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Golden sandstone formed the walls of the softly-rounded room, with only the slightest hint of weathering near the floor where thick moss had once been. Elegant swirls were carved into the stone tile before countless draconic paws, with the two doors at opposite ends of the room having their own swirl sigils. The room rumbled as the floor split open, two halves sliding to the side as a nearly-golden statue rose from the dusty depths – bearing the silhouettes of two dragons, one bulky and one lithe.
Five dragon elders sat along the room’s edges, each one sitting underneath their own simple yet vibrant banner – but one banner lay on its own, some of the elders focusing on their absent friend while the others focused on an old wooden door.
Just as the dust seemed to settle, the door swung open, and the stocky red elder closest to it hacked and coughed while waving a wing before her face. “Some consideration, please, Anoir!”
“Oh, I believe you can handle a bit of dust,” the lithe dragoness snarked as she turned to look behind herself. “Come out, now. Don’t mind Ignistrafe,” she added as she shot the grumbling elder a withering side-eye.
A young dragoness cautiously stepped out from behind the wind elder, her twilight-blue eyes filled with wonder. Her scales were a soft shade of mulberry, her bent-back horns were an orange-ish gold, and her pinkish wings were folded loosely against her sides. Around her neck was a small amulet, and her tiny pointed snout reminded the elders of the infamous black dragoness, Cynder.
Anoir glanced up at the two statues, and the dragoness followed her gaze – and she gasped, recognizing the silhouettes of the legendary heroes, Spyro and Cynder, the duo that saved the world in ages long past.
But why was she here…?
She looked around at the other dragons. The unimpressed Ignistrafe was bulky, red and crimson speckling her scales like blood while her heavily-tattered wings hung to her side. The electric guardian (right?) was yellow underneath and black above, with a sharp head, jagged frills, and wild eyes. The chilly dragon to their side was white and blue like sunrise snow, with soft frills almost like feathers. Another was even bulkier than Ignistrafe and almost entirely brown, with mottled green like mold against their thick plating. The shortest-legged was azure blue, seafoam green, and pearly white, mottled all over like a faraway fish with the webbed fins to match. Finally, there was Anoir, the wind-breathing guardian next to her – sleek and silver with green eyes and vivid feather-tips, with feathery layers coating her wing-arms like a cloak.
The dragoness’ wings shivered. “I-I’m speechless…”
“You recognize your leaders, yes?” the ice elder asked.
“You’re the guardians!” she said. “You lived through that ancient war – you train your chosen students in the elements!”
The elders glanced at each other. “We didn’t live through Malefor’s wars, child,” the ice elder explained. “We were born long after that, in the twilight years of Spyro’s reign.” They glanced over as Anoir took her place by their side. “Does she know why she was brought here?”
Anoir nodded and whispered something the small dragoness couldn’t hear.
Her mom had tried to keep her away from Anoir, no matter how kind and gentle the guardian was, and she didn’t know why because she couldn’t hear their whispers either. Eventually, her mother nodded, told the dragoness she loved her, kissed her by her frills, and let her leave with the guardian. She remembered looking back and seeing the daisies by their home’s grassy hill.
She didn’t see her mom when she looked back.
“So my visions were correct!” the icy blue dragon said proudly, puffing out their chest. They leaned forward. “Greetings, young one. My name is Stormount. I believe you were told why you were brought here…?”
The dragoness glanced at Anoir, who nodded, and she looked back at them. “I… don’t remember why.”
Instantly, the elder frowned. As he reared back, the colorful water elder slithered in front of him, and the dragoness could make out dark blue ripple patterns along their scales. “You are a purple dragon! It is your destiny to guide the fate of the era you were born into, just like the purple dragons before you. I believe you’ve heard of the savior, Spyro? Oh, what am I saying,” they said, cutting her off, “of course you have! Now, your name is…?”
“That does not matter right now,” Ignistrafe said, nudging her compatriot out of the way with a weathered wing. “What element were you born with?”
“Fire.”
She gazed into the dragoness’ purple eyes – almost blue-leaning, unlike the red eyes of a true fire dragon, which the dragoness herself was painfully aware of. “And you know how to use it, correct?”
“I do.”
She reared back and nodded thoughtfully. “I see… But you still need to be trained in the ways of our own elements.” She got back up to her feet and leaned her head towards another door. “This way.”
In the months that followed, the dragoness tried to memorize the names of her elders – along with the techniques that they had taught her. Watchful Ignistrafe, who had taught her stealth and how to set off traps; inquisitive Shocrates, who almost went off in tangents about “advancing technology” before he remembered their training; disdainful Stormount, who drilled into her how ice could be used as a survival tool and not just a weapon; stoic Omidirir, who focused on how to use their sonic earth blasts to deal as much damage as possible; joyful Aquaestis, who taught the dragoness how to harness water-breathing… and Anoir, whose windy lessons often moved so fast that the dragoness could barely keep up.
It didn’t last long.
“Just as we’ve feared…” Ignistrafe mused one day, as the seven dragons sat before a swirling pool. “The necromancer has gained in power.”
“Austoris…?” Shocrates asked.
The dragoness didn’t recognize the name. “Who?”
“The alchemist, yes…”
“But who are they?”
The six dragons focused on their young apprentice. “Come, now,” Anoir said simply, as she stood up and headed towards the door.
“Wait-”
“This is what you’ve been trained for. I will lead you to the Silver Forest and no further.
“But why-”
“Enough,” Stormount suddenly snapped. As the dragoness scurried backwards, he regained his composure and stood tall. “If Spyro could fight a war with next to no time at all, then you can take out this flesh-melder with ease.”
She looked between the guardians, who all stared at her with unmoving expectations. She felt anxiety burrow into her very bones, but she shook it out of herself and nodded. “I’ll try.”
“You’ll succeed,” Stormount said dryly.
“Foolish whelp!” the amalgamate necromancer shouted, as the dragoness burned through the last of his defenses. He clambered backwards as the electric barriers fizzled away and his monstrous minions bled out – and his eyes narrowed as he saw the dragoness leap forward from the flames.
As she ran forward, she could see his complete form – three heads fused onto the same torso, with countless limbs, tails, and even wings sprawling from the sorcerer’s bloated torso. She grimaced and let forth a gout of flame that seared the draconic beast’s necrotic flesh… but even as his skin caught fire, he simply tilted his head and hissed quietly.
“You are a purple dragon,” he said with the voice of many.
She glared at him. “And that means I’m the one to stop you.”
He chuckled softly, then raised one gangly claw, pointing it at her as the flames engulfed his body. “You will not be free…” he said hoarsely. “Your destiny chains you to the earth. Your scales are a foundation. You will be a monument!”
She winced and looked away as his rotted corpse collapsed in on itself.
She swallowed hard as the air went quiet, the absence of wind making the dry heat run heavy. As she walked away, she realized that, in a way, he was right: she was the purple dragon meant to guide the new era, and she had enormous pawprints to fill.
The hanging heat felt like gazing eyes, and all she could picture were the temple’s statues looming far above her.
“You have done well, little one!” Shocrates chortled, as his fellows nodded in agreement.
“I always knew you could,” Aquaestis added.
The dragoness beamed proudly, puffing up her chest as she did. “I… I almost can’t believe I did!” she said. “This is almost surreal… but I think I can keep going! No – I know I can keep going!”
The elders exchanged glances… and then they all stood up and focused on her, each of them taking a step forward.
“We were hoping that was so,” Stormount said.
The dragoness looked between the six of them, and then she glanced behind herself – her back was to the wall, and the six of them had her cornered.
Anoir sighed. “I was never looking forward to this…”
“But we must,” Omiridir said. “For the future.”
She felt their eyes burn into her. “What are you talking about…?”
Anoir took a step forward as each guardian pressed a wing-thumb to their crystal amulets, the colored gems starting to glow as gray light blocked out their colors. “Look, kid…” She sighed. “We already lost Spyro. We’re not losing you.”
The dragoness flinched as the gray light hit her, but she felt nothing…
…Nothing. Nothing! She felt nothing!
She looked back and screamed as her hind legs turned to stone.
“W-wait! No, stop…! STOP!” She reared up and cried. “PLEASE!”
The six elders stepped back, gazing at the lifelike statue of a terrified dragon, her eyes frozen wide – pure gray having overtaken the dawny twilight. Most of them all nodded and quietly left the room, all except for Anoir – and the dragoness peered solemnly at the little statue.
“Your era will never end…”
The dragoness gasped as the smooth rock crumbled away from her skin, coughing and sputtering as she tried to regain her balance – and she looked up and glared at the figure before her. “You!”
The lines around Ignistrafe’s face were more pronounced, her skin sagging ever so slightly. “You are needed once more.”
Ignistrafe screamed as an icy shard shot across her eye, stumbling back as the dragoness darted across the room. The deep darkness of night hung across the temple’s stone, with just a faint blue glow coming from the elder’s mangled eye. The dragoness felt her blood boil as she snorted out elemental ice, her inner fire turning it to steam. “Why should I listen to you after what you did to me?!”
“An era cannot end if it is halted.”
The dragoness heard a rumble in the distance, and she turned and spotted a long hall before her. She stood atop the long landing balcony, seemingly long-since covered with prison walls, and the temple’s training room lay at the end of the strip… and the heroic statues had crumbled, Cynder reduced halfway to rubble while Spyro’s head lay at his feet.
She whirled around to face the weary elder, who averted her eyes until an arrow plunged through her socket and into her skull.
The dragoness lunged across the room as strange reptilian beasts broke through the old wooden door, bearing long swords and electric staves. They fell to pieces as she blasted them with the earth’s sonic fury and the wind’s raging storms, clawing through sinew and bone as her rage oozed across the floor in their bile and blood. She screamed and let out elements none would have taught her, power she didn’t even know she had, until she stood there trembling before countless bodies.
She took a deep breath and steadied herself as her knees nearly caved in on her… but when she saw the countless eyes of the elders left standing, she forced herself to run across the temple, down the strip, lunging into the air as she blasted through the wall and spread her wings…
The elders’ spell hit her spot-on, and it was Anoir who kept her from hitting the ground below.
When she awoke again, she fired a green blast at the dragon who stood before her – but she halted when she saw the lime green dragon’s bloodied face. “You’re not… one of the elders…”
The lithe dragon wiped the blood away, muttering to themself as several others came rushing up behind them – all sorts of colors and forms, so much that the dragoness couldn’t tell who was what element.
“They… died a long time ago, sweetheart,” a smaller elder said. “They’re gone.”
Gone.
They sent her on her way again, this time with a dragonfly companion; the dragoness had heard of dragonfly villages from the old swamps, but this dragonfly seemed different. Quieter. Brighter.
She saw new stone cities, taller and more sleek, with no more wild hills. No more home.
Lights glowed from within windows, brighter than candlelight but dimmer than the sun. Even her dragonfly glowed like the distant cities.
The deep woods glowed, too. Fireflies and whimsical fey flittered to and fro, with the old poison river reduced to a mundane murky green. No matter how deep she went, she could still hear their festive song echoing beyond the massive trees – the air still damp, still humid, the world still dark, but the feel of the wild dying just like-
The dragonfly chittered in her ear, and she couldn’t understand their words.
She came across a rogue elder, deep within these woods. Living within a hollowed-out tree with cauldrons and small beasts lying nearby. Standing there, pleading with her to spare them. Backing away, speaking lovingly of the wonders of nature and wild magic, and being reduced to dust the instant they pulled out a magical amulet.
As she left the elder’s hut, she took one look back and bolted for the woods, but her dragonfly glowed brighter and cast the elders’ spell themselves.
This next set of elders stood hunched over, propping themselves up with elegant wooden staves that had crystals set atop them. The gems glowed with fusions of elemental magic, countless colors swirling together like a painted storm – and though there was a rhyme and reason to their scales and frills, there was no such aura for their very powers, and the dragoness felt as if she’d been thrown upon a sickly, alien sea.
She looked back across the room, noticing the dark purple crystals that ebbed with a deep power.
“Stay away from those, little one,” an elder chastised. “We’ve taken great pains to seal away the powers of the ancients. We can’t let them run loose like they once did.”
She wanted to take the dark crystal and run far away from here.
They sent her out with a dragonfly again, and one of the elders led her out along the chilly mountain path. Stone after stone had crumbled away over the years, and the mountain’s remaining spires glittered in the sunset. There were great arches, with rippling paths to other realms - and after teaching her how to jump between them, old Odysseus gave her a few pointers and headed back into the elders’ castle, his tail swishing along the hard grasses as he disappeared into a tunnel.
She leapt into the portals, ran across realm after realm, solving mundane problems after the other until they all blurred together – for dragons, mostly, but there were now so many other creatures that her head spun until it forced her thoughts back down again.
Time, time, time was an endless depth, a constant waterfall that pulled her into its depths until she fell with the mist of everything she could no longer remember, faces and voices blurring until they bled, blending like paint, and she didn’t snap out of it until the cloaked sorcerer shot her in the wing and she felt darkness course through her veins yet again.
She hesitated to kill him, only snapping back to reality when he vanished into a portal, the magic fading with him. The dragons and the other beings cheered for her once they found her there, giving her a hero’s welcome as they led her back across the hills, and she was so numb as it was that she didn’t even realize the spell had been cast until she saw the staff pointed at her face.
And so she ran through world after world again, too dead inside to truly try to flee. She solved problem after problem, for all sorts of creatures – dragons, mostly, but there were so many other races that her mind spun with the true scope of time itself. How long had she been out?
After days if not weeks of setting things right, she ran up to a monstrous overlord and burned him to the ground. The dragons and other beings cheered for her, singing her praises, and she was so elated at the joy that she felt that she had completely forgotten about the spell.
“What do you want from me?” she asked flatly, gazing up at a fully-bipedal dragon – no staff needed to hold them up. Their colors meant nothing to her anymore; some of them had different shapes and forms, but other than that, there were no elements gleaming across their scales, nothing but the occasional spurt of flame from their maws.
“You are the purple dragon spoken of in legend, yes?” the elder asked, readjusting the glass spectacles that sat before their eyes.
“She doesn’t look purple to me,” another mused.
They didn’t even remember her.
“What do you want from me?” she asked again as the stone flecked away, gazing up at the rhino-like beings before her. They glanced at each other uneasily, and it took until they met her gaze again and a wingless dragon-like queen stood behind them that she realized-
“You’re… not dragons.”
The queen hmmphed and brandished her round-ended staff. “I’m almost surprised she was a real one,” she said to no-one.
The rhino-like beings standing before her glanced at each other. “I didn’t know it was a real dragon…”
The dragoness’ eyebrows furrowed. “Why… why wouldn’t I be?” She slowly looked around at the castle, which was shiny and polished blue, with unfamiliar banners adorning its walls. “Where are the elders?”
“The… dragons?” one of the rhinos asked.
She nodded.
Their queen loomed behind them, grinning slyly as the nearest rhino gulped. “They’ve been b-banished for centuries,” they said.
She stood there quietly.
“Now, then…”
She chuckled.
The queen and her underlings blinked as the dragoness chuckled, then laughed, cackling like a wild hyena as she threw her head up towards the ceiling. “I really did last forever!” She screamed louder. “I outlasted THEM!!”
The queen regained her composure and pointed her staff towards the dragoness, but none of her useless spells could stop the window behind them from shattering.
She wandered the world for years.
The longer she walked, the more she felt the world’s faint magics ebb against her own – and she didn’t know if it was from an eternity of stone skin, or from the death of the ancients itself, but the purple slowly bleached its way out of her very skin, with even her horns turning paler the longer she walked the earth.
Forests, deserts, mountains, across swamps, jungles, ruins and castles, old battlefields and new homes…
She didn’t know how far she’d gone. She didn’t know where she was.
She didn’t care.
She could never have remembered anyway.
On and on she traveled, numbless turning from mania to a faded awe as if she were a normal kid again, everything feeling new and wonderous and beautiful, nothing within her telling her that she didn’t belong her, that she was the Other, the Wrong One – and as the colors of the earth bloomed and spring came once more, she took in the world’s beauty for what it was.
She was alone.
A village. White walls, curved buildings, golden roofs. Curved stone.
The kindly artisans within its walls gave her warm but worried greetings. She didn’t understand why they would worry – their art was beautiful, these dragons were a lovely bunch, the landscape was a wonder in and of itself…
The local nanny asked her if she needed a home, nearly pleaded with her. Home? But she was an explorer! Everything was her home!
The longer she stayed out of curiosity, the more she watched them build and organize and create, the more familiar these walls felt to her. She wondered offhandedly if she would find her mother in the nearby hills.
She had a mom, right?
She watched over the eggs in the nursery, she looked over the local jewelry but always kept her little amulet, she said a happy hello to the fuzzy little professor that came into town one day.
A local elder told her of the nearby swamp, a formidable place – but not to worry, one of his fellow elders lived there and was well-educated in with its inner workings. She nodded and told him she would never ever head into that swamp.
She met another dragon her age, but he seemed pretty rough-and-tumble. A little bit too loud.
She never left that village.
She often sat under one of the trees – the one that bloomed the prettiest in the spring, with soft daisies growing alongside its old roots. She liked to look up at the cloudy sky and weave flower crowns, but no matter what she did she always felt like there was something missing from her life, something she should have had or something she should have been. She always remembered the color purple – it was her favorite. Gems, maybe? A new amulet, perhaps.
She’d heard rumors about an old dragon elder spreading dark purple gems everywhere. Was that it? Dark magic sure did sound alluring! She’d have to keep an eye out for them.
The pieces didn’t truly click together until that purple-scaled, yellow-horned, go-getter dragon kid came romping on through and caught her eye.
“Excuse me,” she said shyly. “Could I happen to get your name?”
He raised an eyebrow as he looked over at her. “Uh, yeah,” he finally said. “It’s Spyro.”
Spyro.
Spyro!
She’d heard of him before – Spyro, the hero Spyro, savior of the realms Spyro!
She felt her heart skip a beat, and as her scaly cheeks flushed and a strange feeling of fire welled up within her, he tilted his head and gave her an odd look. “So what’s your name?”
She blinked and smiled wide.
“My name is Ember!”