Spyro was not destined to live from the start.
Yes, it's true. The Dragon Realms were meant to end under Malefor, to become only a fiery, uninhabitable planet with no one but me left to remember it. Fate had spoken, and only I dared to usurp her. Sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn't. Sometimes she overpowered me. Some things are, quite simply, meant to be.
This was not one of those things.
That particular day, the day of Spyro's birth and the raid on the Temple, it was storming on and off. The rain beat upon the golden waters of the Silver River, turning it into a monstrous beast as it lost its normal steady pace. The stream raged and screamed, corroding the dirt banks. The ocean the river fed into twisted and whorled, the waves crashing on its shores and dragging some of the beach back down with it.
Haven't you ever wondered as you witnessed Spyro's birth? Why the sky was so clear that day, the river so impossibly calm? It was I who thrust away the storm clouds, placated the angry river, guided the waters right to where the dragonflies Flash and Nina would be sure to find Spyro's egg.
I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Fate and I aren't quite on good terms about that day, you understand. We're both very selfish sometimes. If I decide to slow down a world's inevitable demise, it creates more work for her as well. But I'm sure you don't want to hear my ramblings; I should start at the very beginning.
It was a fairly normal day in the life of myself in Spyro's world. I was certainly more than used to wars at this point. It's not that I don't feel empathy for the people who die, but after you have spent so many years reaping the souls of an uncountable amount of casualties, it starts to become less important. I have ushered moaning, crying soldiers who had their limbs blown off into a quicker death; if time permits I've led the souls for a last meeting with their family, even if only in a dream; I've held innocent children in my arms and carried them towards their inevitable fate.
I'd just returned from carrying the souls of a mother and her children to the other side. Their house had been blown up by a pack of apes. The others in the village dispatched them with no deaths, but it was too late for the family of three. The mother sobbed and begged me to save her children.
But that's what people don't understand. If I sense an inevitable death then I can try to change it before it's too late. But I can't turn back time. I can't give you life when it's already gone. And war... war has to have some losses. I couldn't save everyone even if I wanted to. Some things are just meant to happen, and I am meant to respect that.
There were surprisingly few deaths that day. I wasn't sure why; I might be in several places at once but I could only pull this off when there were too many spirits to take one at a time.
But as I was about to leave the world and take my overworked soul elsewhere, I felt it. There were many, many deaths at hand. I sighed and closed my eyes, knowing now why there had been so few this day, and teleported towards where the souls were waiting for me.
When I opened my eyes, I stood in a yellow brick room with a green pool in the middle of it. There was only one dragon here, an old reddish orange one who sat hunched over the liquid. He looked up as I appeared, jumping and rubbing his eyes.
"I must be getting rather old," the old dragon mused to himself, turning back to his pool.
Some beings could see or sense my presence. Why, I could not fathom. Often the ones who caught a glimpse of me were destined to have their lives cut short, and with them, I could not even fight Fate to try to save them.
I tilted my head and examined this dragon. He was not set to die today. Soon, much before his intended lifespan, but not this day. The next decade of his life would carry out much the same as it would have if Spyro lived. But Cynder would find him eventually. Even when I saved Spyro, I still had to tend to this split in the world until Malefor finally ended it.
Which he did much, much sooner without any significant resistance. The creatures of this world fought like hell, it was true. But they may have just laid down their weapons and it all would have been the same.
I closed my eyes again and my black heart gave a sad little thump when I saw the room I was in. I was, as I said, quite used to death. But babies and children still made even my soul cry for them as their lives were snuffed out too early.
I shivered as I gazed at the dozens of eggs around me. Gently, I put my paw on one of the eggs and saw that Fate had not written stories for any of them. Every last one of the beings in these eggs would die today. I might scream and fight but I could not change this.
I reached a black egg and felt a jolt as a touched it. No, perhaps not all of the eggs' stories would end this day. But the baby in here would be used to no good will. I saw her dying over and over again; I saw her causing the deaths of others over and over again. I saw her defy Fate only once. I did not know which one of these was meant to be. All I could do was watch and wait.
Next I approached the purple egg, and as I touched the violet shell, I saw the intended course: The egg would shatter and die and the world would fall into ruin. There was no other path, no other world, just this.
But sometimes a story can write itself. Fate does not make the law. Her rules can and will be broken.
When night came, I sensed more walking corpses and warped to them. I found myself around a hundred ape soldiers, each busying himself with sharpening weapons or donning armour. I walked among them, picking out the ones who would likely die tonight and touching a few others to see what their futures might bring. No one seemed to notice me.
As the night wore on, they stamped out the fires and readied their weapons. I considered attempting to warn the red one of what was coming, but thought better of it. I didn't like to get in the way too often. But all those innocent hatchlings... Death would come sooner or later, but I did not like it when someone didn't even have a chance to make the most of what little life they would have been given.
The apes began to march, moving quickly but silently through the mushroom forest. The Temple was quiet, only a few dying candles in the windows. They would never see it coming. I waited outside, preferring to not bear witness to the gruesome fight. I do not take pleasure in my work; it's simply that if I didn't do it, no one could.
I felt it as the first one fell, and I came to him, lowering the hood that covered my face as the battle of dragon versus ape raged around me. My body had changed into one of an ape black as pitch, tall as a commander, with white armour covering my chest. I prefer to be whatever creature I am reaping. It seems to calm them to see one of their own taking them to the afterlife.
"Take my hand," I said, reaching out the soul of the ape. He did, wearily, and I felt the all-too-familiar shock as every last one of his memories crashed into me like a bus. I saw him taken from his parents as a young child, saw as he watched them executed when they had outlived their usefulness, and saw as he killed just so he wouldn't have to think of them. Saw as all of the humanity was ripped out of him.
But this was nothing new among apes. "It's nearly over," I told him, noting his tired green eyes. I tuned in to the cacophony of all the souls that had ever existed clamoring in the afterlife. I picked out two figures from among them and listened as they whispered a message to me. "Your parents are waiting."
I went about the bodies the Guardians had left behind in the fight, collecting their souls. Some begged, some screamed in rage, and some said nothing as I carried them away. Some spoke to me about their lives, and though I knew their entire story already, I listened.
When I returned from the spirit world, I entered the room where the eggs were stored and found the red dragon Ignitus there. He was breathing hard, having escaped the battle to check on the eggs, and he was thinking of the impossible number of apes. He wanted to hope that perhaps he and the other Guardians could fend them off, but he knew such a thing was unlikely. They had swarmed in from all sides and were pouring in, wave by wave...
Ignitus knew the purple dragon's only hope was to take it away. If he had to save one egg, it must be this one. Snatching it up, he took to the air and flew through a window towards the river below. I should have stayed in the room, waiting to take the babies' souls away, but I wanted to see what the fire Guardian might do with the egg that would cause its demise. So I followed him.
When I reached the old dragon, he had already placed the egg into the cap of a small mushroom, but he was holding it warily rather than setting it off into the river. The storm was about to break again, and the river was surging. There was no way it would survive the journey, Ignitus knew. He could not simply hide it away, for there was no way to know that he would live to retrieve it, and no one would ever find it here. And, too, he couldn't abandon his friends to run away with the egg in tow.
I knew the egg was not supposed to ever hatch. It was not supposed to save this world. But I wanted it to. I was prepared to use my power to quell the river, but then Fate was standing there beside me.
She, too, liked to change her appearance, though few rarely saw her, so she mostly remained in whatever form she had last had to switch to. Often she hid herself away to write stories, so she had remained human from her last excursion into the world. My inverse, she usually took on the colour pattern of white rather than black as I did, evidenced by the sleek white hair falling gently over her pale shoulders.
She reached out and put a small hand my shoulder, as I had already changed into my dragon form in preparation for the hatchlings' deaths. Her touch was gentle, but her voice firm: "Do not interfere."
In one world I broke away from her. In one world I slowed the river and parted the clouds and brought that egg to safety. In this world I stood watching as Ignitus set the egg off along the river, holding not the slightest speck of hope in his heart that it might survive, and knowing that he was all alone.
"May the ancestors look after you," said Ignitus, bowing his head as a tear slipped from his eye. "May they look after us all."
They try, I thought. But sometimes that isn't enough.
I watched the egg disappear rapidly around the river. Once it had gone, I turned and returned to gather the souls of all those dead children, knowing that one more would be waiting for me.
The egg was roughly abused by the river but somehow the cap managed to stay afloat. Spyro stirred in the egg as he was tossed about, finally waking from his deep sleep, not knowing that his new beginning was about to come to an abrupt end.
The storm came suddenly, pelting the egg with hard, fat drops. The first thing that little baby felt was terror as the river rose to meet the storm's ferocity. The walls of his egg cracked as the river mercilessly jolted the mushroom and its precious cargo carelessly about.
And then the inevitable happened. The egg flew from its cap and was sent sailing across the water, slamming into a rock. The hatchling cried out in pain, his body broken, as it was thrown into the water. Luckily the river led straight to the shore, and it spat out the little dragon's body onto it.
When I came to Spyro, he was whimpering in pain, struggling to get off the shore. He tried to walk but the the fragile bones in his body had shattered on impact with the rock. His soft off-purple scales were streaked with blood from being thrown roughly onto the gravel of the shore. He felt himself getting weaker and collapsed onto the ground, barely able to open his mouth to let out a mewl.
I sighed deeply as I looked down at the beaten hatchling. I wanted to help him, but I knew that there was no one around for miles. Even if I mended his broken bones, he would starve or be eaten alive by the swamp creatures. I didn't like to do this, but I could at least grant this hatchling the luxury of not having to suffer.
He looked up at me, a sudden clarity in his eyes, as I knelt over him. The innocent amethyst eggs begged me not to spare him, but to put him out of his misery.
And so I did.
When it was done, Spyro slept in my arms as I carried him away from his corpse. "I'm so sorry, little one," I said to the sleeping hatchling. "But perhaps it is better this way." No child deserved to be born into a war-torn world.
In the end, he was anyway. I had to watch him go through the pain of losing his family hundreds of times because of my decision. Perhaps it would have been better. Spyro did get his happy ending, but I had to watch him suffer again and again. At least if I had let Fate's plan play out, he only would have died once. Now he had to die a thousand times over.
Do I regret saving him? It's a question that will haunt me for the rest of eternity. But in the end, it's just another demon. I'm used to having them torment me by now.