Disclaimer: Endiness is the kind of place that deserves a long history (and actually already has one). This is a sequel to Legend of Dragoon, but not the sequel. "Legend of Dragoon 2" will always be Sony's perogative. Legend of Dragoon is owned by them, and Endiness is their property, I have nothing to do with it...other than liking it a little too much. The original stuff is my own creation, and be aware, there's a lot of it. The world has changed in almost 5,000 years. It might be a bit shocking, but it's still the same Endiness. Give it a chance, you might like it.

Legendary: Prologue

Mathas

The day the first airship rose into the sky was a day of triumph for every citizen of Bale. The crowds that lined the streets cheered the birthing cry of their newest success, the product of their labor and their imagination. It was the crown jewel of their military, a massive silver trophy that signaled the coming of a bright future for all, or at least for them.

Frustrating as it was, Mathas couldn't quite stomp out the swell of pride that rose in his chest at the sight, though it wasn't for lack of effort. The imagery was certainly evocative. There was majesty in the very idea of conquering the sky, there was pride in the achievement, and there was excitement in thoughts of what was to come. But that was where it stopped for him. For all the good, there was unspoken menace in how unnatural the airship was, all spinning rotors and sweeping wings clawing at the sky, dragging the boat-like bulk of the ship upward with them. Unlike the enthralled masses, however, he didn't have time to dwell on it. He had places to be, and Bale's military supervisors weren't exactly renowned for their tolerance when it came to tardiness, especially when his only excuse was gawking at a huge flying boat.

It was a short walk from the corner where he'd been watching the launch to the castle. This close to the center of town, the castle was actually one of the smallest buildings, standing as a small bastion of antiquity at the eye of a storm of progress. All around rose tall buildings for a number of purposes, industrial, commercial, it was all here. The further you followed the stone streets away from the center, the more the buildings tapered off until on the outskirts they were quaint wooden houses with stone bridges straddling the river that the city was built around. Very rustic. Bale was a massive city with many faces, and the castle was just one.

The castle itself hadn't changed much that he could remember, and he'd lived here his whole life. The historians would say that it hadn't changed in thousands of years, but not everyone believed that. They were pretty quick to point out how ancient and amazing Bale was. Today the castle was a predictable mess of excitement that seemed like it could infect the very stones and set them quivering with the same energy as its inhabitants. Mathas found it slightly obnoxious.

Most of the soldiers that were here had transferred only recently from Hoax, where the majority of the construction process had taken place. As a result, the lower levels of the palace were claustrophobic, alive with the chatter of dozens of men. The amount of manpower required to move and protect that much hardware was staggering. All that so the final assembly could occur here, probably to provide the public with this lovely patriotic outing. When they ate it up so eagerly, it was easy to understand why. Maybe he was just bitter.

The guards at the castle gate let Mathas through without so much as a dirty look. Most people were at least vaguely aware of him, even in street clothes. He never thought his infamy was very fair, but the fact that he had another obstacle to be deal with didn't weigh too heavily on him. He had no shortage of those. Presently he was on his way to a meeting with a superior officer regarding a new assignment. That was a warming thought, at least. Some part of him was more than tired of sitting standby here at the castle. That wasn't why he'd joined the military at all.

But first he needed to change, and that meant a trip to his squad room. There was a subtle but important difference between being a loose canon and being stupid. Sure he might challenge the rules from time to time to go that extra mile, but showing up to a meeting with officers out of uniform was picking an unnecessary fight.

All of the units stationed inside the castle had their own meeting rooms, the entire first basement of the castle was, in fact, made up of such rooms. Basically it was a common for each squad, separate from the bigger common rooms elsewhere, and a place to build camaraderie and other such adorable traits. Mathas was technically special forces, as much as he thought there was nothing special about patrolling the castle every day. The only member of a squad of one. This was the center of Serdio's power, no one figured that Bale was going to be the target of any sort of major offensive anytime soon. The country had plenty of little backwater villages for any encroaching army to trip over on the way in. As such the castle itself was staffed pretty sparsely, mostly used for governing and overseeing the military, rather than as an actual point of defense. Back before the influx of new personnel, Mathas had the room to himself.

Now it was a somewhat frustrating stone jar of human sardines. The five faces occupying the room all swiveled towards him in unison when he opened the door. He responded with an expertly blank stare. These five comprised one of the airship's many engineering teams. A frustratingly intellectual lot who didn't seem to understand anything about him, and made no effort to do so.

That probably went both ways, though.

"Didn't expect to see you all down here today." Mathas's tone was laced with the frost of one who tolerated something because he had to. "Figured you'd be...up." His hand flicked upward to bat at the air, a gesture that both indicated the sky and looked like he was brushing away an annoying bug, probably both.

"Only the primary team got to go up this time." The swagger in the responding voice would have painted him as the leader, if Mathas hadn't already known. His hair was almost the same gold as the brass he worked with, and he had rather small gray eyes. Blaise was the big guy among the group, and none of them were exactly scrawny. Brainy though they were, there was a certain amount of labor involved in the mechanics they did. It kept them in shape. Thinly veiled animosity aside, he wouldn't have wanted to actually fight them, even if he was the soldier and they were the support.

Genuine curiosity was getting the better of him now, though, and he did probably the worst thing he could. He asked a question. "Isn't that dangerous? What if something goes wrong?"

It was the worst thing because they'd answer. And they'd make their answer sound perfectly obvious. "If something goes wrong that they can't fix then the ship's coming down either way."

"Better for just one team to die than all of them."

"We've been working on this for too long to go back to square one."

It took three of them to answer him, but they did so without missing a beat, completing thoughts and expanding on points almost seamlessly. It was like the five of them had transcended friendship and become some kind of creepy hivemind. Whatever disparaging things Mathas might want to say about them, they were good at their job. They understood eachother, worked well together, and they were perfect for a crew that would be maintaining delicate machinery.

They were the oil to his water. He gave a sigh. "All the same, you don't want to be down here."

"Of course not," Blaise's dismissive snort was grating, "We've been working on this for years, it's a slap in the face to have to sit out the first flight."

"Unlike some of those present, we don't get to sit around the castle all day, and still go fly whenever we want."

Mathas grit his teeth, and a sudden pressure prickled across his chest, crackling invisibly against his skin. He shook his head, forcing the wave of rage aside before it could snowball into something worse than just anger. "It doesn't work like that," He replied, some characteristic amount of venom in his voice. "It's not a toy that you can just play with."

"Might be a good time to try," Blaise had a big smile on, "that's about all it'll be good for now. The Voltaire will make all other military powers obsolete. We'll be able to protect Serdio from anything."

Annoyance flared up again, but he bit it back as best he could, glowering at Blaise instead of jumping over the table and decking him. "I don't have time for this. I'm running late as it is."

That brought both of Blaise's eyebrows up. "Must be important if even you don't have time to stand around shooting the breeze."

His expression of puzzlement was its own reward. For the first time, genuine cheer snuck its way into Mathas's tone as he made his way to the cramped changing room at the back of the common. "Fortunately, it is. Good day gentlemen."

The changing room was cramped, even though a couple lockers, a bench, and a mirror were the only things in the room. It was probably only big enough for the bench in the first place. Still, it felt much more open than the common thanks to a small bit of blissful separation from his friends outside. Mathas stripped out of his casual wear, replacing it piece by piece with the sterile articles of his uniform. The only good thing about it were the pockets, in his opinion. Plenty of room to keep stuff, even if most of that stuff was meant to harm other people. When he was finished, he turned to examine himself in the mirror.

Sharp brown eyes returned his gaze, and he felt completely unremarkable. He wasn't impressively tall, nor amusingly short, he wasn't built like a tank, nor a twig. The uniform just made it all worse. There was basically nothing impressive about his temper. Mathas had always been quick on the trigger, it made it pretty easy for the relatively patient to get at him. Blaise and the others were professionals when it came to analysis, and he fell into their traps pretty reliably. Sometimes he wondered if it was genuine animosity that drove them to it, or simply the pressures of their job, especially recently. Having your dreams crushed wasn't fun for anyone, apparently. Even so it was hard to forgive them. He may have been a convenient target, but couldn't they bother someone else?

With a sigh, he started stuffing his clothing into one of the lockers without paying much heed to neatness. There wasn't time to stand around being pensive. His only pause was when he got to the worn gray coat he always wore. It was old and beaten, but man, it was comfortable. One hand disappeared into a pocket in the chest of the jacket on the inside long enough to produce the source of his greatest strength and, in fact, most of his problems. The reason he had his own room, the reason the engineers messed with him, the reason he was in special forces in the first place, they all came from the same thing. That thing was a rock.

The stone was unremarkable to look at, really. It was about the size of an egg, perfectly smooth and transparent, almost like glass. But it was harder than steel. It was harder than anything, really. Just holding it gave the impression that nothing could crack or scratch it. None of the stone's physical attributes were important in the slightest, though, save for one. It was a bright violet color.

Mathas was the only person who knew the stone for what it was: Pure power. There was an ocean of raw energy seething beneath the surface, completely out of proportion with its size. It was completely devastating and that was a matter of intuitive fact, but no one else got it, which was especially frustrating because it was something he just knew. To him, it was as if mentioning that the sky was blue got strange looks from everyone else.

He carefully transferred the stone into one of the pockets on his shirt, and came out of his dressing room looking precisely the same as everyone else in the castle in his drab green uniform. The color was traditional wear for those in the Serdian military, one of those things that had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. The legend went that a particularly influential knight from a long time ago preferred a similar color, and after dying to protect their country, the King of the day made it standard out of respect for his deeds.

It was tough to confirm, but it was a nice story.

Not a word accompanied his passing through the common room. Its occupants continued their conversation as if he weren't there, something about burst valves and any number of other things that he was only half convinced were real. It was a fair walk from there to the level where he'd be learning about his new assignment, but no one bothered him along the way. Most everyone was clumped around the windows, gesturing and talking about the Voltaire in the sky, and those that weren't were too busy to bother with him. A little quiver of excitement went through him.

This particular meeting room had no door, though the doorway did have guards on either side, which seemed unusual until they waved him inside. Several men occupied the room, but they all seemed to gravitate around one particular figure. Mathas recognized him immediately, basically anyone in the military would have. General Dersen was the most important figure in in it. It threw him off a little

"Mathas Abrahms, sir." He was unusually stiff as he barked the words, suddenly standing uncomfortably straight. .

General Dersen was perhaps even less remarkable than Mathas, a fact that he found empowering. Or would have, if he wasn't busily wishing he'd taken better care of his uniform. The man was in his fifties, and he looked it, with deep lines in his eyes and around his mouth. No doubt they came from screaming orders to enthusiastic soldiers and squinting over maps day in and day out. His eyebrows were bushy and very grey. Those eyebrows were what always stood out the most to Mathas on the few occasions where they'd actually met before. Old as he may have looked, his eyes were focused and sharp, the full brunt of his gaze was intense and a little unnerving.

Most startling of all was that he was even here. Matters of reassignment could be handled by just about anyone who could read, there was no reason for it to be someone so important unless it was equally important. "Don't hurt yourself, son." Mathas relaxed, but only the slightest amount. "So you're the one..."

It took a moment to realize that he was being studied, that almost made him flinch, but flinching would have made things worse, so he just endured it. "Sir?"

The general had a wolfish smile with a lot of teeth, which he displayed. That was even more unnerving. Maybe he was doing it on purpose. "You already know why you're here?"

"Partially, sir. I believe I"m being transferred."

"We're assigning you to the Voltiare."

Mathas nearly fell down. "Excuse me, sir?"

"The Voltaire. I imagine you've seen it?"

Of course he had, he and the entire town. "Well, yes I-"

"Good. Then there should be no problems. You'll be going aboard along with the rest of the crew once the initial exercises are over."

It wasn't bad, per se, but it wasn't what he expected even remotely. After all, he was supposedly obsolete now thanks to the airship, why put them together? "Yes sir."

"The Voltaire might be able to fly, but most other things can't." There was a special emphasis on 'most'. Mathas just nodded. "I'm sure they'll find a use for your... special talents. Bale needs every one of you to give your all for the sake of our future.""

"I'll be ready to go, sir." Some part of him was sick of saying the word 'sir', but it just fell out of his mouth at the end of every sentence.

"You'll go tomorrow, finish up anything important to you by then." And that was that. The general returned to his banter with the other officers.

Mathas just nodded to his back, not listening to the words being spoken now. Turning to exit the room, all he could do was wonder whether irony had left a black eye when it punched him in the face.

----

Our first massive wall of text has passed and no one's even breathing hard? Legend of Dragoon starts with a town being lit on fire and a girl being kidnapped! Get a move on! You'll get some of that in the next chapter, don't worry. I'm setting the stage and it's all going according to plan, yeesssss....