened the remaining towers along the eastern wall.

When its scales scraped together, the sound was like a thousand glass mirrors shattering simultaneously, magnified until it shook the teeth from a man’s gums.

Morgan couldn’t see the beginning of the body. He couldn’t see its end. It wound down into the bottomless subterranean chasms beneath Elaris, an entity so vast that the human eye could only process it in fragments—a curved expanse of black scale here, a ridge of jagged, calcified spine there, moving with the sluggish, devastating weight of an epoch coming to an end.

Then finally, the head cleared the horizon.

It rose past the mountain peaks, blotting out the remaining sky. It was a nightmare sculpted from pale bone and void-black scale.

Crowned by a sweeping, asymmetrical crest of curved horns that looked more like petrified branches of an ancient tree than mere ivory, the face was a terrifying bridge between a serpentine predator and a forgotten god.

Two massive, elongated fangs protruded from its upper jaw, each large enough to spear an entire battalion of infantry.

Yet, there was no fury in its emergence.

The serpent did not thrash.m, it did not roar to announce its liberation. It rose with a heavy, agonizing grace, its colossal head tilting slightly as it surveyed the ruined world around it.

Its golden eyes, each the size of a palace courtyard, burned with a slow, smoldering light. But beneath that light lay a terrifying emotion.

It looked...exhausted?

It looked ancient beyond measure, thoroughly unimpressed by the destruction wrought by its awakening, carrying the heavy, bitter annoyance of an immortal entity dragged from an eternity of rest by the trivial squabbles of insects.