Music for today:
Heolstor the Nightlord
https://youtu.be/_lXLz-E3syE
Chapter 476: The End
Mid Morning - Early Summer : Atlas | Bahamut
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- Hera ~
It was a beautiful morning in Atlas—blue skies, warm winds, and an atmosphere no other time or place could mimic. Everywhere you looked, there was something different. On one side of the road, there was a food stall with cuisine from an obscure corner of the globe, and opposite of it was a traditional dance performance that had been performed by young maidens for thousands of years.
It was the truest essence of Bahamut—a place where the world gathered to share what it was prideful of. No matter where you went, young dragons spread their connections, accumulated cultural knowledge, and showed off what they had learned.
It was a place to broaden horizons, crush ignorance, and correct naivety before it festered.
Such was the beauty of 'The Final Gathering'.
Before anyone had even realized, the beginning of the final stretch of their journey to adulthood was upon them—a raw, emotional, and more than anything, exciting time for everyone present.
After many long years of getting dragged around, being lectured by parents and professors alike, the time had come for the next generation to receive their final blessing, and journey out into the world on their own.
The time had finally come for them to write their own stories, and learn their own lessons.
It was very normal time to be anxious.
But even still, Krystallo stood out.
...That day, she stuck to me like glue.
Rarely parting from my side to do more than return people's greetings out of formality, her muscles were tight, her mind was worn, and her expression echoed nothing but stress.
By then, it had been months since Vasilias's disappearance, and while I repeatedly tried to reassure her that he was fine, despite my own, suppressed uncertainty, she was.. rightfully burdened.
Having spent an increasingly substantial portion of our time looking into the cult, their movements, and their ties to the Holy Kingdom while we travelled through Bahamut's cities for the ceremony, we had learned a lot that made our thoughts heavy by the end.
Originally, I had wished to keep Krystallo generally out of the deepest rings of information—hoping to let her enjoy the festival as any other youngling should, while also entertaining her desires to dig into it when we had opportunities.
For some time, even after Vasilias's disappearance, this went exactly as it should have. Trusting that Vasilias would return eventually, we took our time exploring the cities, enjoying the events of the festivals, and investigating any suspicious figures we came across.
Honestly, she was having a blast.
After having some criminals she personally investigated arrested, and finding evidence that the Holy Kingdom and the cultists were actually almost entirely separate organizations, an idea even I found unbelievably unlikely prior, she felt a great sense of accomplishment.
She was learning, and making immense progress down the path she wanted to travel the most.
In her eyes, she was easing the burden she was placing on her brother, and the world...
...And she was loving every second of it...
But eventually, our somewhat casual investigations had to take a serious turn.
Just three months prior to the final gathering in Atlas, the rumors that had been floating through the cult for some time—the claim that the disasters they foresaw in their visions was approaching—were finally being given a consistent range of predicted dates, and, shortly after, word that the Holy Kingdom was planning something in the same time frame got leaked.
At first it seemed like nothing more than a conspiracy theory. Tracing back the origins of the rumors, it seemed to initially stem from people in the lower ranks of the cult—where people with ties to the Holy Kingdom weren't terribly uncommon. This made it highly likely to be the assumption of someone who knew of the coming attack, and thoughtlessly connected the events.
But after some time, the cult's higher ups joined as well, ordering members to 'save' as many as they could before the day came by recruiting them to the cult, and urging them to leave Bahamut before the event.
Before long, the rumors spread through the normal populous as well. Knowledge of the cult rapidly became commonplace, and the attendance of the final ceremony multiplied among the older generations.. not just out of curiosity, but of worry.
Without realizing, the cult had ruined the odds of their own gamble. If things happened as predicted, the cult would grow exponentially, yes—likely to the extent of splitting Bahamut as a whole—but if not, it would dissolve into nothingness.
...And now, tens of thousands of dragons were gathering to prevent that event from happening to begin with.
Though that didn't bring me the ease I felt it should've.
Having interrogated countless cultists over the months of our investigations, we knew their visions all followed the same icon. Come the day of the ceremony, Bahamut was going to collapse into chaos, not by draconic or human terrorists, but by mountains of scales...
Every single vision had them—titanic, island-sized serpents the cult worshipped—with seemingly little terrorist involvement.
It made it almost impossible to plan for ahead of time. How would we prevent it? What would we even prepare for? A rapid evacuation? A fight?
Thinking back to my vision of Vasilias's death every time I thought about it all, it lined up too well with other testimonies we had, and painted the scale of the disaster as something far beyond what I could leave to the Cabinet.
It wasn't a disaster we were meant to be capable of stopping. It was an orchestration of fate...
...Something I.. had to get directly involved in, no matter how badly I wished to keep Krystallo uninvolved.
That was where her fun began twisting into misery...
Such a cataclysm wasn't of a scale the Holy Kingdom could orchestrate on their own, at least not entirely, but we lacked information.
Cutting our participation in the festival short, I flew us to Atlas and broke into Bahamut's Library with Krystallo to try and learn about the serpents, only to expose her to some crushing truths without finding anything worth that cost.
Thankfully, we also had the endless mass of data in the Acardi laboratory to sift through.. but bringing Krystallo there only deepened the hole I was digging her mind into.
...Even if we ended up finding the information we were looking for...
The Acardi called them Magma snakes—a swarm of scaled larvae that infested the planet's mantle like worms.
Called to the surface by excessive vibrations, noise, or surges of mana, they were monsters the likes of which even the Acardi dared not test.
But that was the extent of them.
Deemed as generally unintelligent, they were easy to avoid, and purposefully lure away from points of interest. -If that's true, that may mean the Holy Kingdom's 'attack' is just to call them to the surface.-
If that were true, the array of questions thinned.
'How were they planning to do it?'
'How could we prevent it?'
And 'How could we stop it if things went south?'
With those questions in mind, we prepared so extensively even despite the sparse Intel coming from the Holy Kingdom side of the investigation, I was confident.
Gathering every lead and rumor we could get our hands on, we prepared for every possible scenario.
Spells? Nukes? Acardi weaponry?
We were ready for it all.
Hundreds of thunderbirds flew overhead, dozens of our strongest military forces surveyed the ground, and with the help of trusted volunteers, we had every street, building, and underground pathway locked down.
Atlas had been become a vault that no one could move through without scrutiny.
But when the day was finally upon us, despite trying to urge Krystallo to be confident, she was.. in a bad state...
She had gone against my wishes and taken a very major role in the preparations for the attack, and as I suspected, the responsibility was wearing on her mind.
A single traitor or mistake, and her paws would be coated with the blood of countless...
In her mind, had Vasilias been present, she likely could have held herself together. In her eyes, he was the ultimate safety net.
No matter what went wrong.. he'd save the day.
But while she prayed endlessly for his return, I had to muffled those prayers.
While shameless.. and perhaps selfish.. that day, he had to stay away.
No matter how badly the situation turned out, so long as he stayed away, it meant we would have at least changed fate enough to avoid my vision...
...To avoid the worst case scenario...
But the goal wasn't dodging loss, it was manifesting victory.
We had done everything we could to be as prepared as we possibly could be. Even with a thousand years of preparation, nothing would change.
So, as the event approached, rather than watching every tiny step I made, I set my sights on the horizon, and readied myself for whatever was to come.
With several hours until the fated speech at sunset, the event that would set everything off, I let out some strain with a final, heavy breath.
The countdown had begun, and with a single notice from a single security member, I was prepared to activate the countless countermeasures we installed across the city.
However, as I opened my eyes after releasing that breath and looked up to see an orange flare rising over the rooftops on the horizon...
...My confidence was relabeled as arrogance...
Before I could even twist my divinity to slow time, the ground fractured and lifted before the entire city was washed with a light that eclipsed the sun.
*FLLLLAAASHHH* No one had a chance to react... In an instant, the youngest dragons were reduced to ash, those old enough to wear tempered scales had their organs crushed into a boiling soup, and the oldest being crushed or peppered by fragmenting debris.
No one had a chance to think.. respond.. or even scream. The city was simply melted from beneath as if it were the cap of a volcano being blown off.
Thousands, no... Tens of thousands died instantly...
Curling my wings around Krystallo, I threw up barriers as fast as I could, but it wasn't fast enough.
"AAAAGHH-!" Her scream pierced my skull like no other... Time slowed with the churning of my divinity, but it only prolonged the horror...
Krystallo's front leg had been completely mangled, hanging on by a shredded flap of hide and scales, with her wings similarly ruined, and right eye bleeding profusely where a rock had nearly pierced through her skull.
She was.. lucky to be alive...
But sometimes luck wasn't good enough...
Taking to the air in a complete panic, it wasn't just our district, but dozens being obliterated simultaneously...
Red mist, chunks of bone, and splatters of flesh shot into the sky over the center of every shockwave like a scene straight from a nightmare.
'It was a dream'... It had to be...
But it wasn't...
"AAAAHHH-!" Krystallos scream.. her tears.. her trembling.. it was all carved into my soul like a dagger across my chest.
And somehow.. that was only beginning...
As the flashes settled to reveal the field of lifeless bodies, mangled and scattered limbs, pools of organs and blood, all boiling under the heat of half-molten rubble, 'they' came.
Called to the surface by the shockwaves of the blasts, the serpents arrived shortly after the present ancients and elders descended to help those who were savable.
*RRRRRRUMBLE* Arcing across the surface with washes of molten rock in their wake, the serpents dragged their open maw across the surface, indiscriminately gulping down whatever crossed their path.. building.. corpse.. or dragon...
It was the disaster that had been foretold, yes, but.. seeing it with my own eyes was different than hearing the cultists' stories...
It was.. horrific...
"UWAAAH!" Even years later, the nightmare haunted me whenever I closed my eyes...
I couldn't hardly sleep.. and when I did, I'd wake up with a jolt.
After eventually having to give Krystallo to someone trustworthy in order to deal with the serpents myself, I prayed she could reach someone capable before it was too late, but...
Looking into the center of my curl, nestled into my side, I set my eyes on Krystallo, still breathing.. flinching with a grimace as she shared the nightmare I did.. but while wearing a harness that covered her wings, a prosthetic leg.. and a covering over her lost eye...
The damage was essentially permanent, with her only chance at healing being a miracle in her next, distant dragon sleep.. and yet somehow.. that was the best news I had...
By the time I had dealt with the serpents, taking serious damage myself, Bahamut's society had collapsed almost entirely. The revealing of my existence was only salt in the wound...
A huge majority of the youngest generation was dead.. the cult had gotten a chokehold on many.. and the handful remaining afterward left to try and start a new life amongst the humans.
The Cabinet's population was fractioned.. my name was further sullied.. and as a whole, Bahamut was no more...
With the sudden climate shift and ice age that followed, a majority of the largely vacant cities had been almost entirely leveled by glaciers, and over the course of the next decade, hardly anyone remained on the continent...
...And truthfully, I couldn't blame them...
The end of draconic society had come.. and there was nothing I could do to stop the decline even with mountains of gold that seemed almost worthless after everything was done...
"Haah..." Every breath I took was laden with regret and sorrow.. but in the end, there was nothing I could do...
Even as the unforgettable figure of Vasilias laid his shadow over me, I kept my head down.. my eyes below his paws...
I.. couldn't bring myself to look him in the eyes, even if I told myself it was just an illusion...
I.. was no longer worthy of it...
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