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Jumper grew up in the wasteland.
The barren fields and creeping cold were her home until the day she left her little hometown on the edge of norwhere.
Her parents had never left Edgetown, but Jumper wanted to see the places the legends told of. She wanted to see a flower and a gem, a parrot and a cat and fish not yet rotted.
She wanted to see the land travelers spoke of.
Most of all, she wanted to feel magic.
Jumper saw travelers wielding it and some adults, too, but the wasteland didn't allow a magical core to form, even where Jumper used to live, its pull was too strong for a child's soul to resist.
The land, Jumper discovers, is more than cracked stone and withering plants, half-starved wildlife and the endless, lung-biting, bone-dry cold underneith the lightless, cloudless, starless, all-consuming sky.
Nature can be beautiful and colourful and simply full.
Filled with life and filled with people and with so much to discover.
Filled with so many people to discover, coincidentally.
And, of course, the magic.
Magic!
In the wasteland, there was no magic.
Feeling it flow through her body for the first time, Jumper knows that she wants to become and adventurer.
Become an adventurer and hunt down the monster responsible for the wasteland and for depriving everyone in it of warmth and of food and of water and of magic.
She reads about monsters, the effects they have on the surrounding world.
Unnatural beings as they are, they twist the fabric of reality.
Withers make every plant rot and every living thing die, most adventurers fighting them are marked by white streaks in their hair or wrinkles on youthful faces, their body having decayed rapidly.
The same can be observed in those being attacked by withers.
Warden's take the sight of those lingering to long, many people living above their lairs unknowingly are known to go blind.
Statistically, mass blindness is the most common way Warden's are found.
All this, Jumper has read about on her way to find a good book about the Dragon.
Many books have been written on the topic.
Most fail at getting even the barest facts about the wasteland corrrect, let alone saying anything factually proven about the Dragon.
What little she finds burried deep in the darkest parts of the library is more about the dangers of the wasteland itself. The further you venture into it, the more the world corrupts. She reads the the shadow creatures and the lack of a life, the cold freezing blood in your veins and how your magic core no longer refills.
The shadow creatures she dares to doubt, the rest sounds believable enough, mere extensions of what she knows to be true.
It is all so terribly fascinating!
Yet so far, none have laid eyes on the Dragon and lived to tell the tale.
If Jumper suceeds in her mission, she will write a book about it. It will he well-researched and she'll make sure it's all true and factually accurate and it will be perfect.
But first, she'll need to find fellow adventurers willing to take on this quest alongside her.
The first is Pentar. A knight stemming from another edgetown (and it is only know that both of them discover that this town name is truly more of a catch-all then a useful town city name). Knowing the wasteland, they shared the same hoal from the beginning.
Rounding out their numbers are the mages Ash Swag and Squiddo, the latter of which expressed interest in learning to use the magic inane to monsters and hoping to learn more about it from the dragon. Jumper isn't sure how to feel about that.
They pack magic crystals in case their cores really stop regenarating by themselves, pack thick furs and warming gems, pack spare weapons and supplies.
Then their journey begins.
The last time Jumper remembers being this excited was when she left her hometown for the capital city Spawn and the Academy for Magic Crafts.
Now she leaves in direction of her homeland, but, more importantly, the path beyond it.
---
Apart from being for a noble cause, a quest like this has the advantage of finally getting to make friends.
In their time on the road, Jumper gets to know her questmates as she has never known another friend before.
It makes spotting growing tension easy.
The tension that linger in Jumper's own mind, too.
Its root is a single, simple, four-word question.
The question: 'Should we turn around?'
Their magic cores have indeed stopped regenerating. Worse: Jumper has felt her own magic levels falling, without using any spells. Her questmates report the same, which is also evidenced by the lack of light emitting from the magic crystals and, more actively pressing, the lack of warmth produced by the warming gems.
The land sucks magic out, instead of just preventing it from refilling.
Maybe Jumper should have expected it.
But regret doesn't stop her shivering nor her fear as they leave the mountains behind them.
The shadow creatures are real, Jumper can now confirm.
She wished they weren't.
Ash used the last of his magic to half-heal the bite in Pentar's right arm. It wasn't even enough for a dull recovery.
He had caught one of the creatures with his eyes and it had just— Jumper doens't quite now how to describe it.
It had shrieked, stirring up dust and tearing apart the mountain side, yellow stones rushing downhill towards them in an avalanche.
They had run and the creature gave chase, not quite running, not quite not. It seemed to always appear ahead. It's lower jaw connected to its skull only by shadowy threads, where a mouth shut have been there was only black.
It looked just human enough to be recognizable, yet it so obviously wasn't. It made spiders crawl down Jumper's spine.
They stumbled away from it and into one of the many mattly opaque creaks flowing through cracks in the stone.
It hadn't followed them, allowing Squiddo to poke it until it scattered into dust.
Barely visible against the horizon, dark pillars loom in the distance.
It has been seven sleep cycles since then.
She sees her own fingers start to darken, an unnatural fear overcomes her everytime she sets foot into the cold water, even though the cold bothers her elss with every day.
She doesn't mention it.
They're too close to turn around.
They're here.
Jumper is the first to step into the cirle of pillars, taking care to step around the holes surrounding them.
In the very center lies a circles of worldstone, surrounding a pillar of the same in its middle. Black vines quiver and stretch from it. Reaching for something, yet kept abay, a strange imitation of a fountain.
Atop the pillar sits a man.
He looks no older than Jumper, but as he raises his head, in his glowing eyes lies evidence of an eternity.
Jumper wants to scream— no, to screech— as their eyes meet.
Where was the dragon?
She tears her eyes away from the stranger's gaze, scanning the area.
A dragon lies behind the fountain.
Somehow, it seems smaller than Jumper expected.
Smaller and deader.
Very dead, infact.
"Is it dead?", Squiddo asks.
"And who's that?", Pentar adds, gesturing towards the stranger.
The whole situation seems surreal.
Has their goal already been completed?
But the wasteland was still there!
Despite knowing, Jumper looks down at the crumbly floor then up at the black sky.
The wasteland was just as there as it ever was.
"Who are you?!", Ash shouts across the twenty blocks or so between their position and the fountain. The stranger.
Jumper wonders why he didn't simply walks closer. At the same time, she doens't need an answer. She doesn't want to get any closer either. It feels as if her feet are glued onto the floor. Something about the stranger seems repulsing, forcing her away.
Like a monster. A strong one, at that.
That is the moment Jumper notices the black tail curled around the steanger's legs. The dark horns sticking up from his waterfall of hair the same colour, almost invisible. Behind his back hangs a pair of leathery wings, clawed and looking just like those of the dead dragon.
What was going on here?
Everything was wrong here.
There weren't supposed to be humans here, and thsre weren't any monsters that looked this close to humans.
The stranger's voice is a deep growl, "You should leave."
He averts his eyes and Jumper's legs threaten to fail beneath her as the weight of his eyes lifts away feom her shoulders.
What was he?
"What?", Pentar asks.
"You don't have long", the stranger says. Was that a threat?
"You are void-touched. Soon, you will join the shadowmen. You have seen them surely?"
He looks back at them.
"You fear the water and feel no hunger, your skin darkens, you hate locking eyes. You will turn soon, unless you leave."
"Then why are you here?", Jumper can't help but ask.
And why hasn't he turned yet?
"I am the Dragon", the man answers as if that explains anything. Spread out and flared, his wings seem enourmous. And threatening.
His tail swishes.
Like this, Jumper can imagine him as a monster.
But it's all not adding up.
The stranger was unmistakenably a human.
Or had been, at one point.
"But why?!", she asks.
She just wants answers. Why was anything fo thsi happeneing at all?
"A long story. Too long, for you. You should leave."
Jumper doesn't want to leave.
She has stepped forward without noticing and has to glance over her shoulder to catch a glimpse of her questmates.
Pentar leans on Ash, the wound on his arm infected, spreading black tendrils. He had only gotten worse over the last days, murmuring and muttering to himself.
Guilt hits Jumper. They should have turned aeound when he started getting back.
Instead, she had told him, "Hold on a little longer." And repeated it each day. How was she so blind?
Ash and Squiddo too are worn down. Ash is stressed in Pentar's torn coat after having swapped them. Both of them are thin. Too thin with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, shivering.
Just like Jumper's, her questmates fingers are tinged black, as if dead.
"You should leave", the stranger says, softly this time.
Jumper looks back at him again to see him smile.
He looks sad. Lonely, almost. Melancholic.
Junper wants answers, but...
She looks back at her questmates.
She won't sacrifice their lives for it.
Jumper takes Pentar's other arm.
They leave.