"Hark and–"
Oh, of course I can remember everything they said. Such is the timeless voice of an archdragon. The words they used do not matter. I will not dignify them by recording such drivel.
Their voices, for all their eternal majesty, spoke the same sniveling, pompous, self-serving horseshit as the priests of the Golden Order. We were part of a greater plan that we could not possibly understand. Despite the immortality Marika had stolen for us, we were but mere mortals, and that immortality had now passed.
Only the dragons, eternal and true servants of the One Great, beyond time, could understand the true plan for all existence. The Dragonlord was not truly dead and could not truly die but would take the shape the One Great desired. All things were cyclical.
Forever would the Greater Will establish an Order and the Frenzied Flame rise to destroy it when it grew stagnant.
The world was a song and a story without end, amen. We were merely individual notes, and we were becoming dangerously off-key. The One Great was so fine a conductor that Marika's rebellion had amounted to little, but now the draconic choir had decided it was better to silence us.
They would take the Runes from us, and the strength of runes. Without them, we could do little to redirect the song. We could leave with our lives, for they were as dust.
Our own archdragon ally was deviant and aberration. An incomplete theme plucked from elsewhere whose inclusion was a mistake. She descended near us and hummed dismissively.
They asked us again. Surrender the Runes and the strength of runes.
The Prince of Death rejected this offer out of hand. He was First of the Dead of an era of immortality, and he would perish again before he gave up his name and his mother's heirloom.
The Witch's Rune was another curse, it seemed. She could not forsake it, for all the grand desire it held within it, to lay low the mighty and end the endless, to bring the lifeless within the cycle of life.
And what of my Rune, which I was beginning to recognize?