Crowned in Black: Epilogue

“Grrhhn... hnnnn...”

Lucien groaned as his awareness swum back in. There was nothing but solid darkness, and a crushing pressure pinning him to the ground like the hand of God himself. Everything hurt, especially his right arm. His HP was a sliver.

“Hrrn... haahhh...” He panted as he tried to struggle upright. Something was trapping him from above. Grimacing, Lucien twisted and fumbled up toward the slab of stone pinning him. Why did his hand hurt so fucking much? He pushed up against the heavy stone above with the... stump.

Oh.

Lucien’s pulse was pounding in his ears, and the darkness around him became suffocating and hot. Where was he? What was going on? Why hadn’t he respawned in his quarters in the Eyrie? But as he felt around, slow, horrifying understanding dawned. He WAS in the Eyrie. He had respawned in the proper place, in a building that was now a million-ton tomb of broken stone.

“No… NO!” He whimpered, writhing inside his stone coffin, then screamed, thrashing against the walls. As he bucked, he felt something above him shift... and then fall, crushing his spine and legs. Blood filled his mouth. He passed out as the last of his HP drained away.

[You ArE strOnG]

“Hhnnghh... “ Lucien groaned as his awareness flooded back in, again. There was nothing but solid blackness, darkness that fritzed and blurred in front of his dust-filled eyes. Horrific images danced in his mind, all of them first-person, as if they were his own memories. He was a soldier, blowing the face off a prisoner of war. He was sitting numbly behind a drone console as he dropped a grenade into a trench on top of sleeping Pacific Alliance soldiers. He was screaming at his girlfriend, hitting her. He was watching Nicolas burn Ignas’ eyes with a hot poker. He was dying of HEX, over and over again.

Lucien screamed with wild laughter as he tried to struggle out of the ruins of the Eyrie, shifting more rubble down on top of his ever-tightening, ever-fatal prison. This time, the block of stone above him slid down and pinned his ribcage to the floor, slowly crushing the breath from his body.

[Listen to me. You are strong. The strongest.]

[you were right. Ororgael was weak.]

[You will show them all.]

[i WILL help YOU.]

[USE THE SWORD.]

The sword? Lucien couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive, asleep or awake. But as the sick, giggling voice bounced around his mind, he realized he still had his left hand. It was wrapped around a hilt. The Godslayer.

[Yes. You hate them. You will kill them all.]

“No… my dragon…” Lucien moaned. He couldn’t move. Somehow, he knew that his legs and torso were both pinned through. That he had spawned AROUND them, his body distorted around the rock keeping him trapped. “Whisper... Whisper’s dead... they’re all dead... I... I fucked up. I fucked everything.”

[Y o U w I L L h A v E t H e MoSt PoWeRFul DrAgOn iN t H e W o r L D. If. You. Can. Stand.]

The voice cooed in his mind, clipping each slowly drawn word off like an irritated parent. It made something in him flinch each time... as if... as if his soul were being slapped like a clawed black hand.

Lucien gripped the sword, and snarled as he focused on the whitecrystal blade—on the power of the Drachan trapped inside of it. As he concentrated, he could see it grinning back at him: a feral, demonic smile too wide for its twisted muzzle. Its name was Malice. It hated him, and everything else. That was weirdly comforting. Lucien hated himself and everyone else, too.

[That’s it]

[Control it.]

Even as fresh blood bubbled in his mouth, Lucien’s face contorted into a snarl of determination. He remembered the shockwave of energy he’d thrown at Hector, how it had knocked him off his feet. Good. Smug asshole. Lucien focused on that feeling, on the satisfaction of conquering an enemy, of how GOOD it had felt to finally fuck over Ororgael. Oh, that son of a bitch had lorded over him for months. He was always going on about how strong he was, how big he was, how powerful he was. How he knew everything. How he could see the admin panel, for all the good it had done in the end.

‘Not so powerful now, are you, Fuckface?’ Lucien’s mind flashed with the image of broad grinning teeth, a predator’s smile he felt behind his eyes. He dragged the sword in toward his body until he was almost hugging it... then discharged a blast of force around himself.

The debris shifted overhead, rumbling. Then falling.

[Again.]

Lucien died choking. But as he stirred out of the void of death, he heeded the voice.

[Again.]

He lost count of how many times he died. He lost track of his own name. As he died and respawned and shunted the ruins of the Eyrie off his nude, bleeding body, tapping into the seemingly endless power of the sword that was there every time he drew his first breath, his mind was slowly being replaced. No... reborn. He was being reborn. Lucien welcomed the pain now, wheezing with a trickle of laughter.

[Again.]

[Again.]

[Again.]

[Again.]

Over and over, tons of stone shifted, then collapsed inward on top of him. He could feel his body sinking a little more each time.

[AGAIN.]

Lucien snarled against his own animal terror, concentrating, shoving debris away with the power of his mind alone. And this time... this time, he did not feel the sensation of his bones breaking and his organs pulping. A sliver of pale light beamed down through the cloud of dust, lighting the broken floor ahead. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Disbelieving, he slowly picked himself up. He was naked, bloody, covered in a thick layer of dust that turned his skin completely gray. The first thing he did was look at the stump of his arm. It was black at the end, shimmering.

[Touch the sword to your flesh. You have earned My blessing.]

Numbly, Lucien did so. A stab of pain lanced from the exposed end of the bone through to his chest, and he snapped his teeth together, growling as tears poured down his cheeks. But after a few seconds, it was done. He looked down again... and he had a forearm and a hand again. It was solid vantablack, absorbing the light around it. When he rubbed it with his other hand, he felt nothing—not with the fingers touching it, or the perfectly black, light absorbing fingers he experimentally flexed. Somehow, the limb worked. But it wasn’t really there.

“Who are you?” Lucien whispered, staring at it with wide eyes. When he turned his arm the right way, his hand looked two-dimensional.

[God.]

[Advance to the nesting chamber. Your body knows the way.]

Terrified, awed, suspicious and numb all at the same time, Lucien stumbled down the broken passage, flinching as loose stones occasionally tumbled down the shattered walls. He paused as he spotted a familiar piece of tile—part of the mosaic floor from the central hall. He veered around half a body—the torso of a Kyrian nun from the temple adjoined to the Eyrie on the ground level. For some reason, her expression of shock made him laugh. He reached out to pat the side of her face with his black hand, then startled back as she simply disappeared. Not only that... but the rocks that had crushed her stayed where they were, framing the corpse that was no longer there.

The sound of his own giggling haunted him as he struggled through the hellscape Solnetsi had made of his home. As he moved through, he experimentally began to touch things. Rocks. Rebar. Bodies. Pop pop pop. They all disappeared. He could remove pieces of rubble to leave other pieces hanging in the air, as if suspended.

It took hours, but eventually, Lucien put his unfeeling palm against a piece of stone and willed it to vanish. It obligingly disappeared, and he stumbled through and out onto the hatching sands. The natural volcanic cavern the Eyrie had been built on top of and around had weathered the disaster fairly well. The great tower had tipped to the side instead of falling down, though there were now semi-truck sized pieces of stone embedded in the floors. Light shone through the gaping holes the partial collapse had left behind, highlighting the sunken, pale corpse of the old Matriarch. Stretched out under the weight of her chains, jaws slack, her dead blue tongue lolling from between her yellowed teeth, she looked like giant roadkill. Like a big scaly skunk. Lucien’s nose wrinkled with disgust.

[Take the sword in your new hand. Plant it into her hearts. You must strike true.]

Wordlessly, Lucien limped over to the body of Usta, and haltingly climbed up her arm to her shoulder. He had to put his back to the edge of her wing and roughly shove it forward to be able to reach her ribs. When they were exposed, he positioned the sword over the place he knew the twin hearts to be, and drove it down.

The Godslayer plunged into the dead queen’s corpse without resistance... and then absorbed into her, sucking down into the dragon’s chest. Lucien took a halting step back, only to yelp when the ribs flexed outward underneath him. He frantically looked from side to side as something writhed under his feet, then ran for her neck and slid down. It cost him a few more precious HP, but he was clear of her as he jogged backwards, watching wide-eyed as the edges of Usta’s wings began to twitch and flicker.

Blackness spread through the queen’s body, spreading like ink through her veins and scales. Lucien watched in astonishment as her flesh sucked in toward her bones, leaving the formerly obese Queen skeletal and dried-looking. Her smooth pearly scales turned a dull matte black that did not reflect the light, erupting with razored fringes. Her dorsal crest sharpened and lifted with knife-like edge, her smooth long horns erupted with barbs. Lastly, the flesh of her muzzle sunk in and peeled away, until nothing was left but bare white bone. For a minute or so, nothing happened... and then a pure point of blackness, as deep and sucking as the core of a black hole, kindled inside of the empty eye socket he could see.

Lucien took a step back as [Malice the Void Queen] stirred, planting her foreclaws and winghands against the ground. She pushed herself to her keel, then rose slowly to her feet. A long, bladed tail, like the tail of a xenomorph, curved elegantly toward him before it slammed to the ground, and the undead dragon threw its head back and shrieked toward the ceiling. Debris rained down around them, but Lucien was no longer afraid. He was grinning up at the dragon. His dragon. The most powerful dragon in the world.

[I committed an error in placing my trust in Ororgael.] The voice of God whispered to him as Malice lowered herself so that he could mount. [But now, we end this. First, we will replace your weapons and armor. And then, we will fly to Revala. It is the Nexus.]

“The Nexus? Of what?” Lucien didn’t question Squalor’s judgment as he stepped up on the edge of the Void Queen’s wing and clambered to the flight position between her wing shoulders. His corrupted mind simply accepted that Squalor was God, and God was to be obeyed.

Black tendrils oozed out of Malice’s skin, wrapping around Lucien’s bare legs and pinning him to her back just before she launched herself up at near-sonic speed. She didn’t even hesitate: she smashed through the ceiling and powered up into the air. She was so fast, Lucien couldn’t even scream as the wind was sucked out of his lungs.

[The Nexus of The End.]