ORIGIN

Every day that elapsed in this cavern, Lord Dhracia observed. The ash in the air was an echo of time—an echo left to degrade eternally in this chamber until the artifacts of its final vibrations were but a slough, and yet every echo she still received. She could feel it in the air, how its composition now burned where once it dripped. She could taste it, beyond the tar of smoke, the atmosphere electrifying like the distant cousin of its creation, the End of all things—the true taste was that of ozone, white-blue and static and insulting. See, it didn’t used to be like this. These walls saw her once before, when they were darker, bending holographically in mercurial blacks and not pale or throbbing with fire. Few things could bleach them, but they were, it was done. Yes, this was an act of desecration. Deliberate, and hypocritical. And it pleased her to see it burn.

This was supposed to be the hub, the core, plasma and neurons hungrily pulled tighter and tighter, destined by atomic seduction to coalesce into stronger things. It still was, just in a different way. She could feel the pull from Pisces; it was her molecular nature to want to be there, because all things did come from Natural Order, and she loved to watch Progenitor smolder. And on arrival, she found it was exactly what she expected. Vibrant and infested. Empty of the beautiful things that churned and spat out other things, and instead littered with the biological residue of interference. It could have made her ill, if not for the countervailing fact that it was all wreathed in delicious fire.

The Lord moved like a shark through the tropics, command worn on her foreboding fin, overriding the steer of the fires. Her trajectory was immutable. She tasted blood. The destroyer, the beast, his bleeding heart. She cut through bedlam relentless for him—whoever might endure this inferno would see her wield it like she was the one who made it. Twisting, heated winds lashed erratically out of her airspace, and flames writhed and screamed like her footsteps warped them into submission.

They bent to her, recognized her, distorted for her,

Lord of this Chaotic Realm.

That devouring sea of incandescence parted, and it lead her toward the thrumming organ in the fetal, venous map of the nest’s single egg. Shadows rippled overhead as she went. Shadows, and flares of light as new fires touched the air, but she remained undeterred until before her stood the spire in full—the spire to the cave as the transparent heart twitching in the body of a bulgy-eyed embryo was to the nest. Innocuous, until you remember that His nest is not one built by birds.

The shadow swelled across her back, and Lord Dhracia turned the world around her to see it. It all fell into place in the cradle of fire and smoke: his emberous, smoldering wings. His hide the event horizon of destruction. Enchanting, the smog that coiled from his nose and teeth; ribbons that she would leaf through with idle fingers. Inside him was the scalding red nucleus of his nativity: his anger, his injustice. The great dragon bore down on her with rage unbridled and unmatched by anything else in existence, so contrived by his schematics, like she was promised. He shook the earth when he struck it with his feet, and bellowed with heliacal storm.

Hollow cracks shuddered reverently across the spire. Even it could not outmatch the dragon’s sheer hatred.

Death was laser focused on her. But this Chaos Beast seems to have forgotten how easily she whispers death around her, how merely, among countless other aftermaths.

He trembled the ground with a titanic heaving step. Lord Dhracia countered without so much as a flourish, nor move that was seen, but the steadfast grip of her stare. The aperture narrowed in impending doom—flagrant Raheerah, disobedient Raheerah, looking at her as the riotous hellion he’d always been. She knew he wasn’t ignorant, no, all of this—

It was in his irradiated programming. A viral cell sent to wage war on its host.

Lord Dhracia didn’t take it personally.

Raheerah howled and coiled his neck, and shot toward her, flames strafing from his gums. And—for the first time in a long time, she felt her heart beat excitedly.

A single thundering clap that resonated a brush with mortality,

Before she raised her hand with the moonstone nestled in her palm. And it reignited. A snap, a gasp of life rushing back to its haunted crystal matrix, where pearlescent ghosts were forever galvanized with only enough sentience to recite old neural loops. And he felt it—the deep and intimate resonance that followed. He heard the auroral winds of her sighs and hymns, all at once smothering him, trapping him. The dragon froze suddenly then, and his fires froze around him, and he beheld the heart that stirred with life once more.

Lord Dhracia extended the hand to him. Under his reverent breaths, Dawa hummed intangible.

“Today you are repossessed,” Lord Dhracia said, scripture implied in the warmth of her hand nurturing the stone. “I will disassemble you to memories bobbing in your visceral soup, and rebuild you until your pieces become annihilation’s most explosive shape. You will know the pain of being dissected and put back together a hundred times more before your tenure is fulfilled.”

The Chaos Beast churned deeply within himself. Those words were ultimate Fate. And while every fiber of his mortal vessel screamed to resist it, he became reminded of the futility of it when Lord Dhracia turned the stone in the light, and he recognized that her voice was not extended to him at all.

It would all be Dawa’s pain.

“Cruel Fate,” the dragon’s soul was what spoke from dark within his chasm. “What compels us to obey when our firmaments are reduced to torment? Why do we drink from your well when we know it is suffused with poison?” he reverberated, desperately angry but suffocated in magnitude by her purposeful clasping hands. Raheerah, Chaos Beast, humbled again to teeth in chains.

Lord Dhracia clutched the stone close to her breast, and instead offered her other hand, gracious, to his nose. “His Servants obey no true authority,” she said. “It is entropy which compels you. Mindless, beautiful entropy, which has always been yours. You wished to harness it—as I did, long ago—so this, this is not your torment, Raheerah,” the Lord cooed his name, her newest toy, and leaned into the shimmer of heat on his scales to whisper, “all of this is the expense of agency.”

He craved to destroy, so he would be made to destroy.

“Do you understand?” she beckoned.

Raheerah, a man once teeming with selfish, reckless rage, had followed his lover, who followed her fathers into the House of Chaos. His gambit was made for love: and so eternal union of love was his, in exchange for what their union could catalyze. Dawa’s pain as Raheerah’s fuel. That was how it was destined to be for the rest of eternity.

The dragon made his surrender a woeful quake, his great head brought back and pealed, and the fires he caused wailed with him. But there was nothing he could do—he was bound—he was Dawa’s—and Dawa belonged to Lord Dhracia.

Defeat slumped the dragon into Lord Dhracia’s command. The inky black incinerator deferred to her, and Lord Dhracia knighted him as hers with a featherlight stroke of her fingers on his jaw. And then, her wrath dragged toward the repulsive spire behind her back. Whether or not she had gained an audience for consorting with the Chaos Beast, she felt something watching, and it coaxed malevolence to manifest on her brow.

Somebody else had come to greet their Lord.

His drifting image had followed, the stag desperate to keep track of Raheerah's movements. He himself struggled to stay close; the flames were roaring through Tunnel N. He could not follow. He'd considered going around, to Tunnel I, but to travel and maintain his spell both would have been nearly impossible.

Instead Pride stood silent at the mouth of N, watching with unseeing eyes as molten rock dripped and flames gnawed at stone. His mind, rather, was with his other: his drifting-self, incorporeal and swift. It was behind Raheerah--even a form of energy had to catch up to the beast of beating wings--but he had caught much of what had happened. He couldn't hear it all--couldn't see it all; his other-self he left crouching in the dark, or as close to dark as it could get.

His mind sharpened on this stranger. There was something... about it. He could not have said what, being unfamiliar with such power, with even the nature of her; but something terrifying, something overwhelmingly strong. Something horrible. It was clear, too, in the way that the dragon bent his head. Clear in the quiet cracks that appeared, splaying weakly, across the surface of the Spire. Some of the exchange was lost to the stag, and he fought to focus, refusing to lose sight of what might happen next.

Though there was fear in him, too: a sense that he didn't want to see. That he would not want to be here, when whatever happened next, happened.

His magicka obeyed, and relief and dread both flickered through him. The white stag stood silent in the tunnel, and the white stag stood in Polaris; and he had never felt so grateful that he was here, and his other was the one observing. Yet even here he feared: what if whatever-she-was saw him? Saw his other, and saw through it, saw him, somehow, beyond?

...What was she?

It was just a twitch, a suggestion in the ripple of spacetime--and then all of existence burst into anarchy.

Where the Lord was aware the air had changed and warmed with the body heat of some other participant, she hadn't pinpointed exactly who it was, for so many heat signatures in this cave already made her points of interest merge among their creations. It was a clever device, if made to sheath themselves from her prying stare, but it only protected them for so long. No matter the means, she made herself known--

The Master of Atmosphere.

A deluge of arrows flung first from the blur that dropped out of the vents.

There was scarcely a passage of time before they hit their mark. The sharp clatter of hearts on stone coincided with the sting, biting, horribly burrowing, electrifying--one plunged deeply into the flesh above her right breast, another in her left thigh, all the rest bouncing haphazardly off of the floor, or Raheerah's hide as the Chaos Beast suddenly shifted to shield his tamer from the onslaught. The dragon coiled, parted his maw, uttered another shattering roar, but Lord Dhracia remained frozen in time, surprised by the arrows that pierced her. That so threatened her perfection, and, simultaneously, merely advanced it.

It was unexpected, confessedly; but then again, Lord Dhracia had anticipated that things would corrupt in the wake of this nest's assimilation. She'd not been prepared for an all-out attack without warning, but maybe she'd been too quick to assume that at least those capable of damaging her were still in a position where they remembered the risk it posed.

The pain was never something she would forget. Lord Dhracia had always known pain, and this was no different; if anything, it was exhilarating, the way these foreign weapons sought to split her. The crackle of electricity that dared probe at her skin. The rotten air in her lungs trembled, and she focused her eyes on the centaur in time to see her draw her bow once more. Fire an arrow, for her heart, for her heart,

Which she caught in her hand with viper accuracy.

At that moment, Raheerah's massive wing unfolded and slid in front of her, receiving the twelfth arrow which sunk past his leather wing and hung suspended where it had broke through, that gleaming stone she could see on its tip--once the core of a beast Lord Dhracia might have commanded.

The pain blossomed like a flower. Something loosed from its chamber in her chest sputtered up her throat. Was this... blood?

The Chaos Beast wrenched his head back, his maw dripping fire, preparing to unleash his inferno upon the traitor before he suddenly stopped; in the next second that elapsed, neither his wing nor Lord Dhracia moved.

White knuckles surrounded the shaft of that arrow. Her wrath in tight, quivering muscles, unwilling to yet peel open again; she had to steal a moment's reprieve to make sense of what happened. Down she peered at the object of deceit which pointed hungrily for her one proneness; it gleamed at its sharpened head, and glimmered under the tufted and familiar pale fletching, designed specifically for shattering creatures like her. Lord Dhracia was powerful, almost infinitely, but not infallibly; she could have fallen had one of those arrows chipped the heart that lay within her ribs, not beating but surging and dripping. This, too, was deliberate. Dare she say contrived.

Pinching back pain, she flourished with fresh anger. The gall. Not of ungratefulness, which Lord Dhracia could have argued for too, but that this peon would consider that she was enough to overthrow her. That Lord Dhracia could even be pricked by the claws of her slaughter. Her anger doubled in the lurking revelation that it was even possible--the two arrows had impaled her. That this had even happened at all was unacceptable. Her throat tickled, unwilling to yield to the leak of blood from her wound until it came coughing up, spotting her lip. No. She would not be insulted. She snapped the thin bone shaft of the arrow, discarding it while she dabbed the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. Dawa's stone was tucked safely away. It was time to make an example of those who squandered what her House of Chaos had provided them.

A single current of intention swept through Lord Dhracia and the Chaos Beast. Raheerah's great wing pointed, folding like a curtain guided away from the spectacle it concealed, and his body twisted around her and away. She was once more under the light of these caves, under all eyes--but Raheerah hissed and spat fire at any creature he saw move, reserving the center stage for Her. Her vengeance. Her power.

The centaur became the target of all her fury focused into a blinding, burning point. A magnificent ripple of energy sheared the air, accompanied by that distant and concentrated drone of things displaced; like the crack of a thundercloud, it sparked and bruised under her skin, blooming onyx contusions. The solar flare of void magic, bolstering within its vessel. The arrows stuck in her skin trembled, and from their burrows they bled black; oily, poisonous and viscous, until the points ejected and clattered to the stone. It stung, feeling air on her rended flesh, but that just strengthened the clench of her jaw. A shine of holographic silver flared underneath her scarred brow, no--luminous green--

The ground groaned, and from inky cracks in the stone, a thick sheet of shadow rapidly encroached. It vaulted up from the dust and crawled disgustingly along the faces of the spire's vibrant blue, racing, throbbing at first as waves, crashing, until from their froth sprouted hands and palms and fingers, grasping. Vying. They made the centaur their greatest ambition to ensnare, to twist, to suffocate. The darkness curled possessively around each limb it could climb, swelling at each contact made, like a virus, a disease--grabbing and pulling at Jupiter, wrangling her struggles like they were idle squirms. One by one, giant, glassy bulbs of chartreuse eyes peeled open, blinking intrusively as they lolled over the writhing cocoon of the seized Master.

“A pity such finely matured biomass is wasted on such a witless, withered brainstem,” she spoke without any such indication of sympathy, observing the show. “Your next iteration will surely be an improvement.”

Lord Dhracia need only wait for the servant to deliver her spider's meal. She soaked in the resonance of Jupiter's furious howls, shrieks of resistance and despair; like sweet honey to her ears. It was ice upon the burn of her ruptured flesh. Jupiter was left pinned to the ground between Lord Dhracia and the spire. She merely watched as her servant--a pleasant surprise to find one so robust here, a sign that some of these things could be salvaged--razed the Master with vile radiation, stripping her skin in violence and hunger. Things scattered in the mayhem; a pouch full of stones, sharpened arrowheads, scraps. Their gleam caught Lord Dhracia's eye, but she did not bid Senka to stop quite yet.

Worse--the ceiling above shuddered and gasped. An infinite echo of curious chatters began to swell out of the darkness. And with it, long mucus strings of black. The same ooze that coursed through Lord Dhracia's veins, the same that lie strewn through this nest in puddles. The same which made the aqueous, mutable bodies of Batcat's progeny. The dozens of them which had been lying in wait, unseen, tunneling endlessly through the substrate between the nest and what lie beyond in search of more and more to consume. She called them and they arrived, hungry, wild and blind.

“And Jupiter,” she hummed innocuously, “I will have you remember this moment.”

Of the perverted kinship Jupiter made with the erroneous Batcat, Lord Dhracia was unaware. It only served her to have access to the results of such unmonitored proliferation; the flood that Jupiter had fostered. She harnessed them, a tidal wave of darkness and corruption, and watched with utmost satisfaction as they descended onto Jupiter as well. The scene became reminiscent of a feeding frenzy, wild sharks with gnashing jaws thrashing in crimson water. Lashing, whipping darkness, screeching jaws and maddened wings. She caught glimpses of the gaping eyes before they rolled into themselves and blinked into darkness and reappeared in flickering, pupil-screaming brightness, feral with feeding. It was an explosion of carnage as they ripped Jupiter into chunk after chunk of twitching meat. Blood and gore in fresh, throbbing slumps. Her screams ebbed into the howl of the inferno.

Lord Dhracia was satisfied, but she was not pleased.

When the body had become no longer a body, it was Senka who detached first, ripping and recompiling into the hairless, mutated effigy of creation. Skulking closer, a growling and seething hound, with a cleft of flesh in her jaw. The beast presented it, the scuffed and sullied stone of the Master swaddled in muscle and fat. Lord Dhracia claimed the gift. Jupiter joined Dawa.

Her focus on the tide of hounds had thinned. They were beginning to break apart from the feeding site, now that their prey was shredded. Some of them took off with pieces of Jupiter in their teeth. Others snarled and snapped at one another, fighting for a haggard cut. Lord Dhracia released them, severing them from the well of her magic, and walked toward the remains. Some of the hounds salivated at her, only for Raheerah to loom overhead, clipping his great maw and splitting their dark liquid bodies. She didn't care. They would be replenished. Senka coiled around her feet too, in loyal wisps, in shrill and cackling echoes, and warded off what of Batcat's spawn remained while Dhracia poured over the mess.

Bones. Thick puddles of blood. Shards of skull, scraps of cloth, the shattered remains of the Master's bow. And that pouch of stones that spilled. Something powerful emanated from among them, too. If it was strong enough for Jupiter to covet, then it was worth assessment; and so, if only to slight Jupiter and her noble goal, she plucked the stone--a point of jagged pink morganite--and added it to her collection.

Jupiter would serve Chaos again. Perhaps with a more focused drive, next time; perhaps mindless, she hadn't yet decided. The rest of this--beautiful rot--she would make a note to revive later on.

The Lord hailed her Chaos Beast with an idle hand. “Go. Meditate on the advent of your next death,” she said, and dismissed him. The dragon--his body convulsed in a way it never had before. On her command, he turned slick, shining, illusory. His body congealed and loosened, until it fell to gobs. He had not ever been reduced to his primordial soup before, and it sounded of as much pain as it looked. The dragon shrieked while the entirety of his volume degraded into shadows similar to Senka, only his was a tar that was boiling, bubbling as it slid into the cracks of the earth and vanished.

With the servant surging behind her, Lord Dhracia turned away from the spire. It pained her to have to leave it here; but she was already pushing boundaries with how much she had expended today. She would not withstand that explosive aftermath if she were to remove it like she should.

She walked, and paused to pluck one of Jupiter's arrows from the floor.

Seems she has one last subject to discuss with the bird.

Pride had forgotten to breathe.

He realized only when his vision swam, when his magicka flickered, and he gasped a sharp breath and hastened to pour his power back into the link.

Much of it he had been unable to hear, purely from distance. But he had seen, and that--that was enough.

Raheerah, who had come, who had tormented and killed them, who had bellowed for someone unknown, seemed to have bowed before this strange, powerful, pricklingly-unsettling being. And then, in the distance: a figure, falling from above, barely-spotted before it launched a series of attacks--its figure half-blocked from his vision by the dragon's vast wings.

Shadows. Bats. Death-..? Pride could not be certain. He didn't know Jupiter; he had never met her, and did not recognize her. Nor did he recognize the sleek, furless thing wearing cloth and pelts draped around it. But the power--that he recognized. The shadows, the oily slickness, the toxic green glow--these he had seen, here and there, throughout his life.

But what did they mean-? The screaming, the bat swarm, these left him in shock, but he could not know what had happened. From his perspective, this stranger, this powerful being that had appeared and taken Raheerah in hand--surely she must be some sort of guardian, a protector in the caves? And when she reduced Raheerah to nothing but screaming (horribly screaming, and even Pride had to fight back horror) goop, this further reinforced his belief.

He decided to catch up, if he could--but he had quite a way to come. He would, he decided, send his double this way--and loop around, himself, toward the other entrance to Polaris from Orion. It would be quite the run, but the stag was swift and he knew the way well, for Orion--decimated though it was--was his home.

He wished that he knew where Nassir was, and whether the leopard was all right--but he wished to find this stranger, to speak with her, to ask her who she was--and what that power had been. To ask where Raheerah had come from, and whether there were more where he had come from.

But dread lurked in the white stag's heart. Again, even from a distance, even viewed through magic's eyes, there was something fundamentally terrible about this stranger. Reluctance gripped him--but logic pushed him on.