Prolouge: Where Cold Winds Blow

Desert….night…..

Cynder shivered violently, a wretchedly cold wind battering her scales and sliding against her wings. Her breath hitched and exhaled a cloudy fog in the dark night, the sight hardly visible in the blackness.

She cast her emerald eyes to the skyline, consumed in inky tar, like a jar of onyx splattered over a torn piece of canvas, the soup above could hardly be known as night. Whether the celestial moons had disappeared after the end of the world, or the night was so dark they could not be seen, the dragoness knew not.

In the slush below her claws, she hardly found purchase stumbling along through the black forest with an unknown sense of direction guiding her. Cynder had yet to notice it yet, however, the presence pulling her along was outside of her reach of control, pulling and tugging her deeper and deeper into the woods like a fish on a line.

The dragoness, although usually finding the night comforting, like an extension of herself given form, could only feel a numbness spreading across her scarred body, cascading up her arms and legs, arching along her spine and flowing freely into her skull.

Inside the cover of the massive pines and evergreens, the path grew narrower, the trees beginning to ensnare her and shut out parts of her vision. Deeper and deeper, she moved, completely unwavered by the snow piling up against her sagging wings and the shivering now beginning to completely overtake her near comatose body.

A deep fog perpetuated the air around her, drowning all but the most attuned part of her senses in the dusky murk.

Silence prevailed over this night, only a strange background fuzzy white noise being heard, it's strange timbre hardly audible on the very edge of her hearing. No matter how far she walked, no matter the distance she led into the dark, it followed, stuck to her like a tick.

It was cold, so incredibly cold. Most of her body had already gone numb to the touch, engulfed in such a frigid temperature that she could hardly breathe. With each shaking step, heat left her body, ice flowing through veins and engulfing tissue in slush.

A bitter taste was stuck to her tongue and the smell flowed along with it. A metallic dibble that lingered on the tip of her tongue it wouldn't go away no matter how many times she swallowed.

The most perverse sensory mystery was that of her sight itself. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the dragoness knew that this was an uncanny level of darkness, highlights of the barest type being drawn with no moon. Everything around her was consumed in this perpetual night, unstoppable and crushing, it's suffocating grip grabbed her so forcefully she had to force every breath from her lungs as if it was her last.

The metal shackles on her legs and tail clinked with every step, so lightly that in a normal room they would have been lost to ambiance, but not here, here they echoed into the night, and she found this to be building a fear deep within her mind that grew pronounced with every step.

Up ahead, the ever-present darkness was broken by a dimly shining beacon of red light, it's aura being so faint that the dragoness had to strain hard, drawing on the reserves of energy at the bottom of her metaphorical barrel, just barely enough to enhance her vision in the shadow bleakness.

She suddenly found her coma broken, the sensations rushing back to her, cold dredging fear spiking inside her head and racing down into her pulse. Cynder's heart started to race, whirling and pumping blood furiously as the shivers in her bones disappeared, a rush of heat coursing through her veins.

Mind-numbing fear consumed the rational side of her brain, the unholy light beginning to increase in intensity, the beacon filling the gaps in the trees, pushing out shadowy darkness just enough to reveal something crouching out of sight, bent over and huddled under a twisted, broken and gnarled trunk.

It's eyes.

The light shining from it's empty sockets pierced every inch of her scales, lighting the skin underneath in a rush of flaming heat, the intensity like like of a freshly steaming brand. With a broken and twisted shriek she whirled around, nearly faceplanting as her legs shook and stumbled.

Breath coming in terrified, unyielding gasps, the dragoness found herself moving nearly without her own accord, tripping and stumbling in her panicked attempt to put some distance between herself and the creature lying in the snow, deep in that gnarled section of brush.

Movement did not follow her, the silence becoming almost unbearable as the streaks of red light seeming to follow her no matter how far she ran. Nothing stopped her, Cynder jumped over roots and narrowly dodged around the bend in trees, pushing herself to the absolute limits of her weakened, malnourished body.

She became faintly aware of the snowstorm brewing around her, the heavy falling of white powder nothing more than a red haze around her. With each second the light's intensity seemed to increase, an almost permeable haze beginning to manifest around her.

Light encapsulated Cynder. With a shriek she feel, stumbling over a thick root embedded in the ground. Her head tilted fast enough to make er neck crack ominously.

She found herself staring deeply into a pair of black pits, an oozing tar leaking out of the empty, unending sockets. With that void a red light seeped forth, so tiny and unnoticeable, a far cry from the strobe light intensity from before.

Cynder couldn't breathe, she couldn't think. She couldn't move. She couldn't scream.

A voice seemed to emerge from within the twisted goat head, it's janky, cracked surface of a mouth, spreading into a wide gape just under her vision. The voice grew louder, more intense. It's tone was deep, gurgling, like that of an animal of throes of it's life.

Underneath that earthy, unholy growl came an inhaled scream, a child's voice, mixed together with that of a woman, crying, screaming, gargling on liquid. A thick, bubbling, tarry ooze began to drip from it's twisted grin, splattering upon her chest, the scales burning.

She felt the bubbling liquid eat away at her scales, bruning into the skin underneath, oozing into her body and veins. Cynder couldn't even acknowledge the skull splitting pain that was ravaging her skull, all she could do was stare. Stare into those eyes, that of something so much worse than evil. It transcended evil.

The voices, screaming, crying, growling all within one another, fighting for dominance, they surrounded her, coming from every inch of the woods around them. Trees faded into obscurity, the snow beneath her began to melt.

Slowly, the longer she stared, the eyes seemed to drift away, deeper into the woods around her. Light, red as blood, faded into the treeline, which with every passing second pushed itself back, leaving more empty space, filled with unnatural dark.

Like a dying radio, the sounds, the horrid retching, the nightmarish screams and sobs, the demonic growling, it all began to fade into the tree line as well, leaving only the howl of wind, which too began to fall off stage.

Minutes passed, with the only thing remaining, the only thing she could think about or see, being those haunting black sockets, their dim red glow from the bottom of the well being burned into her head, sending shocks of lighting across her eyes and down her spine.

At last, it too vanished, leaving Cynder surrounded by empty darkness, no trees in sight. The dim white of the snowy forest floor, stretched on for several feet before touching the darkness entirely and being consumed.

She sat there for several minutes, staring blankly ahead, mind in shock. Snow, by this point now a gentle flow, fell around her unmoving body, dripping off her wings and horns. Cynder's breathing had become so slow it may as well have stopped.

After an eternity of coma, she slowly came out of her stupor, eyes drifting around lazily, disoriented and confused. The pounding headache began to cease, quickly leaving only a slight lingering pain above her left eye. She didn't even rub at it.

Her paw twitched, picking up a clump of snow, matted by a mixture of black and red liquid. Her eyes, the emeralds dulled and dark lingered for several moments, before the clump dropped from claws with a muted thud.

Cynder's mind repeated that phrase over and over again, the cold tone bouncing around in her skull, unable to make even the slightest meaning out of it. Frazzled and discombobulated, Cynder couldn't pressure her mind to action, to make sense of what she had seen, what she had felt. All it could do was listen to those wretched words.

A dull ache in her belly caught her attention mildly, her wandering eyes meandering down to the burning sensation. Melted into the scales of her chest, a roughly star shape, surrounded by a circle.

Those emerald eyes stuck to the mark for several minutes, the dark forest enclosing around her more and more. She felt sleepy, she felt so, so tired. Maybe she would sleep, that would be nice.

She found herself mumbling that sentence, the echoing reverb of her own voice bouncing around her, distoring her timid voice into a grotesque tone. She didn't know what it meant, but she spoke it, spoke it over and over again.

Cynder collapsed to the snowy earth, a final breath of that sentence on the tip of the tongue, flowing into the air as she lost consciousness.

Kaatharia is born….a world without….end.