[Challenge 005] "Century Eyes"
Title: "Century Eyes"
Game: Fire Emblem 1/3/11 with a passing swipe at FE2
Word Count: 2,735
Characters: Medeus, Tiki
Warnings: From the perspective of the Big Bad and therefore the fictional POV endorses things NOT endorsed by the author (or any other human, we hope). Also features references to dragons eating humans, humans and dragons interbreeding, and mind control. Also references the author's personal crack theory regarding the origins of the "gods" in FE2 and some FE4-derived thoughts on holy weapons.
Other notes: To be uploaded later on my LJ.
Disclaimer: I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Century Eyes
They converged upon him-- Narga’s treacherous daughter, Gotoh’s human tool-- and he could only laugh. Did they not find this absurd? How many times would they be compelled to repeat this scene? How many times would he have to deliver his warning to this stupid small creature with aspirations of saving mankind? Once, twice, a hundred in all? Caught between the breath of the Divine Dragon child and the sword crafted from great Narga’s fang, Medeus suffered defeat. He’d known defeat would be dealt to him the instant he saw the Shield of Seals in the hands of the human boy, and so Medeus made sure to give the boy as miserable a victory as was possible. Medeus may have roared in pain as the sacred sword, the bane of dragons, pierced his scales, but his jaws were coated in the blood of the shieldbearer’s own kin. It was, Medeus thought, a sweet taste to take with him as he sank into the womb of the earth.
But this was not the same as his previous losses. As his body, that splendid body designed to be the superior of any dragon that had ever known thought, dissolved to dust, Medeus felt something he’d not known since the mortal insects had torn his beloved Celu from him-- terror. As each scale of his form disintegrated, it took a piece of his essence, a fragment of his being, with it. Was this, then, the final death, akin to the oblivion suffered by fangless vermin?
The last flake of his existence landed upon the boss of the Shield of Seals, and there was consumed by the the writhing flames within the emblem of Narga’s infatuation with humanity. And yet, Medeus did not die, not even then. The flames licked the mote of dust that remained of the greatest of Earth Dragons and turned it to a spark, bathed in sacred fire as a hatchling bathes in the flames of its mother’s breath. There he remained; not for him the comfortable sleep of the dragon weary of its long years, the sweet rest in the embrace of the life-giving Earth. He was one with the fire, without form and without any respite from consciousness. In the fire, Medeus fed on rage and sorrow, fattened his soul upon it as ticks grow fat upon the red blood of vermin. The wretched creature who carried Narga’s shield knew years of rage and sorrow both, and Medeus drank it up.
They disappoint you, do they? Your precious people disappoint you. I warned you not to be so naive. The pride, the greed, the foolishness of humans knows no bounds. In the end, you will lose it all. There is darkness in every human heart... and I am the darkness in yours.
He hoped the shieldbearer heard him. In time, Medeus was convinced that it was the case; he could feel the reverberations in his soul when the shield was cast across the room, when it was attacked with a sword.
Good, that’s right. Why don’t you gouge out the Seals, one at a time, with your precious sword? Take out the lovely sparkling jewels and set me free. I want to see the pain in your eyes before I crush you under my claws.
It never came to pass. If Medeus was the voice of the shield, the sword spoke with Narga’s own voice, an echo of millennia past, and Narga was once more the victor. The next shieldbearer was a calmer sort, with an irritating habit of reciting prayers whenever Medeus tried to whisper into his soul. The one after that seemed deaf to his whispers, and Medeus took little nourishment from her grief. So the centuries unspooled; as the shield passed from hand to hand, Medeus passed from heart to heart, a seed of darkness in a flower of fire. But the day came when there was no shieldbearer born, when the Shield of Seals and its inhabitant were placed in some temple for great masses of humans to visit. They paid tribute to the shield, their great symbol of peace.
Fools. I am the flame within the shield, the fire eternal.
No longer tethered to the heart of one human, he knew the hearts and voices of the entire seething mass. The shield itself became as his eye, and through its fire he viewed the Age of Man, the triumph of the vermin, in all of its waste. Through the flames, he heard their prayers.
Lord Medeus, who sacrificed much and suffered much on our behalf, take this offering. Take these tears, take this grief from us. Purge the sin from our hearts, as you will one day purge all the world of its miseries.
So they worshiped him now?
O Medeus, great Lord of the Earth, father of Mila our Lady of Mercy....
Mila. His child... Celu’s child. Did she sleep now in the earth, or had some creature armed with a “holy” weapon sent her to the final death? The long silence of centuries tore at his psyche, and the thought of his children, his beloved, sent him into despair. Had he possessed a body, Medeus would have curled up inside his cradle of fire and gnawed upon his own tail. But the chattering horde sent their prayers to him, and the flames of his prison burned more brightly.
At last, the Shield itself began to weaken, at last the sacred seals upon it were broken. First, the Seal of Life, taken so that someone-- was it Narga’s fool of a daughter?-- could perform abominable magic with it. Then the Seals of the Earth and Stars, removed at one time so that only the bonds of Light and Dark chained him. Medeus felt the bonds grow faint but did not strain against them any longer. His moment of freedom, of rebirth, would surely come; as the hatchling in its egg cracks the shell at the appointed hour, so Medeus did wait for his time. On the day all bonds upon him gave way, he burst forth from the flames into a world of blue and green.
Sky. Clouds. The light of the blessed sun, and the existence of eyes to see it. Air sighing around him, and the presence of nerves to feel its chill and pressure. His body. His true body, the skin of an Earth Dragon. Eyes and ears and a tongue to run across his fangs, a neck and a tail and a belly to scratch against rough ground. Medeus unfurled his tongue to the winds and tasted them. He tasted salt and iron, a sweetness like the blood of man upon his fangs, and knew that he was home. His claws scraped soil and stone, and he lowered his nose to bury it in the good, good scent of the Earth.
Alive, alive. I am truly alive.
The Lord of Earth Dragons forgot himself then, and he rolled upon the ground, flinging up showers of dirt to rain down upon his back, his wings. He laughed, he snorted, he breathed out great clouds just to feel the air stream from his lungs, to smell again the essence of the Earth transmuted to power. He even closed his eyes and lay still for a moment, if only to feel the sun warm his scales.
He caught himself, though, or rather the conditioned instincts of millennia finally caught him, and Medeus looked around himself with clear eyes, determined to know where in sweet Dolhr he was and who in the world had summoned him. The broken paving-stones beneath his claws bore a familiar pattern, and as Medeus looked around at fallen columns and ruined arches, a terrible recognition seized him. He stood amid the remains of his own Altar.
“Ah, the great Age of Vermin has left no sacred place unspoiled. I expected nothing less.”
To hear his own voice-- not the feeble voice that emerged from his perverted human form, but the true Voice of the Earth-- was at least a pleasure to mitigate, if slightly, his sorrow. As to his other question, Medeus already sensed that he was not alone. A small figure, the shape and size of a human, stepped out from behind a shattered wall. He knew her, even in this form, by both sight and scent-- though she had been a screaming child when last he laid eyes upon her. A child no longer, she stood boldly before him in strange robes and with hair the color of jade streaming around her in the winds. In her arms, she cradled a long and narrow sword. A sword Medeus knew entirely too well.
“Hail, Lord Medeus. It has been a great while since we last met.”
“Daughter of Narga. Have you repented of your aberrant love for humans? Have you summoned me from the confines of the Shield so that we banished children of the Earth may take our proper place in the world?”
“Yes, my lord. I wish you to join in the world.” She spoke solemnly, and yet he did not-- could not-- trust her. But he had not spoken with another of his kind for so long that he decided to let the depraved young traitor speak her piece before he killed her. “The remnants of our people have come from the shadows of the ages. The tribes of ice and of fire, the great fliers and the users of magic, and even the people of the seas-- all know one another, and together we thrive. Children have been born to us, my lord. We lack only our brothers and sisters of the earth tribes. If you will but lead them to our embrace, we will welcome them as kin, not as sworn enemies.”
“I do not trust you, child. I have not been blind and deaf these years past; I know you lived in the halls of man, that you allowed them to dress you in their clothes, that you supped at their tables. You, so-called Princess of the Divine Tribe, are compromised.”
“I have done what the age demanded, that I should survive,” she replied. “Did you, my lord, not share wine with your human generals once, to convince them of your good intentions? A child, whether human or divine, has only so many strategies at her command.”
“Not a bad answer, girl. I expected you to throw in my face an earlier example, the days when I professed friendship for humans. The days before they betrayed me as foully as they betray one another.”
“Humans do have that capacity, for certain. But they are not completely unlike us-- they can be taught. They can learn from mistakes. Slowly, imperfectly, but they can learn.”
He knew she sheltered some young creature behind her skirts-- he could smell this little pitiable thing, could smell the fear. He could smell the taint upon her.
“And you have awakened me to claim that they, at last, have learned to accept our kind? That at long last, they no longer confine us to the poorest regions of the earth, that they no longer mock us when we seal away our powers and kill us in cold blood whenever we do exercise those powers? You speak of a rebirth of the dragonkin-- will you next say that these brothers and sisters of ours live among humans, passing freely in their society as you once did?”
“Yes, my lord. The line between mankind and humans has been erased by time and necessity. Allow me to show you my proof.” She brought the child forward-- a girl-child in form, a trembling thing whose misbegotten heritage showed in her face, in her coloring, in the very shape of her ears. “This is my own heir, the true child of my line. In her veins flows the blood of Narga-- and the blood of man, the blood of Anri.”
She pressed the sacred sword into the child’s hands, and the little half-breed stepped forward, as close to Medeus as she dared. She knelt before him as though presenting him the sword, and she spoke to him-- with halting, hesitant syllables-- in the tongue of the ancients.
“Lord Medeus, for centuries my ancestors bore this sword as the sign of mankind’s victory over dragons. I offer this treasure now... to you.”
Medeus looked upon the narrow blade that had destroyed his flesh once, twice, three times in all. It seemed nothing more than a plaything. He spoke over the head of the half-breed child.
“What is the meaning of this charade, Daughter of Narga?”
“This is not the world you left behind, my lord. You remember an era in which isolated groups of humans lived and died in near-total ignorance of anything beyond their own shores. The existence of other human civilizations was as incredible to them as were the tales of the Age of Dragons. They lived under a veil of darkness, which was pierced only at the time of your own fall. I was a witness, my lord-- a witness to the first contacts, to the misunderstandings and wars and treaties of peace that ensued. And I have witnessed the birth of knowledge, the birth of understanding.” She smiled at him, and he saw that even in her human guise, she showed her fangs. “They know now that if a man should die of plague on the southernmost continent, its effects can be felt across the world within days. They know that the smallest creatures in the sea have their role in the great scheme of existence. They know that the greatest danger to the world is posed not by dragons, not by fierce cats or wolves or unknown depths of the seas, but by humans themselves. They sense, as never before, the fragility of this world.”
She held up the Seal of Earth before him-- a tiny glittering jewel, the color of the blue sea.
“They know that their world entire can be destroyed as surely as I can crush this stone. And though some deny the truth before them, and some indulge themselves in despair, others work to prevent the death of their world. Humans draw now upon the strength and knowledge of the dragonkin, even as the dragons make use of the humans with their vast numbers and great energy. And we dragons know that if we are to preserve the earth, we need the aid of those who know and treasure this life-giving sphere. We need your people, Lord Medeus. We need you.”
Medeus looked away from her, away from her bastard offspring. He looked at the pale tops of grasses waving beyond the decaying arches of his great temple. He looked at the sun, sinking now toward a faded horizon. He could, now that he was becoming used to his senses, taste a tang of something impure in the air, something like burnt peat or charcoal. He shifted from one foot to the other as he contemplated her words and their true meaning. The half-breed shivered at the movement of his great claws and he felt the passing fancy to rip her little head from its fragile neck.
“Will you not take your true place among us, my lord?” Narga’s girl pleaded with him not as a supplicant, but as an ally with something great to offer him. She smiled again, and her fangs gleamed in the dying light. “This altar has fallen into disrepair over the centuries. It would appear to need its Keeper.”
“This is a most unexpected request, Daughter of Narga. I will need some time to think it over yet.”
“We have nothing but time, my lord.” She gestured to the ruins around them, to the saplings sprouting through the crumbling mosaics. “To reach this moment only took us two thousand years.”
The winds sighed in response, and the half-breed girl-- eyes the color of the sky at its zenith, hair the pale green of Dolhr’s native grasses-- looked up at him for the first time with something other than fear. Was it curiosity? Was it... faith? Medeus wasn’t sure. The Lord of Earth Dragons closed his eyes. Nothing but time, indeed. He’d waited two millennia to have this body again; he could enjoy the feel of the sun upon his face a moment longer.
The End
Game: Fire Emblem 1/3/11 with a passing swipe at FE2
Word Count: 2,735
Characters: Medeus, Tiki
Warnings: From the perspective of the Big Bad and therefore the fictional POV endorses things NOT endorsed by the author (or any other human, we hope). Also features references to dragons eating humans, humans and dragons interbreeding, and mind control. Also references the author's personal crack theory regarding the origins of the "gods" in FE2 and some FE4-derived thoughts on holy weapons.
Other notes: To be uploaded later on my LJ.
Disclaimer: I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Century Eyes
They converged upon him-- Narga’s treacherous daughter, Gotoh’s human tool-- and he could only laugh. Did they not find this absurd? How many times would they be compelled to repeat this scene? How many times would he have to deliver his warning to this stupid small creature with aspirations of saving mankind? Once, twice, a hundred in all? Caught between the breath of the Divine Dragon child and the sword crafted from great Narga’s fang, Medeus suffered defeat. He’d known defeat would be dealt to him the instant he saw the Shield of Seals in the hands of the human boy, and so Medeus made sure to give the boy as miserable a victory as was possible. Medeus may have roared in pain as the sacred sword, the bane of dragons, pierced his scales, but his jaws were coated in the blood of the shieldbearer’s own kin. It was, Medeus thought, a sweet taste to take with him as he sank into the womb of the earth.
But this was not the same as his previous losses. As his body, that splendid body designed to be the superior of any dragon that had ever known thought, dissolved to dust, Medeus felt something he’d not known since the mortal insects had torn his beloved Celu from him-- terror. As each scale of his form disintegrated, it took a piece of his essence, a fragment of his being, with it. Was this, then, the final death, akin to the oblivion suffered by fangless vermin?
The last flake of his existence landed upon the boss of the Shield of Seals, and there was consumed by the the writhing flames within the emblem of Narga’s infatuation with humanity. And yet, Medeus did not die, not even then. The flames licked the mote of dust that remained of the greatest of Earth Dragons and turned it to a spark, bathed in sacred fire as a hatchling bathes in the flames of its mother’s breath. There he remained; not for him the comfortable sleep of the dragon weary of its long years, the sweet rest in the embrace of the life-giving Earth. He was one with the fire, without form and without any respite from consciousness. In the fire, Medeus fed on rage and sorrow, fattened his soul upon it as ticks grow fat upon the red blood of vermin. The wretched creature who carried Narga’s shield knew years of rage and sorrow both, and Medeus drank it up.
They disappoint you, do they? Your precious people disappoint you. I warned you not to be so naive. The pride, the greed, the foolishness of humans knows no bounds. In the end, you will lose it all. There is darkness in every human heart... and I am the darkness in yours.
He hoped the shieldbearer heard him. In time, Medeus was convinced that it was the case; he could feel the reverberations in his soul when the shield was cast across the room, when it was attacked with a sword.
Good, that’s right. Why don’t you gouge out the Seals, one at a time, with your precious sword? Take out the lovely sparkling jewels and set me free. I want to see the pain in your eyes before I crush you under my claws.
It never came to pass. If Medeus was the voice of the shield, the sword spoke with Narga’s own voice, an echo of millennia past, and Narga was once more the victor. The next shieldbearer was a calmer sort, with an irritating habit of reciting prayers whenever Medeus tried to whisper into his soul. The one after that seemed deaf to his whispers, and Medeus took little nourishment from her grief. So the centuries unspooled; as the shield passed from hand to hand, Medeus passed from heart to heart, a seed of darkness in a flower of fire. But the day came when there was no shieldbearer born, when the Shield of Seals and its inhabitant were placed in some temple for great masses of humans to visit. They paid tribute to the shield, their great symbol of peace.
Fools. I am the flame within the shield, the fire eternal.
No longer tethered to the heart of one human, he knew the hearts and voices of the entire seething mass. The shield itself became as his eye, and through its fire he viewed the Age of Man, the triumph of the vermin, in all of its waste. Through the flames, he heard their prayers.
Lord Medeus, who sacrificed much and suffered much on our behalf, take this offering. Take these tears, take this grief from us. Purge the sin from our hearts, as you will one day purge all the world of its miseries.
So they worshiped him now?
O Medeus, great Lord of the Earth, father of Mila our Lady of Mercy....
Mila. His child... Celu’s child. Did she sleep now in the earth, or had some creature armed with a “holy” weapon sent her to the final death? The long silence of centuries tore at his psyche, and the thought of his children, his beloved, sent him into despair. Had he possessed a body, Medeus would have curled up inside his cradle of fire and gnawed upon his own tail. But the chattering horde sent their prayers to him, and the flames of his prison burned more brightly.
At last, the Shield itself began to weaken, at last the sacred seals upon it were broken. First, the Seal of Life, taken so that someone-- was it Narga’s fool of a daughter?-- could perform abominable magic with it. Then the Seals of the Earth and Stars, removed at one time so that only the bonds of Light and Dark chained him. Medeus felt the bonds grow faint but did not strain against them any longer. His moment of freedom, of rebirth, would surely come; as the hatchling in its egg cracks the shell at the appointed hour, so Medeus did wait for his time. On the day all bonds upon him gave way, he burst forth from the flames into a world of blue and green.
Sky. Clouds. The light of the blessed sun, and the existence of eyes to see it. Air sighing around him, and the presence of nerves to feel its chill and pressure. His body. His true body, the skin of an Earth Dragon. Eyes and ears and a tongue to run across his fangs, a neck and a tail and a belly to scratch against rough ground. Medeus unfurled his tongue to the winds and tasted them. He tasted salt and iron, a sweetness like the blood of man upon his fangs, and knew that he was home. His claws scraped soil and stone, and he lowered his nose to bury it in the good, good scent of the Earth.
Alive, alive. I am truly alive.
The Lord of Earth Dragons forgot himself then, and he rolled upon the ground, flinging up showers of dirt to rain down upon his back, his wings. He laughed, he snorted, he breathed out great clouds just to feel the air stream from his lungs, to smell again the essence of the Earth transmuted to power. He even closed his eyes and lay still for a moment, if only to feel the sun warm his scales.
He caught himself, though, or rather the conditioned instincts of millennia finally caught him, and Medeus looked around himself with clear eyes, determined to know where in sweet Dolhr he was and who in the world had summoned him. The broken paving-stones beneath his claws bore a familiar pattern, and as Medeus looked around at fallen columns and ruined arches, a terrible recognition seized him. He stood amid the remains of his own Altar.
“Ah, the great Age of Vermin has left no sacred place unspoiled. I expected nothing less.”
To hear his own voice-- not the feeble voice that emerged from his perverted human form, but the true Voice of the Earth-- was at least a pleasure to mitigate, if slightly, his sorrow. As to his other question, Medeus already sensed that he was not alone. A small figure, the shape and size of a human, stepped out from behind a shattered wall. He knew her, even in this form, by both sight and scent-- though she had been a screaming child when last he laid eyes upon her. A child no longer, she stood boldly before him in strange robes and with hair the color of jade streaming around her in the winds. In her arms, she cradled a long and narrow sword. A sword Medeus knew entirely too well.
“Hail, Lord Medeus. It has been a great while since we last met.”
“Daughter of Narga. Have you repented of your aberrant love for humans? Have you summoned me from the confines of the Shield so that we banished children of the Earth may take our proper place in the world?”
“Yes, my lord. I wish you to join in the world.” She spoke solemnly, and yet he did not-- could not-- trust her. But he had not spoken with another of his kind for so long that he decided to let the depraved young traitor speak her piece before he killed her. “The remnants of our people have come from the shadows of the ages. The tribes of ice and of fire, the great fliers and the users of magic, and even the people of the seas-- all know one another, and together we thrive. Children have been born to us, my lord. We lack only our brothers and sisters of the earth tribes. If you will but lead them to our embrace, we will welcome them as kin, not as sworn enemies.”
“I do not trust you, child. I have not been blind and deaf these years past; I know you lived in the halls of man, that you allowed them to dress you in their clothes, that you supped at their tables. You, so-called Princess of the Divine Tribe, are compromised.”
“I have done what the age demanded, that I should survive,” she replied. “Did you, my lord, not share wine with your human generals once, to convince them of your good intentions? A child, whether human or divine, has only so many strategies at her command.”
“Not a bad answer, girl. I expected you to throw in my face an earlier example, the days when I professed friendship for humans. The days before they betrayed me as foully as they betray one another.”
“Humans do have that capacity, for certain. But they are not completely unlike us-- they can be taught. They can learn from mistakes. Slowly, imperfectly, but they can learn.”
He knew she sheltered some young creature behind her skirts-- he could smell this little pitiable thing, could smell the fear. He could smell the taint upon her.
“And you have awakened me to claim that they, at last, have learned to accept our kind? That at long last, they no longer confine us to the poorest regions of the earth, that they no longer mock us when we seal away our powers and kill us in cold blood whenever we do exercise those powers? You speak of a rebirth of the dragonkin-- will you next say that these brothers and sisters of ours live among humans, passing freely in their society as you once did?”
“Yes, my lord. The line between mankind and humans has been erased by time and necessity. Allow me to show you my proof.” She brought the child forward-- a girl-child in form, a trembling thing whose misbegotten heritage showed in her face, in her coloring, in the very shape of her ears. “This is my own heir, the true child of my line. In her veins flows the blood of Narga-- and the blood of man, the blood of Anri.”
She pressed the sacred sword into the child’s hands, and the little half-breed stepped forward, as close to Medeus as she dared. She knelt before him as though presenting him the sword, and she spoke to him-- with halting, hesitant syllables-- in the tongue of the ancients.
“Lord Medeus, for centuries my ancestors bore this sword as the sign of mankind’s victory over dragons. I offer this treasure now... to you.”
Medeus looked upon the narrow blade that had destroyed his flesh once, twice, three times in all. It seemed nothing more than a plaything. He spoke over the head of the half-breed child.
“What is the meaning of this charade, Daughter of Narga?”
“This is not the world you left behind, my lord. You remember an era in which isolated groups of humans lived and died in near-total ignorance of anything beyond their own shores. The existence of other human civilizations was as incredible to them as were the tales of the Age of Dragons. They lived under a veil of darkness, which was pierced only at the time of your own fall. I was a witness, my lord-- a witness to the first contacts, to the misunderstandings and wars and treaties of peace that ensued. And I have witnessed the birth of knowledge, the birth of understanding.” She smiled at him, and he saw that even in her human guise, she showed her fangs. “They know now that if a man should die of plague on the southernmost continent, its effects can be felt across the world within days. They know that the smallest creatures in the sea have their role in the great scheme of existence. They know that the greatest danger to the world is posed not by dragons, not by fierce cats or wolves or unknown depths of the seas, but by humans themselves. They sense, as never before, the fragility of this world.”
She held up the Seal of Earth before him-- a tiny glittering jewel, the color of the blue sea.
“They know that their world entire can be destroyed as surely as I can crush this stone. And though some deny the truth before them, and some indulge themselves in despair, others work to prevent the death of their world. Humans draw now upon the strength and knowledge of the dragonkin, even as the dragons make use of the humans with their vast numbers and great energy. And we dragons know that if we are to preserve the earth, we need the aid of those who know and treasure this life-giving sphere. We need your people, Lord Medeus. We need you.”
Medeus looked away from her, away from her bastard offspring. He looked at the pale tops of grasses waving beyond the decaying arches of his great temple. He looked at the sun, sinking now toward a faded horizon. He could, now that he was becoming used to his senses, taste a tang of something impure in the air, something like burnt peat or charcoal. He shifted from one foot to the other as he contemplated her words and their true meaning. The half-breed shivered at the movement of his great claws and he felt the passing fancy to rip her little head from its fragile neck.
“Will you not take your true place among us, my lord?” Narga’s girl pleaded with him not as a supplicant, but as an ally with something great to offer him. She smiled again, and her fangs gleamed in the dying light. “This altar has fallen into disrepair over the centuries. It would appear to need its Keeper.”
“This is a most unexpected request, Daughter of Narga. I will need some time to think it over yet.”
“We have nothing but time, my lord.” She gestured to the ruins around them, to the saplings sprouting through the crumbling mosaics. “To reach this moment only took us two thousand years.”
The winds sighed in response, and the half-breed girl-- eyes the color of the sky at its zenith, hair the pale green of Dolhr’s native grasses-- looked up at him for the first time with something other than fear. Was it curiosity? Was it... faith? Medeus wasn’t sure. The Lord of Earth Dragons closed his eyes. Nothing but time, indeed. He’d waited two millennia to have this body again; he could enjoy the feel of the sun upon his face a moment longer.
The End