Author's note: This chapter was supposed to be the showdown, but I got too carried away with the history of the Dragon of Darkness. Hope it's not too bad.
Somewhere, inside a napping volcano scooped on the inside like an upside-down raspberry ice-cream cone of magma, another prince of darkness was in his lair, training.
Or should we say – THE Prince of Darkness – Chase Young, the half-dragon, 1500-year-old young man, most powerful martial artist in the world, as smug as the devil himself. Most evil creature alive, if we don't count a certain oversized vegetable. That bean almost made the Heylin dragon himself become a vegetarian, by instilling in him a deep hatred for all plants and their wrong evolutionary choices.
Certainly the most evil humanoid being alive, until about five minutes ago.
Bleeding from several deep gashes, another of his enslaved tiger warriors smashed into the wall of the training room, like a stuffed toy hit with a baseball bat. It fell to the floor, panting heavily, too injured to move, too weakened to even land with the customary feline grace. Its amber eyes watched in a haze a pair of metal boots heading towards it, the sensitive ears twitching at every step. Their master was not one to take failures lightly, and his sudden burst of anger made one question his chances of survival. Hmpf – what a life. Born in poverty on an insignificant island of the Pacific, entering the warrior's caste because he didn't want to be stuck sculpting giant rock faces for life, then sworn into serving this immortal maniac for eternity. It almost felt...ironic. The feline's eyes lit up threateningly as Chase approached, a growl escaping its throat. Slave or not, he was not going to go down without a fight. The dragon's hand, covered by a metallic glove, touched his head with the certainty of a guillotine. It moved between the tiger's ears, stroking him.
"Not bad" the voice mused, as cold and sharp as a monomolecular ice knife. The gesture, the tiger warrior knew well, meant 'You belong to me'. Like the medieval kind of dragon, Chase Young was highly possessive. But not in the avaricious kind of way – of what use would money be to someone who already had immortal life, after all? No, Chase Young was possessive of people. He wanted their minds, their souls. He wanted the best warriors in the world, and he wanted their complete and unshakeable obedience. The warrior from the island of Rapa Nui wondered for a moment if there'll be a day when Chase's strength and silver tongue will fail to serve his purpose anymore. Then the hand moved down, catching the beast from the skin of its neck and raising it in the air, as if it were a newborn kitten.
"Not good enough, though" added Chase, swung his arm and threw the feline to the other side of the room. It would have smashed into the door, had it not been open; but this way, it flew headfirst through the exit, was dodged by a surprised and very irritated Heylin witch, and eventually came to a stop after sliding in circles on the marble floor.
"Chase, I would just love to sit around and watch you play with your kittens, but there are more pressing problems at hand" sneered the sorceress.
"Why the haste, Wuya?" smirked the man. Calmly, he grabbed a towel from a cautious snow leopard and rubbed his face and hair of sweat, while walking towards the door. "By the way, in your place I would take care who do I call...kittens"
As Chase's unlucky punch bag for that day painfully leapt away with most bones and dignity intact, what seemed to be the rest of his Jungle Cats surrounded the red-haired witch from a safe, yet uncomfortable distance. Inwardly mumbling something about fur jackets and poachers, the woman stormed behind Chase like a raging Fury. So undignified, if she thought about it...
"Dragon of Darkness. Awoken." She telegraphically informed him and proudly stopped walking, clearly expecting a more surprised remarked than the simple, bored: "Yes. I took notice of that fact."
"Oh, you did?!" The tattooed face of the witch twisted in pure irritation. "Then you must know what it means. This is not like the kiddy games you play with the Xiaolin...The prophecy..."
Chase slowly turned around, piercing her green eyes with a golden gaze. "Wuya...I would appreciate if you stopped doubting my intellectual capacities. By the way, are you familiar with the term 'self-fulfilling prophecy'?"
Wuya knew better than to answer that.
"I would advise you to stop following me around like a fangirl, but perhaps you are curious enough to know what my loyal servants may do to a powerless witch"
Leaving the witch fuming, the warlord went to take a shower. As drops of cold water fell from his hair, his breathing resembled a sigh. He had gone overboard during training that day, ever since he sensed the comeback of the Dark Dragon. As if he could ignore it – it felt like a hit to the face with a frying pan; anyone on the planet with more chi than a teaspoon must have sensed it. So inconsiderate; such a lack of style for someone supposed to be the new vessel of the most complex element. But then again, this so-called dragon was an ancient bloodstained legend that was darker than black. It was what Heylin witch mothers would threaten little girl Heylin witches with, before the side of 'good' basically drove them extinct. To help you get an idea, if the Heylin side would be represented by the toxic sewage of a nuclear weapon factory, then the Dragon of Darkness would be one of those nightmarish mutant creatures who live in its darkest depths. It was the difference between plain dark and antimatter.
But Chase knew something which Wuya didn't, and that was that the Dragon of Darkness was the laughingstock of Evil.
"Has this happened before, Chase?" Wuya asked in a slightly seductive tone as Chase entered his throne room several minutes later, the tone she instinctively used when she wanted something from him. 'Worse than a child crying for sweets' thought the warlord, displeased.
"I must admit that the question rises above your usual mediocrity, Wuya. Was it the all-seeing Eye which gave it away?"
"Obviously, it's not working. And you knew it, because you knew what to expect. Which means this is probably not the first time the Dragon of Darkenss awakens. Also, the ceiling is broken."
The ceiling? Chase Young stared above his head. He truly hoped the damage was minor, because the enchanted ceiling which looked like a window to the sky was one of his favorite items in the caste. That very morning, he had set it to show a rainy day. Now it looked like something taken out of a computer screen – a nonsensical clash of black and white pixels, static noise. The funny thing was, he had programmed the respective charm in a way that had nothing to do with computers, so that image should have never happened.
"So unspeakably rude." He stated simply. "You'd better not have anything to do with this, witch."
"Hey, that's how I found it!" said Wuya, quickly gesturing the decline of any responsibility. "I told you it's serious, Chase. Can't imagine what stopped it the last time, but I'm glad I wasn't around."
Chase's thin lips twitched. For a few seconds he seemed to be silently suffocating, but then a few odd sounds were forced through his nostrils, and before he knew it, the evil warlord was chuckling loudly enough to make his Jungle Cats blink.
"Wuya, you have been locked in a puzzle box for 15 hundred years. In this time, the 'dragon' which scares those pink panties off you attempted to come back at least thirteen times, and was met every time with utter defeat. Most of the time, the Xiaolins didn't even have to interfere. It has become the bad joke of the Heylin side, I am afraid, even more so than Spicer. The kind which always messes up the pun."
"What do you mean? That's impossible!" exclaimed the fiery-haired woman. "Not even Dashi managed to defeat..."
"Oh, but it manages quite well not to need any help with being defeated" smirked Chase. He summoned the magical eyeball, but all that could be seen was static noise. "Interesting. This incarnation seems to be a particular powerful one, but we should not get our hopes up. While we wait, I shall tell you a story..."
"Because of Master Monk Guan and the pact for immortality he made with the Dragon of Darkness, I used to be quite adamant about finding her new incarnation. I thought I could convince the new one to...eh...correct that little mistake. But as time passed, her story changed from legend into myth and my research went nowhere. I realized that I was wasting my time when I was listening to a fortune teller's gibberish about the 'core of darkness' being born from a virgin mother and so on. I gave up. About a decade later, a curious pulse of Heylin energy somewhere in India caught my attention. The one emitting it was a young female, almost a teenager. She was of the lowest caste – people could not as much step on her shadow without being defiled. Her family had banished her after almost beating her to death, for showing signs of pregnancy and stubbornly crying that she cannot explain it, for she had not even ever touched a man. I understood what it was all about, took care of her, brought her a medic. But as days passed she became weaker and weaker, and it was soon obvious she couldn't carry the pregnancy to term. When it already certain that the woman will die, the doctor cut her up so he could at least save the child" At that point, the Heylin's dragon voice felt a bit hoarse, as if his mouth had dried. "It was not a child. I didn't know what it was until about a millennium later, but it was monstrous. It was dead and yet alive, a pulsating mass of tissues without a heart and a brain, but still clinging to life until it was incinerated. Nowadays, one would call it 'cancer'. It was the first sign I had that the oh-almighty-Prophecy was not going according to plan. But I still believed it could be a mistake of Fate.
Eventually I realized that the Prophecy was completely right. 'If the Dragon of Darkness is allowed to live', it said, but it seemed that it could not keep itself alive. The recurring 'pattern of darkness' was too corrupted for any living being to endure. I said thirteen incarnations, but who knows how many died before showing the slightest hint of their powers? All of them were broken in one way or another: mind, body and soul. Idiotic, handicapped, unnatural. There was a paranoid puppet-emperor of China with the obsession of torturing people; a moronic giant; a suicidal genius poet; a London prostitute, last victim of Jack the Ripper – who was in fact a nightmare born from her own powers. Most were killed out of fear by the ones around them. Others committed suicide. Two were defeated by the Xiaolin, and one was a pawn I had to get rid of for being too stupid to follow instructions. None of them lived to adulthood. None of them learned to control their powers. Now do you understand my point of view, Wuya?"
The woman kept silent for a minute. "It's almost a pity, really. Something so strong turned into a string of perfect failures...but then again, even the Dragon of Darkness from our time wasn't exactly normal. At least let's see how this one looks"
Chase Young poked the magical eyeball with a finger. It blinked a few times, twitched a little, and then the image cleared. It showed a teenage girl, dressed in something that looked like a cross between a ninja outfit and pajamas. The clothes hanged loose, and not only because of design. She was thin almost to the point of looking unhealthy, with stick-like limbs and slender fingers that a piano player would have killed for. In fact, she looked almost too weak to be cute. Under her skin, her veins seemed bluish cracks in a marble block of the purest white. Her lips were curved into an awkward smile. Her hair seemed a bunch of flames neatly arranged into a pixie cut. Her eyes were red, but not only because of sleepiness – their irises were like two puddles of frozen venous blood. And most unusual, their expression was something out of this world.
"Familiar, isn't it?"
Author's note: Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, is an island somewhere in the Pacific famous for giant rock faces.
Also, I had to find a reason for Master Monk Guan being immortal, right?