Nightblade (Darkest night)

The shockwave of heat detonated through his fingertips.

Morgan groaned, as his body vibrated at a maddening intensity.

"This feeling..."

It felt akin to bolt of lightning striking a dry forest and instantly setting it ablaze.

An overwhelming, terrifying surge of warmth that flowed up his forearm, through his shoulder, and straight into his chest.

The egg felt blindingly, mind-numbingly hot.

Then his heart skipped a beat.

Morgan gasped, his fingers locking onto the crystal shell as if magnetic force had fused his skin to its surface.

He tried to pull his arm back, but his muscles locked.

"Wait— what the—"

The words died in his throat.

The world around seemed to collapse in on itself.

The shattered slate of the cavern floor, the oppressive damp air of the abyss, and even the towering humanoid shape of Nythrakar dissolved into a violent vortex of sensory noise.

Staggering forward, Morgan he was thrown sideways. The world swirled violently around him.

"Nythrakar! What is happening?!"

"Watch son of Thane...Behold..."

The voice echoed all around him.

A moment later he was blasted through a catacyclsmic vortex of time.

"Ah, damn it! Not again!"

A familiar sinking quickly feeling overwhelmed his senses, blotting out the light and ahroudibg everything under a thick cover of darkness.

"Another memory," he thought.

Then everything went dark. Morgan felt himself floating tranquily through a lightless abyss.

Strangely, Morgan felt at peace.

"I see..." he thought.

Suddenly, the ground was rushing towards him. The tranquil illusion swiftly disappeared replaced by the dreadful vision of the obsidian rock.

When his eyes opened, the ground was beneath his feet once more. A sharp sulfuric smell filled his nostrils. Coughing slightly, he took a step back.

His feet sank through the soft ground.

All around him, he was surrounded by a wide expanse of brine and coarse, suffocating ash.

The metallic tang of blood in the air was so thick it coated the back of his teeth.

He wasn’t standing on his broken leg anymore. He was standing or rather, seeing through a thousand pair of eyes at once, on a primitive shoreline beneath an unfamiliar, violent sky.

The mental weight of experiencing so many different perspectives at the same time was dizzying.

"Crap—!"

In the distance, the horizon bled red.

"Look, a voice whispered."

The sound echoed directly inside his mind.

Morgan’s eyes widened slightly.

"That’s not Nythrakar’s voice..."

It wasn’t Azrael’s either.

"Who are you?"

There was no response.

Before him, the mountain range tore itself open.

"This..."

Within the mountain and along itself, primitive human beings, clothed in rough pelts and bronze, threw themselves onto the jagged mud, wailing in a language that predated modern speech by millenia.

Drums pounded frantically, a pathetic, desperate rhythm meant to appease a sky that was slowly falling apart.

Through the smoke and the tearing earth, something rose.

It emerged from behind eight separate peaks at once.

Great, towering necks of black stone and obsidian scales scraped against the clouds.

Eight distinct, terrifying silhouettes crested the horizon, their slitted, incandescent eyes burning like golden stars against the crimson sky.

Smoke poured from their maws their fangs, dripping acidic venom that hissed as it dissolved the primitive valley below.

Eight heads...Morgan’s mind reeled, a fragment of an ancient, half-forgotten from his studies surfacing through the static.

The dragon of the eight valleys...

Morgan’s eyes narrowed slightly. The scene felt strangely familiar.

"I’ve seen this before...but where?"

The primitive priests shrieked, offering sacrifices of grain and iron, calling the titan a multi-headed god of harvest and destruction.

But then, Morgan blinked and the vision shuddered then cracked like a mirror.

For a terrifying fraction of a second, Morgan’s perception adjusted slightly.

In the next moment, instead of eight serpentine heads, he saw one colossal entity, its massive body coiling through spatial fractures, its movement across dimensional layers giving the optical illusion of multiple heads breaking into reality at once.

The primitive humans couldn’t comprehend a shape that existed across folded space, so their mortal eyes glazed over in shock.

For a brief moment, the primitive men struggled to comprehend the harrowing vastness of the what they beheld and when they failed, their minds filling in the blanks.

They gave the disaster a name.

They gave it eight heads.

They built altars to the shadow.

"They decided to name what they could not measure," a dry, ancient voice echoed beneath the memory.

Before Morgan could process the thought, the the space around him cracked again with a melodic tinkling sound of breaking glass.

The red sky turned to lightless, violent sea.

Giant waves, miles high, crashed over black basalt cliffs.

A moment later, a fleet of primitive wooden ships horrendously vanished beneath the churning foam instantly shattering violently into splinters.

A distance away, standing on a towering sea cliff, a king in golden armor, screamed defiantly into the storm, unsheathing his sword and pointing the ornate blade at the frothing water.

A moment later, beneath the surface of the ocean, something moved.

Morgan felt the harrowing presence before he saw it.

"What the hell is he doing?"

Even.in this fragmented memory of the distant past, the idea of a mere mortal confronting a god was preposterous.

And a moment later proved why such encounters were the essence of cautionary tales.

Within moments of issuing the defiant challenge, the waters of stormy sea frothed and churned restlessly, boiling over with violent foam as a deep shadow emerged from its the vast watery abyss.

From the dark depths, an endless, serpentine length of scaled darkness shifted beneath the floor of the sea.

A single coil lifted from the darkness below, so immensely vast that it broke the surface and formed a ring of dark stone that stretched from one horizon to the other.

The king fell to his knees, his golden crown slipping into the mud.

"The World Serpent!" the king screamed in a dead tongue. "The serpent that circles the earth! Jormungandr!"

Morgan watched in horror as the endless body continued to rise, its scales so massive that entire forests had grown in the moss clinging to its ridge.

’I did not encircle their world,’ Nythrakar’s cold baritone murmured in the background of the memory.

"Their fragile world was built upon the curve of my spine."

The conflagration of memories accelerated into a sickening flurry of light and darkness.

A sea monster swallowing the sun during a total eclipse.

A great beast sleeping deep beneath a continent, whose mere restless turnings shattered ancient civilizations with harrowing earthquakes.

A winged leviathan carved into the walls of a cave that had been reduced to glass five thousand years ago.

Dozens of cultures with uundreds of names, several thousand years apart.

Through out the course of history, in different languages, in diifferent religions, Nythrakar had existed.

Underneath every single myth, buried beneath the panicked interpretations of mortal men trying to rationalize the catastrophe that titanic creature was.

Then, the storm of memories hit a sudden, violent wall.

The timeline slowed, dropping into a cavern of polished white marble and burning blue fires.

Three figures stood before the colossal, mountain-sized serpent.

They wore robes of shimmering, woven shadow, their faces obscured by blank silver masks.

The First Awakened.

"What are you?" one of the figures asked, his voice echoing with an unnatural, layered power that vibrated with umbralis.

"Are you the first shadow?"

The mountain of scales shifted slightly. A giant golden eye opened, reflecting the small, citymasked figures like specks of dust.

"You seek an origin for your power because your mortality demands a beginning and an end. I am neither."

" I am simply what remains when the light recedes." Nythrakar rumbled, his voice reverberating through the white marble pillars.

The vision shattered like a sheet of ice under the stroke of a hammer.

Morgan snapped back into reality with a violent gasp.

"Crap! Crap! Crap!!!"

Morgan continued gasping for air, his golden eyes wide and bloodshot.

His lungs burned as if he had been submerged in ice water for hours. He staggered forward, his boots slamming hard onto the slate, his shattered right leg throbbing with a dull, throbbing heat.

"Ah, bloody—!"

He nearly lost his balance, but his reflexes kicked in, locking his joints.

The nebulous dark egg was still cupped in his hand.

The spiderweb cracks of gold across its black crystal surface were glowing far brighter now, pulsing in precise rhythm with the golden sun with the Void.

Inside the Void , a space slowly yawned at the very center of the lightless world. At the debtre of the lightless pit, a dark shape slowly began to take root.

Panting, Morgan wiped a fresh sheen of sweat from his forehead and glared up at the eight foot humanoid figure standing before him.

Nythrakar hadn’t moved once since handing over the egg.

His golden, slitted eyes remained fixed on Morgan’s face.

"Eight heads," Morgan rasped, his voice raw. "The World Serpent. The beast beneath the ocean."

"It was you, it was you all along."