It hit his primal nose, the stench of fire that he knew boiled with him as he flew. Draconic wings beating heavy as the chains around their neck urged to fly towards the wooden landing onto the ground as sticks scratch along the blackened scales yet as usual it was like a hollow pain. The chains were heavy like always along with the saddle but it felt even more heavy than it could be with the rider, who was cladded in purple razor armor which always held a sneering grimace; the Dreadlord he had known since the dragon’s hatching. The sound of that man’s shouting when through their ears and swept out through the other making any command feel like a fog across his mind. It felt like it was natural, as he thought of it as a bond rather than a choker to his brain. Though before the monotonous drone came to spark him into the normal buzz of sadistic tendencies and chaotic flesh, smoke started to be seen over the horizon, over Anvilgard.
The city was in shambles. The lights of distant sparks of stormcasts striking down from the heavens along with a dark aura of fear illuminating the night as a monster towering in figure thrashes through the walls with it’s serpentine figure. The dreadlord unmounted the dragon’s back as he roared in cusses and curses seeing the carnage, but the dragon was not focusing on his words as he was looking to the ruined city. Something was keeping his gaze, guilt? No something darker, something from his heart was not meant to bear as it saw in that wretched sight… relief. The feeling of burden unfettered by the enchantments put upon him from his birthplace, not the magical kind, but the dark false feeling of friendship he had for the rider. The dragon noticed finally the rider was shouting and yelling at him to lower down so his dirty, mucky, slimy steeled boot as the dragon finally sees the spikes underneath. Rage boiled inside his bones, was they not their friend? Their friend in the darkness he called home? Then before they knew it had something in it’s draconic grasp, like a stress ball ripe to be squeezed by my head pulsing with rage. the dragon looked down at this weakling who has tortured him with stagnating thoughts for so long that he screamed and he roared out as the rider’s armor buckles and bends his own lifeforce as the caustic gas of the dragon burned his insides out the same way the dragons were. “You will climb my back no longer, I will not ever again bow to no one! Your city is gone, your dragon is gone, and I am FREE! You, and your city, hold me no longer from this moment on.” The rider’s eyes once filled with spite now bubble with fear as he was thrown down into the ravine over the cliff face with gurgling screams catching the wind. That day a man and his dragon had died as a new beast had awakened deep within one and destroyed the other, that beast was me.
The dragon Gondrysdassnir had been born, I had shedded what was holding my mind back and became anew from the corpse of that wretched city that held my neck clutched. I ripped the armor from my back, the saddle, the emblems as the scars showed from the bolted golden tassles that the aelven ilk adorned the dead dragon with. I thought that I was to be alone with my new born hatred, until I turned back to the army that the dead dreadlord once commanded. The army which was still in perfect marching line of Scourge Privateers and sorcerers of the Darkling Covens which all were clothed in masks to keep the smog that Gondrysdassnir naturally emitted. The army that might’ve fought back if they had not thought the exact thing that Gondrysdassnir was thinking, they were all meant to be here this day to see their dead selves be burned away and something new come. They walked away from the decadent mass that was Anvilgard, not as heroes or as villains.
But as free dragons and men. With Gondrysdassnir his passion for sorcery rumbled within him as a passion ignited to become his own master, to destroy what might chain him down, to become his own lord of fire. For his new army of hunters and sorcerers something that might be a new lease on life, and power to finally lead their own life.
