#Dreadwyrm trance as existential horror I guess?

[ofdragonsdeep]

20: Duel

A conflict between antagonistic persons, ideas, or forces.

On the rooftop of the royal palace of Ala Mhigo, Zenos sought to fight a beast.

Scales and claws will answer.

If there was one truth about Ar'telan that stood out above all others, it was that he did not like fighting.

It was the threat inherent in it. The constant knowledge that if he did not win, others would die, or suffer worse. Knowing that so much rested on his shoulders, and he could not afford to slip up. They did not have another Warrior of Light. They barely had anyone else with the Blessing. He could not fail.

Ala Mhigo had brought it into stark and barren light.

The fight had never been his, but he had never been one to abandon his friends when they needed him. He knew that so, so many would die if the Resistance could not turn the tide - and he had been tasked with finding Shinryu, the creature that had started all of this to begin with. A cause so desperate people were willing to die to see it succeed.

Ar'telan did not like killing people. He was capable of it, more than capable. He had done it countless times before, in that life-or-death situation where if he did not, it would be his life that were forfeit instead. Faced down those who wanted to be there, and those who did not. Feared the day he did not remember ever single life, because they had been lost in an ocean of desperation.

And then there was Zenos.

Zenos had seen in him the same thing that everyone else had - the stubborn weapon who refused to die. The creature who would fight to the last if it had to. And just like everyone else, he had sought to use it.

Ar'telan pitied him, the way he would pity a rabid dog who had to be put down. He resented that removing the threat would give Zenos exactly what he wanted.

For all his time as an adventurer, as Warrior of Light, as someone who had to fight to move forward, Ar'telan had resisted being put in a place where his only option was to kill. He had learned the scholar's arts, and conjury, and enough of the arcanist's toolkit that he could protect with it and little else. He had learned the art of a gladiator, of a knight, of a paladin, to be the bulwark between his friends and the oncoming tide. Always protector, always defender, never aggressive.

But the defender had been useless against Zenos.

He could hold his own, but he couldn't stop Zenos from turning on a whim and hurting his friends. He could salvage a poorly thought out plan, but he could not turn it around into a win. He had led the charge through the royal palace with his sword and shield in hand, protecting those who stood at his back to retake their home or drive out the aggressor, until they had reached Zenos.

Zenos did not care about the Imperial Province of Ala Mhigo. Zenos did not care about the lives of those beneath him, nor the lives of the rebellion. Zenos did not care about his role as commander, as prince of Garlemald, as a man who walked the world.

Zenos only cared about him.

During the attack on Rhalgr's Reach, Ar'telan had watched his impassive face turn up in the slightest smile. Heard the dull voice, replete with boredom, move just a little in pitch. When they had fought in Yanxia, Ar'telan had watched him feel something, for one small, fleeting moment.

And now the fire had caught.

Ar'telan had chased him to the roof of the palace, where in the age of Ala Mhigo's kings the royal menagerie had stood. He had listened to Zenos's impassioned speech, where he tried to claim friendship with the man he likened to a beast that wished to rip out his throat. He had listened to barely any of it, because the backdrop made his blood run cold.

Shinryu.

The primal sat in a net forged, Ar'telan hoped, by Omega. The Garleans had found it, they had brought it to their prince, and he had saved it for his last and grandest gesture of friendship. Ar'telan could feel the malice radiating from the creature even at a distance, its enforced quiescence doing little to calm the anger that fuelled it. A hundred hundred prayers of the dead had fuelled it, calling out to the Destroyer, a horrible amalgam of desperation and hope and curses. One last desecration of Nidhogg's aether, one final horror visited upon dragonkind.

A weapon. A potent force. A way to force the hand of those with power.

Another dragon-made-primal, enslaved to another warmongering empire, fashioned delicate puppet strings to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the sanctity of life.

He sheathed his sword, put up his shield, and from a bag at his hip, drew his grimoire.

---

Ar'telan disliked showy fights the most of all.

The sheer size of Shinryu meant their clash could never go unnoticed, but a showdown on a rooftop felt like spectacle for the sake of it. Ar'telan hoped that none of his allies would try to come to his aid. Zenos would not take kindly to it, and Ar'telan knew he would have no time to spare on protection.

He weaved an aetheric shield around himself as the dragon readied to attack. For his sins, Ar'telan had faced many dragons in battle now, and there would only be so much that Zenos could change. He would need time to grow used to the new form - to how the aether moved across his body, to the wings at his back, to the strength of his snapping jaws. Ar'telan would need the time.

The dragon roared, and Ar'telan paid no heed to the words that formed in his head at the sound of it.

The dance was the same. Lily grabbed hold of his shoulder, her healing staving off the damage from the constant barrage of aether that simply being close to Shinryu caused, and left Ar'telan free to concentrate. It was an unexpected boon that he knew how to read the tells of a dragon far better than he could ever have read Zenos.

Ice at his back. Sidestep, never taking his eyes from the foe.

Water to the side. Channel the aether, plant his feet at exactly the right time.

Wind gathering on the rooftop. Fight the gale, and never stray to close to the edge.

And as he did so, he weaved the aether at his fingertips into biting magic. Miasma in the dragon's lungs, poison in its blood, an aetheric assault of his own catching and redirecting the overwhelming presence back at the dragon itself. All of these were things that a scholar of Nym could have done, and none of them had availed him any against Zenos in the past. But they would chip away at his reserves, and that was all Ar'telan needed.

Time.

He could feel the threads in the aether, pulling taut around the nexus of draconic energy that Shinryu represented. As he moved - a fist from above, dodge to the left. A hail of ice, weather the storm. Levinbolts from the aether, weave a quick curative magic on the stiffness that built in his muscles - he teased them out.

One. Shinryu's eyes shone like bright, sharp points.

The tail slammed down where he had been just moments before, and only a sharp application of magic made it retreat, the dragon - Zenos - rumbling in pain as it did.

Two. The primal's aether outlined itself, around that nest of pulsing purple that was Nidhogg's last remaining essence, the lives of all of those who had died on Baelsar's wall surrounding it.

Energy crackled around the dragon's maw, and Ar'telan poured what little power he had left into a protective shield. The column of fire struck like a lance, only its afterimages avoidable, each pulse a stab of white-hot pain across his flesh.

Three. At the edges of his perception, there was that same distorted song he had heard at the heart of the Ragnarok. An elegy of agony, cried out over millenia, so many frozen voices forced to answer.

He held them, those invisble threads, trembling in the air, and waited.

His opportunity came when Zenos took to the air, wheeling around to strafe across the arena. There was a corner of the rooftop, perilously small, that the Echo drew him towards like a moth to fire. He threw himself to safety, precious seconds gained in Zenos needing to re-orient, and closed his eyes.

When the records of Allag's summoners had shown that they could channel the essence of eikons, Ar'telan had engaged in it only to satisfy Y'mhitra's scientific curiosity. When the theory had been extended to any Eikon that he had faced in battle, he had baulked at the final hurdle and refused her. When the animated tome they had dug out of the dig site had spoken of demi-primals, Y'mhitra had needed to petition him multiple times before he would even humour the idea, much less the execution.

Allag desecrated everything it touched.

But Nidhogg, whose only crime had been witnessing his sister's death for centuries, whose madness had been mutlipled tenfold by the actions of those long-dead Ishgardians, whose death had been both mercy and murder, deserved to rest.

When he opened his eyes, the rooftop sang.

Every battered flower, every cracked rock, every flex of Shinryu's fingers, every flap of his wings. Their fight blurred together like a single breath, move-duck-dodge-weather-watch. Every motion an afterimage that never left his eyes.

It burned, bright and blue, that horrible off-key eulogy to the living dead.

He spread his wings and leapt from the rooftop. Energy and aether beckoned at his fingertips, the price frivolous in the moment. It crackled at his claws, all but crying out for release.

Maintaining the trance for too long taxes the aether.

He unleashed it. A column of bright blue fire slammed down on Shinryu, and its afterimages sang in fire. The dragon roared at the agony of it, and Ar'telan could feel the smile from the man within it.

A trance too deep risks altering the corporeal aether permanently.

He wheeled away as Shinryu lashed out with his tail, and spat aether in reply. Again the afterburn echoed, like the Dawn Wyrm himself was sat at his back, writhing in the agony of his twisted rebirth.

Blue where there should have been gold.

Unleashing a demi-primal requires natural protections against Tempering to work at all.

The song ached for an end to it. That small spark of Bahamut touching what yet remained of Nidhogg in the echo, screaming at the wrongness. He could hear it, words in his head in a speech so aether-deep he knew the meaning even if he did not know the words.

Destruction. Despair. Death.

A century of white-hot pain, Ratatoskr's dying scream etched into his soul like a carving in stone.

"So few people have witnessed Bahamut and remained intact, we have no data…"

"Even being close to it risks being Tempered…"

Go to the heart of the wyrm and set him free.

Shinryu lept for him like a cat at prey, but even with Bahamut's aether coccooned around his body he was still far smaller than the primal, and it was easy to dart backwards, away from catching claws and snapping jaws. This time his response was far more than simple aetheric poisons, a ricochet of energy so intense the air crackled as it hit.

If you linger too long, you might not come back.

All they had to do was evict the interloper. All they had to do was dissipate the shell the primal had woven around Nidhogg's soul. Break it, and they broke Zenos. Without his draconic skin, he would fall to them. It was inevitable.

The now hurt to perceive.

Make sure you come back.

They pulled in their wings and dove downwards. Every weak point was outlined in bright fire across the dragon's back, and they dug in their claws. Shinryu's aether assaulted them with every movement, and the memory of every impact lingered like a bleeding wound on their soul.

Break it.

Shinryu shook back and forth, wings beating in renewed attempts to dislodge the interloper. They sunk their teeth into the skin, magic gathered about them to make the venom more potent than any spell a feeble book could conjure. Their song echoed against his, and they felt his pain, white-hot lances through the blood.

Break it.

Their wings heaved. Shinryu swung his tail around to catch them, like swatting a fly, and they rolled away.

Break it.

They tore a scale free from the flesh, the wound raw and bleeding green. The weakness pulsed with light.

Break it.

They summoned every iota of energy in their form, knotting those delicate threads of aether, and made them snap.

The rush of aetheric energy coalesced like a lance, sharp-tipped and serrated. It slammed into Shinryu's flesh, no longer protected in that one tiny space, and arced through him.

The song screamed, a dragoon's lance through the soul, eyes wrested from body. A borrowed boon ripped free, to leave the flesh to rot.

Break it.

Shinryu hit the floor, crushing what remained of the flowers in the garden. Green blood pooled in the holes in his flesh, hissing where it came into contact with the stone, and the primal dissipated.

In its place, Zenos.

They landed, talons scraping on the rock.

You are more than this.

They had moments left yet. Zenos was a formidable foe to a mortal, but to a dragon, he would snap like a twig.

Keep hold of yourself.

It would have been so easy.

Come back.

They raised their claws. Light crackled about them like a knife. The chorus sang in mournful elegy.

Every moment in an instant.

Rhalgr's Reach. The smell of smoke and blood. Corpses littered on the floor like leaves.

Yanxia, the grin on Zenos's face as he baited the beast. The desperate struggle to keep everyone alive. Knowing the plan would fail. Supporting it in case it did not.

The royal palace. Cutting through the Garleans like they were nothing. The throne room. The desire in Zenos's eyes - the emotion in his voice, the craving.

Shinryu, again and again and again. The assault unceasing, the pain untreated, the only victory in not being the first to fall under the battery.

"There… lies… the beast," Zenos said, every word dredged from the pit of his battered body.

Come back.

This is not what Bahamut would want.

They closed their eyes.

It felt like ripping the skin from his body, the aether dissipating with a violent crack of energy. He gasped aloud at the pain of it, staggering backwards away from Zenos and falling to his knees.

It still echoed in his head. Over and over and over. The song. The chorus. He still felt it like the memory was his own. Ratatoskr. Allag. Meracydia. Falling under an onslaught of voidsent claws and crying out with one final breath for Tiamat.

Dying. Bahamut dying. Ratatoskr dying. Nidhogg dying.

Come back.

He forced his eyes open. In front of him, his hands were his own, though battered and bloody from the fight. The skin still stung from Shinryu's acidic blood, but it was his skin.

He heard the oncoming storm of feet as he collapsed onto his side. Zenos - even if he was not dying, he was in no state to fight. The others would deal with him. Ar'telan's part in it was done.

Their weapon, faithful and true, had done his duty.

Come back.