The borderlands burned.

Everywhere man had touched was aflame, and the blaze had spread to the woods and beyond. Rotgoriel flew above the roiling smoke, catching glimpses of the raging fires below as the black, seething mass twisted and danced in the wind.

And in the distance, dragons.

Rotgoriel passed them as they rose out of the smoke or dove in, three, four, five of them all told as he ignored them and hurtled back toward Eidolon, as fast as he could fly.

It was a good distance. There weren't that many dragons in the air, all told.

But then, one didn't need many dragons to destroy a forest, a kingdom, an empire. They were fire. They were death. And they were pissed.

When a species took centuries to hatch, the destruction of seventeen eggs wasn't a tragedy, or a murder, or even a mass-murder.

It was genocide. A sizable percentage of a future generation had just been destroyed. And when combined with the other visions that Rotgoriel had seen, when combined with the plethora of masked players stealing dragon's eggs, and the fact that the Bharstool Warmers were the largest guild and had the most active players in Generica...

It made the fact that the world was burning a touch more understandable.

Not good, no, not in the slightest, but understandable.

Other dragons, by and large, saw themselves as the only people that mattered in the world. They were apex predators, proud and avaricious and uncontested. And while it wasn't entirely true, it was easy enough to excuse the occasional death as the fault of the victim. Oh, that dragon had been slain? Well he was weak, or lazy, or stupid. The species was stronger for their death.

But seventeen dead hatchlings wasn't just genocide, but a stain on the honor of the species itself.

He saw Kai-Tan before he came to it, surrounded by domes of magical energy, overlapping and crackling with raw power. Sorcery beyond that he had ever seen before had gone into this work, countless materials and components, and for all its might he knew it would not last. Ten of his brethren circled around it, blasting it with elemental fire, scouring it with acid, lightning, frost, and far stranger elements. The largest was four times his size, the smallest was barely a half, but they weren't giving up and even as he watched, some of the smaller domes showed spreading cracks. Kai-Tan would fall, it was only a matter of time, now.

A slightly smaller blue matched him as he passed, her speed greater, her two sets of wings churning at near-sightless speed. “Join us and burn them!” she roared.

“I'm busy!” he roared back.

She moved in closer, then growled. “A sacrifice! Kill that thing on your back!”

“It's mine! Piss off!”

Whether she acted through fear of challenging him or a reluctance to give up her task, he could not say. Whatever the reason, he heard her turn, and the thrumming of her wings faded as she returned to assaulting the city.

“Everything okay?” Midian shouted over the din.

From her perspective, of course, the conversation had been nothing but incoherent roaring. “We are fine,” Rotgoriel called back. “Stay low and stay quiet.”

Some of the eastern forest was aflame as well, though Rotgoriel could tell it was nothing like what had happened in the borderlands. No serious anger had been leveled in this region, not yet anyway. Most of this had probably come from the assault on Kai-Tan.

But collateral damage or no, Rotgoriel could see that it would be bad, given enough time to spread.

Someone actually took a shot at him as he came in, a ballista bolt hurtling past from one of the wall emplacements. Rotgoriel snorted and folded his wings, dropping fast... only to remember he had a passenger. He flapped hastily, trying to break his landing so that he wouldn't break Midian.

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He left a pretty big dent in the earth, but she was alive when she hopped down from him and ran to the council building. He followed at a distance, no match for the raw speed of her elven agility.

The hall was packed. Rotgoriel recognized some of the faces, most of them the support crew and retainers that the players had brought to Eidolon. But there were a few players, and Midian had pulled them aside, was speaking in low and frantic tones.

Rotgoriel moved over to join them, parting the crowd with his mere presence. WorldwarpR glanced up at him, his goggles on and glowing with some enchantment or the other.

The other officer present was VictorVector, a tall, muscular half-orc wearing some sort of suit that looked like a mix of cloth-wrapped armor and weeds. He was bald, and his tusks were cut with inked engravings, a sort of scrimshaw but worked upon living bone.

“You Rich or the bot right now?” Victor asked, looking him up and down. Midian shut her mouth, glaring daggers at WorldwarpR before the two turned to look up at him as well.

“I am Rotgoriel,” Rotgoriel rumbled. “You should listen to her.”

“There's no way in hell we can do that!” WorldwarpR said, throwing his hands into the air. “Even if we could get ahold of the entirety of the guild, there's no way to make them all log off, no way to keep them off! Nobody wants to miss this regional event!”

“It's not a regional event, it's a world event,” Midian hissed.

“Oh shit, this is the final battle, isn't it? This is what you've been hinting at, right Rotgoriel?”

Rotgoriel opened and closed his mouth.

And he realized what he had to do.

INT+1

“I can neither confirm nor deny any information concerning other games set within Generica,” he said, trying to get his eyes to glaze over properly.

“Holy shit,” VictorVector said, a toothy grin splitting his face. “You were right!”

Rotgoriel shook his head. “Mm, strange. Something must have come over me. Midian, what was your goal, here? What did you desire of this guild?”

“The dragons are coming for the players. But not everywhere, evidently?”

“It's mostly happening east of here,” WorldwarpR said, shaking his head. “From what my ley-line scrying has told me. Some went after Kai-Tan, but that's after a big bunch of Bharstool Warmers waystoned over there. They seem to be going after that guild, mainly. But there's a lot of collateral, a lot of players taking shots and drawing aggro. These are dragons, man! You go toe-to-toe with one and it's mad experience! You manage to kill one and boosh, all the levels.”

“Which is why ain't nobody gonna log off and hide,” VictorVector said, smoothly. “Not without something to be gained from it. And they figure sure, why not fight them here? We've been building defenses for the last few weeks. Weren't built for dragons, true, but this is as good a place as any to fight.”

“You speak truly,” Rotgoriel said, then turned his face to Midian. “Tell me. You can see the future. Is there one where the players do not confront it head on?”

“It doesn't work like that,” Midian sighed. “I spent days and mana potions and countless hours listening to bard songs playing out every vision of every timeline and action I could. That got me to here. Getting a read on such a broad question is impossible in the time we've got.” She frowned. “I can tell you without any foresight, that this place will get noticed sooner rather than later, and if there's any players here, it'll get leveled. Then the dragons that live through it will join their kin in the east, and that's where things really go wrong. Everything goes dark.”

“That'll be the transition, I bet you anything!” WorldwarpR grinned.

“East...” Rotgoriel hissed, and realized that now was the time to exploit his idea. “I have a quest for you in the East, noble heroes...”

“I fucking knew it!” WorldwarpR cheered, and with a movement not unlike dogs who just heard their canned food being opened, the players around the room crowded in, listening eagerly.

Rotgoriel had never put together a quest before. It was a thing that did not appeal! It involved carving out a chunk of your own experience, or treasure, and offering it to another for a task. Or in this case, others.

But the need was great, and time was short, and this would motivate them in ways that no other method could. And so Rotgoriel spoke, as he put the finishing touches on the contract that each of them would see, the contract enforced by the words and rules that governed this world.

“To the east lies the tomb of the Terracotta Emperor,” he intoned, once more trying to stare fixedly and intone things like a proper NPC affected by a player's mind-fog. “There the final battle shall be fought. You must guard the tomb from any who would destroy it or enter the final challenge, until I return. Only then will this world be saved from chaos!”

And with a final effort of will, he finalized the last detail of the quest and offered it to all within earshot.

“You heard the man!” WorldwarpR said. “Uh, dragon. Let's move out!”

They left so fast that Rotgoriel almost expected to see vapor trails in their wake.

“That was clever,” Midian murmured. “But was it wise? Why send them to a tomb?”

“That tomb holds a breach into Konol's prison. I need to enter it, and stop Nial'https from consuming him and ending the world.”

Midian fell silent, and the seconds passed.

“Midian?”

“This is what he was hiding. This is what you were all hiding,” Midian said, covering her eyes.

“Yes. But time is short, and we can no longer afford distrust. Can you help us fix this?”

“I can but... oh Rotgoriel, you have a problem. You have a huge problem.”

“Yes, the world is ending.”

“No, no, no. I'm talking about Legion. You have no idea what he is capable of, and if he learns what you just told me, it's going to get bad, fast...”