Prologue
The night obscured the lands of Avalar, darkness that covers everything.
And it would have managed to get away with it until dawn, had it not been for that burst of orange light that broke the night with it's unusual light.
A light of fire.
Warfang was under attack.
The city was on fire, dragons fought above or on the ground against their most ruthless enemies: grublings and dreadwings and apes, leaving behind them countless of bodies now mutilated or unrecognizable. The bells of the temple rumbled in the light of fire, an acrid and iron-like smell mixed up with smoke went up towards the sky, a smell that could cause shivers even to the bravest dragon in the city.
The smell of fresh blood.
A pink dragoness looked up from the top of her small tower, one of the few still standing, taking a quick look below and at the situation. Bands of screaming and heavily armed monsters scattered through the streets of the city, breaking through the doors of the houses, entering and flushing out the civilians who were hiding, screaming, grunting, fighting against the defenders of the city who, despite having already eliminated a large number of them, could not cope with the excessively high amount of the enemy's army.
Looking up, the dragoness' bright but frightened pink eyes reflected the hell that was unfolding among the highest peaks of the city. Even there it was not safe from danger. The dreadwings, dark and brutal flying creatures covered the night sky, of an even darker black, hiding the stars. They were roaring, swooping on a target or simply colliding with a dragon and engaging in a battle that would end with both, dragon and monster, rushing to the ground dead or almost.
They were too many. The defenders couldn't handle them much longer.
The city was lost and she had to go.
Quickly, she returned inside to pick a large object wrapped in a brown-like cloth. Then after a last quick look at what had been her home for the last months, she flew out of the tower and to the north side of the city, towards the mountains, where she knew that the escaping group had been placed for emergencies to leave the city. There were underground corridors leading away from the city along old dimly lit tunnels, but wide enough to allow even to big dragons, food and traffic to the mountains where they could hide. In the worst-case scenario of a potentially destructive attack, there was an implicit order to head to that place, first children, elders, and other citizens that couldn't fight, while who can fight must be alongside the members of the guard and took care of covering their retreat.
And this was definitely a desperate situation, enough to use the passage.
The dragoness hoped that her mate would be able to keep fighting his way along with his ego and heroism long enough to think also about surviving and going back to her, so they can flee through the tunnels.
Unfortunately, the latter thought turned out to be a distraction for the dragoness who, surprised during the flight, was rammed by a dragon and a dreadwing in combat on her right side, sending her falling to the ground. Without even thinking about it, the dragoness turned herself during the fall, clutching the object she held between her paws and covering it from the fall, orienting her body so that her back hit the ground first.
The blow was brutal, the air in her lungs was not enough even to scream, and she had lost her visual due to the violent impact.
She remained there, the dust still dissolving all around, along with the trail she had left from the actual crash site.
Initially confused, the pink dragoness blinked several times, seeing in front of her only a gray and orange blur. But the more she recovered from the blow, the more reality returned to impact her visual cortex and it hit her even harder than the blow she had just taken: the burning city, the houses collapsing, the enemies soon to reach her position.
Taken from a considerable amount of adrenaline born from the desire to survive, the pink dragoness got up ignoring her pain. She immediately checked the precious object in her paws to verify that it was still intact. Lifting a small flap of the washed brown cloth, a bright reddish shell appeared, more red colored than pink.
An egg.
Gently stroking it with her dirty paws, avoiding affecting with her claws the precious protection provided by the shell, the dragoness properly covered the precious thing again, and quickly started moving northward, dodging the burning houses and bodies on the ground. She merely ran, without even considering her wounds. Her right wing was broken and rubbing on the ground as she moved, and the right front paw evidently compromised as it did not touch totally on the ground when she moved.
But that didn't matter for her and she didn't even feel so painful at the time. Only one thing was important and it was called survival. She and the egg at the entrance of the rescue tunnels not too far away. Afterwards she could have thought of her wounds, feelings and pain.
Dodging the rocks of a completely collapsed house and trying not to look at the family crushed by the destruction and the fall of it, the female jumped one last corpse before stopping on her paws.
There, a few steps in front of her, in a clearing wide space close to the imposing north defense walls, were the entering of the tunnels. Slightly raised from the ground and large enough to allow the passing of an adult dragon, it was formed of two holes, so twice the crowd could pass at twice the speed. Dragons of every type and color stormed the place, in and out the entrance, civilians in, and guards out. A blue dragon and a yellow dragon beckoned for the other to enter the tunnels, helping a civilian in distress, shielding another dragoness with her young one, firing an element blow on the few monsters that had managed somehow to arrive there.
They were the Guardians.
On the right side was Cyril. The ice Guardian, generally pompous and confident in a conversation between who should be the best dragon of the year, showed the most serious expression on his features than ever before, genuinely determined to get those people out of there before it was too late. His nonsense on nobility set aside in such a critical situation, to help others escape, finally made him worthy of his title.
On the other side, the yellow Guardian Volteer, the great electric talker, seemed much less willing to talk, and more willing to take action. He was efficient and fast helping people towards the entrance, where there was always someone else ready to help. All this without saying a single word and with a strange glitter in his curious eyes never seen from him before...
Fear
Caught in feelings of euphoria and hope at the sight, the pink dragoness run to freedom, without thinking about the possible dangers that such a wide-ranging area could entail in such a brutal war.
Suddenly, an electric explosion rang out in the dark sky and, after a strong bang, a large green and brown cluster fell from above, miserably hitting the ground near the pink dragoness position that, having the reflections quite ready, managed to stop just in time, covering the egg with her body and her only available wing.
The blow was thunderous, as if a construction many meters high like the Dragon Temple collapsed to the ground, leaving behind a pile of dust.
A voice was screaming at her ear just after the explosion and the dragoness awakened to face the voice. She was miraculously unarmed and she could notice a figure that had grazed her and plummeted to her left.
The voice kept shouting but she could not understand, she was still confusing, looking at the figure unmoving on the ground. Until another figure appeared in front of her: a red and golden frightened face of a young dragon she knew very well
Flame
"Ember!" he cried worryingly over the sounds of the battle "Ember! Can you hear me?" he asked but he didn't wait for an answer because as soon as he saw the pink dragoness blinking, it meant that at least she had to be awake enough to move "Come on" he said urgently, pushing her and the egg toward the caves "You have to go, quickly!"
The pink dragoness did not protest as she would generally have, taking the slight but urgent push for a motivation that allowed her paws to continue walking by inertia. She briefly observed the imposing but inert draconian figure in a crater on the ground that had almost struck her, recognizing an elderly dragon in green and brown colors, but not being able to understand exactly who he was even if she had the feeling of knowing him somehow. Her head hurts, her paw and her wing too, and every single bone in her body burned like she was on fire. She felt shattered. She was shattered.
She was quite confused, and adrenaline run dry. But it was replaced by a feeling of hope that guides her to continue, to put one paw after the other.
The caves were so close...
Another nearby explosion made her wake up from that sense of numbness that enveloped her, causing her to increase the limp step towards that yellow paw that awaited her at the beginning of the cave. Volteer would take her and bring her to safety. Her, her egg and her mat-
She seemed to realize that something was missing, or rather, that she had totally ignored something that should have been important. The feeling of despair abruptly struck her like a lightning bolt in clear sky, subverting all other emotions as if something had stabbed her straight in the heart. Her grip became more instinctively tightened around the egg. The stunned expression of the yellow and blue Guardian that had just taken her paw only increased this strange feeling of... wrongness.
She turned
Her heart broke and fell into her stomach, tears freed themselves from the restrictions of her eyes, a sense of complete emptiness wrapped all her figure, the view almost made her lose the grip on her paws if the Guardian had not been there to kept her stable.
There, not far from the entrance of the caves, laid a red and golden dragon, a stalactite of ice bathed in his chest. Above him, a purple and golden dragon towered over the inert form cold on the ground. The inert, cold and dead form of her mate
"Flame..." she whimpered, looking right into her mate's golden eyes. Dull and dead-empty they were looking at her lifelessly "... no!"
"NO!" she screamed, completely insensitive to the pain of her body now, swallowed by the agony in her heart. She did not think she shouldn't be risking her life or the egg's; she didn't hear the voice near her that called for her, the paw that held her, preventing her from going to the fallen red dragon. She didn't care, nothing mattered. Her screams scratched her throat, her body trying to move forward on its own, furious and desperate as it was restrained by someone's paw. She screamed again, demanding the paw to let her go, the world to let her go. She had to go to her mate, she had to help him, save him, feel him, reach for him one last time.
Time suddenly stopped and the dragoness acquired that much sense that was enough for her to look up and focus on the figure that towered over her dead mate.
The purple dragon, the Saviour of Warfang, in all his terrifying glory. He was looking to her, his purple eyes barely held tears. A solitary one of them escaped his grip, slowly slipping down his cheek, sliding over his jaw and then falling, called by the force of gravity, right on her mate's golden chest.
And there, just for a single moment, the pink dragoness saw something in him, something haunting: a glitter in his eyes. She knew exactly what it was, she had saw the same glitter in Cynder's eyes a long time ago, before everything changed.
Guilt
Time returned to it's speed.
Volteer's voice was clear and frightened as he tried to pull her inside the tunnels. The pink dragoness, on the other hand, ignored either the yellow dragon and the herd of people running towards the entering, the guards who protected their escape falling dead from the lethal blows of the approaching enemies; the city that was crumbling all around her in flames and ashes.
She had only eyes for the purple figure, his mouth open wide loading a purple elemental blow that she had had the misfortune to see in action once in all its destructiveness.
A convexity blow
She retraced the time she had spent with him and, at that time and only for that second in her entire life, she felt pity for him and what he had become.
The second after the blow hit the tunnels, causing the entrance to collapse and the escape to end. In this precise moment the conquest of the Dragon Capital ended as well as the hope in the Realms, for a new time had just started.
The Darkest Time
