3 years ago
The temple was dust now. Wind hissed between cracked stones, sweeping ash over the bones of the fallen, Akira walked alone - 'why always alone' -, his tattered sandals crunching against shattered idols and broken timepieces---remnants of a people who once bent the heavens with prayer, discipline, and strength. His clan was gone; Father is gone died in battle before this ruin and mother's death due to body sickness - 'Poison' - longer before him. He is all that remains, the last of the Starseers, raised on prophecy and silence, now wondering amidst ruin, following whispers only he could hear.
His family's bloodline was blessed with their ancestors' triumph. Granted a covenant with something far older than he could imagine. Outsiders would think they worshipped one they dared not name aloud – a dragon who ruled neither sky nor fire, but space and time itself.
Akatosh.
The murals on the walls still bled their story, even though smoke. A great dragon like twin eclipses, a man of starlight, wings curved like the wings of Saturn. Around her, twelve others–vast, unknowable beings orbiting her like planets. Each one a god. Never slain.
Akatosh chose to be bound, and it chose his clan to guard her slumber.
"hmph ironic, the predator guarding its prey" I say out loud as if someone can hear. -'they can't there dead, food to the vultures now'
Slowly approaching the staircase, he looks in the vast darkness below. The smell of burning flesh sizzling on hot metal still penetrating my nostrils. The smoke of burning cinder stinging my eyes and clouding my vison. The steps descended beneath the central altar, hidden by a false wall and veiled in illusion. Akria didn't hesitate. The deeper he wants, the quieter the world became, until even the sound of breath felt like sacrilege. The air was cold, ancient. The haunting whispers getting louder, screeches mix in with wild non-understandable mumbling. The walls were inked with constellations that did not match the night sky-perhaps ones that no longer existed or had yet to be born.
At the end, past shattered pillars etched with constellations and forgotten prayers, stood a door unlike any other. Towering and circular, it was forged not of mere stone, but of starlit obsidian veined with threads of glowing pearls faintly like constellations in deep space. Around its circumference, dragon eyes were sculpted in exquisite forms the that gave the emotional impression of relief, anger, and ... "love"?
They were arranged like the hours on a celestial clock, their lids shut tight in eternal slumber. At the center of the door, a spiral insignia pulsed—a symbol of the Akat'koshari, the clan who was just torn apart by a 12-year-old boy. At the base of this great structure jutted a solemn altar: a polished plinth of meteoric glass shaped like an open dragon's maw. Its teeth, long and jagged, formed a perfect ring, and its tongue—a ridged, obsidian basin—waited in silence. In the back of the throat, the sigil of Akatosh shimmered like a dying star. The mouth was not static; it seemed to breathe faintly and react to my presents, as if the stone remembered hunger.
I approached, heartbeat thrumming with anxiety.
'I must not fear, fear corrupts, halting the soul, limiting the mind, destroying the nerves. I must keep moving forward.'
Drawing my blade, I sliced my palm and letting the blood fall into the open maw. The moment the drops struck the basin; the dragon's mouth shuddered as if it was being pleasured just by the taste of my blood. I couldn't help but twist my face in disgust. Lines of light snaked through the altar like veins awoken, spiraling outward across the floor and up the door like a living constellation.
The twelve sculpted eyes snapped open—one by one—with no sound, only a gravitational pull, as though the world itself tilted forward in reverence. The sigils beneath them ignited in pale, celestial fire, illuminating the temple's dark atmosphere with the cold, endless glow of the stars. Time twisted. Space shivered. And far beyond the veil of now, something impossibly old stirred and remembered its name. Understanding it's self-promises and already knowing the path forward.
The entrance had closed behind him like the final stroke of an hour. Before him stretched a chamber built in defiance of the world outside—a temple carved not by hands, but by divine precision. Its vast, cathedral-like walls were neither stone nor metal, but a seamless fusion of obsidian glass veined with starlight. Pillars shaped like coiling dragons spiraled upward, their maws agape toward the heavens, each fang a chime frozen in the act of ringing.
The ceiling was a celestial dome—no mere vault but a moving sky. Constellations flowed across it, gliding like slow water, mirroring stars no longer seen in Eldrinth night. The floor below was a vast mosaic of galaxies, unfurling in slow spirals, nebulae stitched with threads of silver and amethyst. Beneath his boots, time itself seemed to murmur.
In the center of this sacred sphere floated the blade.
It did not rest on a pedestal or shrine, but hovered suspended within a ring of golden light, rotating so slowly it might have taken hours for a full turn. Runes swirled around it like orbiting planets, ancient and fluid, flickering between languages never spoken aloud.
Time warped in this place. The air was thick with stillness, yet it buzzed with impossible energy. Near the far wall, an hourglass stood nine feet tall, forged of bone and glass. Its sand flowed upward—forever mid-pour, golden grains frozen in rebellion against gravity. A clock with no hands clicked once every century. A flame flickered beneath water. Nothing moved as it should.
The blade itself was impossible to describe.
Elegant. Shifting. Unknowable.
Its form changed when not directly observed—now long and graceful, now curved like a falcon's talon, now jagged like a bolt of lightning. Its metal was dark as the void between stars, edged with a faint corona of pale fire. Beneath its surface, stars swam—alive, drifting slowly like souls in black water. Symbols etched into the flat pulsed with a breath-like rhythm, as though the sword exhaled between centuries.
He approached.
A shallow basin stood before the blade, carved from a single scale of an ancient dragon. The rim bore inscriptions in the — Tharaan'Teysa language only used by dragon and essence holder - Veylathi "Those Shown Divine Will" He knew, without knowing how, that this was the Offering Bowl. The place where the pact was sealed.
He bit his thumb and let the blood drip.
Each drop rang like a bell.
The blood hissed as it touched the scale, spreading through the engravings like wildfire, until the ring of light around the blade flared, and the sword slowly descended—awaiting his grasp.
He reached forward.
And touched the hilt.
Reality cracked.
He was no longer in the sanctum.
No longer in his body.
He plummeted through infinite dark—past rivers of glass stars and broken hours. He fell through ages—through yesterdays that hadn't happened, and tomorrows already forgotten. He drifted in a place between existence and dreams.
Where she waited.
Akatosh was watching.
A dragon, vast beyond comprehension, unfurled across the firmament. Her wings arched through dimensions, brushing the fading embers of unborn suns. Her scales shimmered with the light of memories not yet lived. Her horns were spires of constellations, each turning in perfect orbit.
She was terrifying. Beautiful. Infinite.
And she did not speak.
She showed.
The beginning.
When the stars were still young. When time bled unformed into the void. Space screamed in chaos.
From that storm she rose—Akatosh, the Architect of Continuity, The First Starseer. She gathered time like clay and shaped it into order. She silenced the madness of unstructured reality and made it march to rhythm. She wound the first clock. She drew the first breath of linearity.
From her breath came the feeling of gravity, flame, void, and voice. Fragments of her will, each bearing a piece of her laws.
But omnipotence is weight.
And gods too must break.
So, she shattered herself into legend. She poured herself into a vessel—not stone, nor scroll—but blade.
Tiidkosaar.
That she might understand mortality. That she might understand HIS Mind, Suffering. Triumph. And death.
To witness change.
She chose his clan. Chose HIM.
She slept, wrapped in the blade like a dragon beneath a mountain, dreaming the fate of many worlds.
He was not her wielder.
He was her vessel.
H̵̢͎̼̳̎͆̔̌ɘ̵̧̺͕̟͋̿̚͝ ̵̢͙̹͈̔͂̒̋ẅ̴͎̦̳͉͂͂̒ɒ̵̛̲̗̗͉̅̾͗ƨ̴̢͓̫͙̍̓̊̿ ̵̢̙̞̲͗̓͗̅H̷̺̮͇͉͋̄̃͘Ǝ̵͈͕̲͍̀̚͝͝Я̵̨̟͕̬̆̅̉̌'̸̡̲͎̣̇̇̋̈́Ƨ̷͎͙̙̳͆̈̇͂
Akira's scream tore the silence as his spirit crashed back into his body. He collapsed, knees slamming to the sanctum's sacred floor. Sweat poured from his brow. His chest heaved like a bellows.
The sword remained in his hand.
Tiidkosaar.
It pulsed with warmth now. Not metal. Not machine.
Alive.
He stood, slowly—vision smeared with light, shadows curling at the edge of his sight. Stars still swam in his periphery. The constellations above had shifted. The room had changed.
The floor mosaic now showed him—walking across lands not yet scorched. His own face, etched in starlight, moving through ruins and storms.
The great door behind him, once sealed like a tomb, stood open.
A breeze entered—soft and reverent.
Outside, the ash-choked sky had stilled.
Even the ash waited.
Time bent subtly around him now. Moments thickened as he moved. Every blink stretched. Every heartbeat echoed.
Above, crows circled in endless spirals, trapped in some silent dance. Unbreaking. Unending.
Time itself had taken its first breath in a thousand years.