Doom Upon All the World

For decades, he had fought with iron-capped claws for his right to starlight. He had wrangled with shadow, endured the bloodletting of altar priests; had lain his nightly sacrifice upon the dais of a queen that did not deign to answer. She who gazed at him with lustful admiration, to tempt but never to touch, to gird his heart with the insidious belt of her constricting admonitions; goading and haranguing him for the countless deeds committed in her blessed name.

And still, the winking sky was beyond his penumbra grasp. Out of reach to his tenebrous talons, which raked across the belly of an aurora sky each night, desperate and seeking, that he might net his evening mistress from her lofty chaise, that he might fetter her to the humility of corrupt mortality. Then she would see, indubitably, how disposable she was—how fleeting his affections might be for those lesser than him.

But she remained out of reach. Untouchable, above the reproach of his indignant, erratic heart. But the Shadeling, her most loyal disciple, had at last grown weary of her hateful games: of her tiresome phases and her winking propinquity. He would adore her no longer, so long as Taaron Ka, Stellanor, remained his nebula-kissed damsel. And so long as the starlit woman possessed his intermittent interests, he would not deign to hearken his heavenly queen’s protestations.

Because in the end, she would take him back—when the world sent him sprawling to his bruised and busted knees, when he was left to laugh before whatever ruin he had wrought, the moon would readily return him to her frigid embrace.

He had nothing to fear, truly.

And in the absence of starlight, he had delved deeper into the cumbersome weight of his self-imposed darkness. His shadows seemed dimmer: voids that seemed beyond the jet of night, but rather so profoundly dark that sunshine balked in his presence. Indeed, the scars cut across his ebony hide rippled with sickly powers; devouring the moony pulse of his galaxy-bedecked gaze, robbing him of that fragile semblance of light.

Because in the quiet of his chambers, in the depths of his estate’s wine cellars, Hraefn had pored over that which was forbidden. Tomes depicting the ignoble and the horrific: blood magik and necromancy, the reanimation of that which was meant to decay.

Throughout the countless hours in which he’d fashioned his senses to a sharpened blade (spread out over considerate years, his daytime hours spent hunched over those horrid spellbooks), he’d sluiced a segment of his shadow of its useless shroud. Indeed, he’d ripped a fragment of his magik from its intended purpose, cleansed it of its ministrations of black illusions of wretched nightshade, and crafted something… crueler.

What would mother say, as he waltzed a rarely-made dance for the Dragon Pit. Weeks from the cold breast of Isdel, which had nursed him for the majority of his inexhaustible years, his legs were propelled by the incessant desires to impress; to defile the dead and to impose upon the world that significance of his dreadful presence.

He’d spent days scouting for the right skeleton. Whole enough to make his task easier, large enough to strike fear into those that witnessed his creation, and abhorrent enough to speak kindly of his damned aesthetics.

And when at last he found the wyvern’s corpse, half buried in sediment, he meticulously exhumed it from its ancient burial ground—gathering its pieces with the care of a father, with a derisive love for his inanimate accomplishments. A mechanic, in his own right: molding that which ought to never exist.

Come dusk on a Summer night, the Shadeling was at last ready—belly aching with hunger, lips parched of wine and water, and magik carving black whorls unto the sand underfoot as he lingered beneath the velveteen sky overhead. The sun plead for him to stop as it balked beyond its horizon, slipping beneath the curtain of its frightful resistance, daring not to watch his ominous ceremony.

He sliced his breast first, Spectre gleaming within the leering light. A deep cut, made over the emboldened ridge of an old scar. He’d drawn blood there countless times before.

And Hraefn stepped closer. Looming, expressionless, over the colossal corpse of that which would soon be his. His magiks came to life: fraternal twins, borne of the same nature, yet vastly different in their blackened spectrums. The dead and the darkness, intertwined within the obsidian heart of an undying, indomitable Warlock.

For that was, indubitably, what he was becoming.

The Shadeling kissed the ivory bones with blood and power, imbuing the skeletal pieces with his soul—with the powers that defined him. Tendrils of shadow uncoiled from his unfaltering hooves, brushing against the feathering at his fetlocks as they wound their way nearer to the corpse; the behemoth that would soon stand tall, who might blot out the starspecked heavens with black wings.

And darkness encrusted the sun-bleached bones as the skeleton jostled, as it stirred and moaned, as the guttural moan of a frankensteined creature roared across the Bloodmaw.

And when Hraefn stood shaking, nose and ears bleeding, the creature rose. Blundering and wrathful, its tattered, ebony-skinned wings stretched beyond the breadth of its reanimated body.

The Shadeling licked blood from his teeth, ignored the throbbing of his skull and the blur of his vision as his ears roared, as his veins sang.

And with a snarl, the Shadowsinger named his creation. “Daïathwin.”