Ghastly Nightmare
Mistus shot upward before the soldiers of Rosmayne could so much as loose another arrow.
He ascended like a streak of pale resolve, rising higher and higher until he had passed far beyond the velarium that arched over Great Gardenia. The arena, once vast and imposing, shrank beneath him into a mere ornament of stone and memory.
Above, the sky opened.
Below, the capital of Fleurein unfolded in its entirety.
From that height, the city resembled a living tapestry. Grand boulevards glistened with rainwater like silver veins. Marble facades and slate roofs caught the dim, storm-muted light. Crowds clustered beneath awnings and archways, their movements small and frantic like currents in a restless sea. And there—scattered through courtyards and side streets—children still played beneath the rain, laughing, splashing in puddles, blissfully unaware of the terror coiling beyond the horizon of their understanding.
Mistus watched.
For a long moment, he simply watched.
Though he had lived for an age beyond reckoning, it had been an eternity since he had witnessed a great civilization directly with his own eyes. His existence, long reduced to one that required a vessel, had severed him from the full tapestry of sensory life—the warmth of breath, the texture of sound, the subtle rhythm that made mortal beings truly alive. Since the betrayal of the Seltis Pantheon, his perception had never been whole.
Until now.
Now, sensation returned to him in its frightening completeness.
The scent of rain.
The murmur of distant voices.
The collective pulse of a thriving humanity.
Seeing mankind flourish like this filled him with a quiet, genuine happiness—an emotion so simple it almost startled him.
But it did not linger—it could not. Because he still had something he must do.
To peel away illusion.
To strip history of its distortions.
To awaken the collective memory of what humanity truly was within a universe that had never ceased to test it.
Slowly, Mistus released his staff from his grasp.
For a heartbeat, it simply hovered beside him.
Then it changed.
From the length of grey wood erupted a myriad of human hands—countless, pale, and impossibly formed. On the back of each hand, a single eye opened. They blinked in unison, wet and aware, their gazes turning in all directions as if beholding the world for the first time in ages.
The hands reached. They clasped one another.
They intertwined, interlocked, and fused—layer upon layer—until they formed a grotesque amalgamation, a swelling mass of grasping limbs and watching eyes. It curled inward, enclosing Mistus at its core like a cocoon shaped by something primordial and disturbingly deliberate.
The sphere began to grow.
Slowly at first. Then steadily. Then relentlessly.
It expanded in the sky above Fleurein, its surface writhing with interlocked hands and unblinking eyes, its silhouette becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. Within minutes, it swelled to a colossal scale—vast enough that its shadow brushed rooftops and darkened entire districts.
In less than ten minutes, it loomed so large it resembled a third moon descending upon the world.
Every citizen in Fleurein could see it with the naked eye, and none could look away—nor they should.
“My lord… what are your orders?”
The adjutant’s voice trembled despite his effort to keep it steady.
Before the colonel could respond, hurried footsteps echoed through Great Gardenia. A messenger burst into the arena, armor damp with rain, breath uneven from haste.
“Report! Report!”
The female knight dropped to one knee before Colonel Maxence, lowering her head in rigid formality.
“Her Majesty, Queen Catalina, is currently in the midst of evacuation procedures! This is a new directive issued to you by the Grand Marshal!”
She extended a sealed parchment.
Maxence accepted it without a word. He broke the seal, scanned the contents, and—unsurprisingly—found exactly what he had anticipated. Suppress the source of public threat. Assist in mass evacuation. Maintain order. Preserve the Crown’s authority.
“Another normative and performative order, just as usual…” he muttered, folding the parchment with deliberate care before handing it to one of his subordinates. “Though, I must admit, it is understandable.”
He exhaled deeply.
Then, in a gesture that startled several nearby soldiers, Maxence walked to the cavea and sat down heavily upon the stone seating. He removed his helmet and leaned back, bracing himself on his hands. Without the helm, his face—clearly that of a man in his mid-thirties—looked far more human than authoritative.
And far more tired.
“The real question is not why,” he continued, eyes fixed on the sky. “The real question is… how?”
His gaze locked onto the monstrous sphere overhead.
“We can fight men. Perhaps even giants,” he said quietly. “But that? How, exactly, are we supposed to stop that?”
No one answered.
His subordinates lowered their heads in silence. The atmosphere grew heavy—thick with dread, resignation, and a creeping sense of helplessness that no drill or doctrine had ever prepared them for.
Then, suddenly—
Maxence laughed. Not a hysterical laugh. Not a mad one. But a sharp, genuine burst of amusement that left several knights visibly startled.
“Grant,” he said at last, rising slightly from his slouched posture, “take a detachment and assist the evacuation effort. The rest of you will begin clearing this area. Move the dead outside the arena for identification and further inquiries.”
“Yes, Colonel!” Grant answered immediately.
“C–Colonel, forgive me, but… isn’t that somewhat different from the order you just received?” blurted a slightly overweight knight—the youngest among them—before he could stop himself.
“Y-You fat idiot! Hold your tongue!” hissed a thinner companion, elbowing him sharply. He bowed hastily toward Maxence. “Our apologies, Colonel. He is new in our unit… and unfortunately not the most tactful. But he is tough. He will clean this place quickly. I beg your forgiveness on his behalf!”
Maxence watched the two of them bicker and plead. Usually, he would love to flex his rank and play a little bit with such discourtesy. However, they are facing something that is quite possibly very dire. Hence, he smiled. A small, tired smile.
“Young man,” he said calmly, “we do not possess air vessels like Varnaria, nor siege weapons like Aramia. The only forces capable of reaching such altitude are the Cloud Riders.”
His eyes flicked upward again.
“And thanks to that black witch earlier, they are currently recovering from heavy losses inflicted by those damned ravens. Therefore… we will do what we can, with what we have. Is that understandable?”
“Ah—I see…” the heavier knight began, only to receive another jab from his companion. “–I mean, yes, Colonel!”
“Thank you, Colonel! Please excuse us!” the thinner knight said quickly, dragging his friend away before further embarrassment could occur.
Soon, their footsteps faded, and the arena grew quieter. Now, only Maxence and his silent bodyguard remained. Side by side, they looked up and prayed—though neither spoke the prayer aloud.
With each passing moment, the colossal sphere in the heavens continued to swell, its mass becoming more oppressive, more inescapable, more inevitable.
Maxence’s jaw tightened.
“… Damn it,” he muttered under his breath. “Should I have been less rigid when speaking to that – whatever that is earlier?”
“I believe so as well, my lord,” his bodyguard replied without hesitation.
Maxence let out a dry, humorless chuckle.
“Did I just make a mistake that could potentially get everyone killed?”
“… I believe so as well, my lord.”
Silence followed.
A long one.
The colonel stared at the sky, eyes reflecting the monstrous orb that now dominated the firmament.
“Damn right, I did,” he whispered.
Then, after a brief pause, barely audible beneath the distant rumble of the storm and the murmurs of a trembling city—
“... Fuck.”
Far above the trembling firmament, something finally changed. The grotesque, colossal sphere of flesh and magic that had loomed over Fleurein did not burst, nor shatter, nor collapse.
It opened.
Not with violence, but with a slow, deliberate unfurling—like a wound remembering how to bloom.
The interlocked hands loosened their grip. The countless eyes embedded upon their backs blinked in eerie unison before dimming, one after another, as though surrendering their vigilance to something greater within. The mass parted along unseen seams, its surface peeling away in vast, silent layers, revealing an interior not of gore nor void, but of deep, oppressive enigma.
And from within that impossible womb, a form emerged. A form no soul across all the reaches of Ersia had ever witnessed.
Mistus was no longer what he had once been.
He had shed the semblance of a being shaped by wilderness, mortality, or the evolutionary compromise of living things. What now descended bore the presence of something that had long outlived the need to resemble life as it was commonly understood. It was not a creature that belonged to nature—it was a form that nature itself might have once attempted and then abandoned for the good of all.
He had assumed a shape that only the most resourceful historians, theologians, and scholars could ever hope to approximate in their most speculative conjectures.
A dragon.
Not of the ballads.
Not of the epics.
Not the kind that had ever been sung, painted, or feared in the myths of men.
This was something that descended from the heavens as a calamity awaiting its sentence upon the lesser world.
His emergence is unhurried. The air did not tremble from force; it parted for him, as though the sky itself acknowledged his passage. His vast body unfolded with solemn deliberation, each motion measured, each extension of form resembling the blooming of an ungodly rose traced in cursed geometry, deliberate lines of shadow and muted pallor.
His scales were not the crude armor of lesser beasts. They were laid with austere precision, each one curved like a drawn blade and set seamlessly against the next, forming a mantle of bone-dark charcoal that did not merely reflect light—it subdued it. Illumination that touched his body seemed to sink beneath the surface, as if absorbed into a depth that refused to relinquish it. And yet, at certain angles, a pallid undertone surfaced—faint, restrained, like moonlight suspended beneath deep water—granting his form a quiet, enduring luminosity even under a lightless night.
From his shoulders extended immense wings, bridging east and west with their membranes bearing the deep, dignified hue of aged wine. Subtle veins traced beneath their surface like ancient script written in living flesh. When they opened, they did not snap nor lash against the air; they unfurled with inevitability, filling the welkin not with violence, but with domination. Their breadth overtook the horizon in a single, measured sweep, and the sky itself seemed smaller for it.
At the roots of those wings rested an additional pair of arms, folded close against his form. Clawed. Composed. Poised in quiet readiness. Their presence lent his silhouette an unsettling completeness—as if his shape had once been intended for something greater than flight alone and had simply chosen to remain that way.
His head was crowned by sweeping horns that arced backward in pale metallic brilliance. Their edges caught the dim stormlight like frost lining the edge of a blade at dawn. From that diadem the pattern of his scales flowed outward in disciplined lines, traveling along his neck and across his body in subtle symmetry, giving the impression that his very flesh had settled into a form of quiet dominion. Beneath the crown, his stillness carried the weight of something that did not need to threaten in order to be feared.
Behind him extended a tail built with the weight of a living pillar, thick at its base and tapering with gradual authority before narrowing into its true purpose. Near the end, the mass gave way to a slender division, splitting into twin crescent blades that curved outward with restrained elegance. Their surfaces bore a cold, metallic sheen, and when they moved, they carved slow, deliberate arcs through the air, precise and inevitable, untouched by haste or agitation.
A dim ember-violet glow stirred beneath the seams of his scales at the joints and throat when he drew breath, not a blaze but a living undertone, like a distant furnace that had refused extinction. It pulsed softly through the thin membranes of his wings and along the fine edges of his form, hinting at a power that was neither wild nor fleeting, but held in deliberate reserve.
Seen in full, Mistus did not evoke chaos or fury, but something far more unsettling: the sense of a reign too vast to oppose. He did not claim the sky through noise or frenzy, but through a simple occupation as though the firmament had always been a throne awaiting his return. And in his wake the world seemed to remember this ancient fear. A bane which even the heavens themselves might yield.