Before the world had a name, the abyss churned. Writhing like wicked worms, as if to swallow everything in existence.
Like something that had been very still for a very long time but now wanted to be agitated...
He stood in the middle of it.
Tall. Young -- though age meant nothing here, where nothing else had a face to compare.
His hands at his sides, eased. Eyes dark in the way of something born before colour had made up its mind.
He was not afraid. He did not even know what fear was, he needed the concept of things getting worse, and he was but a babe in existence…
The abyss moved.
Something in it had sensed him…
· · ·
The first one came up from below.
It had no name yet. Nothing did. But it had a shape -- the shape that would one day be called a serpent, in a language that did not exist yet, by people who had seen one but only through texts, through lenses a hundred thousand miles away.
Well, if those serpents were the size of entire countries like the one infront of him.
Wide as a river. Longer than that. Scales the colour of old bruises -- purple-black, each one the size of a shield.
Its head alone was bigger than anything he had a frame for. The eyes were pale gold, the only light in the Primordial, and they had found him with the flat attention of something that did not hunt so much as arrive.
It smelled of rot. Of cold so deep it had stopped being a temperature.
He looked at it.
Eyes wide and awed.
It opened its mouth...
. . .
The neck snapped forward like a falling tree.
Whoosh!!
He crossed his arms to block the impact. The impact sent him flying -- skidding through the dark, the cold of those scales burning his forearms the wrong way, a cold that was worse than heat.
He braced himself after skidding a few leagues.
The serpent pulled back. Considering him with those pale gold eyes.
He looked at his forearms. The skin where the scales had caught him had torn. Red-white flesh. He filed it.
The neck came again.
BOOM!!
He squinted and….dived into it. Wrong call….
The weight of it was something he had no knowledge for -- his own body was the only body he had seen so far, so he had nothing to compare to -- and that weight smashed into him…
His body went sideways twenty metres before his feet found anything.
He tasted copper. Interesting…. Blood, crimson red trickled out of the corners of his mouth.
The serpent watched him. Patient, the way things were patient when they had always won.
A second shape uncoiled from the dark behind the first.
Then a third.
All were not serpents. That you can be sure of…
. . .
A draconic body came from above.
Wings like torn sky -- if sky had existed yet to tear, that is -- membrane stretched taut between spines each longer than the serpent's fangs.
Black-green scales, hot to the eye the way certain colours burned if you looked at them for too long...
It folded its wings and dropped.
Fwoom!!!
The shock wave hit him before anything else.
He strafed through it -- right call, but still not enough.
The talons caught him across the chest.
Screeeek!!!
He was thrown down through the dark. Two hundred metres of it before the drag even slowed him…
He jumped back up.
What waited him was a face full of dragon breath.
Not fire -- fire wasn't invented yet, would take uncounted ages to be named and put in hearths.
What came out was older. Pressure. Heat without flame. The idea of burning before burning had a word.
It trapped him against a wall.
Fwoom!!!
He went back through the same two hundred metres.
The serpents moved to flank.
CRASH!!! BANG!!! SCREE!!!
Left. Right. Below -- something wide and low… Four-legged thing that he hadn't seen yet.
The shape that would one day be called a behemoth, its horns catching him under the ribs and driving upward.
He flew off of the ground.
The dragon caught him at the top of the arc.
CRACKKKK!!!
He hit the abyss like it was solid…It held for a moment, only to be viciously shredded by his hurtling body.
. . .
The behemoth was the worst of them.
Low to the ground, vast across the shoulders, four legs like thick pillars.
Its hide was a grey-brown and thick in the likeness of an armor -- not grown for beauty no, but grown to endure and resist things.
Horns swept back from its skull, as tall as old trees. Its eyes were small. For It didn't hunt by sight.
It hunted by walking toward things until the things ceased to exist under its stomps.
It walked toward him…..
Each step shaking the miasma under him….
He braced as he saw the Gargantuan Behemoth charging at him. Eyes bloody, Teeth gritting, He threw up his arms as if to catch the creature…
BOOM!!!
It's shoulder hit him dead centre. All that mass, all that momentum, delivered through his chest in one clean awful second.
His feet left the ground. The dark rushed past. He hit something he couldn't see -- impact travelling from tailbone to skull….It burned!! -- he bounced -- was hit again….until.
He finally stopped.
He was on his back, abyssal darkness above. No ceiling, no sky.
Something coiled around his left leg, The serpent!!
It…. pulled~
CRAAAAAASHHHHH!!!.
The drag began -- twenty metres, forty -- scales tearing, cold burning. The dragon landed on his chest mid-drag, talons down.
Schlick!
He lay still.
One second. Two.
His ribs. His left arm, which was twisted one-eighty degrees.
His chest with the dragon on it, his leg still in the coil, the behemoth somewhere behind him, its footsteps patient in the dark.
The copper tang had become a constant at this point.
He exhaled.
The dragon pressed down even harder.
. . .
He got his hands flat on the ground.
And... pushed!!!
. . .
Gritting his teeth, he forced himself up.
Slow. His arms shaking -- the left dangling uselessly, the right taking the weight -- until he was on one knee with the dragon still on him, talons deep, its breath hot on the back of his neck. Crimson rivers still flowing out of the flesh…
One knee!!
He'd been fighting wrong.
He saw it from here. He'd been fighting like something that didn't deserve to take up space.
Arms pulled in. Every hit absorbed inward, folded down, made smaller -- as if he could apologise his way through this. As if the damn dragon on his back cared about an apology.
The behemoth lowered its horns…
He looked at it, and smiled….Finally realising, that his strength can contend against these filthy beasts.
He stopped pulling himself in.
For the first time since the first scuffle, he let himself be the size he actually was. The way a fist unclenched. The way something who was being stared at without reprise finally…
Stared back.
The dragon paused.
Talons still in him, weight unchanged -- it just paused. The way a thing paused when it pressed against something, expecting prey and found hungering fangs instead.
The serpent's coil loosened half an inch.
The behemoth stopped mid-charge.
He looked at his hands. Flat on the ground. Marked at the knuckles. Something from inside him drying dark on the skin….
He stood up. He gripped his left arm at the shoulder with his right....and tugged!
CRACK!!
It was the sound of bone and cartiledge snapping back to place. He twisted his resettled arm and clenched that fist...
Now then~
The dragon came with him -- still attached, wings spreading for balance -- and he reached back, gripping the folded wings to either side he can see in his vision…. He Pulled!!!
RIIIP!!!
It let out an agonising cry, stuttering the other beasts around him… Without regard of any other ambusher, He jumped….right at the wailing dragon's head.
Silver….Bright like the stars… bloomed. And then…
BOOM!!!
With a single punch, twisted like a corkscrew… Sent it flying through the landscape. It's gargantuan body skidding across the miasmatic landscape. Crushing mountains in its wake.
The silver, now coalesced tangibly once he let go his smaller stature....
He felt it settle in his chest then, a liquid yet not, weighty yet light... Energizing yet having a tint of unmaking.
He spread his gaze across the beasts still surrounding him, the serpent...the Behemoth... And finally at the Dragon he just struck, dissolving into black-red miasma after that bone shattering strike.
Spitting a bit of bloody plegm to the side, he cracked his neck...
And settled into a low stance that just felt right...
Come beasts.
His being screamed that now instead of the surprise and prey he was just a few ragdolls ago...
Bracing himself, with a gaze that said "You're next." To the serpent, he twisted....
BOOM!!!
Leaving a Shockwave behind that flattened the illusory mountains behind him....
To be continued....
(Author's Notes: Well here you go folks! The first fight scene of the novel in a flashback!
Tell me down in the comments and reviews on how it feels to y'all.
P.S- I'm so happy to announce that... OUR BOOK IS CONTRACTED!!! Any readers who like what I'm doing genuinely, if it's not too much to ask can send me some gifts if you wish ;). But it's not a must, if you like it, then it would give me a validation to continue.)
Otherwise!!
[I've started a goal from a few days back:
10 powerstones/ 10 coins will make me give a unique reference to the sender in my chapters.
20/50 coins powerstones will have me giving a shoutout to the sender in the top of the chapter of the subsequent chapter]