The cacophony of war was a distant roar, a percussive backdrop of steel, stone, and screams from the slopes of the Emerald Ascension. Up here, on the windswept summit, the world had shrunk to the space between two combatants. Dalazar Denkou, the Emerald King, felt the storm of the invasion below as a tremor in his bones, but his gaze, sharp and analytical, was locked on the epicenter of a far greater tempest: the woman before him. Kilik.
His Magic Sense, a Denkou trait that allowed them to sense and echiper other forms of magic, screamed an unrelenting alarm. She was barely taller than his own sword, a compact frame of whipcord muscle and impossible grace, yet the magical pressure she exuded was suffocating, a weight like a collapsed star. It was the aura of something primeval, a colossal power masquerading in a deceptively small vessel. He had seen the meteor she rode down from the heavens, a brilliant scar across the morning sky, and still, a part of him struggled to reconcile the cataclysmic entry with the person standing there.
Then she had spoken, her voice a low murmur against the wind, yet each word landed like a hammer blow against the foundation of his kingdom. She spoke of his ancestors, the first Denkou clans, and their sin—the colonization of these sacred mountains, wrested from the Azerri, a land they had no right to claim. A familiar, bitter history. But it was her identity that made the pieces click into a horrifying new picture. An Atlantean. The scales that shimmered across her skin, not like fish but like captured nebulae and swirling galaxies, were testament to it.
The old conflicts, the wars for the coastlines just after the Denkou’s pilgrimage of pillage… it was all written in blood-soaked history texts. But that was ancient history. Why now? And why, in the name of all the spirits, would an Atlantean, a child of the deep, ally with the B’halian Empire—a landlocked, tyrannical regime known for its enslavemnt of other non-human races? The fragile peace, the hope he’d felt seeing Atlantean delegates at the Neo festival just months ago, sharing music and food with his people… it all felt like a cruel joke.
He had no time to voice the thousand questions warring in his mind. Before the first syllable of a protest could form, she moved. It wasn’t just speed; it was a violation of physics, a fold in the space between them. One moment she was twenty paces away, the next her blade was whispering for the blood in his throat.
In the end, the reasons mattered little. She was an enemy commander on his soil, and his people were dying. He was the Emerald King. He would not yield.
His singular, gauntleted hand was a blur of steel and emerald light, meeting her assault with a deafening clang that cracked the very air. The shockwave of their meeting blew dust and loose stone from the summit in a violent halo. Draconic magic, raw and crushing as the abyssal pressure of the deep sea, met the crackling, untamed fury of Esoteric Lightning. The mountaintop vanished in a blinding flash of emerald and azure. The battle for the Emerald Ascension had begun.
Her strength was a physical heresy. The force that traveled up his arm from her blade was staggering, a living tide of power that threatened to buckle his knees and shatter his bones. He knew of Atlantean physiology; they were dense, sturdy, adapted to the crushing depths. But this was something else entirely. This was the strength of a god packed into a mortal frame. Every ounce of his considerable power was focused on the singular act of not being cleaved in two.
In that moment… her power skyrocketed.
His Magic Sense shrieked. The vast, ambient ocean of her magic was now consolidating, pouring into her muscles, her bones, her very cells. Enhancement magic, of a potency he had never conceived.
A grim smile touched Dalazar’s lips. "Two can play at that game."
Green lightning, the sacred inheritance of the Emerald Soul, erupted from him. It was not a shell, but an infusion. His silver dreadlocks writhed like living serpents, each strand crackling with verdant energy. The power surged through him, an exhilarating fire that banished fatigue and ignited his cells with magical might. He roared, pushing her back a single, hard-won inch.
They became a whirlwind of lethal intent. Their exchange was a blur of afterimages, a storm of strikes too fast for any mortal eye to follow. Each blow Kilik landed was not just a strike, but a wave building upon the last. Her power was cumulative, a relentless tsunami that eroded his defenses with every crashing impact. He could feel his guard weakening, the lightning in his veins struggling to mend the microscopic fractures in his bones as quickly as they formed. He couldn't win a war of attrition. He had to break her rhythm.
As she lunged, her blade a silver streak aimed for his heart, his scarf—a relic woven from the silk of lightning elementals—came alive. It whipped through the air with sentient speed, a green ribbon of magic that coiled around her sword arm, constricting with immense force.
Her focus shattered for a barest fraction of a second. It was all he needed.
Pivoting on his heel, Dalazar drove his boot into her stomach. The impact was solid, visceral. Her smaller body soared backward, tumoring through the air. In that brief, precious reprieve, he channeled his will into his blade. The sword, forged from storm-silver and naturally conductive, drank the magic greedily, humming with terrifying power until it glowed with the intensity of a captive sun.
He shifted his grip, holding the radiant blade like a javelin. The air itself seemed to thin around him, pulled into the vortex of his power.
"Lightning Magic," he bellowed, his voice the clap of thunder itself. He drew his arm back, muscles coiling into knots of pure energy.
"SEVERING BOLT!"
With a final, explosive cry, he cast the blade. It didn't fly; it erupted from his hand. It shrieked through the sky, an emerald comet leaving a trail of ozone and scorched air in its wake. It was no longer just a sword but a pure concept of severance, a blistering bolt of judgment aimed to punch straight through her and obliterate anything in its path. It moved at the speed of thought, of lightning itself.
A Dynasty Falls PT2[END]
Re: A Dynasty Falls PT2
The air at the roof of the world was thin, cold, and electric. At the summit of the Emerald Ascension mountains, beneath a sky bruised purple and black by an eternal storm, two figures moved as blurs of impossible speed. One was a king, wreathed in the viridian lightning that gave his kingdom its name. The other was a living cataclysm.
Kilik’s blade, a sliver of polished, clear, forged in the crushing pressures of the deep, was a living thing in her hand. She unleashed slash after slash, a relentless rhythm of destruction. Her movements weren't a sequence of attacks but a single, continuous flow, a torrent of violence. Each strike fed the next, the kinetic energy coiling in her well-toned muscles and erupting again with exponentially greater force. It was a dance of steel and power, each elegant arc and brutal pivot capable of shattering bone, grinding most defenses into dust.
And yet, Dalazar Denkou, the Emerald King, stood his ground. His one arm moved with the speed of two, his own blade a conduit for the Esoteric Lightning that was his birthright. Every parry was a contained thunderclap, every block a flash of emerald energy that sizzled against her dark blade. He matched her speed, her power, but Kilik could feel the strain. He was a dam holding back the ocean, and she could sense the hairline fractures forming in his defense. It was impressive, she admitted, far more than she’d expected from any human mage, even one who held the title of King.
But arrogance was a luxury even she could not afford. Just as the overwhelming flood of her power was about to break him, Dalazar did something unexpected. He broke the rhythm. In a move too fluid to be desperation, he flicked his wrist. The emerald scarf tied around his bicep unfurled like a striking serpent. Kilik, her entire being focused on the singular goal of crushing him, found herself ensnared in the odd, shimmering fabric. It tightened with impossible strength, a silken manacle.
That fractional lapse in her focus was all he needed. By the time her cherry-pink eyes snapped back to him, his boot was already a blur, barreling into her gut. For a being like her, pain was a distant concept, a dull and uninteresting signal. But the force was undeniable. It was like being struck by a meteor, a raw, kinetic impact that launched her several meters.
The distance was his. In that sliver of time, the Emerald King was already preparing his ultimate expression of power. He raised his sword to the roiling heavens, his silver dreadlocks whipping around his face, each strand crackling with green light.
The realm shuddered. Lightning, not from the clouds but from the very essence of his being, coalesced around his blade. It compressed and intensified until the sword itself seemed to dissolve into a solid bolt of incandescent emerald rage. He thrust his arm forward. A streak of green fury, accompanied by the literal flash and deafening crack of lightning, tore across the gap between them. The Severing Bolt.
There was no time to dodge, no space to evade.
But Kilik didn't try to.
As the bolt screamed toward her, a strange, profound serenity settled on her features. The cosmic nebulae swirling across her scales pulsed gently. Her cherry-pink eyes began to glow with an inner light, soft and ancient. Instead of bracing for impact, she opened her arms wide, a gesture not of surrender, but of welcome.
The Severing Bolt struck her squarely in the chest. The force of the strike was so great that it sent her cascading towards the ground like a falling star encased in lightning.
However...
There was no spray of blood, no cry of agony. There was only light and sound. An explosion of steam and emerald energy ripped outwards, a shockwave so violent it momentarily vaporized the swirling clouds around the summit. Dalazar might have thrown his arm to shield his eyes from the blinding glare, a triumphant snarl on his lips.
Yet when the light faded, his heart would plummet into a cold, dark abyss.
She was still standing. The Severing Bolt was embedded in her. But it wasn't piercing flesh. It was submerged into a molded cavity of her scales, as if plunged into still, deep water. The lightning, his raw power given form, was being… absorbed. The galaxies on her skin swirled violently, drinking the emerald energy as a parched man drinks water. Her silver-blue hair whipped around her in a vortex of wind and mist. The air grew heavy, humid, crackling not with his lightning, but with the promise of a biblical deluge.
Water vapor hissed from the point of impact, shrouding her form. With a casual, almost lazy motion, she wrapped her hand around the blade-shaped bolt lodged "in" her chest and pulled it free. There was no wound. Not even a scorch mark. The skin beneath was pristine, covered in its swirling cosmic tapestry.
She looked at the flickering remnant of his power in her hand, then at him. For the first time, Dalazar would see not just a formidable warrior, not just an Atlantean commander, but the ancient, fathomless being lurking beneath that beautiful, deadly veil.
"It is from the ocean that all life is sired, Emerald King," Kilik’s voice echoed. It was no longer the sharp, clear tone of a soldier, but a chorus of crashing waves and roaring tides, a sound as old as the ocean itself. "Lightning itself cannot be born without water..."
The last of his lightning sputtered and died in her grasp.
She had been prepared. Before this mission, Kilik had made a clandestine inquiry to a B'halian scientist, commissioning an upgrade to the nanite suit that was a second skin to her. Woven into the molecular structure was a unique substance, a dispersion gel that could "capture" a directed energy charge upon impact, preventing its travel past the point of contact and accelerating its dissipation into harmless thermal energy and vapor. Against a lightning user, it was the perfect counter to her elemental disadvantage.
A smirk, sharp and predatory, touched Kilik's lips. She tossed his blade aside, the hilt clattering hollowly on the stone. Her hands, free and elegant, then knitted together a series of complex signs. As she moved, glowing azure glyphs manifested in the air around her.
"Noa Caar..." she whispered, the draconic tongue for "Shape."
High in the skies of the Emerald Ascension, she was in her element. The eternal storm was a nigh-endless reservoir. From the saturated clouds above, thick streams of water answered her call, descending and oscillating around her like loyal serpents. In seconds, under her absolute control, the water crystallized. The temperature plummeted, and a litany of frozen shards formed in the air, each the size of a fully grown man, each honed to a razor's edge. They numbered in the hundreds, a glacier of spears hanging in the sky, blotting out the last of the light.
Kilik pointed her sword towards him, her command absolute. As she began her own slow, controlled descent towards the kingdom below, her onslaught of frozen death screamed towards its helpless target. She wondered, with detached curiosity, how the King would fare now.
Kilik’s blade, a sliver of polished, clear, forged in the crushing pressures of the deep, was a living thing in her hand. She unleashed slash after slash, a relentless rhythm of destruction. Her movements weren't a sequence of attacks but a single, continuous flow, a torrent of violence. Each strike fed the next, the kinetic energy coiling in her well-toned muscles and erupting again with exponentially greater force. It was a dance of steel and power, each elegant arc and brutal pivot capable of shattering bone, grinding most defenses into dust.
And yet, Dalazar Denkou, the Emerald King, stood his ground. His one arm moved with the speed of two, his own blade a conduit for the Esoteric Lightning that was his birthright. Every parry was a contained thunderclap, every block a flash of emerald energy that sizzled against her dark blade. He matched her speed, her power, but Kilik could feel the strain. He was a dam holding back the ocean, and she could sense the hairline fractures forming in his defense. It was impressive, she admitted, far more than she’d expected from any human mage, even one who held the title of King.
But arrogance was a luxury even she could not afford. Just as the overwhelming flood of her power was about to break him, Dalazar did something unexpected. He broke the rhythm. In a move too fluid to be desperation, he flicked his wrist. The emerald scarf tied around his bicep unfurled like a striking serpent. Kilik, her entire being focused on the singular goal of crushing him, found herself ensnared in the odd, shimmering fabric. It tightened with impossible strength, a silken manacle.
That fractional lapse in her focus was all he needed. By the time her cherry-pink eyes snapped back to him, his boot was already a blur, barreling into her gut. For a being like her, pain was a distant concept, a dull and uninteresting signal. But the force was undeniable. It was like being struck by a meteor, a raw, kinetic impact that launched her several meters.
The distance was his. In that sliver of time, the Emerald King was already preparing his ultimate expression of power. He raised his sword to the roiling heavens, his silver dreadlocks whipping around his face, each strand crackling with green light.
The realm shuddered. Lightning, not from the clouds but from the very essence of his being, coalesced around his blade. It compressed and intensified until the sword itself seemed to dissolve into a solid bolt of incandescent emerald rage. He thrust his arm forward. A streak of green fury, accompanied by the literal flash and deafening crack of lightning, tore across the gap between them. The Severing Bolt.
There was no time to dodge, no space to evade.
But Kilik didn't try to.
As the bolt screamed toward her, a strange, profound serenity settled on her features. The cosmic nebulae swirling across her scales pulsed gently. Her cherry-pink eyes began to glow with an inner light, soft and ancient. Instead of bracing for impact, she opened her arms wide, a gesture not of surrender, but of welcome.
The Severing Bolt struck her squarely in the chest. The force of the strike was so great that it sent her cascading towards the ground like a falling star encased in lightning.
However...
There was no spray of blood, no cry of agony. There was only light and sound. An explosion of steam and emerald energy ripped outwards, a shockwave so violent it momentarily vaporized the swirling clouds around the summit. Dalazar might have thrown his arm to shield his eyes from the blinding glare, a triumphant snarl on his lips.
Yet when the light faded, his heart would plummet into a cold, dark abyss.
She was still standing. The Severing Bolt was embedded in her. But it wasn't piercing flesh. It was submerged into a molded cavity of her scales, as if plunged into still, deep water. The lightning, his raw power given form, was being… absorbed. The galaxies on her skin swirled violently, drinking the emerald energy as a parched man drinks water. Her silver-blue hair whipped around her in a vortex of wind and mist. The air grew heavy, humid, crackling not with his lightning, but with the promise of a biblical deluge.
Water vapor hissed from the point of impact, shrouding her form. With a casual, almost lazy motion, she wrapped her hand around the blade-shaped bolt lodged "in" her chest and pulled it free. There was no wound. Not even a scorch mark. The skin beneath was pristine, covered in its swirling cosmic tapestry.
She looked at the flickering remnant of his power in her hand, then at him. For the first time, Dalazar would see not just a formidable warrior, not just an Atlantean commander, but the ancient, fathomless being lurking beneath that beautiful, deadly veil.
"It is from the ocean that all life is sired, Emerald King," Kilik’s voice echoed. It was no longer the sharp, clear tone of a soldier, but a chorus of crashing waves and roaring tides, a sound as old as the ocean itself. "Lightning itself cannot be born without water..."
The last of his lightning sputtered and died in her grasp.
She had been prepared. Before this mission, Kilik had made a clandestine inquiry to a B'halian scientist, commissioning an upgrade to the nanite suit that was a second skin to her. Woven into the molecular structure was a unique substance, a dispersion gel that could "capture" a directed energy charge upon impact, preventing its travel past the point of contact and accelerating its dissipation into harmless thermal energy and vapor. Against a lightning user, it was the perfect counter to her elemental disadvantage.
A smirk, sharp and predatory, touched Kilik's lips. She tossed his blade aside, the hilt clattering hollowly on the stone. Her hands, free and elegant, then knitted together a series of complex signs. As she moved, glowing azure glyphs manifested in the air around her.
"Noa Caar..." she whispered, the draconic tongue for "Shape."
High in the skies of the Emerald Ascension, she was in her element. The eternal storm was a nigh-endless reservoir. From the saturated clouds above, thick streams of water answered her call, descending and oscillating around her like loyal serpents. In seconds, under her absolute control, the water crystallized. The temperature plummeted, and a litany of frozen shards formed in the air, each the size of a fully grown man, each honed to a razor's edge. They numbered in the hundreds, a glacier of spears hanging in the sky, blotting out the last of the light.
Kilik pointed her sword towards him, her command absolute. As she began her own slow, controlled descent towards the kingdom below, her onslaught of frozen death screamed towards its helpless target. She wondered, with detached curiosity, how the King would fare now.
"I hear the screams of the Ocean, the cries of the waves. The sea floor yearns for healing and begs for retribution. My wish is to grant it"
-
Dalazar Denkou
- Drifter
- Posts: 238
- Joined: Sat Feb 16, 2019 8:39 pm
Re: A Dynasty Falls PT2
A casual smirk crept upon Dalazar’s face as the Severing Bolt connected. The flash it produced, a blinding concussive burst of emerald light, was even more potent than he’d anticipated, forcing the King—even from his distant vantage atop the Emerald Ascension’s highest spire—to shield his eyes from the intense gleam of the clash. For a heartbeat, the world was pure, searing green. Then, as the light waned, Dalazar’s smirk faltered, his confident posture rigidifying into disbelief. What he expected was a mortally wounded foe, perhaps even an atomized vapor trail. What he saw was Kilik, her small form utterly unscathed, a renewed vigor radiating from her, and an indifferent, almost bored, curl to her lip.
“She...caught the lightning?” The words, a whisper barely audible above the residual crackle in the air, escaped Dalazar’s lips. It was a feat only fit for a being of divine origin, a goddess of storms, not this Atlantean Commander. True, his Esoteric Lightning, the very essence of the Emerald Soul he wielded, had been clamoring around the blade, transforming the weapon into a living, shrieking tool of the skies.
And yet...this being, barely reaching his chest at 5’3”, had managed to not only capture his blade mid-strike but, somehow, dispel the electricity saturating it, leaving his most potent attack inert. Her scales, shimmering with the depths of cosmic nebulae and swirling galaxies, seemed to hum, absorbing the residual energy without so much as a tremor. Her cherry-pink eyes, usually sharp and discerning, held a distant, almost melancholic glint, as if bored by his best effort.
“I have to admit that was pretty impressive,” Dalazar murmured, more to himself than to her. She remained leagues beneath him, a curious anomaly in his otherwise predictable path to victory. His pride, however, was quickly overshadowed by a dawning sense of unease.
Then it happened. A chilling power emanated from Kilik. The clouds above, which had moments ago been mere spectators to his fury, began to twist and writhe under a dominion not his own. Dark, heavy cumulonimbus formations, bloated with latent moisture, shimmered, then visibly thinned, drained of their very essence, the water coalescing around Kilik. A litany of ancient, undulating glyphs, shimmering with an ethereal, cerulean light, manifested around the invader, forming an intricate, swirling barrier.
Dalazar’s silver eyes narrowed, his silver dreadlocks, usually sparking with controlled energy, flared with untamed power. This was no ordinary Atlantean. This was a direct defiance of his meteorology. “Let’s see then, just how much you can take!” His voice boomed, echoing across the Denkou Kingdom, a thunderous challenge to the impudent invasion.
With a primal roar, Dalazar unleashed his full might. The skies above the Emerald Ascension mountains were broken, splintered by his furious will. The pounding war drums of the cumulonimbus clouds, now utterly subsumed by his power, banged against the very atmosphere, releasing a furious symphony of thunder.
Lightning, emerald and vibrant, coalesced around his being, engulfing him in a tempest of raw power. Sparks, thick as ropes, continuously ripped at the very air, causing everything around him to polarize, to hum with static potential. Yet, under the flaring will that was his electric edict, not a single spark of electricity descended upon the kingdom below; rather, every charge, every ion, every whisper of the storm accosted him.
His entire form became clad in the heavens’ fury, his silver dreadlocks ripping with chaotic, sporadic sparks of emerald lightning. He slipped casually, almost gracefully, into his Orochi Mage Fist style, a martial art born of his connection to the volatile energies of the sky. And like a shrieking arrow, a bolt of emerald wrath, Dalazar zagged through the skies towards Kilik, leaving trails of superheated air in his wake.
“Orochi Mage Fist…” His voice was a low growl, a guttural hum that vibrated with raw power. Kilik’s defensive glyphs, now solidified into sharp, crystalline thorns of ice, fired at him in their hundreds, guided by the swirling malice of her water magic. But Dalazar’s speed was unparalleled. Each icy thorn, reaching for his heart, his eyes, his limbs, was shattered an instant before impact by a lightning-endowed strike from an open palm, a flick of his wrist, or the barest brush of his charged dreadlocks. His well-toned, 18-year-old body was a blur.
“Chained Lighting Flux!” he roared, a brilliant green arcing across the sky. True to its name, each shard struck by his lightning attack became a primer for the next, producing a volatile pathway for the electricity to strike the subsequent crystalline projectile. He unleashed a furious array of hundreds of strikes in mere seconds, a blur of emerald light and kinetic force.
The aftermath of his blows produced hundreds upon hundreds of smaller, localized bursts of lightning, each one exploding with concussive force. The sky above the Denkou Kingdom became encased in a firework light display of emerald lightning bursts, all while Dalazar maintained his relentless pursuit of Kilik. He was weaponizing the truth of her earlier words, that lightning could not exist without water, and true to that point, he leveraged the lingering moisture, the very air she had once commanded, to empower his technique, drawing out every last bit of energy.
“Combo skill,” he punctuated, his voice tight with exertion and growing exhilaration, as the last of the icy shards was dealt with. Yet, the cumulative lightning produced by his assault did not dissipate; instead, it traveled behind him, a furious emerald serpent, suffusing his right leg with immense power as he went into a front flip. He was no more than a hair’s breadth from Kilik now, his eyes locked onto her indifferent face.
“Fulgora Hammer!” And with that exclamation, Dalazar unleashed a devastating axe kick. His leg, empowered by the collective fury of his sky-borne voyage and the kinetic energy of hundreds of lightning strikes, became a singular conduit of destruction. He centralized all that raw power, all that cumulative force, on one point: Kilik.
The resulting clash with her form was a thunderous smite, a shockwave that tore through the upper atmosphere. The sheer force alone, whether she managed to defend or otherwise, sealed their fate. It would result in them crashing, a meteoric impact, deep into the ancient arena within the heart of the Kingdom, leaving a cratered testament to their battle.
“She...caught the lightning?” The words, a whisper barely audible above the residual crackle in the air, escaped Dalazar’s lips. It was a feat only fit for a being of divine origin, a goddess of storms, not this Atlantean Commander. True, his Esoteric Lightning, the very essence of the Emerald Soul he wielded, had been clamoring around the blade, transforming the weapon into a living, shrieking tool of the skies.
And yet...this being, barely reaching his chest at 5’3”, had managed to not only capture his blade mid-strike but, somehow, dispel the electricity saturating it, leaving his most potent attack inert. Her scales, shimmering with the depths of cosmic nebulae and swirling galaxies, seemed to hum, absorbing the residual energy without so much as a tremor. Her cherry-pink eyes, usually sharp and discerning, held a distant, almost melancholic glint, as if bored by his best effort.
“I have to admit that was pretty impressive,” Dalazar murmured, more to himself than to her. She remained leagues beneath him, a curious anomaly in his otherwise predictable path to victory. His pride, however, was quickly overshadowed by a dawning sense of unease.
Then it happened. A chilling power emanated from Kilik. The clouds above, which had moments ago been mere spectators to his fury, began to twist and writhe under a dominion not his own. Dark, heavy cumulonimbus formations, bloated with latent moisture, shimmered, then visibly thinned, drained of their very essence, the water coalescing around Kilik. A litany of ancient, undulating glyphs, shimmering with an ethereal, cerulean light, manifested around the invader, forming an intricate, swirling barrier.
Dalazar’s silver eyes narrowed, his silver dreadlocks, usually sparking with controlled energy, flared with untamed power. This was no ordinary Atlantean. This was a direct defiance of his meteorology. “Let’s see then, just how much you can take!” His voice boomed, echoing across the Denkou Kingdom, a thunderous challenge to the impudent invasion.
With a primal roar, Dalazar unleashed his full might. The skies above the Emerald Ascension mountains were broken, splintered by his furious will. The pounding war drums of the cumulonimbus clouds, now utterly subsumed by his power, banged against the very atmosphere, releasing a furious symphony of thunder.
Lightning, emerald and vibrant, coalesced around his being, engulfing him in a tempest of raw power. Sparks, thick as ropes, continuously ripped at the very air, causing everything around him to polarize, to hum with static potential. Yet, under the flaring will that was his electric edict, not a single spark of electricity descended upon the kingdom below; rather, every charge, every ion, every whisper of the storm accosted him.
His entire form became clad in the heavens’ fury, his silver dreadlocks ripping with chaotic, sporadic sparks of emerald lightning. He slipped casually, almost gracefully, into his Orochi Mage Fist style, a martial art born of his connection to the volatile energies of the sky. And like a shrieking arrow, a bolt of emerald wrath, Dalazar zagged through the skies towards Kilik, leaving trails of superheated air in his wake.
“Orochi Mage Fist…” His voice was a low growl, a guttural hum that vibrated with raw power. Kilik’s defensive glyphs, now solidified into sharp, crystalline thorns of ice, fired at him in their hundreds, guided by the swirling malice of her water magic. But Dalazar’s speed was unparalleled. Each icy thorn, reaching for his heart, his eyes, his limbs, was shattered an instant before impact by a lightning-endowed strike from an open palm, a flick of his wrist, or the barest brush of his charged dreadlocks. His well-toned, 18-year-old body was a blur.
“Chained Lighting Flux!” he roared, a brilliant green arcing across the sky. True to its name, each shard struck by his lightning attack became a primer for the next, producing a volatile pathway for the electricity to strike the subsequent crystalline projectile. He unleashed a furious array of hundreds of strikes in mere seconds, a blur of emerald light and kinetic force.
The aftermath of his blows produced hundreds upon hundreds of smaller, localized bursts of lightning, each one exploding with concussive force. The sky above the Denkou Kingdom became encased in a firework light display of emerald lightning bursts, all while Dalazar maintained his relentless pursuit of Kilik. He was weaponizing the truth of her earlier words, that lightning could not exist without water, and true to that point, he leveraged the lingering moisture, the very air she had once commanded, to empower his technique, drawing out every last bit of energy.
“Combo skill,” he punctuated, his voice tight with exertion and growing exhilaration, as the last of the icy shards was dealt with. Yet, the cumulative lightning produced by his assault did not dissipate; instead, it traveled behind him, a furious emerald serpent, suffusing his right leg with immense power as he went into a front flip. He was no more than a hair’s breadth from Kilik now, his eyes locked onto her indifferent face.
“Fulgora Hammer!” And with that exclamation, Dalazar unleashed a devastating axe kick. His leg, empowered by the collective fury of his sky-borne voyage and the kinetic energy of hundreds of lightning strikes, became a singular conduit of destruction. He centralized all that raw power, all that cumulative force, on one point: Kilik.
The resulting clash with her form was a thunderous smite, a shockwave that tore through the upper atmosphere. The sheer force alone, whether she managed to defend or otherwise, sealed their fate. It would result in them crashing, a meteoric impact, deep into the ancient arena within the heart of the Kingdom, leaving a cratered testament to their battle.
Re: A Dynasty Falls PT2
Kilik's eye narrowed as she watched the lightning encapsulate him. She had to admit, this was the first time she had encountered another "Elemental" being capable of bending the natural forces of the planet to their whims. What's more, she had seen the likes of fire users like the Salamanders, Joro, with their mastery over stone, but this was the first time she was face-to-face with an entity capable of subjugating the force of lightning under its thumb. It was both harrowing and exhilarating, a perfect preamble of experience to what it would be like when she faced....him. Her true target, but for now, this, Dalazar would serve as the needed stepping stone to prep her for what to expect.
Kilik, however, was ready. Even as Dalazar’s emerald-clad leg arced down with apocalyptic power, her indifference shifted. A hint of something akin to grim amusement, or perhaps resignation, touched her cherry-pink eyes. The glyphs around her, the remnants of her cloud-draining magic, flared with intense cerulean light, forming a shimmering, multi-layered shield composed of solidified water and compressed air. The lightning-dispersing effects of her armor pulsated through her congregated at the point of impact.. Her well-toned body tensed, the cosmic nebulae patterns on her scales swirling with increased intensity, absorbing and deflecting the immense pressure building around her. This was the strength of a water dragon, a creature born of the deep and imbued with the very will of the oceans. And yet...
"Ngh!"
The Fulgora Hammer connected with Kilik’s barrier, not with a resounding clang, but with a sickening, wet crack that reverberated through the very fabric of reality. As Kilik blocked the attack, she felt an intense burning pain in her side; the wound from her previous battle had not fully healed, causing her to wince in agony. This lapse compromised the full integrity of her lightning absorption, causing it to give way. The impact was an explosion of sound and light—emerald lightning meeting cerulean water magic. Her glyphs shattered, layer by layer, unable to fully contain the Emerald King’s unleashed fury. But they served their purpose, dissipating enough of the raw, crushing force to prevent her instant annihilation. But not enough to prevent damage entirely.
The dust of the arena tasted of ozone and pulverized history. For a moment, cocooned in the heart of the crater, the only sound was the high-pitched ringing in Kilik’s ears and the frantic, shallow breaths she forced into her protesting lungs. The pain in her side was a riot of fire, a phantom spear twisting with every heartbeat. Shards of glass seemed to grind against her ribs, a visceral reminder of her own fallibility, of the wound she’d carried into this battle like a fool’s gambit.
Dalazar’s silhouette solidified through the settling gray haze. His form was a defiant pillar of emerald energy against the bruised sky, the storm above the Denkou Kingdom swirling in a vortex of raw power that answered directly to him. He was a king on his throne of ruin, his power an endless circuit between the heavens and his very soul. He was magnificent, Kilik had to admit, a perfect storm of human ambition and elemental fury. And he was utterly surprised. The disbelief etched on his face, warring with his triumphant grimace, was more satisfying than any gasp of pain she could have wrung from him.
Kilik straightened, a deliberate, almost languid movement that ignored the screaming protest of her muscles. The cosmic nebulae patterns on her draconic scales swirled, the deep blues and purples a stark contrast to the monotonous gray rubble. She ran a hand through her long, blue-silver hair, dislodging a cascade of grit. Her cherry-pink eyes, holding the dispassionate calm of the abyssal deep, met his.
"What's wrong, King?" Her voice was a low murmur, yet it carried across the crater with perfect clarity, cutting through the crackle of his residual lightning. She dusted a shard of stone from her shoulder. "You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?"
Kilik… You are wounded, a voice, ancient and deep as the oceans, echoed in the quiet chambers of her mind. It was Orvyn, the Primordial Dragon of Water, the source of her power, the architect of her very being. His presence was a constant, a cool current beneath the surface of her thoughts.
It's nothing, Orvyn, she projected back, a silent rebuke. Aloud, she simply offered a faint, disdainful smile.
But she knew the truth. Orvyn knew the truth. The internal trauma was significant. Time was a luxury she didn't possess. Dalazar was tethered to the storm, a limitless battery recharging with every passing second. She, on the other hand, was a leaking vessel, her power and stamina draining away not only from the fight but from her body’s desperate attempt to knit itself back together. If this fight continued as a contest of attrition, she would lose. Her mission—the B'halian Empire's mandate to cleanse Vescrutia of the human plague—would falter here, on this mountain peak. And she would never get her chance to face him.
This place had to become her ocean.
"What do you say we raise the stakes?" Kilik asked, her gaze drifting past Dalazar to a large, ornate grate a dozen yards away. It was a sewage drain, a conduit to the unseen underbelly of the mountain kingdom. Through her connection to the world, a power the humans could never truly comprehend, she could hear it: the rush and gurgle of a current, the song of a vast cistern deep within the mountain's heart.
A hidden reservoir.
A captive sea.
A devilish, predatory grin finally broke through her indifferent facade. It transformed her features, hinting at the true, calamitous nature lurking beneath. Her body became outlined in an intense, ethereal light the color of cherry blossoms at dusk. This was Shinjustu, the art of becoming one with the planet's pulse, of borrowing its untamed strength. The air grew thick, heavy with the scent of petrichor and ancient, deep water.
"Noa Caar," she whispered, the two words of Wyrmspeech not merely spoken but impressed upon reality itself.
The spell was the same she had used to drain the clouds, but its target was now terrestrial, its ambition far grander. A massive, impossibly complex glyph blazed into existence on the crater floor, its cerulean lines scorching the stone. The ground groaned, then split apart as a geyser of unimaginable pressure erupted from the drain. It wasn't a clean spray, but a churning, furious torrent of the cold, dark, forgotten water that had slumbered in the mountain’s core for centuries.
The deluge slammed into Dalazar, forcing him back with the raw power of a flash flood. He threw up a crackling barrier of emerald lightning, which hissed and steamed as the water crashed against it. The arena floor vanished beneath a rapidly rising tide, the crater becoming the epicenter of a new, churning lake.
But the water was not aimless. As it swirled around Kilik, it obeyed the silent command of her will. The torrent twisted, coalesced, and writhed, rising higher and higher. Shapes began to form from the churning chaos—serpentine necks, heads of crushing fluid, and eyes that were nothing but furious, spinning whirlpools. Kilik rose with it, at the very center of the monstrous creation, its beating heart and malevolent will.
"Wave Mother's Brood!" she announced, her voice booming, amplified by the roaring water.
The creature was a hydra born of raw elemental power, a liquid behemoth with a dozen thrashing heads, each one a living tsunami. It towered over the Emerald King, blotting out the sky, its very presence changing the battlefield from a mountaintop arena to a roiling, watery abyss. Kilik, serene within its belly, raised an open palm.
Instantly, three of the massive aqueous heads lunged. They descended upon Dalazar not as simple water but as colossal fists of hydrostatic force, each carrying enough weight to pulverize granite and shatter steel. They struck his shield with a chorus of hissing waterfalls and deafening booms.
Dalazar roared in defiance, pouring more of the storm's power into his defense. A spear of condensed lightning erupted from his hands, vaporizing one of the hydra's heads in a massive explosion of steam. But two more immediately took their place, their watery maws snapping at his flickering shield.
He was no longer the king of the mountain. He was an island, besieged by a relentless, self-regenerating ocean. An ocean that answered to her. This was the strength of a water dragon. This, she thought, a grim satisfaction cooling the fire in her side, was why they called her "The Calamity." This was a proper test.
Kilik, however, was ready. Even as Dalazar’s emerald-clad leg arced down with apocalyptic power, her indifference shifted. A hint of something akin to grim amusement, or perhaps resignation, touched her cherry-pink eyes. The glyphs around her, the remnants of her cloud-draining magic, flared with intense cerulean light, forming a shimmering, multi-layered shield composed of solidified water and compressed air. The lightning-dispersing effects of her armor pulsated through her congregated at the point of impact.. Her well-toned body tensed, the cosmic nebulae patterns on her scales swirling with increased intensity, absorbing and deflecting the immense pressure building around her. This was the strength of a water dragon, a creature born of the deep and imbued with the very will of the oceans. And yet...
"Ngh!"
The Fulgora Hammer connected with Kilik’s barrier, not with a resounding clang, but with a sickening, wet crack that reverberated through the very fabric of reality. As Kilik blocked the attack, she felt an intense burning pain in her side; the wound from her previous battle had not fully healed, causing her to wince in agony. This lapse compromised the full integrity of her lightning absorption, causing it to give way. The impact was an explosion of sound and light—emerald lightning meeting cerulean water magic. Her glyphs shattered, layer by layer, unable to fully contain the Emerald King’s unleashed fury. But they served their purpose, dissipating enough of the raw, crushing force to prevent her instant annihilation. But not enough to prevent damage entirely.
The dust of the arena tasted of ozone and pulverized history. For a moment, cocooned in the heart of the crater, the only sound was the high-pitched ringing in Kilik’s ears and the frantic, shallow breaths she forced into her protesting lungs. The pain in her side was a riot of fire, a phantom spear twisting with every heartbeat. Shards of glass seemed to grind against her ribs, a visceral reminder of her own fallibility, of the wound she’d carried into this battle like a fool’s gambit.
Dalazar’s silhouette solidified through the settling gray haze. His form was a defiant pillar of emerald energy against the bruised sky, the storm above the Denkou Kingdom swirling in a vortex of raw power that answered directly to him. He was a king on his throne of ruin, his power an endless circuit between the heavens and his very soul. He was magnificent, Kilik had to admit, a perfect storm of human ambition and elemental fury. And he was utterly surprised. The disbelief etched on his face, warring with his triumphant grimace, was more satisfying than any gasp of pain she could have wrung from him.
Kilik straightened, a deliberate, almost languid movement that ignored the screaming protest of her muscles. The cosmic nebulae patterns on her draconic scales swirled, the deep blues and purples a stark contrast to the monotonous gray rubble. She ran a hand through her long, blue-silver hair, dislodging a cascade of grit. Her cherry-pink eyes, holding the dispassionate calm of the abyssal deep, met his.
"What's wrong, King?" Her voice was a low murmur, yet it carried across the crater with perfect clarity, cutting through the crackle of his residual lightning. She dusted a shard of stone from her shoulder. "You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?"
Kilik… You are wounded, a voice, ancient and deep as the oceans, echoed in the quiet chambers of her mind. It was Orvyn, the Primordial Dragon of Water, the source of her power, the architect of her very being. His presence was a constant, a cool current beneath the surface of her thoughts.
It's nothing, Orvyn, she projected back, a silent rebuke. Aloud, she simply offered a faint, disdainful smile.
But she knew the truth. Orvyn knew the truth. The internal trauma was significant. Time was a luxury she didn't possess. Dalazar was tethered to the storm, a limitless battery recharging with every passing second. She, on the other hand, was a leaking vessel, her power and stamina draining away not only from the fight but from her body’s desperate attempt to knit itself back together. If this fight continued as a contest of attrition, she would lose. Her mission—the B'halian Empire's mandate to cleanse Vescrutia of the human plague—would falter here, on this mountain peak. And she would never get her chance to face him.
This place had to become her ocean.
"What do you say we raise the stakes?" Kilik asked, her gaze drifting past Dalazar to a large, ornate grate a dozen yards away. It was a sewage drain, a conduit to the unseen underbelly of the mountain kingdom. Through her connection to the world, a power the humans could never truly comprehend, she could hear it: the rush and gurgle of a current, the song of a vast cistern deep within the mountain's heart.
A hidden reservoir.
A captive sea.
A devilish, predatory grin finally broke through her indifferent facade. It transformed her features, hinting at the true, calamitous nature lurking beneath. Her body became outlined in an intense, ethereal light the color of cherry blossoms at dusk. This was Shinjustu, the art of becoming one with the planet's pulse, of borrowing its untamed strength. The air grew thick, heavy with the scent of petrichor and ancient, deep water.
"Noa Caar," she whispered, the two words of Wyrmspeech not merely spoken but impressed upon reality itself.
The spell was the same she had used to drain the clouds, but its target was now terrestrial, its ambition far grander. A massive, impossibly complex glyph blazed into existence on the crater floor, its cerulean lines scorching the stone. The ground groaned, then split apart as a geyser of unimaginable pressure erupted from the drain. It wasn't a clean spray, but a churning, furious torrent of the cold, dark, forgotten water that had slumbered in the mountain’s core for centuries.
The deluge slammed into Dalazar, forcing him back with the raw power of a flash flood. He threw up a crackling barrier of emerald lightning, which hissed and steamed as the water crashed against it. The arena floor vanished beneath a rapidly rising tide, the crater becoming the epicenter of a new, churning lake.
But the water was not aimless. As it swirled around Kilik, it obeyed the silent command of her will. The torrent twisted, coalesced, and writhed, rising higher and higher. Shapes began to form from the churning chaos—serpentine necks, heads of crushing fluid, and eyes that were nothing but furious, spinning whirlpools. Kilik rose with it, at the very center of the monstrous creation, its beating heart and malevolent will.
"Wave Mother's Brood!" she announced, her voice booming, amplified by the roaring water.
The creature was a hydra born of raw elemental power, a liquid behemoth with a dozen thrashing heads, each one a living tsunami. It towered over the Emerald King, blotting out the sky, its very presence changing the battlefield from a mountaintop arena to a roiling, watery abyss. Kilik, serene within its belly, raised an open palm.
Instantly, three of the massive aqueous heads lunged. They descended upon Dalazar not as simple water but as colossal fists of hydrostatic force, each carrying enough weight to pulverize granite and shatter steel. They struck his shield with a chorus of hissing waterfalls and deafening booms.
Dalazar roared in defiance, pouring more of the storm's power into his defense. A spear of condensed lightning erupted from his hands, vaporizing one of the hydra's heads in a massive explosion of steam. But two more immediately took their place, their watery maws snapping at his flickering shield.
He was no longer the king of the mountain. He was an island, besieged by a relentless, self-regenerating ocean. An ocean that answered to her. This was the strength of a water dragon. This, she thought, a grim satisfaction cooling the fire in her side, was why they called her "The Calamity." This was a proper test.
"I hear the screams of the Ocean, the cries of the waves. The sea floor yearns for healing and begs for retribution. My wish is to grant it"
-
Dalazar Denkou
- Drifter
- Posts: 238
- Joined: Sat Feb 16, 2019 8:39 pm
Re: A Dynasty Falls PT2
The wind over the summit of the Emerald Ascenion sang a thin, metallic hymn as the banners of the four great houses fluttered against the bruised violet sky. Below, the Denkou Kingdom’s five districts were being torn apart by an invasion that had the taste of stinging ruin in every breath.
“These Devils are massacring our people.”
Esmeralda, head of House Flonne, spoke in a quipped breath, her eyes flickering with the glow of unseen currents that thrummed just beneath her skin.
“Then it falls to us to show them just how badly they have erred.”
Her words fell like a blade across the council chamber, where the assembled nobles stood in a circle of cracked marble and storm‑etched glyphs. Oberion of House Urso, his massive arms still bearing the scars of past wars, gripped his battle hammer as if it were an extension of his own bone.
“We need to pull our focus together and mobilize. House Urso covers district five, leaving not a single goblin alive. Oberion, this is your duty.”
A murmur rose from the ranks; the goblin tinkerers—green‑skinned, wiry, and maddeningly clever—had already turned the kingdom’s own conduits into exploding snares. Their sabotage sang through the streets in a chorus of shattered stone and sparking lightning, each burst a reminder of how fragile the kingdom’s lifelines had become.
Onohall, former queen regent, lifted her voice above the din. Her hand, inked with the ancient sigils of the Emerald Serpent, glowed faintly as she spoke.
“Esmeralda, mobilize the Flonne. Your innate control over unseen current will assist in dealing with the Arachnid’s mental antics; prioritize offering healing where you can, leave the slaughter and combat to the Ri’ore.”
She turned to the engineer‑mages of House Gamallow. “House Gamallow, activate the defense protocol in the kingdom infrastructure. Let them bear witness to Denkou ingenuity.”
The words settled like a stone into the heart of the realm. Within minutes, the Grizzly mages of Urso thundered out of the mountain’s catacombs, their bodies crackling with augmented lightning that hardened skin and bone. The Sapphire Mantis healers of Flonne erected shimmering barriers of charged ether that sliced through the venomous webs the Kor arachnids wove. And the Crimson Ant engineers of Gamallow re‑shaped the very steel of the city, transmuting towers into towering conduits that hurled arcs of raw power at the invading fleet.
The battle erupted on all fronts. Goblin rockets detonated against the eastern wall of district three, sending shards of crystal into the night. Vulqin salamanders, their scales glowing like ember, belched rivers of molten fire that turned cobblestones into lava rivers. The Kor araneae slipped through the shadows, their silk‑like webs of solidified magic snaring soldiers whose lightning bolts fizzed uselessly against the chitin armor.
Yet even as the coordinated strikes of the Denkou turned the tide, a darker, more focused horror rose in the center of district one: a massive water‑based Hydra, its many heads snarling with the ferocity of a storm‑tossed sea. At its core swam Kilik, the burning golden sigil of the B’halian Empire on her forearm.
Dalazar Denkou, Sixth Inheritor of the Emerald King, stood at the edge of the battlefield, his sword humming with esoteric lightning. The mantle of the Emerald Soul pulsed through his veins, each heartbeat a crack of thunder. He had faced many foes, but the Hydra’s regenerative heads—each severed only to sprout two more—tested even his prowess.
Kilik’s eyes were the color of storm clouds, her voice a gurgling echo that seemed to drown the very wind.
She thrust a massive hydro‑spike from the Hydra’s maw, the water vortex spiraling toward Dalazar. He swung his blade, recalling it to his hand in an instant via the enchantments upon it, its edge glowing emerald, and sliced cleanly through the torrent, leaving a spray of ionized mist in his wake. The Hydra recoiled, its heads snapping like serpents.
“Dammit… I can’t keep this up forever.” Dalazar grunted, sweat slick on his brow as he felt the strain of endless cuts. He dropped the sword and cast his Lightning Creation: Storm Gods Drum, a massive percussion mirroring instrument carved from the compacted electricity. With a thunderous beat, a shield of crackling lightning blossomed around him, flickering like a living cage.
Each Hydra head slammed into the barrier, each impact sending arcs of blue fire racing across the shield. Dalazar summoned his innate magic, each motion of his hands repairing the fracture, each word a whispered command to the storm that lived within him. The drumbeat grew frantic, a war‑drum echoing the pulse of the kingdom itself.
“At this rate…” he muttered, eyes narrowing as panic threatened to creep into his mind. The Hydra’s heads multiplied, a hundred‑fold, each one a dripping maw of icy water and venomous intent.
Then, a flash of scorching azure tore across the sky. A streak of burning blue aura split the clouds, its brilliance turning the night into a canvas of plasma. Dalazar’s breath caught.
“Are those… blue flames?”
He whispered, voice hoarse from exertion. The blue was not flame at all, but pure, condensed lightning, so fierce it scorched the wind itself, leaving a trail of ionized plasma in its wake.
“Profound Magic…”
From that plasma coalesced an axe, its blade a swirling vortex of blue lightning, humming with a power that made the air tremble. The weapon hovered for a heartbeat, then plunged into Dalazar’s hand as though it had always belonged there.
“World‑Breaker!”
He lifted the massive blade, feeling its weight as a promise of annihilation. With a mighty heave, he swung the glowing weapon in a single, sweeping arc. The plasma blade cleaved through the Hydra’s heads as a hot knife through butter, each strike sending arcs of electric fire into the water that birthed them. The heads evaporated in vapor, their screams curling into the night like dying thunderstorms.
Silence fell, broken only by the crackle of the dying shield and the ragged breathing of a man who had just outrun death. Dalazar stared at the space where the Hydra had loomed, his heart pounding in his throat.
“Don’t tell ’em this is all you’re capable of…”
The plasma began to dim, revealing its creator. A figure stepped forward, tall as a pillar, tattoos of ancient ceremonial runes crawling across his skin like living constellations. He was six‑feet‑five, his presence a storm condensed into flesh.
Myos Ri’ore, his older brother, the Tyrant.
“Myos,” Dalazar breathed, a mixture of awe and grief twisting his throat.
“Stand tall, Sixth King.”
Myos’s voice rolled like distant thunder, steady and unyielding. Though his body bore the bruises of earlier conflict, his aura crackled with fresh vigor, the kind that could shatter mountains. He extended a hand, the fingers sparking with raw energy.
“Or do you plan to face our foe, body bowed before them?”
Dalazar’s eyes welled, but he forced the tears back, gripping Myos’s hand with a grip that felt like two lightning rods fused. The electric surge that ran between them was not merely shared power; it was an unspoken covenant.
“A king never kneels, Myos.”
Myos chuckled, a sound that sounded like rain on a tin roof.
“Heh… she’s a powerful one. Took one of our most potent spells just to slow her down.”
Myos’ eyes narrowed, admiration flickering in their amber depths.
“Profound Magic… I didn’t know you were capable of it.”
The name cracked the very air, calling forth a surge of emerald lightning that wrapped his arms like a second skin.
"Now… let’s show this little girl what happens when someone threatens the Denkou Sovereignty!”
Dalazar felt his brother’s plasma flare again, their combined might a beacon in the darkness. Together, they turned to Kilik, whose water‑shaped eyes glittered with a terrifying resolve.
Myos suggested promptly, "‘I’ll distract the heads… You focus on the girl; unless we disrupt her spell, this will never end."
Myos swung his great sword over his shoulder.
" For Na'lumiere..."
Myos whispered the name. A Sound akin to grief and reverence hitched in his enunciation. Dalazar’s mind surged with the memory of his twin, Na’lumiere, who was the entire reason Dalazar was still among the living.
The Emerald King nodded, his heart beating in sync with the storm that raged within him.
“For Na’lumiere…” he whispered, feeling the name ignite his soul. A crack of pure, green lightning erupted from his crown, scattering the clouds and illuminating the battlefield in an otherworldly glow.
The Hydra’s heads, though severed, splintered once more, each new growth a jagged wave of water and Ice. Myos, wielding the searing blue plasma axe, surged forward, his swings carving arcs of electricity through the heads, each blow a thunderclap that sent torrents of water splashing away.
Dalazar, moving like a living bolt, spun through the battlefield. He drew upon the ancient art of Duplication Magic, a rare technique taught only to the Ascendant Class of Mage within the kingdom. With a series of precise hand signs, he split his own amagic ra into three perfect lightning clones, each one a mirror of his own form. The clones formed a rotating barrier of searing current around him, deflecting the Hydra’s torrents while he focused on the core.
“These Devils are massacring our people.”
Esmeralda, head of House Flonne, spoke in a quipped breath, her eyes flickering with the glow of unseen currents that thrummed just beneath her skin.
“Then it falls to us to show them just how badly they have erred.”
Her words fell like a blade across the council chamber, where the assembled nobles stood in a circle of cracked marble and storm‑etched glyphs. Oberion of House Urso, his massive arms still bearing the scars of past wars, gripped his battle hammer as if it were an extension of his own bone.
“We need to pull our focus together and mobilize. House Urso covers district five, leaving not a single goblin alive. Oberion, this is your duty.”
A murmur rose from the ranks; the goblin tinkerers—green‑skinned, wiry, and maddeningly clever—had already turned the kingdom’s own conduits into exploding snares. Their sabotage sang through the streets in a chorus of shattered stone and sparking lightning, each burst a reminder of how fragile the kingdom’s lifelines had become.
Onohall, former queen regent, lifted her voice above the din. Her hand, inked with the ancient sigils of the Emerald Serpent, glowed faintly as she spoke.
“Esmeralda, mobilize the Flonne. Your innate control over unseen current will assist in dealing with the Arachnid’s mental antics; prioritize offering healing where you can, leave the slaughter and combat to the Ri’ore.”
She turned to the engineer‑mages of House Gamallow. “House Gamallow, activate the defense protocol in the kingdom infrastructure. Let them bear witness to Denkou ingenuity.”
The words settled like a stone into the heart of the realm. Within minutes, the Grizzly mages of Urso thundered out of the mountain’s catacombs, their bodies crackling with augmented lightning that hardened skin and bone. The Sapphire Mantis healers of Flonne erected shimmering barriers of charged ether that sliced through the venomous webs the Kor arachnids wove. And the Crimson Ant engineers of Gamallow re‑shaped the very steel of the city, transmuting towers into towering conduits that hurled arcs of raw power at the invading fleet.
The battle erupted on all fronts. Goblin rockets detonated against the eastern wall of district three, sending shards of crystal into the night. Vulqin salamanders, their scales glowing like ember, belched rivers of molten fire that turned cobblestones into lava rivers. The Kor araneae slipped through the shadows, their silk‑like webs of solidified magic snaring soldiers whose lightning bolts fizzed uselessly against the chitin armor.
Yet even as the coordinated strikes of the Denkou turned the tide, a darker, more focused horror rose in the center of district one: a massive water‑based Hydra, its many heads snarling with the ferocity of a storm‑tossed sea. At its core swam Kilik, the burning golden sigil of the B’halian Empire on her forearm.
Dalazar Denkou, Sixth Inheritor of the Emerald King, stood at the edge of the battlefield, his sword humming with esoteric lightning. The mantle of the Emerald Soul pulsed through his veins, each heartbeat a crack of thunder. He had faced many foes, but the Hydra’s regenerative heads—each severed only to sprout two more—tested even his prowess.
Kilik’s eyes were the color of storm clouds, her voice a gurgling echo that seemed to drown the very wind.
She thrust a massive hydro‑spike from the Hydra’s maw, the water vortex spiraling toward Dalazar. He swung his blade, recalling it to his hand in an instant via the enchantments upon it, its edge glowing emerald, and sliced cleanly through the torrent, leaving a spray of ionized mist in his wake. The Hydra recoiled, its heads snapping like serpents.
“Dammit… I can’t keep this up forever.” Dalazar grunted, sweat slick on his brow as he felt the strain of endless cuts. He dropped the sword and cast his Lightning Creation: Storm Gods Drum, a massive percussion mirroring instrument carved from the compacted electricity. With a thunderous beat, a shield of crackling lightning blossomed around him, flickering like a living cage.
Each Hydra head slammed into the barrier, each impact sending arcs of blue fire racing across the shield. Dalazar summoned his innate magic, each motion of his hands repairing the fracture, each word a whispered command to the storm that lived within him. The drumbeat grew frantic, a war‑drum echoing the pulse of the kingdom itself.
“At this rate…” he muttered, eyes narrowing as panic threatened to creep into his mind. The Hydra’s heads multiplied, a hundred‑fold, each one a dripping maw of icy water and venomous intent.
Then, a flash of scorching azure tore across the sky. A streak of burning blue aura split the clouds, its brilliance turning the night into a canvas of plasma. Dalazar’s breath caught.
“Are those… blue flames?”
He whispered, voice hoarse from exertion. The blue was not flame at all, but pure, condensed lightning, so fierce it scorched the wind itself, leaving a trail of ionized plasma in its wake.
“Profound Magic…”
From that plasma coalesced an axe, its blade a swirling vortex of blue lightning, humming with a power that made the air tremble. The weapon hovered for a heartbeat, then plunged into Dalazar’s hand as though it had always belonged there.
“World‑Breaker!”
He lifted the massive blade, feeling its weight as a promise of annihilation. With a mighty heave, he swung the glowing weapon in a single, sweeping arc. The plasma blade cleaved through the Hydra’s heads as a hot knife through butter, each strike sending arcs of electric fire into the water that birthed them. The heads evaporated in vapor, their screams curling into the night like dying thunderstorms.
Silence fell, broken only by the crackle of the dying shield and the ragged breathing of a man who had just outrun death. Dalazar stared at the space where the Hydra had loomed, his heart pounding in his throat.
“Don’t tell ’em this is all you’re capable of…”
The plasma began to dim, revealing its creator. A figure stepped forward, tall as a pillar, tattoos of ancient ceremonial runes crawling across his skin like living constellations. He was six‑feet‑five, his presence a storm condensed into flesh.
Myos Ri’ore, his older brother, the Tyrant.
“Myos,” Dalazar breathed, a mixture of awe and grief twisting his throat.
“Stand tall, Sixth King.”
Myos’s voice rolled like distant thunder, steady and unyielding. Though his body bore the bruises of earlier conflict, his aura crackled with fresh vigor, the kind that could shatter mountains. He extended a hand, the fingers sparking with raw energy.
“Or do you plan to face our foe, body bowed before them?”
Dalazar’s eyes welled, but he forced the tears back, gripping Myos’s hand with a grip that felt like two lightning rods fused. The electric surge that ran between them was not merely shared power; it was an unspoken covenant.
“A king never kneels, Myos.”
Myos chuckled, a sound that sounded like rain on a tin roof.
“Heh… she’s a powerful one. Took one of our most potent spells just to slow her down.”
Myos’ eyes narrowed, admiration flickering in their amber depths.
“Profound Magic… I didn’t know you were capable of it.”
The name cracked the very air, calling forth a surge of emerald lightning that wrapped his arms like a second skin.
"Now… let’s show this little girl what happens when someone threatens the Denkou Sovereignty!”
Dalazar felt his brother’s plasma flare again, their combined might a beacon in the darkness. Together, they turned to Kilik, whose water‑shaped eyes glittered with a terrifying resolve.
Myos suggested promptly, "‘I’ll distract the heads… You focus on the girl; unless we disrupt her spell, this will never end."
Myos swung his great sword over his shoulder.
" For Na'lumiere..."
Myos whispered the name. A Sound akin to grief and reverence hitched in his enunciation. Dalazar’s mind surged with the memory of his twin, Na’lumiere, who was the entire reason Dalazar was still among the living.
The Emerald King nodded, his heart beating in sync with the storm that raged within him.
“For Na’lumiere…” he whispered, feeling the name ignite his soul. A crack of pure, green lightning erupted from his crown, scattering the clouds and illuminating the battlefield in an otherworldly glow.
The Hydra’s heads, though severed, splintered once more, each new growth a jagged wave of water and Ice. Myos, wielding the searing blue plasma axe, surged forward, his swings carving arcs of electricity through the heads, each blow a thunderclap that sent torrents of water splashing away.
Dalazar, moving like a living bolt, spun through the battlefield. He drew upon the ancient art of Duplication Magic, a rare technique taught only to the Ascendant Class of Mage within the kingdom. With a series of precise hand signs, he split his own amagic ra into three perfect lightning clones, each one a mirror of his own form. The clones formed a rotating barrier of searing current around him, deflecting the Hydra’s torrents while he focused on the core.
Re: A Dynasty Falls PT2
The city of Denkou burned. To Kilik, perched within the serpentine heart of her Water Hydra, it was a symphony of glorious destruction. From her vantage point, the invasion was a masterpiece of logistics and brute force. Her Goblin Tinkerers, giggling maniacs with a penchant for structural weak points, sent foundational pillars of Denkou architecture crashing into the streets below, their detonations swallowing screams by the hundred. Below them, the Volqin Salamanders moved like a lava flow, their shinjutsu painting the district in hues of molten rock and incinerated flesh. It was perfect. A clean, decisive purge.
And then, the symphony struck a discordant note.
From the smoke-choked plazas, new figures emerged. Warriors, not of flesh and steel, but of storm and fury. Lightning coiled around their bodies like living armor, crackling with an ozone scent that cut through the reek of burning. Across their chests, the emblem of a bear blazed with incandescent power. They moved not like soldiers, but like avatars of a tempest, their heavy, infused might descending upon the Salamanders like hammers of judgment. The fiery shinjutsu masters, who had moments before been the apex predators of the battlefield, were splattered under their heels, their flames extinguished with contemptuous ease.
Panic, a foreign and bitter taste, began to seep into the comm-link chatter. From the west, a new horror. The very cobblestones and statues seemed to drift to life, coalescing under the direction of mages bearing the sigil of an Ant. Stone warped, reshaping itself into monstrous cannons that hummed with stolen energy, absorbing the ambient lightning from the Bear warriors and firing it back in concentrated, city-block-leveling bursts. To the east, where her elite Khor elvs had spun their nigh-impenetrable hellish webs, a third force appeared. Mages with staffs tipped in captured lightning bolts moved with an unearthly precision. They didn't blast or burn; they wove. From their staves, scalp-thin threads of pure naten—raw energy—lashed out, slicing through the Khor's webs as if they were morning mist and cleaving through their chitinous, insectoid armor with surgical finality.
The coordination was flawless, a brutal, interlocking defense that turned her invasion force from a conquering army into a panicked mob.
"C-commander," a strained voice crackled in her ear.
Kilik barely registered it. Her focus was absolute, centered on the man before her. Dalazar, the Emerald King of Denkou, was a pest, but a formidable one. His lightning-wreathed blade was a blur, severing the serpentine heads of her hydra, but it was an exercise in futility. For every head he decapitated, two more erupted from the watery stump, their fangs gnashing with renewed vigor. Her magic was a boundless wellspring; as a literal spout of naten, a dragon in mortal form, this was a battle of attrition she could not lose.
"What is it!" she barked, the vibrations of her voice carrying through the comms and the watery flesh of her spell construct.
"We… we are facing extreme resistance from all over," the voice stammered. "Most of our platoons have been wiped out."
"Then call for reinforcements, you fool!"
"Ma'am, we tried, but our connection to the Crimson Cloud is… well…"
A cold spike of dread pierced Kilik's focus. "Kilik to the Crimson Cloud, do you copy!"
Only the crackle of static and the distant roar of battle answered.
"This is Captain Kilik of Squad 5," she repeated, her voice tighter, sharper. "We are being slaughtered. These humans are a coordinated nuisance. Requesting immediate support!"
Silence. A profound, damning silence that told her more than any panicked report ever could. The storm? No. She dismissed the thought. B'halia's technology was supreme; a simple atmospheric disturbance couldn't sever their connection. They were cut off.
Alone
Just as the chilling realization took root, a new light tore across the bruised sky. It wasn't the yellow-white of Dalazar's lightning, but a blazing, sapphire comet that scorched the clouds. From it descended a cleave of pure azure energy, a blade of light that bleached the world blue for a silent, heart-stopping moment. Sound itself was devoured. Then, the shockwave hit—a monstrous thunderclap that rattled the teeth in her skull.
"Such… power," Kilik whispered.
The aftermath was devastating. In that single, elegant stroke, nearly all one hundred heads of her hydra were gone. Not merely severed, but evaporated. Atomized. A display of power so absolute it forced a pause in the chaos, a moment of shared, terrified awe. Before her, Dalazar was no longer alone. A second figure stood beside him, his blue armor still humming from the attack. The blue prince had arrived.
She was at a disadvantage. Hopelessly, utterly outmatched. The urge to flee, to relent, was a physical thing, a coiling serpent in her gut.
And still… she would not give in.
If she, Kilik, a scion of the Primordials, could not topple a mere human lord—two human lords—how could she dare dream of sovereignty? How could she call herself a warrior of the planet, of the seas? How could she face her people, scattered and hunted, after promising them a future carved from the ruins of their oppressors?
The answer was simple.
"I cannot."
The two Denkou lords convened, their murmurs lost in the wind, no doubt plotting her final destruction. Kilik seized the moment. The steam from her disintegrated hydra hissed and swirled. She didn't dismiss the spell; she commanded the vapor, drawing it back, reinforcing the few remaining heads, making their watery flesh dense and resilient. The blue prince’s blade began its relentless assault again, but now it met a sturdier defense. It was then, in the quiet of her soul, that another voice spoke.
"You know what we must do," Orvyn's ancient consciousness resonated within her mind, a tide pulling at the shores of her being.
"Draw the curtains," Kilik responded in thought, her resolve hardening into diamond. "Close out this scene."
"They are powerful," Orvyn’s voice began to blend with her own, their wills intertwining like twin serpents. "They are the sky."
"But we..." Their thoughts became one, a single, booming declaration echoing in the abyss of her spirit. Ancient. Powerful. United.
"Are the ocean!"
Magic, raw and untamed, erupted from her. The cosmic nebulae across her frame, scales that held swirling galaxies, began to pulse with an inner light. Her cherry-pink eyes burned like piercing suns. A visible aura of her Ki, the incandescent expression of her shinjutsu, clad her in a shimmering, silver-blue glow. She raised a hand to the heavens, her long, blue-silver hair whipping around her as if caught in a personal gale.
Her lips parted, and a single phrase of Wrymspeech fell into the world, infused with the universal force of Ki.
"Noa Sozu."
Creation.
It was not a request, but a command. A massive, intricate sigil, woven from lines of pure energy, carved itself into the storm clouds above. A word of Primordial power, invigorated by the life force of the universe itself, gave her the temporary might of something that defied divinity. It was no simple ascension. It was an infinitesimal plummet into a bottomless abyss of possibility, as if she were summoning the very endlessness of the ocean itself from the heart of a star.
It was from this place she drew her power. And from the very skies above them, that power fell upon the Kingdom of Denkou. Not as rain, but as a deluge. A solid wall of water, a flood of biblical proportions, summoned from nothing, crashed down upon the burning city, an unstoppable tsunami meant to wash away the lightning, the stone, the fire, and the sky itself.
And then, the symphony struck a discordant note.
From the smoke-choked plazas, new figures emerged. Warriors, not of flesh and steel, but of storm and fury. Lightning coiled around their bodies like living armor, crackling with an ozone scent that cut through the reek of burning. Across their chests, the emblem of a bear blazed with incandescent power. They moved not like soldiers, but like avatars of a tempest, their heavy, infused might descending upon the Salamanders like hammers of judgment. The fiery shinjutsu masters, who had moments before been the apex predators of the battlefield, were splattered under their heels, their flames extinguished with contemptuous ease.
Panic, a foreign and bitter taste, began to seep into the comm-link chatter. From the west, a new horror. The very cobblestones and statues seemed to drift to life, coalescing under the direction of mages bearing the sigil of an Ant. Stone warped, reshaping itself into monstrous cannons that hummed with stolen energy, absorbing the ambient lightning from the Bear warriors and firing it back in concentrated, city-block-leveling bursts. To the east, where her elite Khor elvs had spun their nigh-impenetrable hellish webs, a third force appeared. Mages with staffs tipped in captured lightning bolts moved with an unearthly precision. They didn't blast or burn; they wove. From their staves, scalp-thin threads of pure naten—raw energy—lashed out, slicing through the Khor's webs as if they were morning mist and cleaving through their chitinous, insectoid armor with surgical finality.
The coordination was flawless, a brutal, interlocking defense that turned her invasion force from a conquering army into a panicked mob.
"C-commander," a strained voice crackled in her ear.
Kilik barely registered it. Her focus was absolute, centered on the man before her. Dalazar, the Emerald King of Denkou, was a pest, but a formidable one. His lightning-wreathed blade was a blur, severing the serpentine heads of her hydra, but it was an exercise in futility. For every head he decapitated, two more erupted from the watery stump, their fangs gnashing with renewed vigor. Her magic was a boundless wellspring; as a literal spout of naten, a dragon in mortal form, this was a battle of attrition she could not lose.
"What is it!" she barked, the vibrations of her voice carrying through the comms and the watery flesh of her spell construct.
"We… we are facing extreme resistance from all over," the voice stammered. "Most of our platoons have been wiped out."
"Then call for reinforcements, you fool!"
"Ma'am, we tried, but our connection to the Crimson Cloud is… well…"
A cold spike of dread pierced Kilik's focus. "Kilik to the Crimson Cloud, do you copy!"
Only the crackle of static and the distant roar of battle answered.
"This is Captain Kilik of Squad 5," she repeated, her voice tighter, sharper. "We are being slaughtered. These humans are a coordinated nuisance. Requesting immediate support!"
Silence. A profound, damning silence that told her more than any panicked report ever could. The storm? No. She dismissed the thought. B'halia's technology was supreme; a simple atmospheric disturbance couldn't sever their connection. They were cut off.
Alone
Just as the chilling realization took root, a new light tore across the bruised sky. It wasn't the yellow-white of Dalazar's lightning, but a blazing, sapphire comet that scorched the clouds. From it descended a cleave of pure azure energy, a blade of light that bleached the world blue for a silent, heart-stopping moment. Sound itself was devoured. Then, the shockwave hit—a monstrous thunderclap that rattled the teeth in her skull.
"Such… power," Kilik whispered.
The aftermath was devastating. In that single, elegant stroke, nearly all one hundred heads of her hydra were gone. Not merely severed, but evaporated. Atomized. A display of power so absolute it forced a pause in the chaos, a moment of shared, terrified awe. Before her, Dalazar was no longer alone. A second figure stood beside him, his blue armor still humming from the attack. The blue prince had arrived.
She was at a disadvantage. Hopelessly, utterly outmatched. The urge to flee, to relent, was a physical thing, a coiling serpent in her gut.
And still… she would not give in.
If she, Kilik, a scion of the Primordials, could not topple a mere human lord—two human lords—how could she dare dream of sovereignty? How could she call herself a warrior of the planet, of the seas? How could she face her people, scattered and hunted, after promising them a future carved from the ruins of their oppressors?
The answer was simple.
"I cannot."
The two Denkou lords convened, their murmurs lost in the wind, no doubt plotting her final destruction. Kilik seized the moment. The steam from her disintegrated hydra hissed and swirled. She didn't dismiss the spell; she commanded the vapor, drawing it back, reinforcing the few remaining heads, making their watery flesh dense and resilient. The blue prince’s blade began its relentless assault again, but now it met a sturdier defense. It was then, in the quiet of her soul, that another voice spoke.
"You know what we must do," Orvyn's ancient consciousness resonated within her mind, a tide pulling at the shores of her being.
"Draw the curtains," Kilik responded in thought, her resolve hardening into diamond. "Close out this scene."
"They are powerful," Orvyn’s voice began to blend with her own, their wills intertwining like twin serpents. "They are the sky."
"But we..." Their thoughts became one, a single, booming declaration echoing in the abyss of her spirit. Ancient. Powerful. United.
"Are the ocean!"
Magic, raw and untamed, erupted from her. The cosmic nebulae across her frame, scales that held swirling galaxies, began to pulse with an inner light. Her cherry-pink eyes burned like piercing suns. A visible aura of her Ki, the incandescent expression of her shinjutsu, clad her in a shimmering, silver-blue glow. She raised a hand to the heavens, her long, blue-silver hair whipping around her as if caught in a personal gale.
Her lips parted, and a single phrase of Wrymspeech fell into the world, infused with the universal force of Ki.
"Noa Sozu."
Creation.
It was not a request, but a command. A massive, intricate sigil, woven from lines of pure energy, carved itself into the storm clouds above. A word of Primordial power, invigorated by the life force of the universe itself, gave her the temporary might of something that defied divinity. It was no simple ascension. It was an infinitesimal plummet into a bottomless abyss of possibility, as if she were summoning the very endlessness of the ocean itself from the heart of a star.
It was from this place she drew her power. And from the very skies above them, that power fell upon the Kingdom of Denkou. Not as rain, but as a deluge. A solid wall of water, a flood of biblical proportions, summoned from nothing, crashed down upon the burning city, an unstoppable tsunami meant to wash away the lightning, the stone, the fire, and the sky itself.
"I hear the screams of the Ocean, the cries of the waves. The sea floor yearns for healing and begs for retribution. My wish is to grant it"
-
Dalazar Denkou
- Drifter
- Posts: 238
- Joined: Sat Feb 16, 2019 8:39 pm
Re: A Dynasty Falls PT2
The air itself was a scream of ozone and pressure. Myos Ri’ore, First Born Prince of Denkou, was a living thunderbolt, his armor shedding flakes of azure plasma like a dying star as he carved through the heavens. Below him, the royal city trembled, its crystalline spires reflecting a sky gone mad. His enemy was not a single being, but a legion born of one will: Kilik’s hydras, each head a battering ram of hyper-condensed water, striking with the tectonic force of a collapsing mountain.
Each impact of his greatsword sent a shudder through his very soul. Shink. Crack. The sound of his ancestral armor, forged in the heart of a lightning storm, fracturing under the strain. He was cleaving water, yet it felt like hewing the diamond-hard scales of an ancient dragon. Kilik had coiled every molecule, every ounce of the sea into a living weapon. She was an elemental of a class he’d never conceived.
Worse, his own well of power was running low. The battle with his younger brother, a bitter clash of ideology and pride mere moments before Kilik’s B’halian fleet had torn through their defenses, had left his frame brittle. The ghost of Dalazar’s magic still echoed in his bones, a dull ache that magnified the crushing weight of Kilik’s spells. His movements, once the fluid dance of a storm, grew ragged, his swings weighted with a desperate exhaustion.
“Anytime now, Dalazar!” he roared into the Iribroum, the telepathic ether that bound his people.
Yet even as his body screamed, Myos, the First Born, did not relent. He was the shield. He drew the serpent’s gaze, weaving arcs of lightning and steel, a frantic, glorious defense to buy his younger brother the precious seconds he needed within his protective orb. Dalazar was the kingdom's hope, the fulcrum upon which their fate now pivoted.
But the heavens are deaf to the prayers of kings and princes alike. They answer only to power, and Kilik’s was absolute. The heavens began to split, not under the weight of clouds, but under the sheer dogma of her will. She didn't just command the water; she was the water. The well of her magic seemed bottomless, as if the planet’s own churning, liquid heart beat in time with hers.
Just…what is this girl? Dalazar thought, his own concentration wavering within his shimmering barrier. His Magic Sense, usually a precise instrument, was a storm of raw, screaming static. Through the chaos, he perceived it: not just Kilik’s monstrous conjuration, but the abyss from which it was born. An ancient, primal power that dwarfed the ambitions of men and their petty wars.
The sky was no longer sky. It was a canvas, and Kilik painted it with the color of annihilation. A liquid firmament, hundreds of thousands of tons of water, hung suspended above Denkou—a silent, suffocating god waiting to fall.
The psychic scream that flooded the Iribroum was more than Dalazar could bear. The terror of his people, a symphony of anguish, clawed at his mind. Even the B’halian invaders, their skirmishes ceasing, stared up at the drowning sky, their faces pale with the shared understanding that their commander had just signed a death warrant for them all. This wasn't war. It was extinction.
The weight of it all—the fear, the responsibility, the impending, indiscriminate death—was a colder, heavier thing than any ocean. That much destruction was a sorrow too vast to endure.
In that moment, something within Dalazar crystallized. The time for strategy was over. The time for holding back, for preserving his own life, was a luxury he could no longer afford.
It has to be me, he resolved, a quiet, terrible certainty. And me alone.
“Brother! Waste no more time defending me! Go now, to the people!” The command was not a suggestion; it was a blade of pure will, slicing through the psychic din and into Myos’s mind.
Myos, who had just vaporized the last hydra, was transfixed by the impossible sea above. The shadow it cast was absolute, swallowing the land in a premature twilight. Dalazar’s sharp tone jolted him from his shock.
“Wait, what are you going to do?” Myos projected back, his disbelief a raw wound. He turned, seeing the orb around his brother dissolve. “You can’t possibly handle this alone!”
“You’re wrong, Myos…”
Around Dalazar, the shimmering duplicates he had created to confuse his enemies froze, then walked back toward his true form, merging into him like ghosts returning to a grave. His body began to emit a blinding, glistening glow.
“I am the only one who can.”
His eyes were no longer human. They burned like twin amber suns, ancient and weary.
“Dalazar…” Myos’s tone softened, a flicker of the brotherly bond they had so recently fractured. There were a thousand apologies unspoken, a landscape of regrets he still wished to navigate with him. But as his heart opened, Dalazar’s closed. He sealed himself away from the pain, the past, from everything but the singular, horrifying task at hand.
“Go, Myos. That is an order.” His hair began to dance on the currents of his rising magic, the ends dissolving into ephemeral mist. His almond skin shifted, deepening into the dark, bruised teal of a twilight storm. “Not from your brother… but your King.”
Myos’s eyes widened. He gripped the hilt of his greatsword, a tremor running through him—a clash of pride and profound anguish. For the first time, he saw not his younger sibling, but a sovereign shouldering a burden too heavy for any crown. He gave a single, sharp nod. It was an entire conversation in one gesture: an apology, an acceptance, a promise that this would not be the end. He turned and became a streak of azure lightning, rocketing toward the city below to shield who he could.
Alone, Dalazar raised his head to the drowning sky.
“Profound Magic: Lightning Soul.”
The utterance did not just shake the air; it unmade it. The very fabric of the world seemed to groan as his naten erupted from him, a geyser of pure magical force. It ripped through the colossal deluge above, not dispersing it, but seeding it. His energy created new clouds within the mass of water, thunderheads that bubbled and sparked with his essence. He was no longer a man casting a spell. He had become the spell. He was the Lightning Soul, an incarnation of Fulgora, the Djynn of Lightning. The atmosphere became his blood, the electric potential of the clouds his own beating heart.
He opened his mouth, and a sound tore from his throat—a gurgling, ferocious bellow that was more divine wrath than human cry.
“Lightning Soul Magic: Bellow of the Viridian Deity!”
From his lips burst an incandescent torrent of viridian-green lightning. It was not a beam, but a primal scream given form, a river of pure energy that moved with such impossible speed it seemed to pierce time itself. It slammed into the heart of the magical ocean hanging above.
The collision was a war between firmaments. A sound like a dying star shrieked across the land as lightning met water. Steam erupted in a world-spanning cloud, obscuring the sun. The sky boiled. For a moment, a glorious, terrible moment, it seemed Dalazar would win. The verdant light of his soul consumed the crushing blue of the sea.
But the ocean’s wrath was endless. And the price of godhood is steep.
Each impact of his greatsword sent a shudder through his very soul. Shink. Crack. The sound of his ancestral armor, forged in the heart of a lightning storm, fracturing under the strain. He was cleaving water, yet it felt like hewing the diamond-hard scales of an ancient dragon. Kilik had coiled every molecule, every ounce of the sea into a living weapon. She was an elemental of a class he’d never conceived.
Worse, his own well of power was running low. The battle with his younger brother, a bitter clash of ideology and pride mere moments before Kilik’s B’halian fleet had torn through their defenses, had left his frame brittle. The ghost of Dalazar’s magic still echoed in his bones, a dull ache that magnified the crushing weight of Kilik’s spells. His movements, once the fluid dance of a storm, grew ragged, his swings weighted with a desperate exhaustion.
“Anytime now, Dalazar!” he roared into the Iribroum, the telepathic ether that bound his people.
Yet even as his body screamed, Myos, the First Born, did not relent. He was the shield. He drew the serpent’s gaze, weaving arcs of lightning and steel, a frantic, glorious defense to buy his younger brother the precious seconds he needed within his protective orb. Dalazar was the kingdom's hope, the fulcrum upon which their fate now pivoted.
But the heavens are deaf to the prayers of kings and princes alike. They answer only to power, and Kilik’s was absolute. The heavens began to split, not under the weight of clouds, but under the sheer dogma of her will. She didn't just command the water; she was the water. The well of her magic seemed bottomless, as if the planet’s own churning, liquid heart beat in time with hers.
Just…what is this girl? Dalazar thought, his own concentration wavering within his shimmering barrier. His Magic Sense, usually a precise instrument, was a storm of raw, screaming static. Through the chaos, he perceived it: not just Kilik’s monstrous conjuration, but the abyss from which it was born. An ancient, primal power that dwarfed the ambitions of men and their petty wars.
The sky was no longer sky. It was a canvas, and Kilik painted it with the color of annihilation. A liquid firmament, hundreds of thousands of tons of water, hung suspended above Denkou—a silent, suffocating god waiting to fall.
The psychic scream that flooded the Iribroum was more than Dalazar could bear. The terror of his people, a symphony of anguish, clawed at his mind. Even the B’halian invaders, their skirmishes ceasing, stared up at the drowning sky, their faces pale with the shared understanding that their commander had just signed a death warrant for them all. This wasn't war. It was extinction.
The weight of it all—the fear, the responsibility, the impending, indiscriminate death—was a colder, heavier thing than any ocean. That much destruction was a sorrow too vast to endure.
In that moment, something within Dalazar crystallized. The time for strategy was over. The time for holding back, for preserving his own life, was a luxury he could no longer afford.
It has to be me, he resolved, a quiet, terrible certainty. And me alone.
“Brother! Waste no more time defending me! Go now, to the people!” The command was not a suggestion; it was a blade of pure will, slicing through the psychic din and into Myos’s mind.
Myos, who had just vaporized the last hydra, was transfixed by the impossible sea above. The shadow it cast was absolute, swallowing the land in a premature twilight. Dalazar’s sharp tone jolted him from his shock.
“Wait, what are you going to do?” Myos projected back, his disbelief a raw wound. He turned, seeing the orb around his brother dissolve. “You can’t possibly handle this alone!”
“You’re wrong, Myos…”
Around Dalazar, the shimmering duplicates he had created to confuse his enemies froze, then walked back toward his true form, merging into him like ghosts returning to a grave. His body began to emit a blinding, glistening glow.
“I am the only one who can.”
His eyes were no longer human. They burned like twin amber suns, ancient and weary.
“Dalazar…” Myos’s tone softened, a flicker of the brotherly bond they had so recently fractured. There were a thousand apologies unspoken, a landscape of regrets he still wished to navigate with him. But as his heart opened, Dalazar’s closed. He sealed himself away from the pain, the past, from everything but the singular, horrifying task at hand.
“Go, Myos. That is an order.” His hair began to dance on the currents of his rising magic, the ends dissolving into ephemeral mist. His almond skin shifted, deepening into the dark, bruised teal of a twilight storm. “Not from your brother… but your King.”
Myos’s eyes widened. He gripped the hilt of his greatsword, a tremor running through him—a clash of pride and profound anguish. For the first time, he saw not his younger sibling, but a sovereign shouldering a burden too heavy for any crown. He gave a single, sharp nod. It was an entire conversation in one gesture: an apology, an acceptance, a promise that this would not be the end. He turned and became a streak of azure lightning, rocketing toward the city below to shield who he could.
Alone, Dalazar raised his head to the drowning sky.
“Profound Magic: Lightning Soul.”
The utterance did not just shake the air; it unmade it. The very fabric of the world seemed to groan as his naten erupted from him, a geyser of pure magical force. It ripped through the colossal deluge above, not dispersing it, but seeding it. His energy created new clouds within the mass of water, thunderheads that bubbled and sparked with his essence. He was no longer a man casting a spell. He had become the spell. He was the Lightning Soul, an incarnation of Fulgora, the Djynn of Lightning. The atmosphere became his blood, the electric potential of the clouds his own beating heart.
He opened his mouth, and a sound tore from his throat—a gurgling, ferocious bellow that was more divine wrath than human cry.
“Lightning Soul Magic: Bellow of the Viridian Deity!”
From his lips burst an incandescent torrent of viridian-green lightning. It was not a beam, but a primal scream given form, a river of pure energy that moved with such impossible speed it seemed to pierce time itself. It slammed into the heart of the magical ocean hanging above.
The collision was a war between firmaments. A sound like a dying star shrieked across the land as lightning met water. Steam erupted in a world-spanning cloud, obscuring the sun. The sky boiled. For a moment, a glorious, terrible moment, it seemed Dalazar would win. The verdant light of his soul consumed the crushing blue of the sea.
But the ocean’s wrath was endless. And the price of godhood is steep.
Re: A Dynasty Falls PT2
The sky above Denkou was a bruised, pregnant purple, heavy with a sea that did not belong. Kilik hovered at its epicenter, a lone figure against the cataclysm she had summoned. Below, the kingdom’s famed crystalline spires, which supposedly pierced the heavens, looked like fragile glass toys. Static silence from her comms unit was a persistent hum in the back of her mind, a chorus of unanswered questions. Why had the Crimson Cloud command sent only her team—a scalpel for a war that demanded a sledgehammer? Were they a sacrifice? The gnawing suspicion that they had been sent here not to conquer, but to die.
The thoughts were venomous, but she forced them down. Kilik’s attention could not afford to be divided. Here, suspended between a sky she had stolen and a kingdom she was meant to shatter, those concerns were distant thunder. The only storm that mattered was the one she was about to command. And in the heart of it, a strange, exhilarating feeling bloomed—a faint joy. Finally… an opponent who might not break before she did.
Above them all, a testament to her terrible power, hung the vast incarnation of her magic. It was not merely a spell; it was a captured sea, a deluge of impossible scale held in abeyance. Coupled with the immutable dogma of gravity, it promised total decimation for the glittering emerald spires beneath its shadow. It was a weapon of fear, designed to inspire hopelessness and crush any foolish notion of resistance.
To break the spirit before it broke the stone.
At least, that was the perception she cultivated. The truth, a bitter memory that coiled in her gut, was far more complicated. Her first invasion, the one that had branded her “The Calamity,” had featured a similar arbiter of power. The display was awe-inspiring, a god’s wrath made manifest. It had also indiscriminately scoured the battlefield of thousands of her own comrades, loyal soldiers decimated by the sheer, untamed backlash of her magic.
That day, a war had begun not against an enemy kingdom, but within herself—a battle between the monstrous power she wielded and her own desperate, failing grip on its leash. Hethra’s emotional words echoed in her ear, a plea and a command. One that though she took to heart, could not honor, not in the way Hethra would have hoped. But that the Sylvan's word echoed twice within Kilik's mind was a testament to the respect she held for Hethra. Yet Kilik had promised herself never to hold back again. This time, though, it would not be a mere spectacle of potency. This would be a demonstration of control.
“They believe themselves to be pinnacles… the top of the pillar,” she murmured, her gaze fixed on the defiant figure at the heart of the city below. The Emerald King, Dalazar, was cloaked in a corona of lightning, his power lashing upwards.
A voice, ancient and deep as the abyssal trenches, rumbled from within her soul. “Draw from me, Kilik… prove your mastery. Contain the flood of my power, invoke your primordial blood,” Orvyn urged, the dragon’s consciousness stirring with anticipation.
As Dalazar unleashed his own power, the very fabric of the unseen world rippled. His transformation was prolific, a being of pure, solidified lightning. A sonic shriek, superheated and electric, tore through the air, aimed at the falling mass of water above. Steam exploded from the underside of the suspended sea, a testament to his staggering might. The Emerald King’s hope was clear: boil the ocean before it could drown his kingdom. A flicker of admiration touched Kilik, but it was fleeting.
His hope would not be realized.
Kilik’s hands began to move, weaving a complex and fluid litany of signs. Each gesture was precise, a syllable in a language older than mortal tongues. As the final sign was formed, her body became saturated in a soft, ethereal aura the color of cherry blossoms. The change was not one of grotesque expansion, but of sublime refinement. Her eyes, once human, now held the slitted, intelligent depth of a dragon’s. The faint scales that traced her cheekbones and arms became more defined, catching the light like iridescent pearls.
She spoke, her voice carrying a dual resonance, her own and Orvyn’s intertwined. “You are powerful, Emerald King. I am amazed that mortal magic could prove this strong.” She paused, letting the compliment settle before delivering the killing blow. “But my magic, my purpose, cannot be cradled!”
“Draconic Sonority!”
The art was absolute, a temporary and perfect merging of two spirits into one. The vessel of the dragon soul awakened a power as ancient as nature itself. But where once this technique would have shattered her human form, unleashing a dragon as vast as the clouds, today was different. Through an incredible, excruciating act of will, she reversed the flow. Instead of the massive energy exploding outward, she drew it inward, suffusing every cell of her being with the full might of a Primordial Water Dragon.
She remained humanoid in stature, but the aura emanating from her was oceanic. The air for miles grew heavy, laden with an impossible pressure. The power was there, all of it, compressed and contained within her slender frame. It was a power that felt less like a storm and more like the crushing, silent, absolute pressure of the deep.
Her lips curved into a predatory smile. “You would have been able to handle that lake…”
With but a languid raise of her hand, the sea above them swelled, doubling in size, its mass blotting out the remaining sky and plunging the world into a deep, aqueous twilight.
“But what will you do against the weight of the ocean itself?”
What Kilik unleashed was not a flood of water, but force. A mere product of its existence: hydrostatic pressure. The force exerted on a surface by water at rest. She did not move the water; she drew upon its immense, constant, crushing force and projected it downward.
For Dalazar and the kingdom of Denkou, it was as if the universe had suddenly gained infinite weight. An invisible column of force, carrying the literal weight of an ocean, slammed down. The Emerald King’s sonic barrier shattered into silence. His corona of lightning sputtered and died against a pressure it was never designed to withstand. His enchanted emerald armor, said to be unbreakable, began to groan and dent. The weight of an ocean, concentrated onto a single point. Dalazar was pinned between the heavens and the earth, a pillar of defiance being hammered into dust. If nothing was done, the kingdom would be crushed into a crater long before a single drop of water ever touched the ground.
Below, the effect would prove catastrophic. It would begin as a slow, grinding apocalypse. There would be no thunderous crash of a tidal wave, only the symphony of collapse. The glittering spires of Denkou groaned, their foundations pulverized by a force they couldn't see. Towers leaned, buckled, and then imploded into dust. The denizens would be forced to their knees, crumbling under the tonnage of her will.
Kilik watched, her draconic eyes cold and analytical. This was mastery. This was the difference between a wildfire and a focused laser, between a flood and the absolute, inescapable pressure of the abyss. She had proven her mastery. Yet, as the last of Dalazar's power struggled out, the reach of victory felt cold. The silence from the Crimson Cloud remained, a far heavier weight than any ocean she could summon.
The thoughts were venomous, but she forced them down. Kilik’s attention could not afford to be divided. Here, suspended between a sky she had stolen and a kingdom she was meant to shatter, those concerns were distant thunder. The only storm that mattered was the one she was about to command. And in the heart of it, a strange, exhilarating feeling bloomed—a faint joy. Finally… an opponent who might not break before she did.
Above them all, a testament to her terrible power, hung the vast incarnation of her magic. It was not merely a spell; it was a captured sea, a deluge of impossible scale held in abeyance. Coupled with the immutable dogma of gravity, it promised total decimation for the glittering emerald spires beneath its shadow. It was a weapon of fear, designed to inspire hopelessness and crush any foolish notion of resistance.
To break the spirit before it broke the stone.
At least, that was the perception she cultivated. The truth, a bitter memory that coiled in her gut, was far more complicated. Her first invasion, the one that had branded her “The Calamity,” had featured a similar arbiter of power. The display was awe-inspiring, a god’s wrath made manifest. It had also indiscriminately scoured the battlefield of thousands of her own comrades, loyal soldiers decimated by the sheer, untamed backlash of her magic.
That day, a war had begun not against an enemy kingdom, but within herself—a battle between the monstrous power she wielded and her own desperate, failing grip on its leash. Hethra’s emotional words echoed in her ear, a plea and a command. One that though she took to heart, could not honor, not in the way Hethra would have hoped. But that the Sylvan's word echoed twice within Kilik's mind was a testament to the respect she held for Hethra. Yet Kilik had promised herself never to hold back again. This time, though, it would not be a mere spectacle of potency. This would be a demonstration of control.
“They believe themselves to be pinnacles… the top of the pillar,” she murmured, her gaze fixed on the defiant figure at the heart of the city below. The Emerald King, Dalazar, was cloaked in a corona of lightning, his power lashing upwards.
A voice, ancient and deep as the abyssal trenches, rumbled from within her soul. “Draw from me, Kilik… prove your mastery. Contain the flood of my power, invoke your primordial blood,” Orvyn urged, the dragon’s consciousness stirring with anticipation.
As Dalazar unleashed his own power, the very fabric of the unseen world rippled. His transformation was prolific, a being of pure, solidified lightning. A sonic shriek, superheated and electric, tore through the air, aimed at the falling mass of water above. Steam exploded from the underside of the suspended sea, a testament to his staggering might. The Emerald King’s hope was clear: boil the ocean before it could drown his kingdom. A flicker of admiration touched Kilik, but it was fleeting.
His hope would not be realized.
Kilik’s hands began to move, weaving a complex and fluid litany of signs. Each gesture was precise, a syllable in a language older than mortal tongues. As the final sign was formed, her body became saturated in a soft, ethereal aura the color of cherry blossoms. The change was not one of grotesque expansion, but of sublime refinement. Her eyes, once human, now held the slitted, intelligent depth of a dragon’s. The faint scales that traced her cheekbones and arms became more defined, catching the light like iridescent pearls.
She spoke, her voice carrying a dual resonance, her own and Orvyn’s intertwined. “You are powerful, Emerald King. I am amazed that mortal magic could prove this strong.” She paused, letting the compliment settle before delivering the killing blow. “But my magic, my purpose, cannot be cradled!”
“Draconic Sonority!”
The art was absolute, a temporary and perfect merging of two spirits into one. The vessel of the dragon soul awakened a power as ancient as nature itself. But where once this technique would have shattered her human form, unleashing a dragon as vast as the clouds, today was different. Through an incredible, excruciating act of will, she reversed the flow. Instead of the massive energy exploding outward, she drew it inward, suffusing every cell of her being with the full might of a Primordial Water Dragon.
She remained humanoid in stature, but the aura emanating from her was oceanic. The air for miles grew heavy, laden with an impossible pressure. The power was there, all of it, compressed and contained within her slender frame. It was a power that felt less like a storm and more like the crushing, silent, absolute pressure of the deep.
Her lips curved into a predatory smile. “You would have been able to handle that lake…”
With but a languid raise of her hand, the sea above them swelled, doubling in size, its mass blotting out the remaining sky and plunging the world into a deep, aqueous twilight.
“But what will you do against the weight of the ocean itself?”
What Kilik unleashed was not a flood of water, but force. A mere product of its existence: hydrostatic pressure. The force exerted on a surface by water at rest. She did not move the water; she drew upon its immense, constant, crushing force and projected it downward.
For Dalazar and the kingdom of Denkou, it was as if the universe had suddenly gained infinite weight. An invisible column of force, carrying the literal weight of an ocean, slammed down. The Emerald King’s sonic barrier shattered into silence. His corona of lightning sputtered and died against a pressure it was never designed to withstand. His enchanted emerald armor, said to be unbreakable, began to groan and dent. The weight of an ocean, concentrated onto a single point. Dalazar was pinned between the heavens and the earth, a pillar of defiance being hammered into dust. If nothing was done, the kingdom would be crushed into a crater long before a single drop of water ever touched the ground.
Below, the effect would prove catastrophic. It would begin as a slow, grinding apocalypse. There would be no thunderous crash of a tidal wave, only the symphony of collapse. The glittering spires of Denkou groaned, their foundations pulverized by a force they couldn't see. Towers leaned, buckled, and then imploded into dust. The denizens would be forced to their knees, crumbling under the tonnage of her will.
Kilik watched, her draconic eyes cold and analytical. This was mastery. This was the difference between a wildfire and a focused laser, between a flood and the absolute, inescapable pressure of the abyss. She had proven her mastery. Yet, as the last of Dalazar's power struggled out, the reach of victory felt cold. The silence from the Crimson Cloud remained, a far heavier weight than any ocean she could summon.
"I hear the screams of the Ocean, the cries of the waves. The sea floor yearns for healing and begs for retribution. My wish is to grant it"
-
Dalazar Denkou
- Drifter
- Posts: 238
- Joined: Sat Feb 16, 2019 8:39 pm
Re: A Dynasty Falls PT2
From the very depths of Dalazar’s being, a primal roar of emerald lightning screeched across the heavens. It was the sound of a king’s desperation, a living tempest crashing against the impossible lake Kilik had summoned above his Kingdom of Denkou. As the celestial ocean descended, the king's wailing cry steamed against the mass of water, a furious, atomizing hiss that filled the air. At first glance, it appeared he would triumph. The sheer, kinetic power of the Emerald King, the Sixth Inheritor, seemed destined to dwarf even this incarnation of the ocean itself. His neck strained, veins bulging like cords of jade and iron, but he would not relent. His people were below him. His world was below him.
That was until Kilik's magic skyrocketed once more.
It was not a surge; it was a cataclysm. It was the shattering of a dam holding back the tides of a god. The very air became saturated in mystic energy, a power so ancient it seemed to predate the bedrock of Maidera itself. The boundaries separating the physical and spiritual worlds strained, the sutures binding reality threatening to sunder. With the coming of that force, the ocean he struggled to evaporate doubled in size in what felt like less than an instant, its weight becoming astronomical.
Kilik’s features, once subtly inhuman, now reflected the full scope of the danger she represented. Her form remained small, a cruel deception, but her essence was draconic, elden as the planet, vast and unforgiving as the abyssal depths. The pressure of her existence alone was a weapon. It was the mere tonnage of a soul that had witnessed epochs, and it betrayed the petiness of her physical frame. This spiritual force, a crushing, abyssal weight, shoved itself down Dalazar's throat, silencing his technique with contemptuous ease. The primal roar died in a choked gasp. He braced himself, expecting Kilik to finally drop the ocean upon him and the kingdom below, a final, watery grave for Denkou.
But… she just stood there, suspended between the heavens and her summoned sea. Menacingly.
She glared down upon them all, a goddess observing ants she could sweep away with a tide of absolution whenever she wished. That was when the true horror began. The spiritual pressure alone descended upon Denkou. The results were immediate and disastrous. A symphony of snapping bones echoed from the streets below as the frail bodies of the elderly and the young simply… failed. They were not strong enough to hold against the tonnage of Kilik’s power. Blood, dark and thick, pooled beneath the feet of those who survived, their screams piercing Dalazar’s psyche like a thousand poisoned needles. He, still hovering, felt the dogma of her spiritual force demanding he fall, that he kneel, that he be crushed into the earth with his people.
Using every final, desperate ounce of his strength, he resisted. He fashioned a single ava, a shield woven from his very soul. From it, the storm clouds born of his Lightning Soul technique swirled to his aid, coalescing into a shimmering green barrier between Kilik and his kingdom. The pressure on the city eased, but Dalazar felt his own spine threaten to bow. He could not hold it for long. His mind was a maelstrom of failure, his breath a ragged, tearing thing. His people were dying. For the first time in his reign, Dalazar, the Emerald King, doubted. His vision began to blur at the edges, the world dissolving into a haze of pain and despair. Just as his will began to crumble, he heard them. Voices, cutting through the anguish.
“Dalazar! Do not falter! By the light within us, we still stand!” It was Esmeralda, leader of the Flonne healers, her voice a silver bell in the cacophony of death, a promise of life that defied the suffocating dread.
“Stand, boy! The Bear of Urso does not fall while there is still a cub to protect!” roared a voice thick with pain and finality. It was Oberion of the Urso clan, his life force erupting in a final, defiant shield to protect a group of civilians, a sacrifice that bought them seconds.
Their words were kindling, and then the ancestors provided the flame. A chorus of spectral voices, the Emerald Kings before him, rose from the depths of his bloodline. Stand tall, Sixth Inheritor.
Through the shimmering veil of his failing barrier, Dalazar saw him. A spiritual projection, solid as stone, clad in the emerald armor of a bygone era. His father, the Fifth King, Dracovis. His spectral eyes held no pity, only a fierce, unyielding pride.
The voices of the previous Kings, a chorus of ages whispering in his soul. Stand tall, Sixth Inheritor. A king does not bow.
Through the haze of pain and doubt, a spiritual projection solidified before him. A man of immense stature, with eyes like emerald fire and a crown of lightning woven into his hair. His father. Dracovis, the Fifth Emerald King.
“You are buckling, my son,” his father’s voice resonated, not with disappointment, but with the strength of mountain stone. “You believe your power is a single flame against this deluge. You are wrong. Look deeper. You are never alone.”
Dracovis’s spectral hand gestured to Dalazar’s own chest. “Within your veins flows the legacy of all who came before. You are not a single warrior; you are the culmination of a dynasty. Let her be the rage Ocean..."
He placed his hand over Dalazar, granting him the strength to move forward, to defy the gravity pressing upon him.
"For you are the vengeance of the sky!"
The words were a palpable force in his chest, a thum of resolution coursing through his very being, embedding and taking root in his very bones. His senses burst to life like a live wire. A dam within his own soul burst. His eyes, once a fierce green, blossomed with a new, terrifying light. His irises became churning constellations of silver and emerald, the legendary Zen Dankestu, the eyes that could perceive the soul itself. Through them, he saw not a woman named Kilik, but a torrent of ancient, sorrowful energy. He saw not an ocean, but a monument of grief. And he saw his own power, not as a weapon, but as the very will of his lineage made manifest.
“Lightning Soul Magic…” he whispered, his voice no longer strained, but resonant with the power of a monarch. He raised a hand, and the Beryl storm that formed his shield did not dissipate; it answered. It swirled around his outstretched palm, a violent, grinding concerto of stone and sky. He began to compress it.
This was not merely shaping a cloud. This was folding reality upon itself. He forced the entirety of the roiling Beryl storm—the sum of his will, his grief, and the spectral power of his ancestors—to congeal. The air screamed as miles of energized cloud were crushed into a sphere no larger than his throne. It was a process of violent creation, the sound like a mountain being ground to dust. Light, blinding and pure, pulsed from its core, and the raw scent of ozone became so thick it was a taste of metal on the tongue. The orb did not spin; it vibrated, its very existence straining against the laws of physics. It looked less like a cloud and more like a captured star, its emerald and silver light warring for dominance within its collapsing shell. It was the kingdom's oldest thunder, given form and purpose.
Dalazar’s Zen Dankestu fixed on the heart of the ocean above. For a single, world-shattering heartbeat, all was silent.
Then, he unleashed it.
“…Terravolt!”
The orb did not explode. It became a vector. A bolt of lightning, thicker than any castle spire, erupted from the sphere. It was not just light and energy; it was a physical manifestation of sovereign might, a spear forged from the planet’s very heart. It tore through the oppressive spiritual pressure as if it were parchment, striking the summoned ocean not to disperse it, but to flash boil it with tempitues that dwarfed that of the twin suns several times over. Not even vapor remained.
Dalazar floated in the aftermath, his breath steady, his Zen Dankestu eyes fixed on Kilik. Her own draconic features held not anger, but a flicker of what might have been surprise, or even respect. The cost had been terrible. The silence from the city below was now punctuated by sobs of grief and relief. He looked down, seeing the devastation, the blood, the cost of his momentary weakness. The crown felt heavier than ever. But as he saw the survivors looking up at him, their faces streaked with tears and rain, he felt not just the weight of his crown, but the unyielding strength of the legacy that held it aloft. This battle had to draw to a close; he knew Kilik had to be aware of this as well, hence her transformation. Whatever this next exchange would be, Dalazar was prepared to make it their last.
He had to...
Or it would mean the end of the Denkou Dynasty...
That was until Kilik's magic skyrocketed once more.
It was not a surge; it was a cataclysm. It was the shattering of a dam holding back the tides of a god. The very air became saturated in mystic energy, a power so ancient it seemed to predate the bedrock of Maidera itself. The boundaries separating the physical and spiritual worlds strained, the sutures binding reality threatening to sunder. With the coming of that force, the ocean he struggled to evaporate doubled in size in what felt like less than an instant, its weight becoming astronomical.
Kilik’s features, once subtly inhuman, now reflected the full scope of the danger she represented. Her form remained small, a cruel deception, but her essence was draconic, elden as the planet, vast and unforgiving as the abyssal depths. The pressure of her existence alone was a weapon. It was the mere tonnage of a soul that had witnessed epochs, and it betrayed the petiness of her physical frame. This spiritual force, a crushing, abyssal weight, shoved itself down Dalazar's throat, silencing his technique with contemptuous ease. The primal roar died in a choked gasp. He braced himself, expecting Kilik to finally drop the ocean upon him and the kingdom below, a final, watery grave for Denkou.
But… she just stood there, suspended between the heavens and her summoned sea. Menacingly.
She glared down upon them all, a goddess observing ants she could sweep away with a tide of absolution whenever she wished. That was when the true horror began. The spiritual pressure alone descended upon Denkou. The results were immediate and disastrous. A symphony of snapping bones echoed from the streets below as the frail bodies of the elderly and the young simply… failed. They were not strong enough to hold against the tonnage of Kilik’s power. Blood, dark and thick, pooled beneath the feet of those who survived, their screams piercing Dalazar’s psyche like a thousand poisoned needles. He, still hovering, felt the dogma of her spiritual force demanding he fall, that he kneel, that he be crushed into the earth with his people.
Using every final, desperate ounce of his strength, he resisted. He fashioned a single ava, a shield woven from his very soul. From it, the storm clouds born of his Lightning Soul technique swirled to his aid, coalescing into a shimmering green barrier between Kilik and his kingdom. The pressure on the city eased, but Dalazar felt his own spine threaten to bow. He could not hold it for long. His mind was a maelstrom of failure, his breath a ragged, tearing thing. His people were dying. For the first time in his reign, Dalazar, the Emerald King, doubted. His vision began to blur at the edges, the world dissolving into a haze of pain and despair. Just as his will began to crumble, he heard them. Voices, cutting through the anguish.
“Dalazar! Do not falter! By the light within us, we still stand!” It was Esmeralda, leader of the Flonne healers, her voice a silver bell in the cacophony of death, a promise of life that defied the suffocating dread.
“Stand, boy! The Bear of Urso does not fall while there is still a cub to protect!” roared a voice thick with pain and finality. It was Oberion of the Urso clan, his life force erupting in a final, defiant shield to protect a group of civilians, a sacrifice that bought them seconds.
Their words were kindling, and then the ancestors provided the flame. A chorus of spectral voices, the Emerald Kings before him, rose from the depths of his bloodline. Stand tall, Sixth Inheritor.
Through the shimmering veil of his failing barrier, Dalazar saw him. A spiritual projection, solid as stone, clad in the emerald armor of a bygone era. His father, the Fifth King, Dracovis. His spectral eyes held no pity, only a fierce, unyielding pride.
The voices of the previous Kings, a chorus of ages whispering in his soul. Stand tall, Sixth Inheritor. A king does not bow.
Through the haze of pain and doubt, a spiritual projection solidified before him. A man of immense stature, with eyes like emerald fire and a crown of lightning woven into his hair. His father. Dracovis, the Fifth Emerald King.
“You are buckling, my son,” his father’s voice resonated, not with disappointment, but with the strength of mountain stone. “You believe your power is a single flame against this deluge. You are wrong. Look deeper. You are never alone.”
Dracovis’s spectral hand gestured to Dalazar’s own chest. “Within your veins flows the legacy of all who came before. You are not a single warrior; you are the culmination of a dynasty. Let her be the rage Ocean..."
He placed his hand over Dalazar, granting him the strength to move forward, to defy the gravity pressing upon him.
"For you are the vengeance of the sky!"
The words were a palpable force in his chest, a thum of resolution coursing through his very being, embedding and taking root in his very bones. His senses burst to life like a live wire. A dam within his own soul burst. His eyes, once a fierce green, blossomed with a new, terrifying light. His irises became churning constellations of silver and emerald, the legendary Zen Dankestu, the eyes that could perceive the soul itself. Through them, he saw not a woman named Kilik, but a torrent of ancient, sorrowful energy. He saw not an ocean, but a monument of grief. And he saw his own power, not as a weapon, but as the very will of his lineage made manifest.
“Lightning Soul Magic…” he whispered, his voice no longer strained, but resonant with the power of a monarch. He raised a hand, and the Beryl storm that formed his shield did not dissipate; it answered. It swirled around his outstretched palm, a violent, grinding concerto of stone and sky. He began to compress it.
This was not merely shaping a cloud. This was folding reality upon itself. He forced the entirety of the roiling Beryl storm—the sum of his will, his grief, and the spectral power of his ancestors—to congeal. The air screamed as miles of energized cloud were crushed into a sphere no larger than his throne. It was a process of violent creation, the sound like a mountain being ground to dust. Light, blinding and pure, pulsed from its core, and the raw scent of ozone became so thick it was a taste of metal on the tongue. The orb did not spin; it vibrated, its very existence straining against the laws of physics. It looked less like a cloud and more like a captured star, its emerald and silver light warring for dominance within its collapsing shell. It was the kingdom's oldest thunder, given form and purpose.
Dalazar’s Zen Dankestu fixed on the heart of the ocean above. For a single, world-shattering heartbeat, all was silent.
Then, he unleashed it.
“…Terravolt!”
The orb did not explode. It became a vector. A bolt of lightning, thicker than any castle spire, erupted from the sphere. It was not just light and energy; it was a physical manifestation of sovereign might, a spear forged from the planet’s very heart. It tore through the oppressive spiritual pressure as if it were parchment, striking the summoned ocean not to disperse it, but to flash boil it with tempitues that dwarfed that of the twin suns several times over. Not even vapor remained.
Dalazar floated in the aftermath, his breath steady, his Zen Dankestu eyes fixed on Kilik. Her own draconic features held not anger, but a flicker of what might have been surprise, or even respect. The cost had been terrible. The silence from the city below was now punctuated by sobs of grief and relief. He looked down, seeing the devastation, the blood, the cost of his momentary weakness. The crown felt heavier than ever. But as he saw the survivors looking up at him, their faces streaked with tears and rain, he felt not just the weight of his crown, but the unyielding strength of the legacy that held it aloft. This battle had to draw to a close; he knew Kilik had to be aware of this as well, hence her transformation. Whatever this next exchange would be, Dalazar was prepared to make it their last.
He had to...
Or it would mean the end of the Denkou Dynasty...
Re: A Dynasty Falls PT2
The world was steam and ozone, a canvas of chaos painted in ash and lightning. A scream was torn from Kilik’s lungs, a sound of boiled water and agony that was swallowed by the hissing roar of a vaporized ocean. The immense pressure wave threw her back, slamming her against the scorched granite of the mountain summit. Her armor, a masterwork of enchanted Atlantean alloy, glowed a dull, angry cherry-red before cracking like porcelain. Shards fell away, revealing the nebula-like scales beneath, now charred and blistered, the swirling galaxies within them muted into smudges of cosmic ash.
Every nerve ending was a filament of white-hot lightning. Dalazar Denkou’s ‘Terravolt’ hadn’t just evaporated her summoned sea; it had conducted through the very medium she commanded, turning her own power into a conduit for her near-execution. She tasted copper and ash, her long, silver-blue hair singed and brittle. Through blurred vision, she saw him descend from the storm-wracked sky, a figure clad in crackling emerald light, untouched. The 6th Emerald King.
He landed without a sound, his feet settling on the steaming stone ten yards from her broken form. His face was a mask of weary fury, his eyes holding the cold, unforgiving light of a winter storm. Sorrow in throat, exhaustion creased upon his face. Bravado masking weariness.
"Why do you persist even now?" His voice was not a shout, but the cold, clear ring of a judgment bell, cutting through the atmospheric chaos. "To come to my home, trampling over the lives of my people. You slaughtered children, mothers, wives… innocents. And still, you think your cause is just?"
Kilik pushed herself up, one arm trembling. Pain was a fire in her veins. Slicks of her own blood, a deep cerulean, mingled with the steaming rainwater on the blackened stone. The scales on her hand flexed, shimmering weakly. His words were barbs, digging past the physical torment to the core of her conviction.
She had believed.
The B'halian Empire's doctrine was a clean, pure thing in the abstract: Vescrutia was dying under the parasitic touch of humanity. A cleansing was necessary. A culling. But here, on this mountain of lightning and death, facing this man whose grief was as palpable as the static in the air, the clean lines of ideology blurred into a bloody, chaotic mess. The words were like shards of glass in Kilik’s soul. Innocents. The word felt foreign, a concept the B'halian Empire had trained her to disregard. Humans were a plague, a blight upon Vescrutia that had to be cleansed for the planet to heal. It was the mission. It was just.
Wasn't it?
No...it wasn't
This had never been about justice, not truly.
She had dressed up her convictions in silken layers of polished ideologies. But beneath the sparkling veneers of her "Higher Purpose"
Kilik hated...
Greif stricken....
And she wanted fucking blood.
For the world to hurt as she had and when she first gazed upon Delion and the B'halian emissaries at the festival, she felt she finally had the means to scathe the world that had taken her mother from her. It was what she wanted, what she asked for.
To be a blade for the empire....and yet
Her gaze drifted toward the horizon, past the smoldering ruins of the lower city, expecting to see the tell-tale shimmer of Imperial teleportation matrices, the vanguard of the fleet she was promised.
There was nothing. Only the empty, storm-tossed sky, mocking her with its vast, indifferent grey.
They hadn't been delayed.
They were never coming.
The realization struck her not like lightning, but like the slow, crushing pressure of the abyssal deep. This wasn't a spearhead assault; it was a sacrifice. The Empire had sent her, their living weapon, their Dragon of the Deep, to break herself against the Emerald King, to soften the target for a follow-up invasion that would claim the glory. They had used her faith as a sharpening stone for their own ambitions and left her here to die.
Her draconic energy, the wellspring of Orvyn’s power within her, was sputtering. The physical pain of her burns was nothing, a distant star compared to the black hole now opening in her chest. Grief, raw and absolute, consumed her. It was not the grief of loss, but the grief of utter meaninglessness. Her life, her loyalty, the blood on her hands—all of it had been for a lie. Her family...what would become of them? After she convinced them to align with B'halia...after she nearly killed her father for them, they....
"Innocents?"
The word was no longer foreign. It was a brand on her soul.
A wave of nausea and despair so profound it threatened to dissolve her very being washed over her. Then, a voice. Not in her ears, but a resonance in her very blood, in the water that composed her. It was ancient, calm, and vast.
“Kilik,” Orvyn whispered, her presence a tide rising within her soul. “The ocean dances to the hymn of your song. It ebbs and flows according to the whim of your patois.”
"I have nothing left," she thought, a ragged gasp escaping her lips. "He boiled it all away."
“You think in shallows,” the Primordial Dragon rumbled, her voice a current of profound power. “You command a puddle and believe it an ocean. But it is all water, my child. Your will is the true wellspring. Forget control. Embrace your nature. You are not a storm. You are the deep, dark truth from which all storms are born.”
The words were meant to be a balm, a guide back to her center. But her center was gone. It had been carved out, leaving a hollow, weeping void. And into that void, something else stirred.
A different resonance, cold and oily, slithered through the cracks in her soul. It was a presence she vaguely remembered, a splinter of darkness left from a battle in her own mind days ago. Ragana. The Sea Witch. The fragment of the crone’s essence, dormant until now, awoke to the feast of her despair. It did not offer guidance; it offered validation. It wrapped itself around her grief, feeding on the acidic misery of her betrayal.
Yes, it seemed to whisper, a sound like barnacles scraping across the hull of a drowning ship. They used you. They discarded you. Your pain is real. It is just. Let it be your truth. Let it be your strength.
The cold whisper grew, nourished by her sorrow, and began to constrict around Orvyn’s presence. The primordial dragon’s voice, once a vast and comforting ocean, became distant, then muffled, as if sinking into a tar pit.
“Child, do not—” Orvyn’s voice choked, then vanished.
Silence. The warmth of the primordial sea was gone, replaced by the frigid, still blackness of the Ur Hollow. Ragana’s essence did not speak again. It didn’t need to. It had silenced the voice of reason and left Kilik alone with her screaming, boundless grief.
Her will, empowered by Orvyn’s ancient knowledge, became a forge of impossible alchemy. She tried to form words, her spirit crumbling under the weight of her shattered soul. As she stared at the Emerald King, gazed around the blackened stone, her single most desired was for it all to simply...
Go away
and the world responded
GGRRWWAAAAAAH!!!!
From Kilik's mouth, a wailing roar of otherworldly cadence erupted. It tore through the unseen, scathing the realm, shattering the very air around them. Glass became dust, stone pummelled beneath her immense spiritual force, and the ocean heard her desire...and obeyed.
The change was horrific. A wave of blackness rolled behind Kilik’s cherry-pink eyes, extinguishing them like embers doused in oil. They became pits of polished jet, reflecting nothing. The vibrant, nebula-like patterns on her scales ceased their gentle swirling. The cosmic dust within them seemed to calcify, the colors leeching away until the scales were the flat, brittle grey of shale. Her skin, where it was not burned, lost its luminescence, taking on the pallid, greyish hue of a deep-sea corpse. Her cerulean blood, still weeping from her wounds, darkened to a viscous, inky violet.
She rose, not with the fluid grace of a warrior, but with the creaking, final movement of something long dead. Her posture was hunched, her head canted as if listening to a sound no one else could hear.
"Justice...." she said, and her voice was a ruin. It was a guttural, wet rasp, the sound of a throat filled with grave dirt and seawater. "No... it's only ever been about revenge..."
She closed her lightless eyes and let her grief pour out of her, not as a cry, but as a command. She didn't reach for the steam or the clouds. She reached for the soul of the world's water. Down the slopes of the Emerald Ascension, past the ravaged forests, to the coastline of the continent of Madeira itself. The Fresh Water Seas, its coastal bays, the vast —they all heard the summons of her absolute.
A resonance began, a low, dissonant hum that started in her bones and spread outwards, a vibration that shook the very foundations of the mountain.
Dalazar’s emerald aura flared, sensing the catastrophic shift in power. "What are you doing?" he demanded, his voice laced with the first hint of fear.
Far below, the world’s water began to reflect her soul. The sea receded from the coasts, not as a tide, but as an exhalation of dread. Harbors emptied, coastlines stretched, revealing miles of seabed never before seen by the sun. The water was being drawn into a single, impossible point of will: her broken heart.
A wave of impossible scale began to form on the horizon, a moving mountain range that blotted out the sun. But it was not blue. As it rose, the water transformed. The life-giving azure bled away, replaced by a cascading, shimmering sickness. The crest of the wave turned the color of an oil slick, then deepened to a viscous, liquid black. It was the color of her grief, the color of her blood, the color of the void that had consumed her.
Water to ink. Life-giver to bane.
"I have stopped asking," Kilik rasped, the words tearing at her throat as she extended a hand not in command, but in kinship with the approaching apocalypse. "I have stopped...caring."
The Grieving Tide did not roar; its approach was marked by a dreadful, grinding silence. It was a wall of liquid mercury, impossibly dense, its momentum absolute. The black tsunami did not crash upon the shore; it embraced it. Like the haunting grip of a spider just before sinking its fangs into its prey. It coiled, snaked around the mountains base. Splatters of anti eating away at everything.
Its touch was erasure.
The foothills and lower slopes of the mountain range were not broken or washed away; they were unmade. The black, ink-like substance, imbued with a corrosive despair as toxic as quicksilver, flowed over the land. Forests of ancient pine dissolved into black sludge. Granite cliffs sloughed away like wet sand. When the tide reached the foundations of the Denkou Kingdom, it was not with the force of an impact, but with the insidious caress of universal decay.
Stone walls, touched by the silver-black tide, dissolved like sugar. The Grieving Tide flowed into every crack, its corrosive nature eating away at the mortar, the foundations, the very heart of the mountain. Statues of past kings wept metallic tears as they crumbled into dust. Great emerald gates, which had withstood sieges for over ten thousand years, simply ceased to be.
Dalazar Denkou stood frozen on the summit, his emerald light a flickering candle against an infinite night. He watched as his kingdom, his history, began to fold towards the sea.
And on the peak, Kilik stood as its epicenter. She was no longer a soldier. No longer the Blade Of the Empire. She was a monument to betrayal, an avatar of nihilistic grief, her blackened eyes watching the world dissolve into the same ink-black emptiness that had consumed her soul.
She was….and perhaps always had been, a cataclysm.
The mountain groaned, its ancient bones rotting from below, and began to fall—not with a roar, but with a final, tired sigh.
The mountain holding the kingdom would crumble, and the kingdom would fall.
Every nerve ending was a filament of white-hot lightning. Dalazar Denkou’s ‘Terravolt’ hadn’t just evaporated her summoned sea; it had conducted through the very medium she commanded, turning her own power into a conduit for her near-execution. She tasted copper and ash, her long, silver-blue hair singed and brittle. Through blurred vision, she saw him descend from the storm-wracked sky, a figure clad in crackling emerald light, untouched. The 6th Emerald King.
He landed without a sound, his feet settling on the steaming stone ten yards from her broken form. His face was a mask of weary fury, his eyes holding the cold, unforgiving light of a winter storm. Sorrow in throat, exhaustion creased upon his face. Bravado masking weariness.
"Why do you persist even now?" His voice was not a shout, but the cold, clear ring of a judgment bell, cutting through the atmospheric chaos. "To come to my home, trampling over the lives of my people. You slaughtered children, mothers, wives… innocents. And still, you think your cause is just?"
Kilik pushed herself up, one arm trembling. Pain was a fire in her veins. Slicks of her own blood, a deep cerulean, mingled with the steaming rainwater on the blackened stone. The scales on her hand flexed, shimmering weakly. His words were barbs, digging past the physical torment to the core of her conviction.
She had believed.
The B'halian Empire's doctrine was a clean, pure thing in the abstract: Vescrutia was dying under the parasitic touch of humanity. A cleansing was necessary. A culling. But here, on this mountain of lightning and death, facing this man whose grief was as palpable as the static in the air, the clean lines of ideology blurred into a bloody, chaotic mess. The words were like shards of glass in Kilik’s soul. Innocents. The word felt foreign, a concept the B'halian Empire had trained her to disregard. Humans were a plague, a blight upon Vescrutia that had to be cleansed for the planet to heal. It was the mission. It was just.
Wasn't it?
No...it wasn't
This had never been about justice, not truly.
She had dressed up her convictions in silken layers of polished ideologies. But beneath the sparkling veneers of her "Higher Purpose"
Kilik hated...
Greif stricken....
And she wanted fucking blood.
For the world to hurt as she had and when she first gazed upon Delion and the B'halian emissaries at the festival, she felt she finally had the means to scathe the world that had taken her mother from her. It was what she wanted, what she asked for.
To be a blade for the empire....and yet
Her gaze drifted toward the horizon, past the smoldering ruins of the lower city, expecting to see the tell-tale shimmer of Imperial teleportation matrices, the vanguard of the fleet she was promised.
There was nothing. Only the empty, storm-tossed sky, mocking her with its vast, indifferent grey.
They hadn't been delayed.
They were never coming.
The realization struck her not like lightning, but like the slow, crushing pressure of the abyssal deep. This wasn't a spearhead assault; it was a sacrifice. The Empire had sent her, their living weapon, their Dragon of the Deep, to break herself against the Emerald King, to soften the target for a follow-up invasion that would claim the glory. They had used her faith as a sharpening stone for their own ambitions and left her here to die.
Her draconic energy, the wellspring of Orvyn’s power within her, was sputtering. The physical pain of her burns was nothing, a distant star compared to the black hole now opening in her chest. Grief, raw and absolute, consumed her. It was not the grief of loss, but the grief of utter meaninglessness. Her life, her loyalty, the blood on her hands—all of it had been for a lie. Her family...what would become of them? After she convinced them to align with B'halia...after she nearly killed her father for them, they....
"Innocents?"
The word was no longer foreign. It was a brand on her soul.
A wave of nausea and despair so profound it threatened to dissolve her very being washed over her. Then, a voice. Not in her ears, but a resonance in her very blood, in the water that composed her. It was ancient, calm, and vast.
“Kilik,” Orvyn whispered, her presence a tide rising within her soul. “The ocean dances to the hymn of your song. It ebbs and flows according to the whim of your patois.”
"I have nothing left," she thought, a ragged gasp escaping her lips. "He boiled it all away."
“You think in shallows,” the Primordial Dragon rumbled, her voice a current of profound power. “You command a puddle and believe it an ocean. But it is all water, my child. Your will is the true wellspring. Forget control. Embrace your nature. You are not a storm. You are the deep, dark truth from which all storms are born.”
The words were meant to be a balm, a guide back to her center. But her center was gone. It had been carved out, leaving a hollow, weeping void. And into that void, something else stirred.
A different resonance, cold and oily, slithered through the cracks in her soul. It was a presence she vaguely remembered, a splinter of darkness left from a battle in her own mind days ago. Ragana. The Sea Witch. The fragment of the crone’s essence, dormant until now, awoke to the feast of her despair. It did not offer guidance; it offered validation. It wrapped itself around her grief, feeding on the acidic misery of her betrayal.
Yes, it seemed to whisper, a sound like barnacles scraping across the hull of a drowning ship. They used you. They discarded you. Your pain is real. It is just. Let it be your truth. Let it be your strength.
The cold whisper grew, nourished by her sorrow, and began to constrict around Orvyn’s presence. The primordial dragon’s voice, once a vast and comforting ocean, became distant, then muffled, as if sinking into a tar pit.
“Child, do not—” Orvyn’s voice choked, then vanished.
Silence. The warmth of the primordial sea was gone, replaced by the frigid, still blackness of the Ur Hollow. Ragana’s essence did not speak again. It didn’t need to. It had silenced the voice of reason and left Kilik alone with her screaming, boundless grief.
Her will, empowered by Orvyn’s ancient knowledge, became a forge of impossible alchemy. She tried to form words, her spirit crumbling under the weight of her shattered soul. As she stared at the Emerald King, gazed around the blackened stone, her single most desired was for it all to simply...
Go away
and the world responded
GGRRWWAAAAAAH!!!!
From Kilik's mouth, a wailing roar of otherworldly cadence erupted. It tore through the unseen, scathing the realm, shattering the very air around them. Glass became dust, stone pummelled beneath her immense spiritual force, and the ocean heard her desire...and obeyed.
The change was horrific. A wave of blackness rolled behind Kilik’s cherry-pink eyes, extinguishing them like embers doused in oil. They became pits of polished jet, reflecting nothing. The vibrant, nebula-like patterns on her scales ceased their gentle swirling. The cosmic dust within them seemed to calcify, the colors leeching away until the scales were the flat, brittle grey of shale. Her skin, where it was not burned, lost its luminescence, taking on the pallid, greyish hue of a deep-sea corpse. Her cerulean blood, still weeping from her wounds, darkened to a viscous, inky violet.
She rose, not with the fluid grace of a warrior, but with the creaking, final movement of something long dead. Her posture was hunched, her head canted as if listening to a sound no one else could hear.
"Justice...." she said, and her voice was a ruin. It was a guttural, wet rasp, the sound of a throat filled with grave dirt and seawater. "No... it's only ever been about revenge..."
She closed her lightless eyes and let her grief pour out of her, not as a cry, but as a command. She didn't reach for the steam or the clouds. She reached for the soul of the world's water. Down the slopes of the Emerald Ascension, past the ravaged forests, to the coastline of the continent of Madeira itself. The Fresh Water Seas, its coastal bays, the vast —they all heard the summons of her absolute.
A resonance began, a low, dissonant hum that started in her bones and spread outwards, a vibration that shook the very foundations of the mountain.
Dalazar’s emerald aura flared, sensing the catastrophic shift in power. "What are you doing?" he demanded, his voice laced with the first hint of fear.
Far below, the world’s water began to reflect her soul. The sea receded from the coasts, not as a tide, but as an exhalation of dread. Harbors emptied, coastlines stretched, revealing miles of seabed never before seen by the sun. The water was being drawn into a single, impossible point of will: her broken heart.
A wave of impossible scale began to form on the horizon, a moving mountain range that blotted out the sun. But it was not blue. As it rose, the water transformed. The life-giving azure bled away, replaced by a cascading, shimmering sickness. The crest of the wave turned the color of an oil slick, then deepened to a viscous, liquid black. It was the color of her grief, the color of her blood, the color of the void that had consumed her.
Water to ink. Life-giver to bane.
"I have stopped asking," Kilik rasped, the words tearing at her throat as she extended a hand not in command, but in kinship with the approaching apocalypse. "I have stopped...caring."
The Grieving Tide did not roar; its approach was marked by a dreadful, grinding silence. It was a wall of liquid mercury, impossibly dense, its momentum absolute. The black tsunami did not crash upon the shore; it embraced it. Like the haunting grip of a spider just before sinking its fangs into its prey. It coiled, snaked around the mountains base. Splatters of anti eating away at everything.
Its touch was erasure.
The foothills and lower slopes of the mountain range were not broken or washed away; they were unmade. The black, ink-like substance, imbued with a corrosive despair as toxic as quicksilver, flowed over the land. Forests of ancient pine dissolved into black sludge. Granite cliffs sloughed away like wet sand. When the tide reached the foundations of the Denkou Kingdom, it was not with the force of an impact, but with the insidious caress of universal decay.
Stone walls, touched by the silver-black tide, dissolved like sugar. The Grieving Tide flowed into every crack, its corrosive nature eating away at the mortar, the foundations, the very heart of the mountain. Statues of past kings wept metallic tears as they crumbled into dust. Great emerald gates, which had withstood sieges for over ten thousand years, simply ceased to be.
Dalazar Denkou stood frozen on the summit, his emerald light a flickering candle against an infinite night. He watched as his kingdom, his history, began to fold towards the sea.
And on the peak, Kilik stood as its epicenter. She was no longer a soldier. No longer the Blade Of the Empire. She was a monument to betrayal, an avatar of nihilistic grief, her blackened eyes watching the world dissolve into the same ink-black emptiness that had consumed her soul.
She was….and perhaps always had been, a cataclysm.
The mountain groaned, its ancient bones rotting from below, and began to fall—not with a roar, but with a final, tired sigh.
The mountain holding the kingdom would crumble, and the kingdom would fall.
"I hear the screams of the Ocean, the cries of the waves. The sea floor yearns for healing and begs for retribution. My wish is to grant it"
The team