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.

Thusly it was spoken years ago when power first rest within our heavenly forms, rules to protect and embolden those pitiable creatures whose likeness is a cruel facsimile of our own. Dragonborn. Creatures born unto the appearance of gods, sprinkled across our islands to scrounge and civilize and love and die, facing their ends with admirable courage - our courage - gifted to them and rising like flames in their hearts.

But our divinity faded, it broke with the world, and with it our minds grew stagnant and eyes betrayed us.

Creatures I once knew by name now perform actions strange to me, as if looking down on the world through clouded and cracked glass. My fading mind may sense for the first time danger, some plot of our lesser kin below. I feel pain, agony washing through me as intertwined our people fight and die for something else. For someone else. Something beyond our divine view.

What few sparks of defiance and remembrance in the face of a culture that once revered us are turned to a singular mind, a machine of bodies and steel that sets its sights upon lands we never dared to touch. Days passed like breaths and by the time we felt the grasp of our memory slipping from those we created, only I understood our imminent fate.

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 souls still bear the marking of our influence, I see them fall until the final flickerings dim and extinguish. Stolen away by death and scattered from the world. I rise in the night and cry out as the count grows ever smaller, my voice too weak to even reach the lands I once called home. Those who know me by more than name grow ignorant or old or else falling in their unknowable wars. 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!