Destiny I

John chomped on the fire bats he had beaten in the inside of the Gravship.

Miraculously, even with burned out chunks of warped metal tattering the ship's surface on top of the ship's know reputation for being more than a little faulty, the ship still managed to stay afloat.

Though the ride was a little more turbulent now. Not that John minded much. He munched on a crisped fire bat leg, having cooked it with his solar beam breath. Tasted like chicken, oddly.

And maybe it was because he had been human once, but he far preferred nicely seared meat over raw flesh, though honestly, he was starting to develop a taste for raw food too.

Being a dragon sure was convenient. He could eat whatever he wanted whenever without worrying about whether it would mess his stomach up.

Plus, there was something about hunting his own food that made it a lot more satisfying to eat than buying up the cheapest groceries to scrape by every month. He felt like he was enjoying the fruits of his labor and not just trying to survive off the bare minimum given to him.

Hemet ate some fire bat meant too beside him, and normally, John would have talked to the guy, but currently, he was busy speaking with Mel in his head.

'So, Mel, now that I'm a Wyrmling, how much time do you have before you have to leave me?' asked John as he checked his status just to get a sense of where he was at essence wise and how far he needed to go.

>>>

*Essence Obtained: +300*

Essence Level: 1650/10,000 > 1950/10,000

Current Evolutionary Stage: Wyrmling

Next Evolutionary Stage: Greater Wyrmling

>>>

Huh, thought John. Looked like there were intermediary stages for draconic evolution too. He would not immediately ascend into an entirely different type of dragon but instead had to reach a 'greater' stage first.

[Now that you have become a Wyrmling, you will find that you must ascend past intermediary evolutionary stages before fully reaching a higher threshold of draconic being.

Your next full evolutionary stage will be that of the Drake, and there, you will gain your second horn and ever more of your might] said Mel, predicting John's question.

Looked like Mel was starting to get to know John and know what he was thinking and ask before he even got to it himself.

[As for my status] said Mel. [I am supposed to be with you only until you reach the Wyrmling stage, that is true. However, the amount of magical energy invested into this shard of my being was to last for ten days. It has only been three days so far, however, for you have far exceeded the rate of growth I initially expected of you.

For the seven remaining days, I can continue to guide you if you so desire]

'Yeah, that'd be really helpful,' said John 'I still don't know almost anything about the world around me. You said before about how I should remember that I'm now a dragon and that everyone will treat me as such.

It sounded like being a dragon meant it would put a huge target on my back.

I can already tell from people trying to hunt me that that's true, but there should be more context to it, right? You were going to tell me more about my purpose, too, before the bats showed up.'

[Indeed] said Mel. [I will tell you briefly of our kind. For ten thousand years, we lived upon the body of our Great Elder Voluntorillycanth, the only dragon whose authority is beyond that of the Dragon Monarchs.

It is said that Voluntorillycanth hailed not from this realm, but another, one with another sun, with another set of worlds and beings vastly different from those here.

It is known not even to the Four Monarchs why the Great Elder came upon Hyperia, but what is known is that he seeded life upon his body, and from him, the first four Dragon Monarchs were hatched, and from them, all dragon kind.

Born from the might of the Great Elder, we dragons were mighty almost beyond compare, but that might isolated us from the worlds of this realm.

We thought ourselves too great to deal with the lowly ordeals of the lesser races and their petty conflicts.

We spread among them, enjoyed ourselves, uplifted some of them, destroyed others, and did as we pleased throughout their long histories.

We saw countless species rise to kingdom hood and then fall into utter extinction.

We saw as some managed to escape the boundaries of their worlds, to conquer them and travel through the starry void.

We saw as others failed to take over their worlds, the planetary guardians and monsters simply too strong for any one people to overcome.

And throughout all this time, we amused ourselves by interfering with the lessers.

Among our kind, some were revered as deities, others as incarnations of destruction, particularly when time passed and our older dragons entered the End of their years, throwing themselves into self-destructive blazes of glory against other races so that they could face their deaths in battle.

We both saved and destroyed the lives of those beneath us, but I should say that where we saved millions, we killed billions]

'Billions? Well damn, I can understand why everyone fears dragons just a little,' said John, but what Mel said about the End of dragon lives caught his attention. 'And what's that about the End of years? Are dragons not immortal?'

[Dragons vary vastly in power. The vast majority of dragons are not truly immortal, though all are incredibly long lived.

Only the direct lineage of the Four Monarchs are truly immortal, and even then, immunity to age does not mean immunity to destruction itself.

For example: the original generation of the Four Monarchs have long fallen. Struck down by gods, by the united efforts of the stronger Majoris, and the like.

Your father, the Dragon Monarch of the West, was the fourth to take the title, a full eight thousand years after the first Monarchs were hatched by the Great Elder.

After your father had lived two thousand long years, it became apparent that this ream was soon to enter a conflict of cataclysmic scale.

The races that we dragons thought of for many millennia as toys and simpletons had now advanced and grown in the blink of an eye, their lives having been protected and nurtured by the Angels who sought neutrality among intelligent peoples.

But now that they have prospered, they sought only to conquer each other, to bare their fangs and weapons and tools upon each other.

The neutrality of the Angels to nurture life failed, for life nurtured only sought to tear itself down.

Once, the Angels believed that by nurturing lives, the different peoples would come together in understanding, but their naivete was not rewarded.

Thus, the Angels enacted one final rule: the Finalis.

A means to settle the conflicts welling up between the races.

An all-encompassing battle wherein at a determined time, a tear in space would open, and in this void, the battlefield of the Finalis would lie.

A final confrontation where every race of the Majoris would join and fight to vie for supremacy.

The race that emerged victorious would possess the right to reign over the entire realm, to shape it and the lives remaining as they wished.

All those that fell in the Finalis would have their souls kept in stasis by the Angels, prevented from fighting further but ready to be resurrected at the conflict's end]

'Like a giant simulation battle,' noted John 'A simulation to show who comes out on top.'

[Indeed.

The only condition that bound the winner of the Finalis would be that once the conflict was over and power invested to them, that they would not reduce the number of total lives in the realm by over fifty percent throughout their reign]

'Fifty percent? So the Angels were willing to let half of this solar system just die?' said John

[The Angels think in terms of absolute numbers, not relative, my child.

They deemed that should full scale, proper conflict occur across all the Majoris, then over ninety percent of life would be eliminated, with a high chance of all life across the entire realm fading.

The Finalis system, the Angels believed, was the best way to preserve life in absolute terms, and the Majoris agreed upon its terms]