BECMI Chapter 329 – The Rings of Fire
His head carefully held just below her station on her throne, Ignaxilliumvythiux the Great Red Wyrm approached carefully across the distance from the doors, his tail swaying behind him nervously.
The magical power in the air was stifling. This was not mortal power or limits!...
She blinked once, and the Great Wyrm froze where he was, aware he should step no closer. Thinking further, he lowered his muzzle to the floor, a single drop of burning spittle escaping his jaws, sitting there and sizzling impotently on the polished black stones cut into numberless tiles so perfectly, his claws leaving not the slightest mark on them.
“Elder Ignaxilliumvythiux, Egg of Pyraclanosmitx the Crimson Cataclysm. The Great Scorn of the Brokenfangs, Bane of the Intrumeel Clans.” Her Voice was scarcely a whisper, but it rang in his ears with unnatural clarity, cutting through the distant thunder, the quiet rumblings through the floor, and the echoes of this vast and empty chamber, which seemed to be filled with the murmuring of ghosts and souls who had not escaped the Doom of Darkmoor.
It was also exquisitely musical, something not normally associated with Draconic, and it THRUMMED with power beyond any great wyrm!
“The Lady Edge of Darkmoor,” he returned in acknowledgment. She had never claimed a greater title. “Your reputation and deeds precede you, Elfin,” he rumbled warily.
“You are thousands of miles from your domain, Elder. What brings you to my lands?” she asked him calmly, her voice betraying an utter lack of concern over the danger he presented. Though her words held no true volume, the field of magic around him seemed to reverberate with every single syllable, and the very magic he held in his mind and thoughts was thrumming in response, a horrifying sensation to a dragon. It was akin to her stretching out her hand and laying it upon his innermost thoughts and power.
The great wyrm was thoroughly convinced that without any effort whatsoever, she could wipe the magic clean from his mind, and doing so would be horrendously painful, too!
“Power, Lady Edge,” he admitted after a moment of careful thought. “The power of the flames of these lands sings in the air and the earth, calling to my kind across the miles. I felt it rise all the way in the Brokenfangs, and word came of the fires raging up from the molten heart of the world from where the humanoid nation of Darkmoor once stood, wiping it away from the world even as the world turns in a new direction with every day.”
“There is indeed power here, Elder Ignax, because I have made it so.” The soft words had a razor bite to them that just clashed and echoed with harsh realities, and the great wyrm found it impossible to not believe her. “I spoke with the world, and it agreed to make this monument to the folly and treachery of the Immortals who brought the Doom upon Darkmoor.”
Ignaxilliumvythiux felt his bones creak. The Immortals were involved in this? “The stories say that humans and elves reached too high, and in their arrogance did not care for the limits they passed…”
“Those stories were created by the Immortals who did the deed, and are perpetuated by the Immortals who let them happen.
“I was there, Elder Ignax. We were a grand and glorious realm, and we were not arrogant. Look at the other tales in your memory. We did not go a-conquering, although Iberon was fat and falling apart and meat on the table. The open plains of the horsemen were waiting for us to sweep them. The very plateau upon which the City of the Gods stood could have been purged clean of dragons and their annoying presences with little effort, but we let them remain.
“We overreached nothing but making ourselves higher and greater than the Immortals allowed. They stirred up an ancient evil, made a pawn of it, and unleashed power from the forerunners, those from the age before that is lost to mortals and dragons alike, bringing down death from the sky.”
The ceiling above him swirled, and Ignax looked up, watching from far above as a thing of steel trailing fire, girt in magicks that were not mortal, blew out of the side of a nameless mountain in the north, arcing into the sky at speeds far greater than anything a dragon could attain. It covered thousands of miles in mere minutes, its course easily calculated at a glance by the dragon, and he knew exactly where it would land.
It came down, and there was fire. Fire where it landed, fire this world had never seen, fire to swell and clear away the land, and bring the sea in, to atomize vapor, and whose shockwave and edges spread for over a thousand miles in all directions, reducing a prosperous landscape of green and growing things to glass, ash, and dust, and shaking the whole world.
He had been sleeping when the shockwave roared past him in the land, and he felt the manafield shake as if the entire planet was screaming. Ash had rained down upon them from lands far beyond the horizon, the moon was red every night, and the weather and the planet had gone mad.
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Every sun’s rise and sun’s set since then, the planet had been rolling, turning on its very axis, aligning to a new course and rotation. Looking upon that detonation swallowing the sky and the land beneath it, Ignaxilliumvythiux saw what had done it, and that the Doom of Darkmoor had definitely not come from within.
It had been destroyed in fires far, far greater than anything a dragon had ever imagined being able to unleash!
“You stand in a monument to Immortal folly, Elder Ignax, not a graveyard for Darkmoor,” the elfin’s cool Voice overrode the memories racing through him as every detail he saw matched his experiences, even the secondary explosion far to the North that lifted that nameless mountain from the earth and tore it apart in smaller, weaker flames that nevertheless took and made out of it a jagged and empty crater, seething with dangerous magicks unleashed.
“This land is mine. I have claimed it by power, by right, and by my sheer unrelenting willingness to utterly slaughter anything that thinks it can come down and take it away from me for some puerile purposes of their own. Like dragons of flame.”
The great wyrm lowered his head once again. If she was responsible for these rings of fire, if she could speak to the world itself… then she had influence that rivaled that of the Immortals. He already knew that he would not be King here, for what wyrm would dare to call itself king in this place, where this terrifying elfin’s power made his own magic jump and dance to the sound of her voice?
“Dragons are coming to these Rings of Fire, Lady Edge,” he opted to say, very politely. “I was merely the first, the most ambitious and tempted by what should have been an open and unclaimed territory. The storms that writhe about this land, the teeth of the narrow ranges that border them, the lakes of fire still boiling about them… this place is a paradise for dragons in its elemental power and purity.
“My kind will not stop coming, Lady Edge.” It was not a threat, it was an explanation, although it had a weight to it of such.
He didn’t need to command it or report on it. This monument to the glories of the dead, this place of the anger and contempt of the world, drew dragons like flowers drew bees. The young and the foolish were coming, the grown and the hungry for territory to hunt and raise their clutches, and the old and the mighty chasing power and prestige.
“Excellent.”
He wanted to drive his claws into the stone, but they defied his power and strength, the only scuffing upon them being ground from his own talons scraping across them.
She was looking forwards to killing the dragons who were coming here and seeking to settle without her permission. The land was honey to flies, and she would always have a harvest priming itself to be ready to be reaped and made into mere components for the elfin whose eyes were burning with bloody light, ready to reach and cut them all down without fail.
The fate of lesser dragons did not truly concern him, but he was a great elder of the dragons, a Great Red Wyrm, among the mightiest of dragons alive in all respects, exceeded only by a few rare Golds and Amber Wyrms, most of whom kept to themselves rather than having ambitions to be a Dragon King.
He had hoped that this was his time and place, and he would be able to gather followers and build a fortified lair here, only to find that this entire land was already under the control of another.
She obviously did not consider him a great threat, which meant she also considered him to be walking spell components! He had naturally not brought his hoard with him until he knew he would be moving, or she very well might have moved against him already!
“You sound like you have something to propose, Elder Ignax?” she inquired in a voice that felt colder than the breaths of some of the Whites he had driven away when younger. Of course, none would be stupid enough to try that now, him being easily twice the size of the largest of them…
“Would you be willing to accept the service of dragons, in return for being able to lair here?” Ignaxilliumvythiux asked very cautiously, not certain of where he himself was going with this. He could not be a Dragon King here… but he could certainly reign over all the dragons of this area, as long as this elfin didn’t kill him, and all of those dragons as well, which he was very, very certain she was capable of doing!
The great dark Bat just snorted disdainfully, but said nothing. Obviously it had no desire to have more dragons around, although only the largest and most formidable wyrms would be any threat to it… and even less so if its mistress was about.
“The Oaths you and your cousins would have to swear would be exceptionally powerful and extremely unforgiving, Elder Ignax,” was her cool rebuttal. “This is a dangerous road for your people to go down, acknowledging a non-dragon ruler. Your own kind will likely fight it the most of all.”
“Then they are most stupid and will certainly die, Lady Edge,” he returned carefully, and realized he meant it, it was not mere flattery in the slightest. She was going to be hunting down all the dragons who gathered here, and they were going to flee far and fast, or they were going to die.
He would not be a Dragon King… but there would be no Dragon King here. He would have an ideal lair, he would have power and influence over all lesser dragons, and he would only have to worry about other great wyrms coming in to dispute his authority… but they could not be Dragon Kings, either, so there would be no acknowledged ruler.
He doubted she would have any involvement in the affairs of dragons, humanoids simply had no interest or involvement in such things, until they butted heads.
“Well, then, Elder. I am not familiar with any precedents for this situation. Give me an offer, and let us see how much of my fires you will be able to breathe as you sleep.”
The whole tower thrummed around him, and a dozen thunderclaps exploded above it, shaking the stones and echoing through the chamber.
She had absolute control over the raging elemental storm above them. If she could tap its lightning at will…
The elder wyrm nodded slowly, contemplating his words, and realizing deceit and subterfuge would likely not go over well here at all. “This is what we seek here…”