Chapter Text
Time: Unknown
World: Unnamed Unknown planet of Alpha Centauri
Area: Mainland, 250 miles from seashore
Oheň… could hear his heart beating.
Thump-thud…
Thump-thud…
Thump-thud…
Slowly, oh so slowly like the steady inhales of the Queen Alpha in her long hibernations. He felt warm… very warm, and he could hear the gentle sloshing of the water around him as he slept in the waves of the Grotto. They were a dying breed- with the ability to destroy other nests with nary but a single breath attack if one was truly enraged enough, the other Nests always felt threatened, and with a pact made with one of the Mautha Alphas resulting in Oheň's existence they felt even more so.
The hybrid Mautha-Rathalos rumbled and rolled to the side, nuzzling into the shallow shoreline that dimmed his flames for sleep; no matter, let the Queen Beta see to their attempted assaults when she awoke- he and the other Warriors would fly out to defend the Nest and Thunder with their very lives. Until then, Oheň would sleep. As a low purr echoed throughout the Nest, the crystal spires amd salty trees all around him ebbed and flowed in the world’s lifelights to his breathing. Despite being used to this, even under his scale-plated eyelids he could see the bright pulse and dim of the crystals that made up the Thunder's nesting grounds.
And thus, Oheň slept…
=◊=
Something was wrong.
Queen Alpha had awoken ahead of her next Clutch-Lay.
The Ancients, Queen Beta, and the Mautha are worried, and Oheň lets out a low growl in his Nest Tongue that blends with the Esses and the Drakes own concerns. He switches to Mau Tongue and asks the Mautha Alpha if the Thunder's Queen Alpha will be alright. The Mautha only furrows the flesh of his brow in worry, before replying that he didn't know.
The Nest was in a state of stasis then. If the Queen Alpha is awoken and has not produced another Destruction Wyvern Heir in the Clutch-Lay, it means she is sick and unable to produce the next viable Clutch of Heirs.
A sick Queen Alpha means a weakened Nest and a weakened Thunder.
They are vulnerable…
They are d y i n g.
=◊=
The Queen Alpha looks into his eyes with her one great flameforged facet. She is weak and her old heart beats slower and slower each day- her sickness has accentuated her age, and the Mautha Alpha gave the news only a moon-cycle ago… Queen Alpha was poisoned, and there was no cure to give her. The culprit, a trained Egg-Stealer, had been caught and the miserable pest exterminated, but the Thunder was now in the throes of fear and hopelessness.
=◊=
Oheň lingered at the periphery of his thoughts, the uneasy hush of the Nest draping over him like a heavy shroud. The scent of fear—sharp, electric—hung in the air as even the youngest Drakes pressed together, their scales shivering in anticipation.
Then, a ripple of movement, a gathering in the great Atrium where stone pillars and ancient trees arched like the ribs of timeless leviathans. The Ancients and Mautha stood as silent witnesses under the shifting light of crystal lanterns. At the Atrium’s heart, Queen Alpha sat upright, her regal form diminished but still unbowed by the sickness gnawing her life away.
Oheň stepped forward, drawn by a force older than thunder or wingbeats, and knelt, wings furled tight. The Queen’s breath rattled in her chest, yet her single eye burned, an ancient forge gleaming with resolve.
With a voice rough as chiseled stone, she spoke in the Mau Tongue, her words echoing through the chamber: “You are the bridge between our Thunder and the Mautha.” The gathered fell silent, the magnitude of her proclamation settling like falling ash. “The FIRST in the promise of peace we Wyverns and Elder Dragons have seen since even before I was hatched…”
Her words grew louder, riding the hush with stormlike force. “Our world is destined to fall to the other Mautha, my Hatchlings…their frenzied god rises, and it is foretold that he will destroy all, leading the charde alongside the black death, the Mountain King Serpent, and others like them who have fallen to darkness. Until such a time where our goddess cannot shield us, do not follow me into the Skies above quietly. Do not let them rip your wings away, and tear your throats out in the mud under their claws… If you are to follow me, do so with your teeth bared, wings buffeting your enemies, and your elements shredding their scales from their bones. Drag them with you and drop their spirits into the Pits where they belong.”
The despair that once haunted their eyes was banished by the Queen’s fire. Moans and whines twisted and burst into thunderous roars, cheers that rattled the Atrium’s very bones. Oheň felt their longing, their feverish hope, settle around him like a mantle.
The Queen’s flame-bright eye fixed Oheň in place. With the last of her strength, she offered the mantle of command: “Lead them, Oheň… First… and Last of the King Alphas... He who Is To Be An Elder Dragon… Lead them… do not… let them die… in vain…”
And as her voice faded, the fate of Thunder and Mautha alike hung in the air—heavy, perilous, yet ablaze with hope.
=◊=
As the Queen Alpha breathed her last, the entire Atrium of Mautha and dragons bowed to the massive crystal-spiked corpse reverently, the crystal spires all around them glowing brighter, the crystal dusting that covered the wings and scales of the dragons around them pulsing in unison before the Queen Alpha's body sent a rushing pulse of light towards her Heir, absorbing into his body.
Over Oheň's face grew a mask of obsidian-black Dragongem, glowing white in its skull-like visage with a crown of crystal curving around his brow over his own forwards-curving horns before it shattered, revealing a Mautha face with long Wyvernian ears. Over his torso, a plating of scales overlapped, producing the same white-blue glow. At the outer edges of his wings, spikes in the form of razor-sharp horn-like protrusions grew. The fins on his tail become a bladed tip, made to batter and slice and poison.
And he felt a bone-deep hum in his being… one that whispered of shaking the skies with his wings and raising the crystals on the peaks of mountains…
Oheň roars, and it shakes the entire nesting caverns to their very foundations.
=◊=
Blades of amber-orange crystal glow in the night as the battle between heretic and chosen wages around them, the blurs of glowing bodies in the moonlight causing disorientation everywhere someone unused to the display looked.
Oheň snarls as an enemy Mautha atop a Garvumaul levels a grin at him while the Red Dragon roars his challenge at the half-breed. Oheň answers in kind, flipping his crystal blades in his clawed hands before flying at the duo with a snarl. In moments, the enemy is falling to the ground, jagged blades of diamond protruding from their flesh as their lives vanish from their eyes.
Hearing a powerful roar from across the battle-sky, Oheň turns to see a large, poison-green Queen Beta barreling her way forwards. Her black scales glitter in the moonlight, the green on them glowing a vivid toxic emerald as she roars her rage, her sickly yellow eyes burning with the twisted blessings of her god as she spews a bolt of venom from her maw that turns any in her way into a puddle of melting flesh.
Oheň turns and focuses on the light of the moon on his wings, the power of the Queens that came before flowing in his flesh and blood.
His form grows, his bones crunch and shift even as his guts slosh about to move or grow to accommodate his expanding bulk.
Oheň, in the form of a King Alpha, the first amd only Four-Legged Rathalos, roars his answer, and it shakes the skies.
A storm gathers and glowing pulses caresses the protrusions on his spine, tail, and crown. Gathering them up in his maw, Oheň snaps his jaws shut before they spring open, spewing a concentrated beam of white and blue plasma-fire. It collides with the Queen Beta of the Poison-Breaths, sending her now lifeless, smoking husk tumbling to the rocky craigs below.
As Oheň turns to assist his Thunder, who are fighting with renewed vigor, something pierces his plated chest.
An arrow.
A poisoned arrow.
Turning to see who had shot it, he spies an emerald female Waterbreathers and her female Mautha rider, of whom holds the bow that shot the arrow.
In a whiteout of sudden pain, the First and Last lets out a roar and falls, shifting from his battle-borne form to his original Dragongem-masked one. Through pained eyes laced with tears of rage and anguish, Oheň watches his Thunder and their Riders bellow in a sense of shared agony before launching a final assault, Pit-Bent on avenging their fallen King.
Oheň sees his mother, a Mautha with hair as dark as the night and riddled with his father's sapphire-blue shed scales, atop his father as they rip apart the Mautha and Waterbreathers that shot him from the sky.
He sees the Ancients rise from the Nest below, their old bones creaking, scales long since cracked from old age and battles past, as they stand by no longer and fight with the young blood- the old and new would perish together.
Oheň bellowed in anguish as he crashed down at the mouth of the Grotto, just in time to see the dreaded Dalamadur and Lan Shan Lung breach the barricaded entrance and begin to shatter the remainder of the unhatched eggs belonging to Esses and Drakes, the bodies of the young and infantile lying in piles just behind them, and even then they ripped the barely-formed embryos from their shells to splat amidst their elder siblings.
As Mother Night spread her wings to guide him to the stars, a sudden flare of light raced over the crystals marking the interior of the Nest, pulling head from deep down withing the crystal of the world.
All at once, it pulled, bouncing back and reaching for the dying young King.
Spears of crystal, all pulsing different colors, stabbed through the ground, encasing him in a flash of warmth and a rush of ice at the same time. Their points gleaming in the moonlight as they impaled the intruding bodies. The blood of his Nest spattered the crystals around him, and Oheň felt as if he were being encased in a warm barrier. It was as if his father's wings and is mother's arms were wrapped around him.
He closed his eyes, and knew nothing else.
=◊=
As Oheň slipped beneath the surface of consciousness, wrapped in the cold and comforting embrace of crystal, the world outside was plunged into chaos. The surface of the planet shuddered as if in agony, phantom veins of light—living rivers that once pulsed gently with the secret heartbeat of ancient life—now flashed and flickered, spasming in erratic bursts. Across continents, ten great white dtagons amd ten great black dragons bent the world to their will, destroying, destroying, destroying everything in their wake.
Mountains groaned and bent, their age-old spines thrust skyward or torn asunder by invisible hands. What once stood as tranquil forests and rolling plains were now heaving, torn by fissures that belched molten flame, the air thick with the desperate cries of creatures great and small.
Below, at the very core of the planet, something stirred—a presence long dormant, forged in the fires of creation, its will older than memory. It awoke to the cacophony, its awareness stretching through stone and magma, its attention drawn irresistibly to the fragile spire of crystal that cradled Oheň. The presence was many things at once: a whispered lullaby and a scream; gentle as a father’s touch, fierce as the wrath of forgotten gods. It was time, and yet—something resisted, clinging to the final threads of a fading world.
Suddenly, the ground convulsed, earthquakes radiating outward in terrible waves. Structures toppled, valleys folded into themselves, and the sky turned the color of blood. Lava burst from riven earth, flowing in incandescent rivers, pooling around the crystal spire standing sentinel in the midst of ruin. The pressure grew—palpable, suffocating—until the very air seemed to hold its breath, waiting for an inevitable end.
Then, from the heart of the tumult, the presence made its move. With a force both unseen and undeniable, it surged upward, entwining itself around the crystal spire. Oheň, sealed within, drifted between life and death, unaware of the cosmic battle raging just beyond his shell. Time slowed—each second stretching into eternity—as the ancient force gathered itself, whispering words of release and hope, of vengeance and new beginnings.
A sudden, shuddering pulse of energy blasted the spire free from its foundation. The world seemed to freeze in a heartbeat of anticipation. For an instant, the silence was absolute—a hush so profound it threatened to crush the soul. And then, with a noise that split the heavens, the spire rocketed into the sky. It pierced the roiling clouds, streaking past them in a prism of refracted moonlight, scattering shards of crystal and hope in its wake.
Higher and higher it soared, propelled by the will of the ancient force, leaving the blighted world behind. The surface below convulsed one last time, the planet’s crust folding as though in supplication. A tremor, deeper than any before, signaled the final collapse. The moon, pale and watchful, shimmered as the spire shot past, and for a heartbeat, the cosmos held its breath.
And then—eruption. The world below split asunder, the core bursting outward in a cataclysm of light and fire. The explosion painted the void with brilliance, outshining the stars as fragments of earth and memory spiraled into the abyss.
Oheň, encased and silent, was hurled farther into the dark, suspended between the echoing destruction behind him and the unknown that lay ahead. All around was silence—save for the whisper of that ancient presence, lingering like a promise: your story is not yet finished. Suspended among the stars, Oheň’s fate—and the fate of a world he had yet to land on—remained unwritten, teetering on the edge of what was lost and what might yet be found.
Little did the cosmos know that the First and Last King was, in fact, not the first and last of his particular kind. Trailing after his crystal catacomb, several other glints followed.