Confessions of a Part-time Waitress
Part 3-Dreams and Dragon Gods
Some time later Luna Inverse yawned, locked the door to her cottage with a quick turn of the key and went to bed. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred, no revelations, prophecies, or anything of that manner. It was sleep, deep and dreamless. The Dragon God stayed awake, watching over his champion with the utmost care. It wouldn't do, Cepheid thought, for his champion to be slain in her sleep with her hair splayed out across her pillow. A few nightmares, the tendrils of the Dark Golden Lord, centered round the sleeping Inverse. Cepheid batted them away. The Lord of Nightmares could be protected against to a degree, as Luna's younger sister found out when she tried to slay Gaav the Demon Dragon king with the mighty Laguna blade. Common nightmares were nowhere near a match for the Dragon God, as they were nowhere near as powerful as the Laguna blade or even the Giga Slave. The tendrils withdrew from the cottage, and the presence of Cepheid began to roam the wooded copse around Luna's cottage. The animals in the swathe of forest felt a gentle, reassuring presence as Cepheid's spirit flowed among the trees. The Dragon God peered into a robins nest. Cepheid smiled, or at least that's how you can imagine it. He liked this world. How could Ruby-Eye be so blinded by his jealousy of humanity that he would want to destroy a gem such as this?
The root cause, Cepheid believed, of the Mazoku race's hatred for all existence was centered round the humans. Generally, the Mazoku hated the hybrid creatures of spirit and flesh with a hatred that would put the worst megalomaniac to shame, and at the same time were green with envy. Shaburanigdo detested the fact that the Lord of Nightmares had gifted the Mazoku and Shinzoku bodies of pure spirit, but had granted the humans bodies of both flesh and spirit. The humans had access to such wonderful senses such as taste, touch, smell, and a sense of time's passage. They could savor, while the Mazoku could only experience. Cepheid remembered this first cause of Ruby-Eye's long war; he must not ever forget it. No matter how weakened he became, the Dragon God would never forget. The Mazoku had refused Cepheid's pleas to not touch the humans, who at the time had only discovered magic. He had ridiculed the Dragon God as being an arrogant fool, for letting a race of such weak, transient beings inhabit the world.
When Shaburanigdo's servants: Xellas Metallium, Dynast, Phibrizzio, Gaav, and Deep Sea Dolphin began to ravage the world and butcher the scattered humans like so many cattle, the Dragon God took to action. Using portions of his own spirit, he created the four Dragon Gods to rule over the Ryuzoku; the dragon races Cepheid created in his image as the guardians of the world. The Ryuzoku were not born of the Lord of Nightmares, they were born of Cepheid, mortal agents of both spirit and flesh crafted to guard the world. Then the weakened Cepheid along with his four cohorts and the newly created Ryuzoku, went to war. Cepheid's servants taught the humans of Shamanism, white magic, and black magic—a clever trick the Dragon God had thought at the time. What better way to fight Ruby-Eye than to use his own power against his lieutenants?
At the final cataclysmic confrontation where Cepheid fought Ruby-Eye, the Mazoku God released a blast of destructive power that would have annihilated the world had it been unchallenged. Confronted with the death of all he loved, Cepheid used all of his energies to both absorb the blast and defeat Shaburanigdo, for the Dragon God knew that his servants and the humans would carry on the war for their survival long after he passed away. And so, the Dragon God sunk into supposed oblivion as Shaburanigdo was split into seven parts and sealed, supposedly for all time.
The light of dawn peeked over the horizon and Luna Inverse stirred.