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From atop a veritable mountain of his brothers’ corpses, Seath the Scaleless looked out over the battlefield. For eons, he had suffered their ridicule for his defects—his smooth, bright skin; his serpentine extremities; his reliance on learned magics in place of inherent abilities. Over that time, their reign had remained unchallenged. In their complacency, Seath had seized his restitution by force.
Out of an abundance of caution, Seath had avoided participating in the battle directly. Rather than potentially endanger himself, he had served as adviser to Lord Gwyn. He had shown him and his soldiers where to aim their lighting bolts in order to strip the dragons’ scales from their flesh. Now, glutted on the satisfaction of victory, Seath levied that knowledge to claim his prize.
Seath dug his needle-sharp talons under one of the corpses’ stone scales and ripped it from the skin. He admired its dull, grey surface—rough as unworked stone. Seath held it over a spot on his forearm and imagined himself clothed horn-to-tail in them. The spoils of the war would do well in covering his chloric, oily skin - the moon-pale wellspring of all his grief.
As Seath rotated the scale to test different angles of grain, a clump of dirt crumbled off his trophy. He ran a finger over the scale to wipe the grime of battle away, but the more he brushed, the thinner the scale grew. It was not dirt caked into its grooves: the scale was disintegrating.
Tossing the damaged flake aside, Seath tore another scale from the corpse beneath him. It too crumbled to dust. Fistful over fistful of scales he ripped up, only to find that not one maintained its form. It was not Gwyn’s lightning that had compromised their integrity. The Lord of Sunlight’s mighty bolts left charred streaks in the flesh wherever they struck. The scales were an organ and, like any other, could not persist without their hosts. Even in death, Seath’s kin mocked him for what he lacked.
Closing his fist around a scale until it was ground into nothing, blinding fury boiled up in Seath’s chest. Throwing back his head, Seath roared to the heavens. The ground shook with his fury and sorrow. All of it - the planning, the dealing, the mound of sacrifices upon which he now sat - was for naught. The dragon’s shrieks echoed out in all directions, bearing his malice, until they faded on the wind.
Rushing in to fill the vacuum left by Seath’s sorrowful cries, a low and bruiting wheeze rolled in like thick fog to swallow Seath whole. It crept over the bodies stacked beneath his crystalline core and floated up to encircle his throat.
“I smell your rot, Gravelord,” Seath growled, blowing back the fingers of dark miasma with a snort. “Do not think you can overtake me so easily—not even in my time of grief.”
Dozens of humanoid skeletons pushed their way out from between the dragons’ corpses in a grotesque mockery of birth. Pulling one another in to embrace until one could scarcely be discerned from the whole, they coalesced into a form reminiscent of a towering humanoid, as though emulating the stature of the giants. The black fog that had heralded their meddling receded from around Seath, settling instead onto the skeletal figure’s shoulders like a cloak. The Gravelord Nito—first among the dead—now stood fully before him.
“What ails ye, Traitor? Do thy ill-gotten gains not sate thee?” the skull at the peak of the collective rattled.
Seath snarled at him.
“You think to chide me?” the dragon demanded. “You may be a lord, but you are an infant as compared to myself. I have watched, waited, and endured eons - all for this one chance. You, who rose again unsatisfied to have lived and died in your measure, have no pulpit from which to lecture me on satisfaction!”
The pile of bones did nothing but grind its vertebrae together in a facsimile of a laugh.
“However much thou loathe thy nature, thou’rt incontrovertibly a dragon. To assist in bringing their demise to fruition…” Nito clicked his teeth together disapprovingly. “Thou’rt first among fools, ahahahah!”
Seath turned his frame with surprising swiftness. With a swipe of his tails, he scattered Nito’s constituent parts across the ground. Bones tumbled down the hill of flesh as the skeletons grasped at one another desperately. Within seconds, however, the Gravelord had reformed.
“Such impulsivity. ‘Tis no wonder thou could not foresee such an outcome to thy craven scheme,” Nito taunted.
Seath bristled. The petals lining his pseudopods stood on end.
“It is you who is the fool. You, first among an entirely new breed, and yet you cannot fathom the implications of your own birth. The sparking of the First Flame burned the end of my kin into the annals of history, plain as day for all with eyes to see. Our enemies would have, in time, realized that the introduction of death to this once eternal world was as pitiless and thorough as the flames it sprang from. If not me, then another. If not a traitor, then dumb luck. All I did was sense the change in the air and ensure that I stood upwind of the fires.”
A flash of lightning in the distance suddenly commanded their attention. Seath and Nito both turned at the rumble of thunder across the scorched battlefield that followed.
“We question if thou hast truly done thyself the favour thou expects,” Nito said, breaking the reverent pause. “Gwyn shall have his kingdom. The Witch shall have her tinder. We shall follow close behind, patiently harvesting the fallen from their wake. But what of thou? Thy plan is already naught but ash on thy tongue.”
Prismatic flashes of light raced across Seath’s pale skin as it reflected the glow of the lightning striking the horizon.
“I shall have Gwyn. All under his rule shall be within my reach. I shall have magic - pure and untainted by your worldly elements. The subjects of his kingdom shall become subjects of my experiments. I shall have knowledge; the knowledge to reshape the world to my will. And when the end of this era comes, when your pitiful souls have been reduced to ash by your ambitions, I alone shall have the means to carry on. I shall gather the ashes of this world and from them build my own.”
Nito clapped his one skeletal hand against the side of the massive, calcified scythe attached to the end of his other arm.
“Thou hast thought out at least one portion of thy plan, We see. A pity the first step had not been lavished with such consideration. If youthful insight may to aged wisdom one last warning tender, remember this: there are no whole eggs in a broken nest.”
Cackling, Nito raised his arms into the air, summoning a dark wind. Seath lashed out one last time with a claw, but hit only air as the Gravelord discoporated into the black mist. Seath peered about until the derisive laughter had faded completely.
The dragon - last now of his kind - took a deep breath of the blood-tinged smoke filling the air. He would show the talking corpse who the fool really was. He would show them all. The last to ridicule him lay broken in a pile beneath his naked belly. He had killed the unkillable without lifting so much as a claw. He would show death that it was no more absolute than the eternity it had overthrown.