"Wow… these… these past few weeks have been quite hellish, haven't they?" Rubblerust asked with a sigh, breaking the silence after Cynder told him, Pyron and Freeze about Electrika's suicide while they ate lunch. Ten days had passed since her suicide, and it had taken Cynder a long time to get over it enough to tell them. They never spoke with Electrika after she abandoned her friendship with Cynder, and so to hear that she had suddenly committed suicide when trying to make amends with Cynder was extremely shocking to them. Freeze appeared to be the most shaken.
"Yeah, more than you know." Cynder replied forlornly. "But I… I'm okay. You don't have to worry about me."
"No, Cynder. I'm your friend. If you're struggling, I can't help but worry. I'm sorry I haven't been around for you during the past few days, and I really wish I have been. I've had to help out my family with their own grief. My uncle died in the most recent siege, and Mum isn't taking it too well." Rubblerust explained.
"Oh. I'm sorry." Cynder muttered, taking another bite of her meal.
"It's alright, Cynder. I just… I just also wish I could have been there for you as well, helping you out with your own problems. That's what friends do. With all that's gone on with you recently, I can't imagine what you must be feeling right now."
"Rubblerust is right, Cynder." Freeze said. "And I also want to say that you shouldn't blame yourself for everything that's going on. None of it is your fault."
"I can't help but blame myself. All this… the death, the pain, the bloodshed… it just reminds me of the Dark War. Of everything I did. Of everything I witnessed. I was a monster. It didn't help with Electrika as of recently reminding me of it until she… until she died last night." Cynder said with a shudder. "And now Spyro has been pulled into this dark hellhole, and he's the one causing this. All on his own accord! He hasn't even been possessed by anything! He just up and turned on us, turned on me, the damned worm!" She slammed her paw down on the table that they had been eating at. Small amounts of her food bounced off the plate, but Pyron, Freeze and Rubblerust's plates of food stayed relatively untouched by the vibrations in the table. They jumped back in shock at Cynder's act of rage.
"Cynder, calm down, please!" Pyron pleaded. "Don't make a scene!"
"He did this!" Cynder spat through clenched teeth and hoarse breaths, spittle flying from her lips. "It's all his fault! He's not a puppet like I was! I want nothing to do with him anymore!"
"Cynder, listen to me." Pyron said, and Cynder looked up at him, glaring daggers at the red dragon, who wilted under her angry gaze for a short while before recomposing himself with a shaky breath. "It may be his fault, but you can react to this situation much better than you are now. You're in charge of a whole army now. You need to be a role model to them. And we want the nice, calm Cynder back. Your friends want the nice, calm Cynder back. I know you're stressed; we all are. But try not to lose yourself, your true self. Please."
Cynder looked away from Pyron, before nodding, and picking up her half-devoured deer leg and took a large bite of it, taking off a little bit of bone as well, as a loud crunch went through the air as she forcefully broke the bone. Pyron, Freeze and Rubblerust looked up at Cynder with worry, and she stopped chewing, raising a claw and picking out the snapped bone pieces from her mouth, placing them gently on the plate, before continuing to chew up her food, before swallowing.
Freeze sighed. Pyron and Rubblerust continued eating, too, but the ice dragoness couldn't bring herself to put another piece of food in her mouth. She honestly felt like throwing up the three bites of venison that she had swallowed earlier, just before Cynder had started to get angry. Freeze enjoyed being friends with Cynder, but to be completely honest, Freeze was also pretty scared of Cynder. Her anger scared Freeze. It scared Pyron and Rubblerust too, but she showed it the most. And it wasn't just Cynder's anger that had put Freeze off eating, but it was also Cynder's explanation of everything that had been going on recently. Cynder had just explained everything to them just now, including her parents' deaths, something she had only mentioned to the Warfang Army the day she and Aerus returned from Dark Peak, as well as Electrika's suicide. The current events in Cynder's life were making Freeze really concerned about the dark purple dragoness' wellbeing, and she wanted to help her.
Wanting to distract Cynder from her anger and depression, and hoping to lighten her spirits, she asked, "How's Aerus? You enjoying being with him? Getting to know him? Is he like… Is he like how you thought a brother would be?"
Cynder put down the deer leg, swallowing the last bit of venison in her mouth, before replying. "Yeah, he's fine. I'd always wanted family, and I'm so glad I was able to find him. He's still rather shy around me, though. He's told me a few bits of his own life; I wanted to know what his childhood was like as mine's kind of well-known and he knows the majority of it already. He could tell some parts of his life without crying, but most of the time, he would burst into tears." Cynder explained. "His parents were butchered before his eyes, and he has no contact with his friends. He wants to go back to Typhaar to visit them, and to be honest, I do too, so I can see what his life was like, but the trip would be too dangerous. To go in a straight line to Typhaar, we'd have to pass Dark Peak, as well as the Blackened Desert. So basically, until the war ends, or something happens where we need to go to Typhaar urgently, we're not going to be going there anytime soon."
"The Blackened Desert?" Rubblerust asked. "Isn't that the place where the deciding battle during the war with the sinister dragons was fought?"
"Yeah, I think so." Freeze said.
"Sinister dragons? What are they?" Cynder asked.
"What, do you not know?" Rubblerust asked with shock in his voice.
"Cynder didn't do Ancient Dragon History during school, like me." Pyron reminded, rolling his eyes, and Cynder nodded in confirmation at Pyron's last statement.
"Right, I forgot." Rubblerust murmured. "Freeze and I were the only ones here that did Ancient Dragon History."
"Care to explain what these sinister dragons are, then?" Cynder asked.
"The sinister dragons are… they're kind of a weird species of dragons." Freeze explained. "They were the ones who actually introduced torture into the Dragon Realms. Prison and violence had been around for a long time, but until the sinister dragons came around, torture hadn't existed. The thought of using sadistic acts of violence and teasing either to try and force information out of someone, or just for fun even, was unheard of before the sinister dragons appeared. The sinister dragons came into existence about ten million years ago and became extinct about five million years later. They were a strange mutation of the elements that already exist, including some of the dark elements that had existed for fifteen million years, and the respective dragons went extinct five hundred thousand years after the first sinister dragons were born. The sinister elements were lava, a mutation of fire; plasma, mutation of electricity; sound, a mutation of fear; ethereal, which is a more telekinetic element allowing the user to move things to their will; and sinister, the element category's namesake, which also allowed dragons to use all of the sinister elements on top of the sinister element's own powers. They're all pretty dangerous; they were labelled, even when the dark dragons were around, as the most dangerous dragon species in existence. No dragon species have gotten close to beating that title, apart from probably Spyro's army as of now, and a few individuals, namely Malefor and Spyro."
"So wait, lava is a…? Oh, no…" Cynder murmured, her breathing getting faster and more irregular as she began to panic.
"Cynder, calm down. Calm down. Deep breaths." Pyron soothed. "Breathe with me. In, and out. In, and out. Good. Are you alright?"
"Yeah. Y-y-yeah, I'm fine." Cynder stammered.
"Sure you are." Rubblerust deadpanned. "What caused that little panic attack?"
"Spyro now has another four elements in his arsenal! Back in Dark Peak he used a lava projection. He can already bend lava to his will!" Cynder cried. "And you said that the sinister elements were 'the most dangerous' ones, which means that if he has control of all of the sinister elements, then dear ancestors, he's more dangerous than we thought!"
"But that… that shouldn't be possible, should it? If there's one thing I remember from when Freeze was practising one of her orals on the topic, it was that purple dragons cannot inherit the use of sinister elements, like the dark elements." Pyron muttered.
"Actually, that's not true. You must have missed the next part of it that is equally as important. Like dark elements, a purple dragon can inherit sinister elements if the genes come directly from the parents or grandparents." Freeze corrected. "Any further back or anywhere else in the family completely disables the ability to inherit it. Of course dark elements can also be inherited due to exposure to darkness, but the point still stands."
"Well then that means that…" Rubblerust said, his voice rising with fear as he gulped. "That means that someone in Spyro's family was a sinister dragon. And that means…"
He trailed off, not wanting to speak his fears out loud. Freeze was the one to speak them. "…that the sinister dragons are not extinct." she breathed.
"They were wiped out millions of years ago! How could they have survived all this time, all these millions of years, without being seen once?!" Rubblerust exclaimed.
"If you don't mind me asking, how'd the sinister dragons become extinct in the first place?" Cynder asked. "Or… 'thought-to-be-extinct', since we know they're still alive due to Spyro. Somehow."
"The regular elemental dragons warred with the sinister dragons on and off over the five million years they were around." Rubblerust explained. "The wars were pretty bad, but most of the information has been lost over the extra five million years between now and the extinction of the sinister dragons, although we still do have very important info lying around, which we had to study during Ancient Dragon History. It was pretty interesting, to say the least. Apparently, the sinister dragon species went extinct after a large elemental discharge in the Blackened Desert that killed of all life there, including the desert. That's why it's called the Blackened Desert. And apparently every sinister dragon was there during that fight, so that's why they were all killed off. It's believed that either the elemental discharge was the cause of a purple dragon or the cause of the ancestors. No one knows which one it is to this day."
Cynder raised an eyebrow. "Okay. Obviously, some of them managed to make it out alive. My other guess would be that not all of them were during the battle at the Blackened Desert. But… I've just remembered something Freeze mentioned earlier that I can't really get out of my head. Dark elements have existed for an extra fifteen million years before the sinister dragons' birth? I thought that Malefor created them." Cynder questioned.
"No, he didn't. Even I knew that, and I didn't do Ancient Dragon History." Pyron scoffed. "The dark elements weren't created by Malefor, although the dark elements were used by him, and lots of other dark lords before him; most of them weren't purple dragons, but there were a good amount who were."
"There were more purple dark lords other than Malefor and Spyro? I knew some other types of dragons fell to darkness and converted themselves, but I didn't know there were more purple ones!" Cynder exclaimed.
"The phenomenon doesn't happen often; what we have with Spyro's corruption happening immediately after Malefor's defeat, pretty much, is quite rare." Freeze explained. "But yes, other purple dragons have fallen to darkness; I'm pretty sure the total number of recorded corrupted purples was around two hundred." Cynder's eyes widened with shock at the number, but Freeze kept going. "I think the name of one of them was Salrorh, famous for his use of almost every element known to dragonkind, including sinister elements, as his mother was an ethereal dragoness, and her mother a lava dragoness. It now seems Spyro's joining Salrorh with this feat, which is kind of worrying, knowing how strong Salrorh was, and how strong Spyro is. Also, while two hundred corrupt purples may sound like a lot, there have been a little over two thousand purple dragons recorded in history as of now; there may be more, so it's not as much in comparison to the bigger picture."
"It's still ten percent, which is fairly frequent, though." Pyron muttered under his breath, but his words went unheeded.
"So… with these dark dragons… were they like the ones we know now?" Cynder asked. "Like the venomfangs and shadowclaws?"
"No. The venomfangs and shadowclaws are merely mutations of those elements, and Spyro's own creation. And to be honest, most of the dark dragons of ancient times were actually quite peaceful, although they were still quite prone to… violent outbursts… just to say the least." Rubblerust said.
They sat in silence, and continued eating their meals, including Freeze, who had gotten her appetite back. Cynder was the first one done. "Well, thank you for the… interesting… history lesson, guys." Cynder said, standing up and stretching once she had finished her meal.
"No problem." Pyron boasted, puffing out his chest, only to be slapped in the cheek by Freeze, a large grin on her face.
"You didn't even do half the work! You can't take all the credit for it!" Freeze chuckled, and Pyron just stuck his tongue out at her.
"It's alright, Freeze and Rubblerust." Cynder said, and Pyron began to pout childishly. "I've got to head back to work. It was nice catching up with you, so I'll see you around."
"See you, Cynder. Hopefully you get better!" Pyron called.
"And it was good talking about less… stressful… topics." Freeze added.
"It sure was. I think it was good to get my mind of current events, so thanks again, guys. It… It does worry me a lot though, knowing Spyro has access to the sinister elements. I mean, who knows what he could do with them? For all we know, the lava projection could have been the easiest thing possible, and I don't want to know what things like plasma, sound, and the amalgamation of all of them, sinister, can do. I guess I'll have to… try and prepare myself… Hopefully the knowledge we have is enough to prepare." Cynder said, before she turned and left the restaurant.
Rubblerust turned to Pyron and Freeze with a sly smile on his face. "I don't know how we got caught up talking about draconic history, but it distracted Cynder from her grief for a while, so… I guess we did good." he said, shrugging.
Pyron nodded, taking a whopping big bite of his hunk of steak, before starting to choke on the lump of meat. Freeze slapped him on the back a few times, and he coughed up a few flecks of spit and meat, before finally swallowing his food. "Smaller bites, next time." Freeze said with a laugh.
I'm back. Phew.
I am so very sorry for not updating this story over the past two, almost three months. If you've been keeping up-to-date on my profile, you may know what's been happening, but for those who don't know, I'll say it here. (big A/N incoming because there's a lot that's been happening over these two to three months that I need to address)
I needed to rewrite the majority of the second half of Demonised. The main premise of it has remained the same, but heaps of it has changed from the original version I had finished writing last year. There were lots of character development and plot issues that came up, and it came to the point where my poor planning and rushed writing from last year finally caught up to bite me. I'm just glad it happened early-on in the Purple Legacy series rather than near the end. But knowing how long Purple Legacy will end up being, I wouldn't be surprised if some big issue popped up again.
But I've currently rewritten up to Chapter 34 and replanned up to Chapter 42, so I've gotten a bit of progress since I've been gone. But because of the slow progress this will take, updates will be a hell of a lot more spaced out. School's also started up as well and it's my final year, so I've been trying to dedicate more time to school since I got distracted by many different things all throughout last year, and I want to try and improve.
I won't go too into detail on what's going on with Demonised, but that's the gist of it.
I also want to address my other two stories. On a high note, Broken Perceptions hit over 50K views back in late December, and with one year having been gone since I started posting it, it's absolutely crazy to see how far it's come and how popular it is. Anyone here who's read Broken Perceptions, thanks for all the support, and same with Demonised. Demonised is almost at 5K views in eight months, so it's not as popular, but I kind of expected that, and I just thank everyone who's read my work.
It's the same with Bitten, and here's where the low note comes in. Bitten needs to be put on a hiatus. It's hard to write, and right now, I really need to focus on Demonised and Purple Legacy to make it the best it can be. I want to improve the Fazbear series, sure, but I don't think I can redeem it to the point where it can match my writing of Broken Perceptions and Purple Legacy, especially while working on them simultaneously, so Bitten will be put on a short hiatus for a bit, until I've fixed up Demonised and done a bit more of Purple Legacy in terms of Parts 2 and 3 at least. So to everybody who's been reading Bitten as well, I'm very sorry to say that it won't be updated for a while. I'll try to get a chapter up every once in a while, maybe once I finish rewriting Demonised I might upload another chapter, but DO NOT hold that to me. I have no promises involving Bitten. I do like Bitten (I actually kind of have a love-hate relationship for it, as some of you may know from some of my A/Ns in Bitten), and it does annoy me that I have to put it aside like this, but my Spyro fanfics have always been my biggest priority and always will, and with this big rewrite that's popped up for Demonised, it means Bitten has to be thrown in the 'do later' list. Again, I'm sorry for this.
…
Derick Lindsey: Yeah I'm not surprised about your confusion about how to feel about Electrika. I guess this means I wrote Electrika a lot better than I thought I did, especially when she fell into her depression in the last chapter. I actually had someone message me on DeviantArt saying Electrika was their favourite character, so that kind of stunned me for a bit lol.
The first section of that chapter that I rewrote? It was honestly crap. Nothing really changed story-wise, but it was the way it was written that was pretty terrible.
And yes, Ulfitz was the one you compared to Sayori/Yuri. Originally Electrika was going to be found in her room dead, like Ulfitz (not necessarily hanged; she slit her throat like in the final version of last chapter), but as I said, I didn't want to repeat myself with such a similar theme to Broken Perceptions, so I ended up having Electrika commit suicide in front of Cynder and Aerus.
Also, your comment on Cynder attempting suicide. First, I didn't think of the mirror with connecting Cynder and Electrika's suicidal thoughts together, so nice spotting there. Second, Cynder didn't actually get 'saved' in the nick of time, like you say she did. If you remember, she did slice her neck, but she had missed and cut too low, where the neck connects with the collarbones/shoulders, meaning that she never made it to death. Had her aim been accurate, she would have killed herself.
…
So yeah, that's this chapter done. Hopefully you enjoyed and managed to get back into the swing of things. It'll likely be a while before Chapter 27 comes out. But if you have any questions, leave a review or PM me. I'll try to respond as quick as I can. If you're a guest, you'll probably have to wait a while (so yeah sorry Derick Lindsey that the response took almost three months), or get an account so you can PM me or I can reply to reviews via PMs.
Anyway, see you all later. (this was a long A/N lol)