Scorched Earth
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When they see the state the world is in, the young heroes almost wish they'd perished in the flames. The Dragon's Gate had been turned to char and the blue air is black and red with ash and the hellish scent of brimstone wafts up from the earth beneath them.
"How did we survive that?" he asks, his rashness tempered by a chill sense of dread. Even in this burning world, he feels cold and his fingers feel fat and dead.
"I don't know," she says.
"Is everyone else..."
"I don't know," she says. The tears fall from her cheeks angrily, salting the barren earth in bitter drips and drops.
"Aye...everyone...they're all dead." He is half angry, half in despair, all in disbelief. His blue hair is colored crimson.
"Stop...please...stop it..."
The grass has all been burned away, the dirt and dust kicked up by the cruel east wind, slashing and tearing and burning like knives pulled still warm from the pit of the forge. The plants, the stone, everything is colored hellishly from the infernal wake of fire the beast left as it flew away; not even the sky above seems to pity them, not a bit, not an inch, not for a second. The lords three look up into the sky at the billowing ash-grey clouds and the enraged thunderclouds hanging in the distance and they realize that even as they stare down the storm, the storm is staring back at them. All around them, the evidences of death loom large, and their horizons are not any brighter.
"Is this what we get for failing? Is this all there is? Are there no second chances for us?" Bloody and beaten, his burnt skin peeling and screaming for balm, he drives the head of his axe into the ground and kneels. "And now that bloody thing is loose on the world."
"It will only get stronger as it awakens," his friend said. Blood trickles down his scalp, red emerging from red, and he too drives the point of his weapon into the ground and genuflects to the beast of lore now far off in the distance. "Before it succumbs to the foreign air of our world, it will probably have laid waste to most of Elibe. Even by itself...Saint have mercy on us all...it will all be..."
Beside him, she collapses, her curved lion-toothed blade falling to the ground beside her.
"A thousand...curses..." says she, and she breathes her last, an ashen, smoky breath, red and deep and terrible.
"I'd strike at it with my last damn breath," he says. He can still feel the lightning crackling in his hands, the thunder rumbling in his heart, but the sparks are too weak to lift his weary legs. Here, in the garden of war's bloody delights, he coughs and groans.
"It's flying away from us, Hector. It won't come back...not until we're all dead...not until everything has turned to ash…that is the way...of the dragons..."
"Are we going to heaven, Eliwood?" he asks weakly, and his friend dies before he can answer. "I think I've already seen hell."
He falls face-first against the scorched earth and curses the burnt landscape one last time before he dies.