The Last Vigil
The wind no longer had the smell of rain.
Now it carried ash instead, fine, weightless, and drifting endlessly across a sky the color of an old bruise and rusted iron. Below the mountain range, the land stretched outward in a vast, broken expanse. Cities lay collapsed in on themselves, their structures half-buried beneath many dunes of gray dust and black metal. Rivers were no more, dried into cracked scars in the soil. Forests were nothing but bare figures frozen mid-reach toward a sun that could no longer warm them.
There were no voices. No sign of movement or life.
At the crown of the mountains, three immense figures stood in silence. Fax was the first to turn his gaze toward the horizon. His scales reflected what little light remained, reflecting it in dull gold rather than the normal brilliance they were. The great solar dragon lowered his head, claws digging into the stone as if trying to anchor himself against a grief too large to name.
“This world burned itself hollow,” he rumbled at last. His voice rolled like distant thunder, heavy with sorrow more than fury. No human ears would be around to hear it. “Not by fate. By choice.”
Beside him, his lunar mate Lumina unfurled her wings, the moon-pale membranes fluttering from the poisoned air. Her blue eyes traced the land below: the nearly dried seas, the shattered atmosphere, and the silence that billions of heartbeats once filled.
“They dreamed once,” she said softly, her voice carrying almost as regally as Fax’s. “They loved, and they reached for the stars before they learned how to care for the ground beneath their very feet.” Her tail curled close to her body. She was protective even now, as if she could still shield something fragile.
Her brother stood slightly behind them, half shrouded in shadow. Noxys sighed as he looked around. The nyctal dragon’s form shimmered despite having ink colored scales, his presence deepening the darkness around him. For a moment, he said nothing, eyes still scanning.
“All things end,” he finally said in a quiet voice. “But this end came too early to believe.”
The three dragons stood together as the wind howled through empty skies, carrying echoes of a world that would never speak again. Then Fax lifted his head. A raw aching roar filled with mourning rather than wrath tore from his chest. Lumina joined him, her cry rising in a haunting keen. Last came Noxys, his roar deep and resonant, rolling across the mountains like the closing of a cosmic door. All three had a harmony in their roars that seemed to ripple through the dead air itself.
The sound wasn’t a challenge. It was a farewell.
With one final look at the world below, they spread their wings open one by one. The three cosmic dragons lifted from the mountain peaks, rising higher and higher through the toxic sky. Dark clouds parted reluctantly around them. The atmosphere thinned. The planet curved beneath their gazes.
As they broke free of Earth’s final veil and vanished into the black between stars, the world was left as it had ended… quiet, abandoned, and yet remembered.
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