As most of you should know, those were Griffins. The flying beasts that attacked the female dragon, I mean. They were one of the earliest self-aware animals in the world, with intelligence beyond raw instincts, though they have a penchant for aggression. They populated that area of the mountain range years before the dragons, being the king of the skies.
Although their ancestor was a feline that ruled the mountain range millions of years ago, griffins perfectly combine the strongest traits of the mightiest bird of prey and hunting beasts of the land. They are a very proud and regal race, being part king of beasts and part king of the sky.
Their greatest assets are their powerful bodies and acute senses that let them pick up on the slightest sound and see clearly for miles. A lone griffin can take down a Dire Bear, and as you have seen, when hunting in packs, they become a serious threat to even large predators like dragons.
Well, they only became a threat after the variant species came, the griffin with the scorpion-like stinger at the end of its tail. It has more genes from its feline ancestor, giving it a more feline look and a scorpion-like stinger. The venom from those stingers is potent enough to kill a whale.
Honestly, the female white dragon would have died right then and there if the heat from her heart hadn't rushed through her body and evaporated most of the venom in her system.
And yes. Dragons' hearts are the organs that allow them to breathe fire and ice. I made it like that because I wasn't smart enough to make a believable organ that would allow them to breathe fire and ice from their mouths.
Despite being almost wiped out by one dragon, griffins are powerful beasts. If the two dragons don't hunt them to extinction for revenge, their species might evolve into a sapient species.
'Hm...'
Apart from that, the male white dragon on the old white side stayed in the vast grassland outside of the frozen tundra for more than ten years, waiting to see if his companion would follow his path to chase the sun. During this time, he moved around the grassland, hunting and eating new animals almost every day for the first few months. He avoided hunting large animals, like the supersaurus that lived in the grasslands, intimidated by their size.
When he wasn't hunting, resting, or sleeping, he spent his time watching animals like they were animal documentaries. He was extremely interested in how less intelligent creatures lived, sometimes stalking a single animal for days while hiding within the clouds, just watching and learning about them.
The longest he stalked an animal was four years. This was during his seventh year living in the grasslands. He had noticed a Bactrosaurus hatching from an egg while flying through the skies, looking for something interesting. From that moment on he watched it live its life and watched it get killed by five Velociraptors, one of the few colors in the grasslands.
I was honestly surprised how he could wake up every day, hunt for breakfast, track down the Bactrosaurus, watch it for the entire day, hunt for dinner, go to sleep, and repeat that routine for the next four years. But again, people wake up every day to work, so it might be the same for him.
The only difference is that he thoroughly enjoyed watching the Bactrosaurus live its life.
The day he watched the Bactrosaurus get eaten by the five Velociraptors, he finally decided to leave the grassland. Seeing as he didn't see her through these years, and since he had finished learning all he could, he ate a lot of food before flying south.
He could have kept chasing the sun, heading west, but during one of his explorations of the grasslands, he saw something intriguing that piqued his interest. The grassland connected to a land filled with trees, just like the taiga back in his old den, but not covered in snow.
It has been more than six years since he first saw this forest. However, he decided not to go because he wanted to wait for his companion in the grasslands. Now that he had decided to stop waiting, he was finally free to explore this new place and learn more about the world.
As for the female white dragon, she had remained in the taiga, not interested enough in the outside world to even think of leaving. She was interested in something else. The emotions of the animals and how they acted due to those emotions.
Her interest in this subject first arose when she was chasing an ermine through the tundra. As it ran towards the taiga, it suddenly stopped and turned to face her, hissing fiercely at her. It was nothing special. After all, most of the creatures she hunts always try to fight for their lives. Anyone would fight for their life even though they knew they would die. Herself included.
But this time, a question popped up in her mind. 'What if I let it go? What would it do?'
In normal circumstances, when an ermine she is chasing turns around to defend itself, that would be her cue to kill it. This is because she felt like she had given it the most fear it could get, enough to risk its life. But that day, she just landed a few meters away from the small beast and did nothing.
The ermine stood in the same spot for more than thirty minutes, growling at her, not attacking but not daring to turn its back on her. But after almost an hour of the female dragon not doing anything, it started backing up slowly before turning around and running.
Stolen story; please report.
That day, she smelled it for the first time. She smelt emotions. The joy, relief, and all the other emotions the ermine felt while escaping certain death.
'Hmm...' I did give them enough sense to smell fear but no other emotions. But who am I to say? It is similar to how I didn't expect the two dragons to separate because of the new instinct I gave them or for the Giga-Centipedes to fight the way they do with their digging abilities.
I might be nigh-omnipresence on this planet, but nowhere close to nigh-omniscience.
Besides that, from that point on, she became interested in animals' emotions, what makes them come out, and how they act on said emotions. She became what I would call a psychologist.
She experimented with whatever she thought would hit those three points at once. She repeated the ermine experiment again, but unlike last time, she killed the ermine once it turned its back to run. The extreme despair the ermine felt at the last moment of its life was something she thoroughly enjoyed.
She enjoys the extreme emotions and reactions of all animals in the taiga and tundra, be they negative or positive. She even started the routine of eating her prey alive, reveling in their despair, anguish, desperation to survive, hopelessness, and all the multitude of emotions they felt when they were being eaten alive.
It was more interesting watching her than her partner, who does the same thing I do. Seriously. I observe every living being on this planet 24 hours a day and 730 days a year. I don't need to watch an animal that is watching another animal that I am already watching, if you get what I mean.
After about twelve years of tormenting the animals, she finally decided to leave and look for her companion. Seeing as he didn't return to her, she concluded that he either found a new and better world, so better that he didn't want to return to her.
Or, worst case scenario, he died.
Either way, she was bored of staying in this lair. Her food was running extremely low, to the point she had to start eating the disgusting reindeer to preserve the other animals she likes eating and let them breed. And, most of all, she had been feeling lonely since her companion left. So she decided to follow her instinct and depart from this place.
Finally, am I right? She was about to end the ecosystem in that place. It wouldn't affect the world's environment even if she did destroy it. However, I would rather not see that happen at the hands of something I created to preserve the world's ecosystems.
So, at sunrise one day, she feasted on multiple animals before flying off in the direction she remembered her companion had flown off to about twelve years ago. She is a faster flyer than the male dragon, but her stamina, although more than the two Platinum dragons, was less than her male counterpart.
At one point, she had to stop flying and run due to the fact that she was running out of energy to keep herself in the air. The despair she felt when this happened was something no other being on this planet had ever shown.
Since she was intelligent, she understood more about what dying meant than all other unintelligent creatures. She didn't know what would happen to those that died, but she didn't want to find out.
She spent three days wondering about the frozen tundra. At this point, she even ate half of her tail for energy, but the energy she got from digesting it was used to regenerate her tail. She used her claw to pull off her tail's scales, cut it off with her own claw, and ate herself, all for no reason.
This was when she experienced ultimate despair, enough for me almost to feel sorry for her.
"How careless of me. I nearly gave a fuck." I can't start feeling emotions toward my creation, or that would be my downfall. I am lucky that I caught myself before I gave a fuck, or else that would be the tilting point of my heartless god regain. I can already see what would have happened. I will start helping animals with my CE. Then I would create a mortal body to descend, marry, and have children.
'Oh, god.' That thought scared the living daylights out of me. I need to stop scaring myself--
Would you look at that? She smelled the scent of a living animal more than 80 km ahead of her.
Her despair was washed away by the energy that came out of nowhere. Adrenalin rushed through her body, giving her enough strength to take flight and shoot forward like a bullet with a sonic boom, pursuing the animal's scent.
She soon entered an alpine tundra, which she ignored, and kept following the scent, catching up with its owner after 4 minutes of flying. It turned out it was the scent of the blood of a dead animal being feasted on by a Gorgosaurus.
Like a crazed beast, she dived down and pinned the Gorgosaurus to the ground, brutally ripping it apart with her strong jaw while it was still alive. The blood-curdling scream of the dinosaur reverberated through the alpine tundra, causing any nearby animal to take off running in its direction.
But she didn't care. No, she enjoyed the scream. It told her she was alive. It told her she was eating. All of her despair was washed away by it. The cry of this Gorgosaurus was music to her ears.
Once it died due to blood loss, she left the half-eaten body of the Gorgosaurus and ran towards the nearest beast. It was a small Dromaeosaurus, a small animal she usually does not eat, but she didn't care. She opened her mouth, and without stopping, she grabbed the Dromaeosaurus with her jaw, threw it into the air, and swallowed it alive.
She kept chasing after any beast she smelled, be it big or small. If they were small, she would swallow them whole and if they were larger, she would take her time eating them alive. When they died, she would leave their bodies, even if she wasn't done devouring their bodies, and continue hunting.
She was mad. Just like me. 'Hehe.'
Yeah, that was a joke. I am not mad. I might be narrating the life of a dragon and all the other living beings on this planet to myself, but I am sane. Definitely not mad. Yeah. Doing this is just a way to pass my time. Like a hobby...
Besides, madness is a subjective term.
I remember, there was a story that went life this.
Once, there was a man who received a message from god advising him to store water because the next rain would corrupt all the water in the world and make all who drank it mad. That day, the man ran around the world, telling everyone to store water before the next rain. Everyone called him mad, shunned him, and he alone stored water to prepare for the rain. He thought he could prove everyone wrong when the rain came.
Soon, the next rain, and he watched as everyone become mad. He went around the world, telling everyone they were mad. Yet, the world thought he was the one that was mad. He was shunned, beaten, and soon, this man who listened to god succumbed. He threw his stored water away and ran to the nearest river, drinking from it and joining the rest of the world in madness. The world reacts by marveling at the astonishing miracle of seeing this man who had stored the water, the one who ran around the world, calling everyone mad, the madman, becoming just like them in one day. He had somehow become sane.
So, there is the question. Did the man really get this message from god, or was he mad? Did the people in the world really turn mad after the next rain, or was it the man who was mad? Do you know who the mad ones were?
The answer was left for the reader to decide. Who, in this story, was really mad?
So, no. I am not mad.
Now that is over with, why don't we get back to the story?
The female dragon stood above the dismembered bodies of three Pachyrhinosaurus, with a smaller one that looked like the child of the two bigger ones, the white scales on her face were drenched in the mixture of green, red, and blue blood from all the animals she killed. Growling, she faced the sky, opened her mouth, and let out a cry that shook the earth itself, ripping across the air through the valley like thunder.
The cry itself was something I had never heard in my 3.2 billion years of living. It sounded like a roar, yet somehow it sounded like a shriek and a howl. No, it sounded like all those cries mixed together into one cry.
The cry of madness.
A temperate forest lies to the west of the alpine tundra and south of the grassland outside the frozen tundra. In this forest, there is an area flooded with water. Almost no trees grew on this land, allowing the afternoon sunlight to beat down on the muddy water littered with papyrus, sedges, and dead leaves. Vines twisted beautifully around the infected trunks of the few cypress trees in this flooded area, with moss hanging from their branches.
Standing on the root of a cypress tree sticking out of the water was a massive brown frog, big enough to swallow a human, its croaks echoing through the otherwise deadly silent swamp.
Suddenly, the calm waters of the swamp rippled as a dragon's head, veiled in the swamp's water, rose from underneath, causing the frog to immediately stop croaking and freeze, realizing it had been standing right next to a dangerous beast for the past hour.
The brown water quickly slid off its scales, revealing pristine snow-white scales belonging to the male white dragon. He looked into the distance, his eyes narrowing.
He felt something. But he doesn't know what.