Humans are funny. For example, contemplate the breath. This miraculous process where one drinks from the very pool of life. Humans are prone to forget just how awe-inspiring it is; many take it for granted in their day to day lives, because they are busy with “more important matters”. Such "busy" people often find themselves at the end of their lives, cruelly realizing the miracle of it all when they exhale their last and cannot partake in the joy of drinking in another lungfull. This is something that many of the gods and higher races poke endless amounts of fun at, because these kinds of priorities are fucking stupid.
Humans know as much, of course. Pretty much all their religions, spiritual paths and self-help applications hold the breath in high regard for everything from inner peace and stress-treatment to exploring the spiritual universe to perfectly measurable things like increasing their EXP gain and gaining and improving their skills. Yet, many tend not to care anyway, because they are easily distracted, and their priorities are terrible.
Archmage Khymerion suddenly remembered this little fun fact as his body failed him and his vision blurred into the nothingness beyond. There was a terrible, absolutely soul-wretching terror as he realized his breath failed him, a rage against the injustice, against the wrongness of him dying, and here.
.... then all the pain and the rage faded, as his bleeding, melting lungs gave their final sigh. Every weary muscle in his body finally relaxed after all those years, and the soft, sinking feeling of death beyond the excruciating pain of dying visited him again.
It was an exalted feeling. Much like a feather than had traveled through storms that finally, softly, touched the ground and found rest. It was peace. It was the arms of those who went before, cradling him in a collective embrace as the starry sky swallowed him and the vastness of the universe truly made itself known. Every time this happened - every time he died - it seemed almost silly to him that he had once again managed to forget about this. About breathing. It really shouldn’t be forgettable, because it was so terribly important. It was rest. It was peace. It was a new kind of inhalation, like a baby's first breath. It was warm and welcoming, sweet and soft, it was a sacredness and vastness he longed to sink into and forget himself in, the way a tired body may sink into the softest of mattresses, the way sun sinks into sun-starved skin. It was -
“*GAAAAAAASP!* MOTHERFUCKERS-” he cursed with the first enraged breath of this new life before he was even done breaking forth from his black, crystalline phylactery, “- I WILL END YOU! I WILL SPECTACULARLY END YOU!” he sputtered, wiping the black foulbeast goo from his face. (Very inefficiently so, because his hands were also covered with foulbeast goo.)
There was a quiet, softly whispering sense in the back of his head that he had just forgotten something that might be important, but he was a little busy with raging right at the moment, and so, he pushed it aside to focus on the more immediate and important matter; the fact that he had already expended way too much power on this little trip, and he still was not done.
“Bah, I’ll enjoy squeezing out all the power I can from this little backwater world, teach you to make me waste it on something as unimportant as this pathetic little place and an uneducated, classless savage…”
“... YOU’VE NOT ALWAYS BEEN THIS ANGRY OF A MAN...” said a disembodied voice that rumbled from the darkness all around him. It was a quiet, weak and almost broken voice, but unfathomably deep, like the smell of soil after rain.
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The archmage paused, collected himself, and gave a small, sheepish cough as he pretended to have been calm and collected all along.
“Ah, well. Dire times require dire solutions, old fellow.” he said and waved a hand, shaping some of his mana into a towel and a new set of clothes.
The space he was in was dark. Sound was muffled, as if spoken under a blanket. The only light came from the slightly glowing phylactery, hanging from some sort of extended network of goo-covered, metallic cables that extended into the black nothingness. Aside from them and the sole man in the ‘room’, the light reflected in absolutely nothing.
“Still, you are right. I must say, it is a little unbecoming of one such as I to lose my temper at someone as simplistic as a woman in suicidal armor. She may be strong, but she’s just an uneducated savage. Shame, when I think of what she could have become with the right education. Probably never even read a book.” he said, shaking his head sadly.
“Well, enough dwelling on such things.” Khymerion said, his voice dropping cold and hard. He raised his hands into the air, and the darkness crackled and swirled obediently around them. His eyes went black, eye-whites and irises inking over, black veins spreading across his skin.
“Come. Let us join together for this fight. This is a waste indeed of resources much needed elsewhere, but it is better than wasting time here. For their Champions dedication, I shall show them the mercy of ending their world quickly.”
“KNOW. WE ARE… STRONGER TOGETHER….” the disembodied voice rumbled and rattled the air, like the last sigh of a behemoth's death throes.
“Ah, yes indeed.” Khymerion said with a pleasant smile, his entire skin soon covered in that unsettling, void-black darkness, his eyes, his teeth too. Then that wrong-ish dark seeped out of his skin, into tendrils that reached towards the invisible ceiling, and attached there. They reached around him like a cocoon. His new body went limp as they raised him just slightly off the ground, like the phylactery was, suspending him.
Then the darkness faded, and he could seeeeeeeeeeeee.
-------
Stormshards hooves clinked against the crystal hide of the amalgamation dragon. As he ducked under cover from the all-consuming pillars of pearly white dragonfire that the amalgamation dragon failed to barrel out of the way of, Estelle looked around. The dragons hide was cracked, all over; that abyssal darkness seeped out of its wounds like smoke from the sands of a barely dormant volcano.
She spotted what she searched for soon thereafter; a crack larger than the rest of them, in between two colors of crystal that seemed almost haphazardly attached together. The gap paled compared to the dragons size, but just this small wound on it was like a gaping ravine leading down into nothing.
“You should wait here, Stormshard.” Estelle said and dismounted the robot crystal unicorn. “There’s no way that’s right, so I’ll be heading in there. See what I can find.”
“Neigh!” Stormshard said and shook his mane.
“There’s no helping it. I simply have a higher chance of surviving in there for long enough to cause some internal damage. Worst case, though, it’s just foulness in there and we both dissolve.”
“Neigh, neigh!”
“Yeah, but what else can we do right now?” Estelle said and gestured around her, at the great plains below the Lair where, with her eagle vision skill, she could see the valiant armies of humanity do battle against the foulspawn. “Every second the breach remains open, there are more and more foulspawn forming. It is not an immediate problem as long as the army stands, but we cannot know how long we have until bigger things begin to come through.”
“... neigh?”
“Aaw, c’mon. Do it for me.” Estelle said with a gentle smile and patted his sad muzzle. “Just wait here and have some faith in me, will you? I’ll probably be fine anyway; if it looks totally hopeless, I’ll just climb back out and we’ll try something else.”
Stormy’s ears dropped, but he didn’t say anything more.
Estelle peered over the edge of the wound ravine, black smoke rising like from a resting geyser. Down there in the depths, nothing was visible. She felt no fear as she reached to grab the crystal with her hands to start and lower herself down.