Greetings, prospective readers! Welcome to the world's first Skylanders-Legend of Spyro-Classic Spyro crossover event! I've always wanted to do one of these, and now that I have the finer details figured out, I can finally bring it forth! Now then, I can safely assume that people aren't going to be pleased with my inclusion of Skylanders in this project. The truth is, I decided to add Skylanders because of the creative possibilities provided by having them there, especially in terms of there being two Cynders, one of whom was Malefor's former general while the other is straight-up Malefor's daughter, and of course there being the Legends characters and Skylanders Malefor, and anyone who's played the Legends series knows what Legends Malefor did. Also, there are a few things I should explain real quick: on the Skylanders Academy side, this story takes place about seven months after the end of the show, while the Classic Spyro side takes place about three months after A Hero's Tail, while Legends is set a few months after Spyro pulls the planet back together. Also, Dark Spyro doesn't actually know about Strykore's defeat, what with him trying to survive on a floating rock after his defeat and all? Well, what are we waiting for? Let's begin!

Prologue

The Great Merge

The Cave of Future's Past — The Skylands

A lone shadow ducked into the entrance of the Cave of Future's Past. The shadow had learned of this sacred and ancient place through the books he had studied while undercover for his former master Strykore at the Skylanders Academy, before that loathsome Eon had discovered him, tied him down, and separated him from his pathetic good self, with whom he did battle. No doubt his good self and the Academy thought him destroyed in the explosion, the result of his own fire breath clashing with that of his good self.

The fools. They know my good self's scales are indestructible, so why should mine be any different? the shadow thought to himself as he journeyed through the caverns, his technokinetic powers disabling any surprises left behind by those who left the item he sought here. But even still, he had barely survived his fall after being knocked unconscious by the explosion and falling onto a small, dark islelet that happened to hover far beneath the Academy. As he lay upon that floating hunk of rock, starving, broken, bleeding, and as weak as an orphaned kitten as his bones slowly knitted themselves back together, he knew he couldn't return to his Master after having failed. The torture of working alongside those incompetent Skylanders, and the physical agony of his injuries would be sheer bliss to whatever punishment Strykore had in store for him. No… rather, he would become the master of himself and his own destiny. And then the Skylands would kneel before him and his kind!

But first… he needed to free the rest of the purple dragons, only…

Why free them if they were never imprisoned in the first place?

And that's what brought him here. For within this cavern was the Nexus Crystal, an artifact capable of manipulating time and space to the whims of whoever possesses it.

Finally, as he arrived before the shimmering purple crystal, a beam of light was cast upon the shadow, revealing him to be a black and silver dragon who happened to be the spitting image of the Skyland's last purple dragon, Spyro. This black creature was known as Dark Spyro.

"Oh, it's beautiful…" Dark Spyro whispered as he gazed upon the crystal. Within it he saw many things: infinite deaths, infinite lives, infinite possibilities. In one image he saw the wedding of what seemed to be his good self and Cynder. In another, he saw the planet being torn apart. And in yet a third, he saw his good self's death, his peaceful-looking, yet battered and bloodied body being mourned by a faun, a cheetah, and a mole he didn't recognize, while in a fourth his good self seemed to be marrying the faun.

"I'd take a good look around, Spyro… because your future is about to change. The purple dragons will rise again!" cried Dark Spyro before he fired a beam of dark energies at the crystal, muttering an incantation as his energy unleashed itself into the crystal.

…

Skylanders Academy

All was peaceful in Skylanders Academy. The weather was nice and calm, the students were studying for their exams, the faculty were filing paperwork and grading assignments. And most importantly… Master Eon restocked on his beard spray.

Closing the cupboard, Eon gave a pleased sigh. "I almost ran out of my beard spray…" he muttered in disbelief. "With all the craziness with Strykore, I almost forgot about the simple things." He shook his head, glad that crisis had been averted.

Before the old Headmaster could continue his musings, a violent shake followed by a noise that sounded somewhere between a thunderclap and something cracking open knocked him to the floor.

"Oh, Mother Carey's Chickens! What on Earth was that?" grumbled Eon as he pulled himself up off the floor just in time to hear several students and faculty scream in terror. Not long afterward, his Beard Sense kicked in with the force of an exploding bomb, alerting him that they were all in terrible danger of a…

Master Eon's face fell when his Beard Sense told him what it was: a temporal cataclysmic event that would destroy Skylands.

"But, the only thing powerful and unstable enough to do that is…" the old Headmaster said, his voice drifting off as his sense of dread quickly increased. "I must go and retrieve Spyro! It's time for him and his team to begin another mission!" cried Eon before he threw open the door leading out of his study and ran through the panicking students and staff as fast as he could to the Academy Dormitories, where he would no doubt find Spyro and his friends.

…

Avalar — Summer Forest

A young purple dragon with golden horns, a yellow belly, and yellow and brown wings lay beside a female faun of around the same age wearing a dress made out of leaves, the both of them looking up at the star show above them.

"Wow," said Elora as a particular set of stars zoomed in the night sky overhead. It was rather peaceful here, just her and her draconic boyfriend Spyro. They had been a little nervous at first, considering that they lived in two completely different worlds, and because of the fact that neither of them were sure that the other one felt the same way, but once everything was out in the open, something truly beautiful began… even if Gnasty Gnorc, Ripto, and The Sorceress kept popping their ugly mugs up every once in a while to spoil whatever the two of them had planned for the day.

"Spyro?" said Elora, turning her head to face Spyro, causing the young dragon to turn his head to face hers. "Tell me you love me."

Spyro sat himself up to face Elora, a soft smile on his face. "I will always love you, Elora…" Spyro said softly as he leaned in towards Elora, closing his eyes as Elora did the same...

Before the dragon and faun could lock lips, however, a violent shake jolted them out of their little piece of heaven, causing them both to sit up and look around wildly.

Immediately Spyro could sense that something was wrong. The very fabric of reality seemed… distorted somehow. And within the distortions, Spyro saw things, such as a completely different valley that seemed to be seamlessly attached to the part of Summer Forest they were currently in, and there seemed to be a set of islands floating in the sky above… islands that were falling towards the ground at an alarming rate. But, it wasn't until the ground started to violently shake and parts of the Summer Forrest Castle began to crumble that Spyro made any move.

"We need to find the Professor!" Spyro yelled. "He'll know what's going on! Now!" Elora gave only a quick nod before the two of them changed headlong into the newly created chaos and through distorted landscapes in search of the Professor's Lab, dodging boulders and masonry as they rained down upon the fracturing ground.

As they were running through what seemed like the end of the world, Elora tripped and fell, crying out in pain as she hit the ground with a sprained ankle, just as a particularly large slab of masonry began to fall towards her.

"Spyro, help me!" screamed Elora.

Hearing the cries of his girlfriend, Spyro turned on his heels and speed off toward where she'd fallen and lept through the air, his horns smashing through the masonry mere moments before it could fall on top of the frightened Elora. The second he hit the ground, Spyro sped off towards Elora, who was now motionless on the ground, a piece of rubble apparently having struck her in the skull.

"ELORA!" screamed Spyro as he sped towards his love, and picked her up in his foreclaws, checking her vitals. A sigh of relief at the sign of a pulse was all Spyro had time for before a loud thunderclap rang through the sky. Daring to chance a look, Spyro saw what appeared to be a massive shimmering white crevasse in the sky, with random glowing bolts of lightning being thrown out of it as what seemed to be a landmass came crashing towards the ground.

Knowing that the End Times for Avalar and quite possibly the Dragon Realms and the Forgotten Worlds were upon them, Spyro held Elora close to him, his eyes shut tight as he prepared to meet his end.

Ancestors on high… deliver us…

…

Valley of Avalar

As the midday sun shone down on the valley, a certain Purple Dragon was busy chasing down his quarry. An unlucky stag had managed to catch his eye, and he wasn't about to miss out on a good meal. Tucking in his wings, Spyro dove down towards the stag, claws outstretched to latch onto the fleeing cervid. The stag pulled to the left, and he twisted a wing to adjust his flight before grabbing onto its hide, biting down on its neck. Giving a single twist, a crack resounded before the cervid went down, the young war hero planting his feet on the ground.

Several months had passed since Spyro and his dear friend Cynder had pulled the world back together after Malefor broke it apart. Winding up on the other side of the world from their friends had been a little disorienting, but nothing a little traveling around couldn't solve. It had taken a good deal of time, but they'd finally managed to make their way back. Spyro couldn't wait to let everyone know they were okay, though Cynder… wasn't quite as enthusiastic.

The two had grown close since their journey back had began. Hearing the dragoness say the words "I love you" back at the world's core had been eye-opening for the Purple Dragon. As they continued their long journey home, Spyro had made sure to let her know he felt the same way through his actions. Curling up next to her to share his warmth at night. Going out hunting for food and bringing it back to her. And in the past couple of weeks, he'd entertained the thought of asking for her claw in marriage, though he was anxious about the timing.

He made his way back to where they'd settled for lunchtime, the stag's carcass clutched in his foreclaws as he flew. A small grotto came into view, and he quickly beelined for it with a twist of his wings, gliding with the occasional flap. As he flew in close, he smiled as he caught sight of the black dragoness, waiting patiently for him by a small unlit campfire. Adjusting his descent, he hovered briefly before touching down, placing his haul on the grass.

"That's a pretty big one," Cynder noted. "You sure we can eat all that?"

"We're getting closer to the village," he replied. "We might have a guest or two, so why not bring more, right?" Rearing back his head, he let loose a small burst of flame on the campfire, lighting up the pile of sticks placed in the circle of rocks.

"You think Hunter might be around looking for us?"

"More than likely." Dragging a claw down the belly of the stag, he reached into the cut he made and pulled out the more undesirable organs, starting with the intestines. "They probably all are."

A sound ringing through the valley brought them out of their musings, both of them looking around for the disturbance. A loud thunderclap from above made them look up, and their eyes widened. A glowing white distortion in the sky in the shape of a long crevice was slowly growing from the direction they'd been flying from with smaller cracks branching out, arcs of lightning sparking out at random. As it grew, the center of the distortion grew darker, before the two dragons began making out a shape within it. It looked like… a landmass, ripped from a planet's surface. They were more than certain, having seen such when Spyro pulled the shattered world back together.

Another, much too similar sound resounded off the valley's hills, drawing their attention back down low to the distant landscape. Another rift, almost identical to the first, had began spreading over the region they'd came from. Electrical arcs zapped the area as the rift expanded, though something even worse than the environment being scorched occurred; the land itself began to shift wherever the arcs struck, warping into something unrecognizable. Memorized landmarks were erased in the blink of an eye, and out-of-place terrain replaced the landscape seemingly at random. Creatures both familiar and not appeared literally out of thin air, all of them in a state of panic as they fled. All the while an entire world came into view within the distortion itself.

A strong gale of wind roared past them as they sat transfixed before the chaos unraveling upon the land. Thankfully, neither of the two distortions seemed to be getting closer so much as they were expanding away from the valley, the ground rift skewing off slightly to one side while the sky distortion veered heavily in the other direction. As the grotto was almost right on the edge of the Avalar region, that meant they weren't heading anywhere towards the village, Ancestors be praised…

Then something terrifying happened…

Branches of the two rifts collided.

As if a small trickle had become a great flood, the two spatial anomalies suddenly accelerated in their invasion of reality. The outlands were rapidly overtaken by a massive forest expanding past the horizon, in which rested a castle of the whitest marble either of them had ever seen roughly a few miles out. In comparison, the sky crevice tore itself open above the world, revealing the sizable landmass they saw to actually be an entire continent of plateaus and island chains mishmashed together. And the latter didn't stop with heading in just one direction anymore… It was now going EVERYWHERE across the sky, hovering just mere leagues above the visible mountains within Avalar.

It wasn't long before the two rifts finally clashed in full, giving what Spyro and Cynder could only liken to a thousand simultaneous sonic booms.

The two dragons looked at the aftermath in worry.

"This is—" "—not good," Cynder and Spyro said, respectively.

…

The Cave of Future's Past

Dark Spyro could tell something was wrong with the Nexus as his dark energies poured into it. It was pretty easy to figure out when it felt like the Skylands were being distorted somehow, on top of what sounded like screams of terror coming from outside the cave that somehow had reached him in here. And yet, despite the obvious feeling of something going awry, Dark Spyro knew he couldn't stop now, for he could risk making things worse.

"You?! How are you still alive?!"

Dark Spyro heaved a sigh. That was assuming his pathetic good self didn't muck things up first. "Can't really talk right now, Mr. Goody-Four-Shoes. I'm in the middle of rewriting history so that my fellow corrupted purple dragons reign supreme over the Skylands."

Spyro, Stealth Elf, and Eruptor did a double-take at this information. "Are you insane?! You're gonna kill us all!" Stealth Elf cried. "Reality itself is being distorted! Strange lands are becoming fused with the world below, and to top it off, the Skylands are beginning to fall from the heavens, killing God knows how many innocent people!"

Dark Spyro shrugged. "Gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette," he said nonchalantly.

Spyro had heard just about enough of this. Taking a large inhalation of air, Spyro breathed a massive stream of flame at his evil twin's face, disorienting the dark dragon enough to get him to stop his spell.

The second the stream of dark energies stopped pouring into the Nexus Crystal, the time manipulating artifact began to go critical, throwing of large bolts of lightning all over the cave, some of them striking a little too close for comfort for Team Spyro, all while the crystal's glow began to increase dramatically.

"Spyro, you fool!" Dark Spyro shouted in rage. "You've doomed us all!".

A few seconds latter, the Nexus exploded in a brilliant flash on energy and light, causing everyone in the Cave of Future's Past to black out and know no more.

Whoo! Talk about an explosive opening! Anyways, big thanks to my co-author and editor, KyuubiMakai009, for his aid in this endeavor. Join us next time as Spyro meets Spyro meets Spyro! See you then!