Chapter 30: Tale From an Old Dragon
10188 years before The Aetherman's reincarnation and arrival on the Old World.
Gawain Indrath
The words echoed through the vaulted throne room of indestructible gold ore and sun-bleached ivory, a chamber so vast its ceiling was lost in a perpetual, self-generated twilight.
The air hummed with the latent power of the being who sat upon The Throne, a presence so dense it felt like a cataclysmic weight upon my shoulders, a pressure I accepted with devout gratitude.
"The lessers known as the Djinn have proven themselves unworthy and dangerous to the continents of Dicathen and Alacrya. To maintain the righteous balance of the world we of the Indrath Clan represent, they must be eliminated."
Lord Kezess Indrath's voice was not loud. It did not need to be. It was the grinding of continental plates, the silent thunder at the heart of a storm. Each syllable was carved from absolute authority and etched into the fabric of reality itself.
Before this power, we, his most faithful, knelt—a constellation of the world's most potent beings rendered into humble satellites orbiting his sun.
My forehead pressed against the cool, impossibly smooth floor of the throne room, the scent of lavender and ancient stone filling my nostrils. This was order. This was purpose.
"For this, Gawain, you are tasked with leading the elimination of the Djinn."
The command settled upon me not as a burden, but as a mantle of sacred trust. My blood, the very same that flowed in a lesser measure through the veins of the god who spoke, sang in recognition of my purpose.
I was His will made manifest.
"After their end will be confirmed, Windsom will be tasked with leading the next population of lessers to avoid such a mistake happening ever again."
"Yes, my lord!"
Our voices chorused as one, a symphony of obedience that resonated through the hall. As we rose and filed out, the immense, carved doors of gold sealing shut behind us with a finality that echoed in my soul, a familiar, grim quiet settled within me.
Another race. Another culling. It was the second time I had been handed this particular instrument of divine will.
The pattern was as old as time: the lessers would multiply, their ambition would outpace their wisdom, they would reach for a branch that could not hold their weight, and we, the gardeners of this world, would be forced to prune the tree lest it collapse under its own chaotic growth.
But the Djinn… they were different. They were not like the former race I have exterminated: the Snowpeople living in southern Dicathen when it went under a long and unforgiving ice age so many millennia ago when I was still an hatchling.
Their sin was not one of violence or conquest, but of profound, unforgivable and blasphemous insight. They had looked upon the fundamental code of Creation, upon aether itself—the sacred province of Lord Indrath, the very bedrock of our divinity—and they had not merely understood it.
They had conversed with it.
They had built cities with it, sung songs to it, woven it into their art and their lives with a gentle mastery that bypassed the brutal, dominating force we dragons employed.
They used it better, more elegantly, than we ever could. That was not progress; it was blasphemy. A direct challenge to the hierarchy ordained by the heavens, a hierarchy with Lord Kezess Indrath the 117th at its apex.
Their existence was a stain on the tapestry of balance my lord and all his predecessors had woven with blood and fire.
———
My humanoid form was a study in lethal precision, a vessel of condensed power. It was more than enough for the task at hand.
To assume my true draconic majesty for this would be an admission of their significance, and they were worthy of none. I stood upon a windswept cliff overlooking a wide, fertile valley nestled between two sprawling mountain ranges.
Below, nestled in the heart of the continent we Asuras named Dicathen, was one of the Djinns' primary cities which name I ignored.
The Djinn called Dicathen Kush-Ā—Cradle.
The irony of the name, in their soft language, was not lost on me. This was indeed where their civilization would be returned to the earth. The air was clean, scented with pine and the distant promise of rain. It was a pleasant world they had built for themselves.
The young one, Windsom, already buzzing with meticulous ambition, had been given his preparatory orders.
He would shepherd the next wave of lessers upon this cleansed earth, carefully guiding their development, ensuring they never forgot their place, never forgot that their peaceful lives were a gift bestowed and safeguarded by their silent, omnipotent gods—us.
Lord Indrath had contemplated using Thyestes Aldir's World Eater. A single, cataclysmic bloom of light to scour the continent clean.
But despite the young general being incredibly talented, even more than his predecessor, it was… messy. Indiscriminate. It would leave a scar that would take millennia to heal, a useless wasteland where new lessers could not thrive.
This required a surgeon's touch, not a butcher's cleaver. And I was my Lord's finest scalpel. His sharpest, fastest weapon. I would not destroy these upstarts with barbaric joy, but with the profound, solemn duty of a god imparting necessary justice.
There was no hatred in my heart, only the cold, clear certainty of a difficult puzzle being solved.
Aether shimmered around me, the world folding and compressing without a sound. The cliff face vanished, replaced by the soft, diffused light of their underground city.
The air changed. It was cooler, drier, carrying a faint, alkaline scent and something else… the hum of active aether. It was subtle, a harmonious background resonance woven into the very structure of the place.
It was this that made my skin prickle with revulsion. They had dared to make aether their tool, their servant.
Our birthright, their technology.
I stood on a wide thoroughfare. Their architecture was bizarre, a fusion of organic curves and sharp angles made of polished glass, gleaming iron, and a strange, dull grey stone they called 'concrete'.
Light emanated from intricate sconces that held captive, gentle spheres of aetheric energy, not the harsh blaze of mana.
Djinn moved around me, their forms slender and graceful, dressed in simple, flowing robes. Their faces were coloured, their eyes large and luminous, reflecting the soft light. They did not look dangerous.
They looked… thoughtful. Peaceful. They moved with a quiet purpose, conversing in low, melodic tones, their attention on scrolls or strange, shimmering artifacts they carried. Their weakness was palpable, a tangible fragility that seemed to hang in the air like dust. They were scholars, not warriors. Pathetic.
"Asura!"
The cry was not one of challenge, but of startled recognition, laced with a fear so acute it was almost a taste in the air. A male Djinn had stopped, his scroll falling from nerveless fingers. He did not raise a weapon. His hands were empty, long-fingered and delicate. He trembled.
"W—we sent diplomats to the mighty Lord of the Dragons," he stammered, his voice quavering with a desperate, pathetic hope. "Lady Sae-Areum… she leads them… we seek only understanding… peace…"
Sae-Areum. The name surfaced in my memory. The one who had stood before my lord's throne, her head held high with a foolish courage, speaking of 'shared knowledge' and 'symbiosis'.
She had been given every chance to relinquish their stolen secrets, to bow and acknowledge their transgression.
They all had. They offered their knowledge as a gift, not understanding it was contraband. Their stubbornness, their polite, unyielding defiance, had signed the death warrant for their entire species.
Perhaps if they had yielded, prostrated themselves, my lord in his infinite mercy might have granted them another century of existence. Their pride had killed them.
"Silence, whelp," I said, my voice flat, devoid of emotion. It was the sound of a glacier calving, cold and inevitable.
My hand moved, a gauntleted blur of indestructible metal. The crest of the Indrath Clan—a stylized dragon over Mount Geolus—gleamed for a fraction of a second under my chainmail.
There was a soft, almost insignificant sound, like a dry reed snapping. The Djinn's head tumbled from his shoulders, his body slumping to the pristine street. The hopeful light in his large eyes was extinguished instantly.
A woman screamed. The sound was a lance of pure, undiluted horror that shattered the quiet hum of the city. The peaceful scene erupted into chaos. The silence was broken by a rising tide of cries—not of rage, but of terror, of utter, world-ending shock.
I raised my hand. This was taking too long. Mana, raw and violent, coalesced above my palm, a seething, brilliant star of pure destructive force. But it was not just mana.
My own deviancy, my unique signature, manifested as crimson lightning that wreathed the gathering energy, crackling with a hungry, malevolent sentience.
It was the most destructive spell I could conjure in a confined space—a gift of absolute obliteration.
Those not vaporized by the initial blast would be electrocuted, their nervous systems turned to ash. Those who survived that would be crushed by the collapse of their artificial cavern. A thorough, efficient cleansing.
The screams intensified, a symphony of despair. I could see them now, faces etched with a terror so profound it was almost religious. They huddled together, parents shielding children, friends clutching one another. They were not fighting. They were waiting to die.
Annoying, buzzing insects, daring to disrupt the sacred silence of creation with their blasphemous hum. Be gone.
I clenched my fist.
The world turned white.
Then it turned to sound—a roar that was the death of hope, the shattering of glass and stone and bone, all merged into one deafening crescendo.
The ground heaved.
The ceiling, that magnificent, engineered dome, groaned and began its terrible, slow-motion descent. The air filled with dust and the smell of ozone, scorched flesh, and pulverized stone. The harmonious aetheric hum of the city was replaced by a discordant shriek of dying energy.
When the light and sound faded, there was only settling rubble, deep cracks veining the earth, and a silence heavier than any I had ever known.
I did not linger. Aether shimmered around me once more. Two thousand and twenty such blasphemies remained on the face of Dicathen and Alacrya. My clansmen would already be about their work.
By the time the sun set on this continent, the great nests of this infection would be scoured clean.
Then the real work would begin: the hunt.
———
The hunt was a different thing entirely. It was not the clinical excision of a tumor; it was the pursuit of scurrying, terrified vermin.
The air in the deep woods of western Dicathen was thick with the scent of damp earth, rotting leaves, and the sharp, coppery tang of fear.
Aether folded, and I appeared behind a fleeing Djinn male. He was stumbling through a thicket, his robes torn, his breath coming in ragged, sobbing gasps. He never heard me. My trident lanced forward with a whisper of parting air.
The three keen points emerged from his chest in a bloom of crimson. He made a small, choked sound, more surprise than pain, and looked down at the metal petals that had blossomed within him. Then his light went out. I withdrew the weapon, and his body slumped to the forest floor, a discarded doll.
"Please! Please! Lord Dragon, spare my children at least! They are innocent! They know nothing!"
The voice was a raw, desperate scrape of sound. From behind a thick, gnarled oak, a Djinn woman emerged.
She was the wife, no doubt. She fell to her knees in the loam, not ten paces from her husband's cooling body, her hands clasped in a universal gesture of supplication.
Tears carved clean paths through the grime on her face. Behind her, huddled in a hollow between the roots of the great tree, were two small figures, their large, luminous eyes wide with a terror so absolute it had frozen them beyond screams.
They had hidden here, like animals. Like squirrels burrowing away from a storm. But even the squirrels of Epheotus possessed a noble, wild grace.
This was just… pathetic. Their existence was a danger to the cosmic order. Their very breath was an affront.
"Your kind is a danger to the Old World," I stated, my voice as emotionless as the trident in my hand. "Your extermination is a mercy you cannot comprehend. It is a favor to the world you threaten with your mere existence."
I raised my weapon, the glint of its points catching the dappled forest light. The woman squeezed her eyes shut, a final, shuddering breath escaping her lips, a silent prayer on it.
My thrust never landed.
A wall of fire erupted between us. No, not mere fire. This was incandescent plasma, a conflagration so intense the air itself screamed as it was torn apart. It was hotter than any flame a lesser could ever dream of wielding.
It was Pyrokinesis.
I recoiled, not from pain, but from shock. The sheer, familiar power of it. My booted feet dug furrows in the earth as I was forced back a step. I looked up, through the rippling waves of impossible heat.
Descending from the canopy like an avenging star was another Asura in her humanoid form.
A phoenix.
She landed softly between me and the Djinn family, the flames she wielded dying down to a corona that wreathed her form. She had long, flowing hair the color of burning embers and molten copper, each strand seeming to move with a life of its own, like individual feathers of flame.
Her eyes were the same, solid gold and burning with a fury that was both beautiful and terrifying.
Dawn Asclepius.
The name surfaced from the depths of memory, a memory from a time of alliance and camaraderie now long dead. The Asclepius Clan. Once our greatest allies, bound to us by treaties, battles, and blood.
Now, they were exiles, traitors to the order Kezess Indrath embodied.
"Dawn Asclepius," I said, my voice low, a warning rumble. "What is the meaning of this? Your Clan has been banished for its treason against the Great Eight. Has Lord Mordain's folly so infected you that you still defend these vermin?"
She didn't even look at me. In a flash of movement, she tossed a small, intricately carved stone to the Djinn woman. It glowed, and a portal of shimmering, golden light ripped open beside the hollow.
"Go! Now!" Dawn commanded, her voice sharp and clear. The woman scrambled up, grabbing her children, and vanished into the light just as the portal snapped shut behind them.
I did not move to stop it. Fighting an Asura was a prospect of catastrophic consequences, not to be undertaken lightly. It was a complication my lord had not foreseen. It mattered not. She had saved three. I, or another of my kin, would find them later. It was a delay, not a defiance.
Now, I turned my full attention to her.
"Gawain Indrath," she stated, her voice laced with a contempt that felt like a physical blow. Her gaze finally met mine, and the fury in it was a tangible force. "The Asclepius Clan are not cowards who slaughter defenceless lessers to soothe their own insecurities! If you are going to pursue them, then you will have to go through me."
I frowned, a genuine flicker of irritation breaking through my cold discipline. "You truly believe you can match me, girl? You may be the most talented fledgling your Clan has produced in an age, but you are a child playing with flames before the mountain itself. You are nothing compared to the will of Lord Indrath."
"Do you want to see me try?!" she exclaimed, and the air around her exploded into a maelstrom of fire. The trees nearby instantly blackened, their leaves turning to ash.
"Lord Indrath has gone too far! This is not justice, it is a crime! A genocide born of fear and pride, and you…" she spat the words, "you are his willing butcher. You know it in your soul, Gawain, but you are too clouded by your blind devotion to see the monster you serve!"
Her words were like stones striking armor. They did not penetrate, but the impact was felt. "I will not fight another Asura over the fate of insects, Dawn. Leave. Now. This is your only warning."
I planted my sword in the ground, my hand resting on the pommel. A gesture of finality.
"Too bad for you," she snarled, the flames around her intensifying, turning from orange to a blinding, furious white. "But if your Clan has sunk so low, I no longer care for the honor of a fair fight. I will stop you here and now."
Her impulsivity was breathtakingly foolish. I had my orders. The continent was not to be unduly damaged. A battle between us, even in these lesser forms, would scald this land for centuries, leaving a blighted scar across northern Dicathen.
The torrent of fire hit me like a solid thing. A river of star-core heat enveloped me, seeking to reduce me to my constituent atoms. My armor glowed red, then white. I grunted, not in pain, but in effort, anchoring my will against the onslaught.
With a roar, I swung the sword on my side in a wide, devastating arc, not at her, but at the stream of fire itself, using the immense concussive force of the blow to divert the plasma jet up and away, into the sky, where it lit the clouds from below in a false, terrifying dawn.
In the same motion, I used my aether arts. The world flickered.
I was behind her. My plan was simple, efficient: disable, not destroy. Grab her, apply precise force to the base of her skull, render her unconscious. A phoenix would heal from such an injury in hours. It was the most merciful solution.
But Dawn was fast. Preternaturally so. She sensed the spatial shift and moved, not away, but into a spinning kick wreathed in hellfire that I was forced to block with my vambrace. The impact was staggering.
"You care so much for the rocks and trees," she snarled, her voice thick with incredulous fury, "but nothing for the lives you extinguish!? Your Lord is a twisted, fearful tyrant, Gawain! Can you not see it?"
"You will pay Lord Indrath the respect he is due, girl!" I barked, the first real heat of anger entering my voice.
Her insults against my sovereign were a poison in the air. I slashed through another whip of fire, the action creating a vacuum that howled around us. This was getting out of hand. I had to end it.
I launched myself upward, aether carrying me high into the atmosphere. She followed, a comet of rage and fire. We rose above the world, the forest shrinking to a green rug below, the air growing thin and cold. This was better.
Here, the collateral damage would be minimized.
"You can't run from this!" she screamed, her voice carrying easily in the thin air. Her attacks came faster, more furious.
She was not fighting to subdue; she was fighting to kill. And she was powerful. Far more powerful than I had given her credit for. Each blast of fire carried the weight of her righteous fury, each strike the skill of a warrior born of a noble Clan.
I parried, I dodged, I absorbed. I was still stronger, my centuries of experience a vast well from which to draw. But she was a tempest, unpredictable and all-consuming.
Finally, I saw an opening. I batted aside a spear of solidified flame, my sword shattering it into a million fading embers, and my free hand shot out. My gauntleted fingers closed around her throat.
I could feel the frantic pulse of her life beneath my grip, the heat of her body. It was over. I would apply the pressure, snap the cervical bone, and send a potent red shockwave through her body, and let her unconscious form fall.
I would retrieve her later, deliver her to Epheotus as a prisoner. A sentence for Lord Indrath to solve.
But then I saw it. A gleam in her golden eyes. Not fear. Not defeat. It was a look of terrible, absolute resolve. A look I had only ever seen in one other place: the eyes of my lord when he passed a sentence of absolute annihilation.
The Immolation.
The ancient, dreaded technique of the Asclepius and Avignis Clans. The reason they were so feared, so respected. The reason they could never be truly destroyed.
Panic, a sensation so foreign it was like a cold knife in my gut, lanced through me. I tried to tighten my grip, to complete the motion, but it was too late.
Dawn's body erupted.
It was not an explosion of flesh and bone. It was the violent, instantaneous unleashing of a star. Her entire mana core—the vast, swirling font of her Asuran power—detonated in a controlled, yet cataclysmic, act of self-immolation.
There was no sound, for sound was too small a concept for this event. There was only light. An all-consuming, pure white light that swallowed the world.
It was a second sun born in the sky above Dicathen.
The force of it hit me like a continent breaking apart. My armor, forged in the heart of the Golden Sun, screamed as it was subjected to forces it was never meant to contain. The heat vaporized the outer layers.
The concussive wave shattered something inside me—ribs, organs, things that had not been damaged in a thousand years. The crimson lightning of my own deviancy sparked across my body in a futile, defensive response before being utterly overwhelmed.
I felt my consciousness unraveling, shredded by the absolute power of a Phoenix's final sacrifice. She had not tried to defeat me. She had offered up nearly all of her existence—returning to a child wherever her reincarnation happened—channeling it into a single, glorious, suicidal blast meant to stop me from harming a couple of lessers.
To save the few scurrying lives I had been about to extinguish… heroism? Was that it?
In my head, tales flashed.
In Epheotus, all dragons—especially the Indrath Clan—have a strong relationship with that word. The Indrath Clan itself was founded on honour, prestige, and the solemn duty of being the spearhead of the Asuras.
Kezess the First was the hero who made Epheotus what it was. Arkanus Indrath was the hero who slew the Natural Beast Geolus, who threatened to destroy the entire dragon race. And my Lord was the hero who brought peace and unity to Epheotus, forming the Great Eight.
Lies. All of them. That wasn't heroism; it was something else. To be a hero is to be selfless and kind to all, even to the lesser beings we have slaughtered.
As I fell, a broken, burning thing, my blackened armor trailing smoke like a meteor, my last coherent thought was not of pain, or of failure, or even of my lord's displeasure.
It was of the look in her eyes. Not hatred. Not fury. Nothing I would have expected.
It was pity.
And as the darkness swallowed me whole, I understood. She had not just broken my body. She had, for the first time in my interminable life, given me a moment of perfect, terrible, and utterly unwanted clarity. I had let my guard down against her power.
But worse, far worse, I had never thought to raise it against her truth. And that was a wound from which I knew, somehow, I would never truly heal.
Edit (21/02/2026):
Changed the timeline from 5188 years before the start of Volume 1 to 10188 years.
Edit (22/02/2026):
Changed the name of Dicathen in the Djinn language from Culla to Kush-Ā