Chapter 15: The Dragon King
(Eris)
After my mother and sister returned to the inn, we ate and went to bed.
My mother and father took the bed closest to the door while Fantasia and I slept in the remaining bed. Everyone dropped to sleep in their own time, leaving me alone with my thoughts, and the silent, frigid night.
I ate, drank and slept out of a duty to my family and for the sake of normalcy but in truth, I was always full, I was never thirsty, and as for sleep, I only slept to dream. I slept because I wanted to make my family happy and not because I needed it.
I always thought about the disparity between those who live and myself, one who does not. It seemed the one thing we had in common was dreaming.
Indeed, to dream, to dream and see memories and imagined things, to witness one's deepest fears and desires, this one thing I had in common with my family. I stared out into the black of the room, only scarcely lit by the embers in the furnace. Yes, indeed, to dream… I thought to myself as my eyes shut out the light. I always feared that when I'd open them again, I would be back in that stone coffin, with a blackened crown on my head.
A war room bathed in torchlight with a map of the area on a table with multiple glowing pawns of holographic light, both blue and red, sat in the centre of the roiling pit of kings, queens, Nocturnas and automatons. My father sat slumped over in thought.
I remember this day for its windlessness and how hot it was outside despite the heavy cloud cover.
The rulers bickered and fought over one strategy or another, voting and cancelling votes over and over again. I watched from my place at my father’s side, who was the only one of the group who was silent. The group each looked distorted and strange, like a funhouse mirror given a mouth and a form with which to voice its angry ventings and harsh jabs.
Soon, one of them asked the group to be silent and hear out my father’s opinion for our plan of attack. They leaned in and glared at him as he sat in silence. We were planning an attack on a large group of Void and necromancer forces that would either cripple them, or doom us.
We were visibly outnumbered. Our forces were starving, underequipped for such a long campaign and our war beasts were either killed, wounded, or sick. Around the table of rulers, I recognized those of the Fire, Electric, Venom, Mechanical, Dark, Metal, Stone, Time, Nocturna, and Warrior Clans, all done up in fearsome war paint and with heavy armour.
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Some were bleeding, some were far worse off than they would admit. Only I was unscathed. My father was never silent on matters such as this, he always knew what to do and when to do it.
I remember angrily chastising him for his silence, a mistake I would never repeat in another scenario. He looked up at me, a look of mild annoyance on his face before he stood up.
“You all speak as if you were afraid. You speak like children.” A growl escaped his lips as he spoke. He held something in his hands that was dripping on the floor. “You speak as though we have already lost.” He hung his head as he said these words, a darkness covering his eyes. The silence became uncomfortable and everyone turned away a touch, either tending to one of their many wounds or finding something interesting on the floor of the bastion we were stationed in. “How dare you doubt your king!” He roared at us, the doors shook with the force of his voice. “You act as though we have done nothing! As if the day is lost simply because we have fallen! Raise your heads! The enemy is more broken than they seem! See now, we ought to raise our heads, for they cannot anymore!” With a thud, he threw the severed head of a man onto the table. The silence was deafening as my father fumed, fire igniting across his body, and the shadows writhed like headless snakes.
“This man was the general of the unit we will be ambushing. Or should I say, I will be ambushing. Since you kings and queens are so quick to put your tails between your legs, and run or worse, turn and bite each other's throats and bury your noses in each other's failings.” He walked out of the room and I followed. His steps smouldered and sizzled, turning the cobbled stone black as he went.
No others followed us. My father forced me to remain at the bastion while he walked on. I watched from a parapet as he walked straight into the jaws of the enemy. As soon as he passed out of the treeline, he roared like a fierce dragon. All enemy forces assailed him, all of which fell by his cleaving blades and powers. I watched as hundreds came with pikes and spears, swords and knives. I saw him impaled and stabbed, slashed and cut, but he never bowed. I saw him take the blades from himself and snap them in half. He spread his wings and the soldiers fell away from him like autumn leaves.
He spun and slashed like a top, the look of pure emotionlessness on his face chilled me to my core. He felt no pain, he held no joy nor sorrow in his form. I watched so many bodies pile from his slaughter that I could no longer see him. I watched as the spires of that encampment crumbled, and fell by his hand alone. By the end of it, my father was completely red, caked with fresh blood from wingtip to heel. The enemy camp burned and shimmered as he set it alight while he stood in the centre of it, nothing more than a black outline and two, glowing red points for his eyes. Eyes that were dead set on me.
He took no prisoners, he captured no resources, he slaughtered their beasts of war in their stalls and he left no trace of that emplacement ever having been there with cleansing fire. He had started in the early part of the morning, when he had finished, night was falling. All I could remember were those red, heartless, unfeeling eyes as they bore into my soul. Those eyes that held no more mercy in them.
I jolted awake as I looked around the room. I was sweating and panting heavily. I was crying quietly as I got up and got to the floor. I was having a panic attack, something I’d had many times while I was alive, but now that I was dead? Never. I was afraid of the beast, the monster, the demon, the dragon, the thing sleeping in the bed just a metre from me. Oh, what a curse it was to dream.