Ash fell like black snow.
The capital of Eirenos no longer had a name, only cinders and silence where cities once sang. Streets had melted into a river of despair, palaces gutted to skeletons, towers leaning like burnt matchsticks against the bloodied ground. The stench of scorched flesh clung to the wind, heavy and threatening, curling through the ruins as if the air itself mourned.
From above, a shadow uncoiled.
Wings wider than stormfronts beat once, stirring the smoke into whirling tempests. The The Black Dragon—its scales a tapestry of darkness—descended through the cloud of its own making. The heat rose off its flanks in quivering waves. Beneath its claws, the broken remnants of Eirenos steamed.
The dragon tilted its horned head, exhaling a low growl that rippled through the charred landscape.
"Done already?" its voice rumbled like thunder echoing through stone. "How dull."
It dragged a talon through the ruins, carving trenches in the molten earth, watching the fire lick back at the wound it made. A single golden eye narrowed, bored. The fight had lasted mere minutes...or should he say, massacre. Mortals. So fragile, so fleeting. So weak. Their screams always ended soon. Far too soon. How boring.
The dragon sniffed the air. No scent worth the chase remained. He had been hearing of the warriors in this nation, their feats and glory so he had come to experience such delight himself.
"Pitiful," he murmured, and the mountains shuddered in answer. "Such effortless slaughter offends me."
With a final sweep of its wings, the dragon lifted off. The gust flattened what was left of the city, scattering bones and banners into the wind. A roar followed—bored, weary—rolling through the heavens like a dirge before it vanished into the clouds.
Silence returned. Only the crackle of dying fire remained.
******
Hours later, beneath the smoke-veiled dawn, a handful of survivors crawled from the wreckage. Faces smeared with soot, eyes hollow, clothes burned to rags.
One man, his arm in a blood-stained sling, spat into the ashes.
"Curse that beast," he hissed. "Curse its kind and the sky that bore it."
"You curse the sky, Odey" said an elderly woman, her voice trembling, "and yet it's all that still watches us."
"Hmph." Odey turned away, irritation tightening his jaw.
They gathered in what had once been the city square—a crater now, its marble fountain split open like a wound. Someone lit a torch, though there was little left to burn.
"We're not the first to meet this fate," the older survivor rasped. "I've heard the other unfortunate nations fled north after their ruin. They say they're heading to Adistaktos."
A murmur swept the group. Even speaking the name felt dangerous.
"You want to serve them, Dominus?" the wounded man barked. "After what they've done?" his voice stretched thin with pain as he clutched his chest
"Serve or die," said another, a thin boy clutching a charred amulet. "What else is left? We rebuild, and another dragon will come. They always come."
"Better to live beneath their talons," someone whispered, "than be crushed beneath their fire."
An argument broke like a storm—rage and desperation tangled in every voice.
"They slaughtered our children!"
"And yet we still breathe!"
"Only because that monster grew bored!"
A silence followed. Thick, shameful, final. The truth lay bare for them to see: boredom was mercy. The dragon had left not out of pity, but indifference.
At last, Dominus spoke again.
"Adistaktos is far. None who walk ever return. But those who reach it… they say the dragons let some serve. They eat well. They live."
"And the rest?" the woman asked quietly.
He didn't answer. Everyone knew the fate that awaited them.
Still, by dawn, they were walking north. What remained of Eirenos, dragging its fear and hope through the wilderness, chasing the faint, shimmering lie; that a better life still existed somewhere among the clouds, in their enemies arms.
*******
The Black Dragon rose higher, slicing through the storm-wracked sky until the mortal world disappeared beneath the clouds. The wind grew thin, the light sharper, until even the sun seemed to bow before the vast silhouette ahead.
Adistaktos.
It was less a city than a celestial wound—vast and gleaming, carved into the marrow of the heavens. Mountains thrust upward like the bones of titans, their peaks wrapped in jasmine mists and auroral fire. Lightning slithered lazily between spires, and rivers of light flowed through the air like molten stars.
At its entrance stood the monumental gate.
Over sixty feet tall, it loomed like a fallen knight hammered into shape. Obsidian slabs, veined with rivers of gold, pulsed faintly as if alive—each breath of wind setting off glimmers that danced like trapped souls. The gold had been poured by hand from the blood of nations; the obsidian mined from the Tungsten Wolves' veins. To touch the gate was to feel time itself hum.
As the dragon approached, the gate trembled. Its hinges, older than kings, groaned open. The air rushed inward, heavy with magic and heat. Beyond it, the domain unfolded. A continent suspended in mist.
Thousands of palaces sprawled across terraces of cloudstone—a living celestial mineral, a luminous and semi-transparent marble forged from draconic fire and the condensation of magic in the highest strata of the sky—and crystal. Some hung from the undersides of floating cliffs, their foundations bound by roots of molten gold; others speared upward into the firmament, their spires wreathed in dragonfire and crowned with diamond sigils that turned slowly around their sires like sentient constellations.
Every palace sang. The walls themselves thrummed faintly with the pulse of the creatures that built them—dragons so vast their breath could snuff suns.
Through the haze, the silhouettes of other dragons stirred. Their eyes glimmered in the clouds like distant stars.
The Black Dragon's shadow swept across them as it landed upon its perch. Below, the wind roared against the citadel's endless expanse.
It exhaled, a slow plume of smoke curling upward like memory.
"The world grows quieter each century." it murmured
Far below, mortals trudged toward their gods, unaware that even among dragons, boredom was a hunger that never died, and cruelty toward the weak, a pastime to fill their endless immortality.
High above them all, Adistaktos glowed, a heaven carved for the most dangerous of Dragons.