Now everything was on his nobles that followed him. The good thing was that he had plenty of good hands who had followed him since the beginning. He could count on them to hold the line.
They moved to intercept. Artorius felt the change in the corpse before he saw the Life Dragon. The terrain ahead of him was no longer dead.
As he and the Psychic Dragon crossed the boundary into the Life Dragon's influence, the ground softened beneath their steps. Pale bone darkened, then flushed red, veins spiderwebbing across surfaces that should have been inert. Cartilage thickened, muscles knitting themselves out of nothing, swelling into ridges and cords that flexed sluggishly, like a corpse struggling to breathe again.
Ahead, the battlefield revealed itself. What had once been a wide vertebral causeway, an ideal defensive corridor had been transformed into a jungle of warped anatomy. Trees of bone and sinew twisted skyward, their leaves fleshy membranes that pulsed with slow heartbeats. Vines made of nerve fiber slithered across the ground, reacting to movement, recoiling from heat, then lunging again with whip-like violence.
And at the center of it all was the Life Dragon. He stood emerald and jade scales blending seamlessly into the overgrowth. Roots pierced his limbs, arteries fed into his wings, and wherever his talons touched, the corpse responded eagerly, growing more, becoming more.
He turned as they approached, eyes old and calm, filled not with malice but with certainty of his victory. "Artorius," he said, voice layered with countless overlapping heartbeats. "You still persist."
"What can I say, I really don't know how to go out," Artorius replied, planting his sword into the softening bone. The ground shuddered at the act, resisting him, trying to heal around the wound. He twisted the weapon, forcing the corpse to remember injury. "You should have stayed in your grooves."
The Psychic Dragon moved first. He had nothing to say. The air screamed as psychic force detonated outward, thought-anchors slammed into the terrain, fracturing the biological coherence Life was maintaining. Growth stuttered. Vines spasmed. A forest of cartilage collapsed inward as neural signals misfired.
The Life dragon grumbled, wings unfurling, and the terrain surged in response. Massive growths erupted from the ground, not attacking directly, but isolating. Walls of muscle rose, trying to separate Artorius from his ally.
Artorius unleashed his word of powers, letting flame burn though and force break others too difficult to burn. He didn't only attack the terrain which was hostile to him but aimed right for the life dragon.
The sword did not just cut through, it severed arteries that fed it nutrients and he got close enough to scratch its scales. Blood sprayed, and the dragon screamed. With anger in his eyes, life dragon retaliated.
The ground exploded upward, a titan of regenerated muscle and bone forming in seconds, its fists the size of a hut. It swung down with the force of a collapsing great cane. Artorius leapt. His wings snapped open, carrying him upward through a storm of growth which tried to bring him down.
The Psychic Dragon followed up, mental blades slicing into the life dragon's growth. Artorius came down hard, landing on the life dragon, driving his sword down. He was smacked away by a fist which appeared from the ground.
He watched as the life dragon recovered before his eyes. It let the life it drew from the corpse feed it and a great portion of land withered and died away to recover from its wound. The withered land did not remain dead for long.
Life flexed his wings, emerald membranes stretching wide as roots tore free from his scales and reburied themselves into fresh ground. The corpse beneath him answered eagerly, new growth surging outward like a tide reversing.
"You see?" the Life Dragon said calmly, watching the devastation he had just undone. "Wounds are meaningless to me here."
Artorius rose slowly, sword scraping against bone as he steadied himself. His Draconic Eye burned gold as it adjusted, peeling back layers of vitality until he could see the truth. "This isn't healing," Artorius said. "It's redistribution."
The Life Dragon's smile was faint. "Everything lives. Everything feeds." The corpse convulsed. From the ground erupted towering growths of bone wrapped in muscle and bark-thick sinew. They weren't mindless. Each pulsed with a shared heartbeat, moving to intercept angles of attack, positioning themselves between Artorius and the Life Dragon without direct command.
The Psychic Dragon reacted instantly. Reality blurred around him as his presence split. One became two. Then three. Each was translucent, half-formed, but real enough. They moved independently, phantasmal claws tearing into the growth.
Artorius moved with him and their clash was great.
-
The Summer Dragoness did not rush to the battlefield. She had never needed to. High above Zytherion's corpse, beyond the reach of most enemies and well outside the killing fields carved into bone and marrow, she hovered in silence.
Her wings burned not with wild flame, but with controlled radiance, heat folded inward upon itself until the air around her shimmered like glass. She was not part of the chaos below. She oversaw it all.
From her vantage, the corpse of the Dragon Emperor stretched impossibly far, a great mass of dead sovereignty repurposed into a fortress. The skull-citadel glimmered faintly in the distance, its wards flaring and dimming like a patient heart. Along the spine, armies moved like insects across mountain ridges. Wings became ranges, ribs became valleys, the tail vanished into haze so distant it might as well have been another world. She watched all of it.
The Summer Dragoness did not see battle as mortals did. She did not count casualties or measure ground gained in leagues. She saw pressure. Momentum. Where heat gathered. Where resistance hardened. Where war slowed, not because of weakness, but because something immovable had been placed in its path.
Artorius. She felt him even from here. Not as a presence of flame or force, but as structure. A stabilizing weight imposed upon chaos. Where other commanders bent under the sheer scale of imperial war, he had shaped the battlefield into something that responded to him. The corpse fought back, yes, but not blindly. It resisted with intent and cunning ruthlessness.
That troubled her. The Summer Dragoness had lived through the rise of many different wantaba warlords and conquers in the Nest. She had watched them rise, burn, and collapse into ash beneath her wings. She had seen them all fall before them, the Imperial Dragons once they committed fully. This battlefield should already have been broken especially with so many.
It was not. She watched as her equals enter the battlefield one by one.
Space had moved first, as she always did, tearing through distance and topology alike. Summer had felt the distortion ripple even up here, reality flexing, folding, snapping back. Normally, such an entry would have shattered any defense not anchored by something greater or a law. Instead, her advance was slowed.
Then Plague had manifested, patient and inevitable, her corruption seeping rather than striking. Summer had expected panic. Collapse. Retreats cascading into routs. Instead, the resistance had adapted and pushed back her power.
Dream followed, as subtle as she was insidious. Summer had smiled then, knowing how battlefields unravel once truth itself becomes unreliable. But even that front stabilized.
One by one, the expected breaking points refused to break. The Summer Dragoness narrowed her eyes, pupils flaring like miniature suns. This was no desperate defense. This was a prepared one. She had hoped that they could catch him unaware however it was as if he expected this.
Below, the Life Dragon had committed fully, drawing upon the corpse's latent vitality, reshaping dead ancient flesh into a living weapon. Even then, the line held.
Summer exhaled slowly, heat spilling from her nostrils in a controlled plume. "Impressive," she murmured in admiration. She had to be honest with herself this new upstart proved to be more wily then she thought.
She observed the flow of the battle. She thought about joining in on the fighting, crushing this ustart once and for all however she sensed something deep in the marrow of the air, something that set her senses off.
The first sign that something had gone catastrophically wrong was not an explosion. It was the silence. Across every front in the battlefield, the corpse stuttered. It was like it senced something truly terrifying.
All fighting ceased on every front, no one retreated but they hesitated in where they stood. Artorius felt it immediately. All his hair stuck out as if his life was in danger, and they screamed for him to run.
The Psychic Dragon recoiled mid-engagement, his phantasmal influence flickering out of life. "What on earth is that?"
Artorius did not answer. His gaze had lifted toward the horizon. Something was moving towards them. Far beyond the battlefield, beyond the Life Dragon's zone of influence, the corpse convulsed. Bone ridges collapsed inward. Entire mountain-ranges of vertebrae cracked and sank as if the world itself had inhaled.
Then it began to rise. At first, it seemed impossible to parse—too large, too distant. A curvature breaking the horizon line. A shadow that did not belong to clouds or wings.
Then the scale became clear. A head. Severed. Ancient. Withered beyond decay. It looked to be a old she dragon, old beyond time like a great crone. It great mane of white hair surrounded it wildly, billowing in slow, unnatural motion.
Image: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/78461218501391861/
It rose slowly, inexorably, dragging leagues of fused bone and petrified sinew with it. Its jaw hung partially open, some teeth larger than hills remained while other fell out a long time ago. One eye socket was hollow, collapsed inward with nothing inside. The other burned faintly with ancient memory and life like it was judging them all.
The battlefield froze.
Imperial forces and his defenders alike faltered as the sheer presence of it crushed perspective. Dragons of ever stripe felt deep instinctive terror as they knew they were looking at something way above their reckoning. Some froze mid-air, wings locked, unable to move. Soldiers dropped to their knees without realizing they had done so. Some screamed as their minds broke when they looked upon it. Others could not find the breath to make a peep at all.
The head was nearly moon-sized, its ascent tearing through entire biomes apart as it floated haphazardly.
The life dragon recoiled in absolute horror and he heard it mutter, "That can't be… its a immortal dragon corpse."
From the deep recess of his mind Zytherion spoke up and this was the first time he heard anything close to alarm in its tone. 'Run child. Run! This is the end of all things.'
Artorius did not need to be told twice, he sounded the retreat to his soldiers around him and into all the pshycic channels open. They had been preparing well for the evntuallty that they might need to withdraw from this corpse so things began without a hitch.
Hopefully his men could make it out safely because there was no way they could stand against this thing. Nonetheless he needed answers. "Is that truly a immortal corpse? Where did it come from and how it is alive?"
"Yes, that is a immortal dragon and no its not alive. The connection between sires and children go both way as a sire can take command of their blood so can a child especially if there is no will left in their corpse."
"Wait is this the Void dragon?" he asked, thinking about the only other true blooded dragon he knew besides himself.
"No. This is my mistress who has seemingly came out of nowhere."
Artorius had so many question but Zytherion cut him off, "Its times like these that you make yourself scarce. Live to fight another day. You do not stand a chance against it in a million years."
Artorius was in agreement and was about to take off to flee with his men when a voice cut them off. He remebered that speaker quite well as they had a pleasant conversation with Zytherion. "Where are you heading off to Zytherion?"
Turning to look at the life dragon whose father had taken him over, Artorius answered honestly. "To flee."
The dragon snorted in disgust, "You were always a coward, Zytherion," it stated not realizing it was speaking to him or jyst not caring. "You have a duty. This act breaks all parameters of this Nest. We need to put a stop to this."
This time it was Zytherion himself who answered and he did not sound to happy being ordered around in his death. "Did you forget I'm dead. My role and responsibiites have ended with my passing."
"Our serve to the Eternal Flame never stops even in death," a new speaker stepped in. He saw it was the Summer dragoness getting piloted by her mother. The other imperial dragons soon joined them each with their sire in control. Even the Star dragon was here with someone in command. He smiled at him or whoever was puppeting him.
This was really quite the occasion. If only they had the decency to let go of him and die off on their own. Artorius could tell their was no way even with Zytherion taking control and going all out by using his own power at the detriment of his body could serve this.
He knew instinctively even without witness a ounce of this severed head's power that they were nothing against it. This had to be the divining line between true Great Dragons and Supreme Dragons.
Zytherion was also not having any of this and knew the truth of the matter. "Well I think the five of you are more than enough. Best of luck to all of you. I better not get in your way."
Taking off his path was blocked by the others. The dream dragon spoke for them. "We need all the help we can get."
"Even with how infirm you are, ever bit helps," the Space dragon chuckled. Artorius could see from the corner of his eye the giant head was drawing ever nearer, they did not have that much time left.
The old dragon who had taken him over turned silent before stating cooly, "My duty is over. My long serve to the Eyrie has ended with my death. Unless I swear anew to the Eternal Flame I owe you all nothing. If you don't move out of my way right now, you will not only be fighting the Karmic Dragoness old corpse itself but also me. Let see if you stand any chance then."
The imperial dragons looked disgusted at the old dragon but they moved aside. They knew they stood no chance against both threats however as he passed by them, the life dragon shook his head, "You were always a coward Zytherion."
"Better to be a coward then dead. Trust me I would know," he stated without looking back.
"Zytherion," the summer dragon called out. "You will pay for this. I shall find you in the Peaks no matter where you hide and make you pay dearly."
"Good luck with that," the dragon that controlled him said before he finally took off. However they did not make it far as they some how winded back right were they started.
"What is going?" the dragon asked himself as he looked around then with his dragon eye he could see something was attached to him. It was a red string right on his back, pulling back like a marionette.
"Where do you think you are going Artorius?" a voice echoed from everywhere as the giant head arrived before them. "I prepared this homecoming all for you!"
-
Author Notes: Well that's one way to end things!