Reiandyl rhyn Tandem
Pronounced "Ray-und-Dill Rinn Tan-Deem"

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No stories are spoken of deserters and oathbreakers.

No clan shall speak their name, no creature of wing and scale shall harbor them nor grant them comfort, no mercy shall be allotted them in life and in death.

So it was spoken years ago, when power first rest in our heavenly forms; rules to protect and embolden those pitiable creatures whose likeness is a cruel facsimile of our own. Dragonborn. They sprinkle across their islands, scrounging and uniting and facing their ends with admirable courage. Our courage, gifted and rising like flames in their hearts.

But our magic faded, it broke, and with it our minds and eyes failed us.

Their actions are strange to me now, as if looking down on the world through a clouded lens. To my fading mind I sense for the first time some danger, some plot below. Pain, and agony intertwined as our people fight and die for something else. Something beyond our divine view. What few sparks of defiance in the face of a culture turned to a machine are fewer and far between, and with their passing I can feel our power wane.

Gods, we were. Gods, we are only barely.

Fear takes me. Me, who rose with the night and set with the day.

Fear takes me. Me, who listened for hundreds of years to the terrified prayers of a doomed people.

Fear takes me. Me, whose mercurial wings once cast away the encroachment of that terminal blackness. My enemy, that cold and quiet night.

Those whose sparks still shine in their souls, I see them fall until the final lights dim and flicker. Stolen away by death and scattered from the world. I rise in the night and all I can do is cry out as the count grows smaller, those who know me by more than name growing ignorant or old or falling in their unknowable war. I feel it wrapping around me, a tangible nothingness, a veil of peaceful black, a funeral shroud whose material is obsolescence.

Fear takes me.

Fear cannot have me.

I plan, I plot, I wait.

And when the right pawn is in position, when his green eyes look to the sky and shout out in anguish, when his world is brought down around him and all he can feel is alone, when he is ready to give anything for the touch of some lost connection to home...

I will be there.

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Artist is  comicyoshi2002! I'm incredibly happy to have worked with her on this, as other works in her gallery have turned out equally phenomenal and the style is a delightfully stylish. Go check out her page!