Story Complimentary Comic [12/12]
Art by @5enketsu
Written by @D.M Rhodes
Barjuchne rose slowly, testing her balance on the strange moss. The fairy kingdom stretched around her in twilit beauty that hurt to look at directly. Colours were too saturated where light touched and too impossibly dark where shadows fell. The contrast was nauseating for her senses, accustomed to the normal world. The air itself hummed with magic that made her scales tingle, a sensation similar to the passive ambient aura of her own dungeon but wilder, older.
She began to walk, her claws sinking into moss that glowed faintly with each step.
The trees here were ancient beyond measure, their trunks twisted into spirals that suggested the presence of natural laws fully different from those of her own dominion. Mushrooms grew from their bark in impossible profusion, some as large as her head, others tiny and clustered like jewels. Hanging from the branches above were small structures that caught her attention.
Houses.
Fairy-sized dwellings suspended from the trees like lanterns, swaying gently in a breeze she could not feel. Most were rotted beyond recognition, their organic walls crumbling, their tiny windows dark and empty. A few retained traces of their former beauty. Carved mushroom caps for roofs. Walls woven from living vines. Doorways no larger than her palm, decorated with crystalline flowers that had long since wilted.
It was an entire civilisation, seemingly abandoned and left to decay.
Barjuchne moved deeper into the forest, past the giant mushrooms that glowed with bioluminescence, into deeper places where even the strange light struggled to penetrate. The magic grew thicker here, pressing against her skin with almost physical weight. She could feel things moving in the darkness beyond her vision.
Something splashed in water nearby. She turned her head towards the sound, eyes narrowing. The surface of a dark pool rippled outward from where something had just submerged. Nothing broke the surface again.
Underbrush rustled to her left. She spun, claws extended, ready for attack. But whatever had made the noise was already gone, leaving only swaying branches and the faint scent of something old and wild.
The forest watched her. She could feel it. Dozens of eyes tracking her movements, studying her, deciding whether she was prey or predator. But nothing showed itself. Nothing challenged her passage.
The aura of this place was dark and mysterious.
She walked on.
The ground sloped downward, leading her into a valley where the mushrooms grew even larger. Some were the size of houses, their caps spreading wide overhead to create a second canopy beneath the twisted trees.
Then she saw it.
A fortress loomed in the distance, rising from the swamp-like ground in organic curves that suggested it had been grown rather than built. Mushroom towers spiralled upward. Walls of interwoven roots and crystallised sap gleamed wetly in the dim light. The whole structure pulsed faintly with magic, its surface crawling with phosphorescent patterns.
Barjuchne approached carefully, her senses sharp for threats.
The ground beneath her feet suddenly blazed with light.
She recoiled instinctively, but her legs refused to move. Looking down, she saw her ankles bound together by glowing magical chains that emerged from a sigil carved into the moss. The symbol flared with power, its lines burning bright blue against the dark ground.
"What the -"
Her legs tangled. She stumbled, her balance failing, and crashed to the ground with a grunt of pain and surprise.
Cold, cruel laughter echoed through the forest.
Barjuchne lifted her head, her eyes blazing with anger. A small shadow appeared above her, descending slowly. A fairy-sized throne hovered in the air, carried by two armoured knights whose wings beat in perfect synchronisation. And seated upon that throne was a figure that commanded attention despite her diminutive size.
The fairy princess was small, but her presence filled the space around her with malicious authority. Sun-touched skin glowed faintly in the dim light. Straight dark blue hair fell across her face, covering one eye whilst the other gleamed with cruel intelligence. Her crystalline wings spread behind her like stained glass, refracting the forest's strange light into rainbow patterns. She wore robes that draped across her ample form with deliberate sensuality, and she held one hand over her mouth whilst she laughed at the trapped dragon.
"You walked right into it just as planned," she said, leaning her head onto one fist. She crossed one leg over the other with languid satisfaction. "Oh, I have been dreaming about this. Welcome, Barjuchne, the last dragon. To the home of the last fairies. After seeing you so long in my sleep, I'm quite pleased to finally meet you in person." A strangely satisfied smile rose on her small face, but her eyes didn't shift at all. "We're both the last of our kind, dragon."
Barjuchne glared up at her, struggling against the magical bindings. "You must be F.P. I came for what's mine, fairy princess."
The fairy clicked her tongue. The two fairy knights descended, lowering the throne until it settled on the ground. The princess clapped slowly, unimpressed, and rose to her feet. She began walking barefoot through the thin mud towards Barjuchne.
Before she could take her second step, one of the knights threw himself face-first into the mud at her feet. She walked across his back without hesitation. Then the other knight did the same, positioning himself ahead of his companion. One after another, they engaged in a ridiculous display of chivalric one-upmanship, creating a living bridge so their princess never had to touch the ground.
Barjuchne stared, raising an eyebrow. This was just sad. What a bunch of weirdos.
"Oh, you figured it out," she said, stopping with one foot pressed against the back of a knight's head, keeping his face firmly in the dirt. "I'm impressed."
"...It's a two-letter acronym," Barjuchne replied dryly, staring blankly at the fairy who sauntered closer. "It was hardly complex."
The fairy princess clasped her hands together with theatrical delight. "Oh, my stars, you don't know how happy I am to meet someone with a brain in their head. I've been stuck wrangling bandits and lost highwaymen for years." She sighed dramatically. "They're quick on their feet, but not the brightest. Like the bait I sent your way to bring you to me. Two letters is the most my usual company can handle these days."
The dragon girl tilted her head. "You could have just invited me," Barjuchne said, rolling her eyes.
The fairy princess laughed as if it were a joke.
"No, seriously. I can read. If you had just sent a letter, I'd have dropped by." The dragon's voice was dry and exhausted. "Hell. You could have just knocked. Not once has anyone just knocked on my cave and asked to hang out. It's always 'return my fiancé' this and 'give me back my gold' that. Speaking of." She narrowed her eyes. "Give me back my gold or I'll eat you alive."
The fairy princess let out a sad, playfully cooing "Aww..." as she reached out, putting one small hand beneath Barjuchne's chin. Given the difference in scale, it was really more of a symbolic gesture than a practical one. "But where's the sense in that?" She made a pouting face and lowered her tone into that of a high-pitched but low-volume mocking childishness. "That would imply I view you as worthy of communicating with as an equal."
The fairy leaned closer, her expression shifting from playful to cold.
"But you're not. You're a beast. You're a wild, rabid thing that lives in a cave and I, well..." She flaunted her hair with one hand. "I am royalty," she said, as if it were obvious. "I am the princess of an entire kingdom. I am the owner of everything you see around you. I need my gold to fund my campaign to reclaim the rightful power of my kingdom."
Honestly, Barjuchne wanted to get angry, but this was just silly.
The dragon turned her head from one side and looked quietly at the empty, dark, swampy forest. At the rotting houses. She turned her head the other way, looking at the abandoned civilisation slowly being consumed by nature. Slowly, she turned back toward the fairy princess.
"You have... like... three guys in your entire 'kingdom'," she replied, looking around at the two knights and one lookout standing by a distant tree. The lookout lifted his hands, acknowledging her with a half wave. "I have more goblins than that. This is weak, you know? It might just be over. Let it go."
"SHUT UP!" The fairy princess' facade shattered. She lifted one hand, flames erupting around her fingers. Not orange fire, but crystalline blue that crackled with wild magic. "I won't be insulted by an animal!"
Her tiny hand swung down, slapping Barjuchne across the face with surprising force. Not that it moved her face an inch or even stung all that much, considering the fact that it was done by a fairy. But it was still pretty rude. "Is this how you treat people you dream about at night?" asked the dragon, staring the fairy down.
"I'll rake your flesh and defile your spirit like a broken-legged dog chained behind a moving carriage," threatened the fairy princess. "Then, when your arrogance is shattered and you're gratefully licking the mud off of my feet, I'll have you destroy all of my enemies," she said, suddenly changing her tone again to something more chipper as her smile returned to her face. "You'll be the distasteful but necessary sword I need to kill all of the traitors who turned their backs on their crown." Her eyes widened with feverish intensity. "Every last fairy who has a drop of human blood anywhere in them. And all the others will be dragged back here in chains to restore the glory of their homeland."
She was clearly insane.
"Why would I ever do that?" Barjuchne asked, doing her best not to get angry at the delusional creature.
"Because I'll hurt you if you don't." The fairy princess pressed her glowing hand against Barjuchne's forehead, blue flames dancing across the dragon's scales. "You're not the first dragon I've spoken to, you know. You're not even the first one I'll kill."
The fairy princess paused, savouring the moment.
"I know the magic of the cave. I know that when you die, another will take your place, and another, and another. Some I've helped in the past. They failed. Some I've watched. They failed too. Some I sabotaged because I felt like hurting something, and, well, believe it or not, they failed." The fairy clutched her own face with her free hand, her expression shifting to delirious ecstasy. She turned away, walking back over the still-prone knights.
"You did what?" Barjuchne's voice went flat, dangerous.
The bones in her cave when she first woke. The hundreds of failed attempts. The skeletons of reborn dragons who had died alone in the dark, killed by adventurers or starvation or failing their system quests. Was that why there were so many? She had just always assumed they weren't able to complete their system quests in time.
But some of them had been sabotaged. Murdered. Tormented by this creature for entertainment. Barjuchne's memory went back to the fragments she'd found herself in the past in the cave, remnants of fairy-sized things. It fit.
Had this creature been meddling in her affairs from the start? Even before then.
The fairy princess held her face with both hands, lost in memory. "At first I wasn't so mean. I needed them, you know?" she asked. "But then they kept failing and they kept dying and I kept having to start over from the beginning and at some point, I got a little cross," she explained, sounding happy as she reminisced. "So I took some of my, understandable, frustrations out on the other dragons who came... until you showed up. I was going to torment you next, but you're the first one I've ever dreamt of, you know? You must be special." She did a small pirouette on the spot as her wings shivered, in motion from the ecstatic quiver of her body. The fairy princess clasped her hands together by her face, staring back toward her castle. "Oh, I took such delight in it for a while. Watching one of them after the other die, and die, and die!" Her tone grew heated, aroused by the memory of having power over life and death. "Knights. Take her to the dungeon."
Nothing happened.
The fairy princess turned around slowly. "I said -"
She froze.
Barjuchne stood there, holding both mud-covered fairy knights in her clawed hands. The magical bindings around her ankles lay shattered on the ground, their light fading. The knights flailed helplessly with their tiny swords, completely unable to harm the dragon who had casually overpowered them.
A vibrant orange light filled the air, glowing from Barjuchne's chest, her throat, and between her lips.
"What the -" The fairy princess stumbled backward. "How did you -?"
Barjuchne, lost to draconic rage, opened her jaws and unleashed hell.
Dragon fire roared forth in a massive cone of destruction. The fairy princess barely dodged, throwing herself to the side with desperate speed. The wash of flame blasted over her head, missing her by inches, and slammed into the ancient castle beyond. The entire structure erupted into flame. Organic walls crackled and burnt. Mushroom towers collapsed into blazing ruin. Centuries of accumulated magic ignited, feeding the fire with unnatural hunger.
"My castle!" The fairy princess stared in horror at the destruction. "You cretin!"
She snapped her fingers.
Blue fire exploded around Barjuchne, covering the dragon in crystalline flames. The fairy princess laughed smugly as Barjuchne's silhouette was engulfed in magical conflagration designed to burn flesh from bone.
But the dragon simply threw the knights aside and continued walking forward through the flames, her eyes glowing, smoke rising from her nostrils.
The fairy princess' expression shifted to confusion, then fear. She snapped her fingers again. More fairy fire blasted into the dragon. Nothing happened. Barjuchne kept walking, the spells washing over her scales without effect.
"Why aren't you dying?!" The fairy princess' voice cracked with panic. She stepped backward, then launched herself into the air with desperate wingbeats. But she did not get far. Barjuchne's wings snapped open. She launched herself upward with terrifying speed and snatched the fairy princess from the air with one clawed hand, dragging her back down to the ground and pinning her there with her back to the mud. The force of it pressed her flat, half-submerging the fairy in gunk that was starting to swallow her shape whole.
"I like it hot," the smouldering, still-partially-burning dragon replied, her voice otherworldly and menacing. The sizzling magic around her hand dissipated, baking the damp soil.
"You can't hurt me! I'm a princess!" replied the fairy, struggling but unable to break free from the dragon's tightening grasp as she was pressed down by the firm hand, her legs flailing but failing to achieve anything.
"Where. Is. My. Gold?" asked the monster with glowing eyes, smoke rising from its nostrils as its claws tightened around the caught fairy as the dragon pushed its weight down against the struggling princess.
"This is just like my dreams..." spluttered the fairy as she was choked, her eyes fighting to not roll into her skull. Barjuchne's grip tightened until something quietly popped. "- In the castle!" the fairy princess mutedly gagged out, unable to escape as she spluttered, the mud she was being pressed down into readily seeping into the corners of her mouth. "It's in the castle!"
The dragon's eyes almost seemed to pop back into their usual colour and shape in an instant, as if she had been awoken from a daze. Barjuchne's head snapped towards the burning fortress. Her eyes widened with horror.
And just like that, she released the fairy princess immediately and hurtled towards the flames with frantic, desperate energy. All the menace evaporated from her posture, replaced by pure panic like a mother running into a burning house that her children were inside of. Her treasure was burning. Her gold. Her precious gold!
It was the only thing that mattered.
The fairy princess sat up slowly, confused and dishevelled. She spat out mud, gasping for breath as air returned into her choked throat. She stared after the dragon who had just abandoned their confrontation to rescue some coins instead. "...Wait," she muttered, watching the dragon Barjuchne barrel into the burning castle without hesitation. Confused and almost betrayed, she called after Barjuchne. "Hey! I'm worth more than some stupid gold! Come back here!"
The cruel princess scrambled to her feet.
"Hey!" she shouted at the dragon, who was no longer listening to her at all. "HEY!"
Apparently, she wasn't, actually, more important than the gold.
[QUEST UPDATE]Objective Complete: Destroy a castle ✓Your body now has the collective magical requirements needed in order to reach your next transformation stage.
Your evolution ability will be unlocked in 72 hours, after your organs have finished readjusting.