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The Dark Lord Gillian - Tales of Prompted Madness (Complete)
Chapter 89: Gillian Arc - Remember, Congrad?

Chapter 89: Gillian Arc - Remember, Congrad?

[WP] Ages ago, an evil warlock learned the secret of immortality. He is feared throughout the lands and thought of as a God. Meanwhile, you were granted the gift of reincarnation. As the centuries go by, you and the warlock gain a sort of rapport. You are, after all the only thing he can't destroy.

...

In the shadows of the Blackened Spire, flames sputtered over burning scents not meant of mortal description. Rising on the tendrils of vapor and smoke to catch a faint wind, horrors which belonged only to the damned.

The once great Army of Faith had followed through in its service of the gods, by joining them.

From beneath their sources, grinning skulls smiled to no one, sighing out the last breath of coal and carbon towards the air. In the center of it all, the dead and long since dying passed to cinders, two men stood in silence. One young, still strong against the passage of time, and another old- withered as if a tree left with only enough rain to survive- yet never thrive. Beyond the quiet draw of lungs between the two, not a word was said.

Swirling in the wind, the ashen flames faded on the battle field. Portions of armor and bone peeking out from the blanket of ethereal like tiny mountains on an endless field. Their essence seemed to current, winding about the two men who watched as they crested, forming a strange eye of black. An eye of a storm already passed.

"Do you remember yet, Congrad?" Though the wrinkled and hunched man stood but barely, heavy lean upon the gnarled wood of his staff, the voice seemed indifferent. No rasp of weakness, nor heave of the ages weighing down on its tone. "Do you know who I am?"

The smoke continued to swirl, approaching as the bent back straightened, a single withered palm reaching out to breach the strange circle of cloud that had formed. A hand that seemed to soak in the blackness of it, as if it thirsted for the deaths which passed.

The younger man said nothing as he watched, witness to the strange display as the smoke rose thicker, pulling towards and around them in an endless spin of a powerful storm. Eyes that both understood and did not, fixated entirely on the strange figure before him, whose wrist and forearms had slipped deeper towards the black shade.

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"Ah... so it comes... Approaches as it always does along the passage of these centuries." The gnarled staff of splintered wood seemed to slip away from its own shape, uncoiling like a viper to fill out in an off-white: As if a bone bleached far too long beneath the desert's sun. "That strange memory of yours, pressed deep with the curse of your father, and his father... On and on it goes."

Faster, and faster still, the smoke rose up, and the great Blackened Spire beside them seemed an almost laughable thing. What could compare to all this death? What could compare to all this raw and tainted power? Surely not a building of stone or structure.

"As the East has always done, they have sent their armies." The bent back and wrinkled skin seemed to stretch, voice growing stronger. "And as the East has always done, they have failed."

A roar bellowed out from above the swirling smoke, on the great winds which stretched across the Western wastes of the land. The shout of an ancient and desperate glory, of a time long passed. Both sets of eyes turned to witness the Great undying Dragon scream its mortal challenge.

"But this time, and this time alone: They have sent you, Jarl Congrad. You, and that proud beast above us." A chuckle echoed out, as the smoke twisted to a torrent, thicker and thicker as the black sands lifted from the ground and tore earth to wind as the man leaned in farther still before the watching eyes. Elbow, then shoulder, staff then legs willingly stepping into a tornado of shadow and death. Soon all the remained was a pair of watching eyes and a horrid smile, barely visible in the tremendous threshold before still air and disaster.

"How long I have hunted that very creature, most might not even fathom." A smile that twisted to a terrible glow of blood-stained ivory, as the face grew to and ageless splendor. "But it is only you I can not kill."

Overhead, the Beast's roar sounded with the unmistakable heat of forbidden flame, and the clash of thunder. The sound of shrieking winds and spirits, of magic long forgotten by all of man. Magics of the gods, passed on and held to protect the very plane of existence in which they stood: The last Guardian of the world plunged towards them, spouting fiery death.

Yet, beside him the tempest struck out. Lashing with magics known only the the abomination of the man who cheated death and made it his own. A force of chaos and screaming souls, burned like fuel to the cold heat of immeasurable power. An immortal of their own creation, facing the last Ancient of the gods.

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So it was, that Jarl Congrad stood and watched the last Great Dragon die.

And so it was, he remembered.