Fate and Chaos, Intertwined

by Chris Walker

Having been rendered inanimate following his battle with the Aspects years prior, Chromatus, the foul and unnatural creation of Nefarian, is kept under careful watch in Northrend. Revived at long last following a devastating ambush by the Twilight's Hammer, his weakened self topples into a deep chasm. Trapped with him is one of his crippled captors, the blue dragon Tetricugosa.

1. Prologue

I dreamed.

I have dreamed for a time I could never fathom. So long. So very, very long. For the few, lengthy years I have endured, each one has only lazily traipsed by without care nor feeling, passing me as gnats drone past a fallen log. I have dreamed in countless centuries, that I have seen the trees in my greatest reverie fall from the rampaging storms and mountains in my worst nightmares reduced to dust by the passing of the ages.

For a while, I thought myself awake and alive. I thought my surroundings real when they were but paltry illusions brought forth by my subconscious. In the mind, I found how desires could be made manifest by simple thought. I learned to discern reality from illusion, and for it, I hold a strength in cunning rivaling that of the physical might possessed by my awakened self. Now, I use the visions I formulate to study and plan strategies, some of them so complicated I nearly find myself getting caught up in them like a fly in a web.

Indubitably, my heritage has allowed me this skill - perhaps an arranged, or serendipitous consequence of my father's doing. To dream so lucidly as this has taught me much, and I learn more with every fading second. Dreams do not hold, so simply, the stuff of deception and lies. Dreams can hold power. Power over the mind, power over the future, power over life itself.

As I have dreamed, I have prepared. I have plotted. I have looked forward, and I have reflected. Reflected back to the brief moment I was alive and how I was brought so low by the powers of the many. How I had my newly-given life stolen from me by the meek and fearful. How I might learn from it. How to overcome and adapt.

My being will not end there, as I thought it did, for a time. I am destined to rise up and bring life, at last, to my dragonflight. Not just my parent, nor the ones he served have chosen me to act as their sword, but fate has as well. It is my birthright, mine alone, and mine to manipulate as I so choose to. I shall not forsake it. I shall realize it.

I will awaken soon. I have felt it. Seen it. It is no simple, insufferable illusion brought forth by my unconscious mind, but a fact as certain as the rain that falls from the sky. It is no meager and deluded wish. It is truth. A truth I will live to accomplish - the truth I will show to this entire, miserable world once my bonds are shattered and I am freed again.

I am the first, true child of the chromatic dragonflight. I am Chromatus. And I shall not be so easily denied my promised destiny...