Oasis
The midnight sees mirages, and ripples begun.
...
The white was not blinding. A fading landscape, with no color, could not be so vibrant, or eddy in the mist of absence that likened to a pale meadow. In pallid slumber nothingness conquered, that as shrubs of aimless outlines scarcely appeared, returned to the nihility unseen.
Then from the silence came the voices. Voices that knew no body. No soul, no heart. His was a name cried in sorrow, anger, hatred - damnation. He could feel their presence: ghosts who came marching, at first faceless, nameless, until their shadows blotched the surface, somber canvas dying as their darkness brought drenched it in night.
A dark forest surrounded them, the phantoms under the light of menacing moon and fire.
Eyes merciless, joyless.
Aaravos!
He awoke, breathing deeply the dense smoke, listening intently the flames' wild crackle as it lived, raging on the hearth for the wildfire that burned within him.
It does not do well to let the dead walk.
Yet it did, he argued calmly, not without reminder that he needn't say it aloud and dignify the poison they left him with. The demons did not feed on sufferance, so they were hungry, starved under their incestuous mire. They would stay starving. Monsters were insignificant.
Monsters. A glint, elsewhere, gold and glass capturing fire, snatched his attention and stood in mocking. The hunting gaze of the Dragon King did not pierce, had not pierced his reflection. Without that hideous spark was ill-begotten peace.
He rose, and approached the mirror in yearning wonder. Cold yet incredible in its beauty, the sheen felt of the runes along his hand was irresistible. Irrepressible was it, to admire the magic of his own arrest.
Essence glowed between his fingers, cool heat in his hands. His tracings caressed the looking glass, soft and rushing like a river of nebulous silk.
And into the river he fell.
Chaos, the humans come; The Dragon King fallen, his eyes wide dead, his opal heir shattered; the rage of the Queen, justice harrowing, the Moonshadows would do their part, dagger to blood, death and undeath preceding; a battle, innocents' horror in the scent, the sound, the sight of -
War.
Aware again was he of his vessel, of the oasis, as the last of the transcendent current flowed back into the eons. Unconsciously, taken by his heart afoul with insidious mirth, Aaravos' laughter chided in revelation, his mimic dauntless and savage inside the entrapping frame.
He purred, sneering at the mirror as if the massive iris laid lifeless before its very face. "Was this not what I had warned you..." He taunted with an acrid snarl, "Thunder?"
An echo resounded. At first it was merely that: an airy companion, whittling away in oblivion.
Yet the tail of the sound did not perish, and swimming out from the mist, another reached his soul, touching, a nova like a tempered old sun resplendent.
Relentless is rancorous passion.
All such malice fell from him. The blazing hunger quelled. These words he knew. Intimate, familiar. A long-away star glowing through the vaporous veil, soothing unlike venom.
Distantly, Aaravos ached.
He sought the mirror an apparition, though in the facade of his adversary, never would they come. Despite it, still he envisioned, if to himself and one alone was he at the gates of the infinite, spirit elysian and unknown possessing him.
The demons marked his resolved reflection, the oppunger's amber once more-over forged.
They can not conquer you.
In time, he would be the victor.