Before the rise of empires, before the forging of steel, there were the Dragons. They were the world's first perfection, creatures sculpted from starlight and the planet's own fiery heart. Their scales were impenetrable jewels, their breath a force of primal creation and destruction, their lives spanning millennia. They watched mountains rise and fall like waves. To them, the world was a slow, grand symphony, and they were its eternal conductors.
Then came the fleeting things. The short-lived, scrambling creatures that bred in the dust and called themselves Humanity. To the Dragons, they were little more than mayflies—a brief, noisy infestation that evolved through frantic generations, their fleeting lives a blink in a dragon's long gaze. They were pests, perhaps occasionally amusing, but ultimately insignificant. What was a king of men to a king of the skies? What was a castle to a mountain? Their wars, their glory, their love… it was all meaningless noise.
For ages, this was the natural order.
But the mayflies learned. They forged weapons that could bite. They devised magics that could sting. And from among them, rare individuals arose—Dragon Slayers. They were heroes, fools, and martyrs, their names sung in ballads that barely lasted a century. They would win a great battle, slay a great wyrm, and be consumed by the next. They were a problem to be managed, a seasonal fire to be stamped out.
None were remembered. None were truly feared.
Until him.
He did not come with songs or banners. He came in silence, clad in armor blacker than a starless night, a moving shadow against the scorched earth. Where other slayers fought for glory or gold, he fought with a cold, terrifying efficiency that spoke of something deeper: a purpose as immovable as dragonbone. He did not simply kill dragons; he broken them. He shattered their ancient pride along with their skulls, turning their own legendary arrogance into a weapon against them.
The great wyverns of the northern crags fell. The volcanic drakes of the southern spires were extinguished. One by one, the eternal symphony was disrupted by a single, dissonant chord—the sound of his footsteps.
Whispers began in the high, wind-swept aeries and deep, gem-lit lairs. A new name, not sung by bards, but cursed in the Draconic tongue. A title born not of respect, but of a primal, unfamiliar dread.
They did not call him a hero. They did not call him a slayer.
When the shadows lengthened and the skies grew dark, the mightiest of the ancient brood would watch the horizons, their ancient hearts stirring with a forgotten emotion. And they would speak the warning to their kin, a single name that had become a legend of terror:
Beware the Man in the Black Armor.