In Akenothustar's hand, a new image came to life: this time Balagaberan was shown, still single-handedly supporting the ceiling of the entire cavern with her spine, wings and legs, her head nearly crushed beneath the huge amount of rock above, her eyes now empty and expressing in their glitter how old the dragon felt by now, tired and longing for rest, yet still filled with an inextinguishable fire that burned with the power of a thousand suns. Balagaberan was looking at the young dragons who sat in front of her muzzle, and who were in turn staring at her with admiration and pride; but not only them, because together with them there were also thousands of newcomers, sitting next to the dragons and intent on listening to what the enormous dragon had to say. "She told us about a dream that none of us before had ever even imagined. Neither we dragons, nor those who would become the newcomers" Akenothustar said. "She told us that one day the catastrophe would be over, and that we could go out on the surface again and admire the sunlight again. She told us that the earth would become green again and covered with life, and that new species would soon arise occupying the ecological niches left empty after the catastrophe. The Old World was over and there was no way it would return, but a new one would soon arise. And my mother told us what she wanted the New World to be; she told us about a new civilization, no longer belonging only to dragons, but one in which dragons and newcomers would coexist, acting together for a common purpose. We dragons would provide the newcomers with power and intelligence, and they in return would protect us from our own arrogance; because if before the catastrophe there had been someone weak that we dragons should have protected, surely our ancestors would not have stood still and done nothing, and we could have avoided the disaster. Newcomers could become a way to completely change our mentality: thanks to their short life they could accelerate our progress and would be more inclined to improve. Things that would have taken a dragon ages to accomplish due to its long life giving it the false idea that it had all the time it wanted on its hands, the newcomers could have accomplished in just a few decades if they had our support. My mother told us about a world where knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge would be the basis of civilization, where we would learn to free ourselves from natural limitations and begin to travel to higher and higher skies and farther and farther places; he told us of legions of artists, sculptors, painters, mages, architects, engineers, scientists, philosophers, who under the guidance of the dragonfolk would create wonders so extraordinary that no mind could imagine. The weakness of the newcomers could become the greatest strength of us dragons, and the strength of us dragons could become the strength of the newcomers, in an eternal and perfect cycle in which our two species would balance each other, making a world so strange and at the same time at the same time so fantastic, that until then had only existed in my mother's dreams. Balagaberan had realized how much better it was if dragons and newcomers worked together with each other by observing how they and we had interacted, gaining both of us in terms of both protection and provision, and her dreamy and visionary mind had done the rest. And the more we listened to her, the more we convinced ourselves that she was right, and that this was indeed a possibility. For we knew that even under the best of odds, the number of dragons that would survive the disaster would be far fewer than that of the newcomers, and that consequently their species would multiply and spread more than ours, and if we weren't careful this would be result in an all-out war between us; although we trusted in our own strength and power, fate had already once shown us how wrong we had been, and that we weren't quite as invincible as we thought. And even if we did win this war in the end, the cost would be high; so why not try to get along? Newcomers could transform themselves from simple adversaries in the struggle for survival into very promising allies; with their numbers, their inventiveness and their ability to adapt, added to the strength and power of the dragons, nothing could have stopped us from achieving things that even our ancestors could only dream of. When would it have been nice to have a world where we dragons would have ruled not only ourselves, but countless races that would have benefited from our guidance and our protection? Together we could create a world that had no limits, where no one would be forced to kill, suffer, toil anymore; no more wars, no more famines, no more division, no more anger and hatred, just one people led by us dragons with the purpose of discovering and sharing knowledge and expanding even beyond this world. This was the dream Balagaberan gave us, and we all promised that we would do anything to make that dream come true, and that the suffering the dragons had endured would never be repeated. Satisfied by our words, our mother breathed her last, but not before casting a spell that made her eternal: her indestructible scales, her powerful muscles, her flesh and her blood, her whole body merged with his bones, increasing their hardness until they were practically indestructible, and thus leaving his skeleton here for all eternity, to support this cave that had become our nursery. In her last words she commanded us to remember our promise every time we looked at her immense bones, and that just as she had protected us with her body, we were to protect her from oblivion by making her wish real and making so that her name would never be forgotten"
Haku listened to all this enraptured by those words. That's why he'd thought he'd felt Balagaberan's flesh and skin and blood when he'd touched her skull... they were really there! Those body parts hadn't gone away, but they had remained there in that cave, an everlasting reminder of a mother's desire to protect her children. Balagaberan had not wanted to let her body decay and had defeated the greatest of all foes, time itself, effectively becoming eternal. Her consciousness was gone, but her body would remain there forever, and at the same time her memory would remain forever, never forgotten by the dragons and newcomers she had rescued. While all the dragons of the Old Age had sunk into oblivion due to their pride and stupidity, Balagaberan, whom everyone deemed foolish to believe that dragons could be defeated by the evil light, had survived even her own death, and would survive in eternal as long as there was someone who would remember her. That, in a way, was the kind of immortality Haku had also wanted since he was a baby dragon: the body could die, but the memory would remain. In a way, he felt a certain familiarity and empathy for the dragoness, fully understanding the reasons for her request.
And then... her dream. A world where dragons and newcomers lived together, where neither should be afraid of the other. A request clearly born of necessity (as explained by Akenothustar, the excessive multiplication of newcomers was an event that could not be stopped, therefore a war would have been inevitable), but also from the desire to be different, better. To be more than just predators. Two species working together, in perfect symbiosis, and which would have made it possible to avoid the mistakes of the past. Even if the dragons had again become arrogant and puffed up in their power, the large number of newcomers would have prevented them from becoming tyrants to avoid revolts, and this would also have forced them to deal with them, thus preventing the dragons from standing still. doing nothing in anticipation of another catastrophe like the one that had wiped out their civilization. Dragons had occasion to confront an intelligence different from their own, so why waste it? Why not just try to get along? Wasn't that just what he, Haku, was currently trying to accomplish in the Thul Oasis? A community where dragons and newcomers could help each other and be happy all together? A place with no fear, no fights, no discrimination? Wasn't that a dream worth pursuing?
"And so we did" Akenothustar continued. "For 700,000 years we dragons waited and waited, alternating hibernation periods with hunting periods, and likewise for 700,000 years the newcomers who had come to these caves continued to resist building new cities and villages following our advice and teachings, generation after generation. And then, finally, after an almost infinite period of time, the surface ceased to be a mortal place. All of us, dragons and newcomers, arose from the underground; me, my brothers, my sisters, and those other young dragons with whom I was not related by blood but who by now I had come to consider part of the family, we were now adults when this happened, and as soon as we saw the sun rise again, we could not resist any longer and spread our wings, for too long remained folded along our body, and we took off for the very first time in our lives. There is no more beautiful feeling than flying, believe me. And after us all the newcomers who had lived with us in the caves came out, and many of them they exploded with joy at seeing the sky for the first time. And in the rest of the world, all the other dragons and all the other newcomers who had managed to survive up to that point also reemerged from the earth. The dark era was finally over, and it was time for a new beginning, and we were ready to build that beginning together"
Haku had never experienced those sensations, but he could imagine how happy the ancient dragons and newcomers had felt to finally see the sunlight again after all those hundreds of thousands of years. He remembered when he was in the arena, and could only see the sun for a few minutes each day when he fought, and that alone made him go crazy with joy when he was finally able to spend a whole day outside again under the light of that beautiful golden ball; so he could only imagine what pure joy those people felt after spending a very long time underground, never being able to feel the wind on their body or the touch of sunlight on their skin.
"The world we returned to, although it was once again possible to live in, was devastated. The wonders of nature that once covered it had vanished, leaving behind only bones and dust; where there had been lush forests, now no there was nothing but deserts. It was a very depressing sight, and many of us who remembered what the old world had been like and how much we had lost could not help but burst into tears. For three days and three nights we commemorated everything: not only the dragons that had died in the catastrophe, but also all the animals, all the plants, all the mushrooms, even the tiniest organisms that had died solely because of the arrogance and stupidity of our species, and it was therefore only right for us to ask them sorry. But after this short general funeral, we recovered our senses and set to work. It was not with tears that we would honor those who had died, but with our work and our good will that would allow the creation of a world where such a tragedy could never be repeated" Akenothustar said. "First, we looked for a vein of mana and there using our powers combined with all that powerful energy we helped our newcomer followers to improve their bodies, generating numerous new races. This was how the arachnes, the kobolds, the nagas, and many other creatures were born. It was also there that we created many of the seeds that would give life to different species of plants, which we then spread all over the world, we planned to wait for them to take root and form forests, then more or less in a thousand years, and then starting to fill the world with animals... but by the end of that time we realized that life was already doing its own thing, multiplying in mana veins all over the world, and there was no therefore reason to intervene. Thanks to our mother's creations, what you call sand worms, we had enough food and what we didn't have enough we supplemented with large quantities of mana that we extracted from the underground. Having solved most of our problems food, and having started the process that would lead to the regeneration of the world, the other dragons and I then began to fulfill our mother's dream"