Ch.2 — Ancient Elder (Updated)

Before the sun rose the baby black dragon got back up again. He decided to give another shot at getting some meat. No matter his hunger, exhaustion, or pain he kept nibbling at the flesh of its former kin in an attempt to tear a piece off.

At noon its effort finally managed to bear fruit as it managed to separate a bit of flesh. Greed filled its eyes for a moment before it calmed down, it felt like it needed to be careful so it could peel as much flesh as possible from this to eat.

So, it began moving sideways, nearly stumbling along the way. Its aim was to peel as much flesh as it could off. Unfortunately, despite its best efforts it still didn't manage to get much. It started crying as it was distressed… it really just wanted to eat!

After crying for several minutes it slowly stopped, it gobbled up what little meat it was able to get and began trying to nibble for more. By nightfall, it only managed to get a few strings of flesh as thick as a small marble with each of them a couple of inches long. While this was enough to feed it for now it was nowhere near enough for it to be filled up.

It spent a couple of hours opening up a couple more scales before going back to sleep under its dead mother's wing. This cycle continued for a week, it would wake up, pry the flesh from the dead corpse of its kin and go to bed under its mother once more. Of course, it also got water from the rain since it seemed to rain almost every night.

In this week it had gained about 3 kilograms, and some of its teeth were barely starting to grow in. This helped it in peeling scales and flesh off. Life got a bit easier as time went on for it, it now only needed about half an hour to remove one of the scales from the dead dragons.

Today though, it had the urge to explore a bit. It decided to head to a thing it had somehow come to recognize as a rock. Except for it, this rock felt strange and mysterious. For starters, it was huge, about a kilometer tall with many cubes stacked on one another, each slightly smaller than the last.

Thus it decided to give this a new name… A temple!

The temple seemed to be very shiny, the walls seemed to be made of polished black marble with gold accenting the thing. The temple had 7 floors. After circling around the temple he noticed that there were arches on all 4 sides, unfortunately, they were filled in with black marble. It frowned, it felt like he should be able to enter it somehow. He kept inspecting every inch of the thing for some reason. Eventually, he accidentally stepped on a sword hidden under dirt, etc. The sword was still sharp though and split open his front right paw.

He hissed venomously at the sword attempting to kick it away, but that only made it worse as he cut open another paw. Blood dripped on the ground, and gradually flowed through the grooves between the stone slabs. Pouting the dragon just began walking away. He wanted to go rest under his mother's wing again where he felt safe and lick his wounds.

However he suddenly heard a strange humming sound, turning behind him the black marble-filled arches suddenly began transforming into doors. The runes engraved on the gold that made up the arches lit up a crimson red one by one.

It was then the doors on his side of the temple slammed open bringing forth what seemed like a mighty gale that nearly knocked him off his feet. He had to use his wings to form a sort of windshield making it so the wind flew past him.

Even then, he was still nearly knocked off his feet by the 2nd gale of wind that formed when a crimson vortex appeared in that archway as a minor shock wave spread out. The archway itself was 30 meters tall, a testament to the true size of the temple.

The baby started shivering, it felt afraid. On the other side of the massive amalgamation of swirling lights, it felt a powerful aura.

*THUD*

*THUD*

*THUD*

Loud steps could be heard from the other side of the vortex and they were getting progressively louder. Right now, the dragon was in a dilemma. Its mind and body were fighting each other, one wanted to run the other wanted to stay. In the end… the side that wanted to stay won as a slender head began appearing from the crimson rift. The head mainly had shiny black scales with some golden scales on its chin leading down to its stomach.

She had amber pupils which widened in shock as she observed the scene around her. Despite the fog that was rolling in, this dragon could see everything within the canyon, thus she was able to see all the dead dragons around. She quickly stepped out of the portal revealing her massive yet slender hill-sized figure.

It only took a moment for her to get over her shock though, there was no point dwelling on the situation. She was an experienced immortal, having existed for nearly 10,000 years. Such scenes were all too common in this world, she just didn't expect it to happen to her own clan. From the looks of it, none of them could even react before their souls were destroyed by some powerful force.

She narrowed her eyes, this was done by someone capable of summoning very powerful lightning.

She went into thought thinking about possible perpetrators. It was then her attention was brought back to the baby dragon, and she realized it probably wasn't even 2 weeks old. Yet the corpses were probably a month old. This brought her a little hope, perhaps there were other eggs who survived. Focusing she spread her senses across the entire chasm and noticed 4 eggs and broken bits of a 5th one. Presumably, this was the one the baby dragon in front of her crawled out of.

Using her immortal sense, which could communicate through intent, she began speaking to the baby.

("Do you know what happened?") She asked calmly with a soothing and pleasant voice.