Chapter 6: 6 The war of the dragons

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6: The war of the dragons 6: The war of the dragons The Vanhai had been the easy part.

The dragons remained.

At the head of their newly formed immortal army, Vezareth and Kharmul marched toward the territory of the Extra.

When they arrived, even they were left speechless for a moment.

Black dragons covered the expanse of the Abyss as far as the eye could see.

They lay scattered across the land like living mountain ranges, their colossal bodies stretched out beside one another for miles upon miles, their breath rising in waves of hot vapor, their eyes burning in the darkness like suspended embers.

The ground beneath their weight had sunk by several meters.

It was the greatest concentration of destructive power the Abyss had ever known.

“We cannot paralyze them all,” Vezareth said, and for the first time, there was a note of caution in his voice.

“There are too many.

And they are too strong.

The gravity that crushes a Vanhai merely tickles a dragon.” “Then we will not crush them all,” Kharmul replied, his eyes gleaming.

“We will break one the greatest and the others will follow.” The greatest dragon was named Zerthik.

The Dragon Emperor.

He was a colossus so ancient that, with the passage of time, his scales had become as black as the void between the stars.

His wings were so vast that when he took flight to confront the intruders, the gray sky of the Abyss was completely darkened, as though a solar eclipse had fallen upon it.

The battle lasted a week.

The dragons were not the Vanhai.

They fought with fire and claws, and every one of their strikes annihilated hundreds of warriors.

Flames swept across the expanse in incandescent waves, hurling Vanhai bodies into the air like leaves, and for days the outcome remained uncertain.

Many far too many Vanhai fell, their gems going dark by the millions across the battlefield like dying stars.

But Vezareth and Kharmul did not surrender.

They could not.

They had sworn an oath.

Kharmul faced Zerthik.

The duel between the brother and the Dragon Emperor is a legend that demons still tell to this day, distorted by thousands of retellings.

They say it lasted three days without pause.

They say that, to withstand the dragon’s flames, Kharmul had to bend gravity around himself until reality itself warped, creating wells of darkness that swallowed the fire before it could reach him.

They say Zerthik seized him in his jaws and hurled him against a mountain range, reducing it to dust, and that Kharmul rose from the rubble as though nothing had happened, his eyes burning with cold fury.

In the end, it was not strength that decided the battle.

It was will.

Kharmul did not want to kill Zerthik.

He wanted something far more difficult: He wanted the dragon to kneel before him.

When the dragon, exhausted and wounded but still unbroken, realized that this small being who had come from nothing would never surrender, not even in the face of death, something within him changed.

Zerthik lowered his colossal head.

And with him, the black dragons stretching toward the horizon and beyond lowered their heads as well.

The Abyss had chosen its masters.

The Four Cities With the two peoples subjugated, the brothers still lacked one thing: A bloodline of their own.

The Vanhai were subjects.

The dragons were allies.

But neither was of their blood.

And an empire meant to last forever needed heirs.

Thus, Vezareth and Kharmul did what no Seraph would ever have dared even imagine: they joined with Vanhai women, seeking to discover what creatures would be born from the fusion of their mortal essence and angelic-descended flesh.

The result left them breathless.

No Seraphim were born.

Nor were Vanhai.

Something new emerged something the cosmos had never conceived of before.

Beings of extraordinary power, resembling their fathers in bearing and gaze, yet without wings.

Stronger than the Vanhai, faster, and capable of generating energy rather than merely channeling it; creatures whose veins carried a mixture of the fire of the former Seraphim and the immortal stability of the Gem People.

They called them Demons.

When the Demons had multiplied beyond measure, the brothers decided it was time to give their dominion a definitive form.

They returned to the Void Stone and, around the Black Tower, at the four cardinal points of that world, raised four great cities.

To the north rose Nocturnum, the city of discipline and eternal war.

Its streets were broad, designed for entire legions to march through them.

At its center lay a military parade ground vast enough to contain armies, while scarlet flames burned along the avenues, casting marching shadows across the stone.

“Here,” Kharmul said as he watched it rise, “our armies will be born.

From here they will march forth to bend every world that dares challenge us.” To the south rose Umbrafluctus, the city of shadows and deception, built around a black lake whose waters were never still.

Those waters reflected images that did not belong to the present: the faces of the dead, scenes of what had yet to happen, truths better left unknown.

Anyone who stared into them for too long risked losing the ability to distinguish reflection from reality.

“A place,” Vezareth murmured, “where nothing will ever be as it seems, and where we will keep that which must never be seen.” To the east rose Ignimurus, the city of eternal flames and forges.

From cracks in its ground flowed a fire that did not destroy, but created.

Around it arose workshops, forges, and chains of laboratories where the weapons of their dominion would be forged.

The thunder of hammers upon anvils became the very heartbeat of the city.

“Here,” Vezareth decreed, “we will forge the instruments of our power.

Every blade, every suit of armor, every engine of war will bear the mark of this fire.” Finally, to the west stretched Sanguinarii, the largest of the four, shaped specifically for the dragons.

It was not a city of buildings, but an endless expanse of plains and rocky ridges, designed to bear the colossal weight of the Extra.

There, beneath the pact forged with Zerthik, rested the ultimate force of the Abyss: an innumerable multitude of black dragons, waiting in silence, ready to rise only when an invader dared cross the borders that had been imposed.

Those who flew over Sanguinarii saw an ocean of black scales moving slowly like a sleeping sea.

And they prayed that it would never awaken.

When the work was complete, the Abyss was no longer the same.

For the first time, in that place where there had once been only Nothingness, there was form.

Silence had become breath.

The void had become a kingdom.

“From this day forth,” Kharmul announced, gazing toward the horizon from the summit of the Black Tower, while four cities pulsed with new life below him, “this shall be the Demon Realm.

Our legacy.

Our eternal shadow.” For many years, the two brothers ruled as a single will.

But harmony between those who are too alike is the most fragile of all constructions.

And no one would learn that lesson at a greater price than Vezareth and Kharmul.

But that is where their story ends.

For now, we must return to the point where another story begins.

Ten thousand years later, when, from the bloodline the two brothers had created, the one foretold by prophecy was finally born.