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Marigold	SOUTHWESTERN BERN      Not far, supposedly, from the Dragon Temple.      For those haven't stayed, it's been a few days since your last visit.      The painstaking repair of Eckesachs, necessary for the ritual to bring the sealed Dragon Temple fully into this reality, can't be rushed. Neither can decoding the ritual itself, from Zephiel's mostly-destroyed notes.      Still a pall of urgency is over the camp.      Even Niime, the old crone from Ilia, gets persuaded by Raigh into visiting to help reckon with the old magics. Sophia consults the notes that the hero Athos left her on pre-Ending Winter magic, and Lucius cross-checks them with the obscurer arcane writings of Saint Elimine.      This side of the water, Mage-General Cecilia and Wyvern General Galle sally their armies through the Warpgate, staring down Brunnya's forces across the water. Among the great hundreds of tents of the Etrurian camp, combat engineers hack together ships out of local lumber.      On the large meadowy island in the lake's center, the humans of Brunnya's army are hard to make out, but every few hours another drippy-black war-dragon heaves itself out of the ground and slouches into formation with them, as if overflowing from an endless well below.      Cecilia counts the time. Five hours and forty minutes between war-dragon emergences, at first. Then five hours and fifteen. Then four hours and thirty. Then three hours and fifty...      The night sky is so, so bright and beautiful.      - - - -      By the time Cecilia calls for you, it's not long after sunset.      Your meeting-place with her is by the lake's pebbly shore, where all along the water to your left, at least two thousand men in Etrurian white-green armor are boarding hastily-wrought rowing boats that still show the shape of the trees used to make them. To your right Galle's wyvern-riders anxiously tend their steeds and begin to take wing.      Three of the largest boats- and the sleekest, not that that's saying much- are reserved for the Elites and the Lycian army. One has an elaborate ritual circle in its center, the culmination of the mages' work. Queen Guinivere sits there uneasily, fragile Eckesachs laid across her lap; the ritual, it seems, needs someone of Hartmut's blood.
Marigold	There's time to talk tactics on the twenty-minute voyage across, flanked by dozens of the other boats and with friendly wyverns swarming the sky overhead.      "Since we're coming for Brunnya, she must guess we have the means to reveal the Dragon Temple. But given her positioning I don't think she knows where on that island it'll emerge. Thanks to Zephiel's papers, we do," says Cecilia, who has excused herself from rowing.      "Shouldn't we, hahhh, help you fight Brunnya's army...?" says Roy, who hasn't (despite his bandaged fingers)].      "If you can kill a war-dragon or two on your way in," Cecilia is careful to emphasize 'war' with an aside glance to Fae, who's hanging over the boat's edge seasick, "I won't say no. But I've still got Forblaze, and I want you rushing for the Temple while you're still fresh. Saint knows what you'll find in there." "Well... nnnh... the Demon Dragon, I'd hope." "Just the Demon Dragon, you'd hope." "If you think we can make it..." "Your chances are good! The temple will be to the north end of the island- sorry, your right. If Galle and I can cut Brunnya off from it and then hold her, you should be able to run for it."      You're still some hundreds of feet from the island's shore- just close enough to see the gleam of the Bernish speartips raised against your landing- when Galle gives the signal to his riders to swoop down. Their black shapes plunge ahead of you like a waterfall in the sky against the organized line, driving it back; they're answered by the great howling ice-blades of Brunnya's magic from the distant rear shearing their formation and the lightning-bolts of her lesser mages.      When you arrive, the pebbles are already slick with human blood and the lake's shallows are tinged pink. Your boats grind ashore with a rattling crunch-- Guinivere raises Eckesachs with a pale face and two trembling hands, making the sweeping twisting gesture she's been coached on as the circle around her glows gold-- With a sound like rending metal, a vast building of black stone twists into materiality to your right of Brunnya's army-- Guinivere hurriedly presses Eckesachs into Petra's hands-- "Go, go, go!! Cut them off from the temple! Captain, have your men cut across--" Cecilia is yelling at the top of her lungs, already leapt down to the shore.      Just to your left wyverns are squealing and dragons are howling and Forblaze's flames wrestle with Brunnya's blizzard magic and the shaking air tastes like ozone and two kinds of burnt flesh.      But ahead is the Dragon Temple.      To even call it a 'building' feels wrong. It was not built. Though bulbously three hundred feet tall and made of solid dark-gray stone, it looks sculpted out of drippy molten wax.      Fiery breath melted that stone into pliability in a long-ago age, and great talons sculpted it, leaving their heartstopping clawprints in its walls. Its forty-foot-high doorless gate holds almost pitch-black shadow that seems to squirm, lit only dimly from within by a violet light.      Clutching the Binding Blade to his chest, Roy casts one last look back at the bloody line of the armies' conflict, seeming to wish he could be there instead. But he sprints across the open field with the rest of his companions, bracing himself against errant javelins and lightning-bolts, towards the Temple's horrid maw.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel runs here through multiple lenses of the world.     ---     The Director watches the footage. The footage of a blonde king dashing valiantly over the shores and dirt, Eckesachs in much better condition clutched to his body tightly, fleeing something, his body bloodied, and--     ---     Flamel traces the path he remembers from something he's gone through recently, or rather, had someone else go through. Invisibly, in the thick of just enough battle to evade death himself but not enough to catch him in its blastwaves, he charges through cryokinetics and pyrokinetics like he hasn't seen in anything besides Oleander's worst imagined simulations of the end of the world.     <Save everything you can for the temple. The only thing that matters is the temple, so move, move, don't stop moving, don't wait, don't let yourself get distracted by saving anyone at all because that temple means saving *everyone*. GO!!> He's broadcasting thoughts, seemingly half for himself.     The squirming darkness in there... It reminds him a lot of a certain pit they dug up a long time ago, and a certain encounter. Pulses of clairvoyance won't help but they're not abstained-from. Levitation to speed him up doesn't stop just because that looks more solid than it is. He charges for the gate, and in fact, looks to get in ahead.     ---     "Director." A technician looks back from the console.     "Yes?"     "You don't really think that she'd be vulnerable to a surprise attack."     "No. We're activating UPE-1396."     "Sir? Is that one a weapon?"     "No. It's something to carry us through this."     ---     He's stocked up his Dream Fluffs. He's loaded his mental health as positively as he can. He's mentally armed, armored in a sense in his tactical turtleneck, and accelerating to the end. Saving all his fuel for the end here, and comforting himself with the thought that, at the very least, he might get one good shot to change the course of history.     Starlight bears down. Red lights rotate in Flamel's mind. One directive shines in the Parsons Institute.     Stop the launch. Whatever it takes.
Nobunaga	Demon King Nobunaga rides at the forefront of the boat she is in, her right foot resting on the prow. Once again in her ascended form, one hand resting on the tsuka of her curved sword.     "I will assist the temple infiltration personally," She lifts her free hand, fingers loosely splayed, "However, I will commit as many soldiers as I am able to summon to aid in the offensive before we have moved out of range."     She gestures forward with that upraised hand.     They emerge from the lake this time; the first and most obvious one being the Great Mecha Nobbu, lakewater running off its cap and cartoonishly round head. Tromping through the shallows well clear of the Lycian boats, the machine rotates its head a full circle and raises its arms, ending in charmingly simple C-clamp hands, NO BU     A figure hops up onto Great Mecha Nobbu's shoulder, steadying herself with one hand while the other clutches a katana that roars with flame. The firelight reveals a specific mixture of silken finery and metal armor, a helmet with a visor and an Oda-clan sunburst crest. It is none other than the little princess Yodo Azai, recognizable to the Lycians by the name Chacha.     While the 'giant' robot Nobbu leaves the surf, more normal-sized (knee-high) Nobbu troops start marching forth, accompanied by the little Nobbu Tanks, but no sign of Nobbu UFOs or Nobbusengumi in this formation. Chacha points with her sword; Great Mecha Nobbu answers the order by engaging the flank of Brunnya's forces, opening hostilities with a bright pink laser from its mouth. --     "Of course Mori isn't recovered yet," Nobunaga hisses during her dash to the Temple proper, "Good luck, niece." Her attention shifts to the structure ahead.     It couldn't be more obvious that a dragon lives here. Her eyes shift skyward to the stars that Elibe had only obtained so very recently.
Angela	It's Gebura, Love, and Roland here. Gebura is here because this involves a Demon Dragon God and she is the one who is best suited for battling numerous high grade entities who would tear apart any lesser Librarian in moments. Love is here because she would never miss 'the final episode' for anything. Roland is here because Flamel talked to him and he's now glumly settled on not getting out of here even if the big job he was here for is now complete. It's not entirely over. And he is a professional. Even if being a professional doesn't mean anything, even if being a professional won't pull him out of the abyss of his soul, even if being a professional means he might just die here without ever getting his revenge. And the truth is, maybe that wouldn't be so bad, but when you turn into a book when you die--you don't really feel all that invincible even with the Library's protections when fighting creatures that can breathe fire. "Here." Gebura says as she arrives, Roland and Love following behind her. "Angela doesn't like sending me out too much since it could draw attention but this seemed like it'd be the big end of it. I missed one huge fight like this a few years back," She means the battle against the Queen. "So I figure I owe it to everyone to help out here, so no need to worry about me backing out." Love obviously wouldn't but Gebura does give a worried look to Roland whose mood is so cancerous that he hasn't even tried to look for Igrene and Fae. "I'm surprised Brunnya is still keeping at this. It isn't really loyalty to the kingdom anymore, is it?" "Maybe she doesn't know?" Love asks. "No, she knows." Roland says. "No way she wouldn't." He notices that Fae isn't looking so good and, reluctantly, says, "Hey ... I know a small trick that might help... Can I see your wrist?" And if Fae offers it, he'll rub his fingers in a circle against Fae's inner wrist. "Small trick I learned from an outing to the Great Lake, should help with the nausea." ''I want you rushing for the Temple while you're still fresh.'' "Good thinking. Beating Brunnya is way less important than dealing with whatever's going on in that temple. Can't risk going in too beat and exhausted to get the job done." ''Just the Demon Dragon, you'd hope.'' "If we need to split forces in there to deal with...whatever. I can break off. I'm still pretty decent at fighting groups." When the battle begins, Gebura takes up the rear amongst the trio, cleaving through blizzards and flame with Mimicry as Love attempts to stick close to Roy to cover for him and Roland stays close to Fae, the only person (aside from Igrene and Lilian) who can really get him in the mindset of caring about what happens here today. He knows he needs to shake out of it, but he hasn't been able to. 5rHe feels like he's already rotting.
Odette Raskins	Although Odette isn't a seasoned mage nor a blacksmith, she's still got ways of contributing to the efforts to repair Eckesachs and finally get the Dragon Temple open. She hasn't been staying the entire time since the last visit, but she has been coming back and forth to help those decoding Zephiel's notes with plenty of writing supplies and little folders with organizer tabs that may or may not just get lost in the shuffle. Those keeping tabs on Brunnya's army, meanwhile, get those ever reliable energy drinks, and she's also able to spare time to do checkups along the way. She's not around long enough for any of those visits to notice the shortening times between emergencies herself, but Cecilia bringing everyone together is enough cause for alarm that she arrives decked out in her full battle gear. Full battle gear just consists of her usual working/EMT uniform, a helmet, and an armored vest that looks like it would be better at dulling gunshots than slashes. She's also sweating a bit on the ride over to the island, partially from not really having much in the way of sea legs, and also because she knows she's on a timer while checking on and/or tending to Roy's hands. "Rushing the Temple... What are the odds it's small enough on the inside that more of those war-dragons won't show up?" Odette asks, already chuckling nervously and knowing full well not to expect that at all. "Wishful thinking, I know... Ehm. So at least one Demon Dragon, probably some other war-dragons, and whatever else she might be able to muster up that we might not have seen yet. And... We can't just bury them in the temple itself, I bet." She inhales deeply, and then she looks out towards the shore. Odette winces slightly as she sees that all-too-familiar rush of black wings in front of her, shaking off that initial fear response by reminding herself that she's not the target of the wyverns for once. "Definitely need to get this done fast... They're all counting on us, too." It gives her some time to get her head back into the fighting mindset, and she has just enough time to check her weapons, gear, and medical stash over before rushing off the ship. "Going! We'll see you and everyone else later, General Cecilia!" Even in her rush, however, Odette knows her place in this strike force, and that's firmly in the middle rather than making herself a target. With her staff to heal anyone injured on the way in and her handgun to distract (or even maim) defenders for her allies to capitalize on, she's not taking any unnecessary risks on the way in. Should Lucius or any of his kids be here, she'll be right there to back up their efforts as well, whether it's with magical healing to spread the load or firing off well-aimed gunshots to keep anyone from getting too close.
Lilian Rook	The reluctance to move her right arm that had accompanied Lilian mere days ago, clinging to her on this same shore, has finally gone. It wouldn't have survived the moment if it hadn't. In this, what can only be the final hour of Elibe's campaign for its own future, every stroke of her blade has already been justified in advance. It is the moment of moments for Lilian to prove that she deserves its regained use at all. That thought helps her more than it makes her feel queasy.     "I wonder what it was that kept her close to his side." Lilian says, alongside Cecilia and Roy as much as Guinivere. "If she'd been told to do this from the start, what could have stopped them? I know it doesn't matter now, but I can't help but think of it. Was it all just a matter of buying time? Or was it so important that he had an equal hand in it himself? Was this only ever the last resort, when the end was alright in sight?" She sighs. "I just can't help wondering. 'Could it really have been so normal after all'."     'Shouldn't we, hahhh, help you fight Brunnya's army...?'     "For what purpose, Roy?" Lilian says. "Even a temple for dragons can only be a death trap for moving thousands of troops around inside. The Divine Weapons are better used in there than out here." The grim implication of her own words passes through her with a disturbingly understated flutter; or, at least, it disturbs her to realize. "If we're quick, the battle out here won't get any worse. Even if it's Brunnya we're speaking of, it's also Cecilia and Galle, and reinforcements aren't far behind. In other words--" We have enough bodies to handle this many war dragons. We may not have enough if the pace keeps accelerate while armies clash. "--We'll already be taking out General Brunnya's reinforcements just by going in."     For some reason, the thought, or perhaps Cecilia's glance, leaves Lilian magnetically drawn to Fae, whom she sits beside and comes surprisingly close to leaning on in the process of gently rubbing her back. "There there. It won't be long. You'll feel much better once you've got solid ground under your feet." A wishful hope that nothing makes her feel worse after.     Most of the voyage is passed on quadruple-checking her equipment, reassuring her of her right arm's functionality, and fidgeting with the irregular black metal shards that lay clustered in layers around the lip of Night Mist's sheath. She made no pretenses of dressing in Berns' fashion; Lilian arrived in her armour, and she imagines she won't change out of it again until someone she knows is dead. It bothers her at Iðunn is in the top ten she feels willing to let it be, but there's nothing to be done. She can smell the blood from the opposite shore, long before the boats beach themselves. At the moment of Galle's dive, she closes her eyes and wills herself to believe that the thudding sound is the footsteps of soldiers in formation, and not the collective fearful heartbeats of everyone around.     'Go, go, go!!'     Lilian leaps from her seat on well-honed adrenal instinct. If Guinivere isn't inside the Beauty of Ash in the next half-second, she comes with her to the entrance of the temple, and if Roy isn't under heavy guard by the time she turns around, she follows with him.     Lilian waited the whole day until now; to save up every little bit she can.
Petra Soroka	<J-IC-Scene> (NPC) General Cecilia hesitates. "... If you have anything that would go unfinished if you die, I would suggest you think about that now." <J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, bleakly joking, "Fuck. Lilian, I barely even started making my riddles and quests. You'll have to pretend they're really hard if I die." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "You'll live. I'm not making plans assuming that you don't."     It's not really like Petra thinks she'll die here today. It's not something she's said out loud before, but she's pretty comfortable with knowing that, in the absolute worst case, if the Demon Dragon proved to be insurmountable and the world doomed, she'd flee the losing battle and look out for no one but Lilian as she does so. This isn't a world she'll die for, not when she has so many other worlds to live for.     But was that fatalistic preparation so clear in her mind several weeks ago, when Zephiel was still alive? Her first thought at hearing Cecilia's words wasn't certainty that she wouldn't die, but that if she did, she'd rather leave everything unfinished that would be unfinished, rather than 'get her affairs in order', as she has before. More than once, she's walked to what she thought or hoped would be the end of her, and each time she tied a dismal little bow on the arc of 'Petra'. "The rest... is in your hands... IÐUUUUUNNNNNN!"     Zephiel died certain that Iðunn would carry on her revival of the world and the annihilation of what remained of this one. He died, exactly as he had very likely envisioned happened months ago when the League began closing in on Bern, in a symbolic tied-bow of Eckesachs broken over his knee, the radiant night sky above, the castle collapsing around him, the one weapon that could harm the phantom prognostication of his apocalypse feebly useless in his enemies' hand.     No matter what, that dying satisfaction can never be disproven, and Zephiel will never know that the world was saved. The closure of a human life is ultimately psychological vapor. He may as well have dreamed the war and stepped off the wall of his castle two years ago. If Petra was still suicidal, this would either put her off it entirely, or sent her over the edge the very next day. "Since we're coming for Brunnya, she must guess we have the means to reveal the Dragon Temple."     "I really wonder what she's thinking."     It's not phrased as a question, or even laden with more than a baseline curiosity for keeping her alive to ask. Petra sits beside Guinivere on the ship, one foot bouncing over her knee, staring at the array drawn on the deck.     "... The others, at least, probably can't imagine an end to the war where they aren't, like, executed, or something. So they're just coasting on inertia and self-preservation. Maybe it's not really any different for her, actually."
Petra Soroka	"If you can kill a war-dragon or two on your way in,"     Two thousand Etrurian soldiers is twenty war dragons. The math done in that tower back then hadn't accounted for Bernish wyvern riders, but there's an opposing army to contend with too. Forblaze... is Forblaze the only one that's not coming into the Temple with them? If Iðunn dies to one swipe of the Binding Blade, and two thousand soldiers die outside the Temple for not having the rest of the Divine Weapons to even the scales-- but then, it's just as likely that being one Weapon short will be the difference that allows the Demon Dragon to triumph, and then the battle on the plateau was pointless for everyone anyways.     "I guess I'll check my schedule."     Ahh, oh no, she's really in a bad mood now. Twenty minutes sitting quietly on a boat is *horrible* for her psychological state. Restlessly, Petra gets up and wanders to the railing to lean off the side of the ship, so that the cigarette she lights up doesn't stream its smoke into Guinivere's face. "If we're quick, the battle out here won't get any worse."     "If we're quick," Petra echoes, pushing herself up from the railing and cutting her dropped cigarette in half with her Silver tail by turning around. It sounds like a bleak restatement for a second, before she suddenly giggles. "That's my secret. I'm always quick."     Eckesachs is only in her hands for a moment before she and it are enveloped in the glittering eruption of the Beauty of Ash from its compact mirror. The mech braces its forelegs on the side of the ship in a sprinter's posture before vanishing with the whistle of air rushing around its faceted angles, galloping towards the Dragon Temple with no mind paid towards the clashing armies.     It stops just as quickly as it accelerated, shattering as though it slammed into an invisible wall, and shucking itself in a million pieces off of Petra, who drops to the ground in its wake. Eckesachs is bound to her wrist by a coiling grip of Silver threads that brace the fragile blade as well as keeping it locked in her grip. Ahead of the army already by virtue of the Beauty of Ash's burst of speed, Petra strides into the looming gate of the Dragon Temple while they catch up behind her.
Riku Asakura	The sight would have been so pretty if not for the enormous gravity that hung over the entire lake.  The feeling that this would be the end of the world, or its salvation, loomed in Riku's mind.  He turned it over constantly in his mind, not letting it stop rotating for a minute because of how important it was to him.  It never left his mind for an instant, because... well, if they failed, they'd likely die too.   On the boat across the lake, they gave them their final twenty minutes to talk tactics.  He listened to Cecilia, though inwardly he wondered the same things as Roy.  Would they be enough?  Could they do anything more to make sure the battle wasn't just a bloodbath?  Though after a few moments, he came to terms with things.   'Shouldn't we, hahhh, help you fight Brunnya's army...?' Riku sucks in a breath. "It isn't always about doing or not doing things, but knowing where your strength is best used, right?  Ours is going to be best used in making sure no more war dragons are made, and if we win... well, there won't be any more war dragons.  We just have to trust in Cecilia, just like she's trusting in us to finish this with Idunn." 'If Galle and I can cut Brunnya off from it and then hold her, you should be able to run for it.' "Is there any way you know of that can make this go wrong?  Anything we should do to prepare for it?" He asks, wanting to make sure he is ready for almost anything, because once they're inside the temple... or if they land and something comes up they weren't counting on... "Speaking of Brunnya... why is she going this far?  Certainly she has to know what it means if Idunn actually DOES what she's trying to do, right?"  He just doesn't understand the mindset of people who just want to destroy the world.   For him, it's such a foreign concept that he can't help but not understand. He also pointedly doesn't transform into Ultraman Geed.  They will definitely need Geed on the inside, so he does anything he can to conserve the timer and energy needed.  They do only have one shot at this... and coming up short near the end could spell disaster for this entire world. 'Go, go, go!!' At Cecilia's words, Riku is with the group.  He tries to stay near either Gebura or Lilian.  If things go sideways and he needs to conserve time as Geed, these seem like the best people to stay near in case things go south.  He pushes his legs as hard as they will go, and Riku's training regimen and actually eating real fucking food show off because he's quite athletic now compared to two years ago. The building itself stands so ominously to Riku, but the thing that stands out the most is the lack of human design.  It was made by dragons for dragons, and the claw markings made on the stone really show how... inhuman the design is.  Riku does not look back at the battle because he has to trust in the army that's buying them time.  He wouldn't be able to push forward if he didn't have that trust in them.
Desire Stars	Ace and Neon arrive, in less battered condition than their prior visit, both still a ways from perfect health -- Ace more obviously than Neon.     The color is returning to Ace's skin, the bags under his eyes receding. Care has been taken to make himself presentable, but he still looks like someone recovering from extreme exhaustion.     Neon's bruises have faded somewhat, and she's likewise had a chance to clean up. The cuts and burns that bled through her armor's protective measures still rear their heads, tidied-up though they might be. If Galle and I can cut Brunnya off from it and then hold her, you should be able to run for it.     Neon frowns, worry plain on her face as on her gently wringing hands. It melts away gently, though not completely, into resolve. If you stick close enough to me to hear my music before we have to break off for the temple, I can at least give you an edge for a minute or two.     Thank you. We'll make the most of it. ---     Kamen Rider Geats leaps from the boat in the mysterious Boost Mk2 armor, alongside Kamen Rider Na-Go in the Beat and Powered Builder armors.     Na-Go's music grants heightened speed and strength to all of her allies within earshot, just as she'd said, conferring whatever small edge she's able to Cecilia and Galle's forces.     The two of them break off, down towards the Dragon Temple, and whatever awaits within. Though Geats' armor confers frightening bursts of superspeed, he doesn't use them yet, no doubt electing to save whatever's left in the tank for the temple.
Marigold	Fae, much heartened by the gentle anti-seasick rubs from Lilian and Roland, lags behind on her stubby little legs; Igrene practically has to drag her along by the hand while sprinting towards the temple, until Fae transforms into her fluffy dragon shape and starts dragging Igrene behind her instead. Sophia fretfully sprints after them faster than you've ever seen her move.      Not far behind are Echidna with the terrible axe Armads in hand, trying to shield Roy against errant projectiles with its flat; Rutger with two chipped blades and Durandal at her waist; Sue still on her little pony, snapping off two whistling-green shots from the bow Mulagir at the war-dragons charging into Cecilia's army; and Lucius with the Saint's book under his arm, unable to shake Chad and Lugh from following to the one place they aren't safer by his side.      "Roy, keep your head down!" "No, just move! If you're hurt, Odette and I--" "Here. Little Red. Get on." "She's just in there... I'm sure of it...!" "Aa--uuuohh--..." "I know... it'll be alright..."      The Dragon Temple's entrance yawns wide enough that everyone here, Fae included, could enter abreast. Even if he transformed, Riku could fit on his hands and knees.      Roy takes three steps into the cavern-like structure, raises the Binding Blade to cast its light inside, and gulps.      The black stone interior is lit by magical 'torches', burning cold with blue-violet fire. The dripping-wax walls of the entrance chamber are claw-carved into eerie designs. Twenty-foot-tall etchings depict the coiling shapes of wyrms, abstracted according to an unfamiliar visual language.      Sometimes around the depicted dragons' feet are rows of simple vertical scratches- trees? Or swarming humans, depicted with a disdainful lack of care? It's impossible to tell if the scenes are portraits, or historical records, or depictions of conflict.      Oddly, some of the branching corridors leading from the entrance-room are human-sized, carved with more finesse. But Sophia doesn't hesitate to lead down the largest cavernous path inwards. That must be where she 'feels' the Demon Dragon.      As you press on, the shadows' squirming intensifies. With Zephiel's death, Iðunn's war-dragons have begun looking less and less like living beings. Wherever the light doesn't reach, mucky-dripping claws of shadow reach out; half-remembered drooling jaws, tendrils that might or might not be lashing tails. The abortive imitations of dragonkind ooze from around corners, drip from the high ceiling, blossom from the crevices of the engravings.
Marigold	Splat, goes one grasping shadow-limb when Echidna puts her axe through it. In death, it can't decide if it wants to be shadow or viscera. "Ugh, gross. What's the deal with-- Sophia, look out!!" "Ah--?!"      She puts an arm around Sophia's waist to drag her away from grotesque lunging jaws that emerge from an unlit corner, and then Fae blowtorches the shadows there away with her radiant-sparkling breath. "Uaaaa!! ... Uu--ao--oh...?" "Ah... n-no, I'm safe... thank you." "Aa----uohh--au..." "No... you don't look anything like that... they scare me, too..." "Just keep your head on a swivel. They're not so tough." "Sophia, can you make any sense of these carvings?" "N-no... maybe the village elder could, but..." "It's alright. I'm sorry."      As the group advances, pruning the shadow-creatures begins to feel more and more like hacking one's way through a jungle with a machete. The amorphous mass of draconic dark magic has already swallowed the path you came in by; by now you'd have to fight just to get back out.      Just when you've gotten used to that--      "Is the child your captive? How strange," says the bored voice of a red-robed man, who wasn't standing among you just a second ago. Rutger of course instantly swings for his neck, but Durandal merely passes through- on closer inspection, he is slightly transparent- and he waves his hand dismissively. "I should have known you vermin would rather attack than entertain me. Don't waste your energy on a projection. Or do." "Ah- wait, who are you?!" Roy chokes out, having reeled backwards. "You're... you're certainly not the Demon." "Yes; you behold the last of the proper dragons. I believe the name your kind gave me was 'Jahn'."      'Jahn' regards the rest of you with that same vaguely bored contempt on his face. Most of Roy's companions have stepped back from his projection and raised their weapons warily, but he makes no physically threatening move; as a 'projection', likely he can't.      "Why have you come to meet your deaths early? If you ran, you'd have another day or two before that thing you call 'Demon' put you to your ends."
Riku Asakura	The entrance of the Temple opens up for the group.  It's so large, he realizes... they could easily walk side by side and still have room.  He wonders how much of himself he could fit in if he grew to maximum size and tried to enter as Ultraman Geed.  He shakes off such thoughts for now, instead focusing on the path ahead of them.   Riku is not sure how cold torches even work, but he presses on as the room turns into some sort of mural.  He sees the ones depicting the ancient dragons, but also the ones that seem to depict humans with... well, a lack of care might be an understatement.  That, he supposes, goes without saying due to the two being in conflict.   It's about this point where the shadows start turning into potentially threatening limbs and jaws; people move to act, but Riku does his best to stay out of the way.  He knows he's gotta save that juice for the real fight, and it's not like people can't handle themselves against the shadows of shadows.   Even as the darkness turns more like cutting through a jungle, he manages to keep himself out of harm's way as best he can.  His hand is never off the Fusion Riser, though, ready to transform should he need to in an instant.   'Is the child your captive? How strange,' Riku jumps, turning towards the voice.  He pulls the Fusion Riser up, but when the axe passes cleanly through the image of the either not here or ghostly Jahn, Riku lowers the Riser and glances at the man.   "Fae is our friend, not a captive... she's here because she wants to save the world too... but I suppose I should let her speak for herself," Riku says.  He turns to keep moving, but the man keeps talking.  "Proper dragons?  What about her?" he motions towards Fae, but the words don't get out.  "Also, by your own words... Idunn isn't a 'proper' dragon?  Why do you think that?" 'Why have you come to meet your deaths early?' "I think you know why we're here, but you don't think very highly of us to actually give us enough credit to actually have a chance at pulling it off."
Flamel Parsons	Hack. Smash. Punch, Grab. Rip. Flamel is willing to attack the arkness and its creatures with more lethality than he ever gives to the people he's been fighting. These are unthinking, these swarms *are* a mental multitude. The fact that they've become like this in the absence of Zephiel's guidance...     ---     The Director views a containment cell with new samples of the Dark Magic beasts. One arm behind his back, one on his cane. Complex machinery runs scan after scan after scan, estimating the mentality of the one creating them. "Sir." A technician says. "We can't know for sure. But, if these are emerging from a mind purely, and they're changing, then..."     "The mind perhaps can change." The Director nods.     "Can we afford to operate on that principle?"     "We're moving to the Hartmut Contingency. Get the Bramimond Files."     ---     Flamel steps back from the projection, retreating from an effort to psychically 'backstab' something that's intangible. He flicks out of invisibility. "We've come to stop the launch." He says, as if the phrase, 'stop the launch', were a sort of scripture. "Zephiel is dead. Stop this." But that won't work, will it? "I'm Flamel Parsons, I'm with the Psychonauts." Flashing his badge to a holoprojection? "Draconic forces are host to severe hyper-rationalizing cultural psychohazard. You're going to *destroy* the dragon homeland, including living pure-blooded dragons in extant peaceful dragon settlements." He gestures to Fae as self-evident example.     "If you don't stop and help, more dragons will die, more damage will happen to draconic heritage in Elibe." Leave humanity out of this, of course. Focus, purely, on the probable shape of the Psychohazard. "The Scouring is over, the only thing that matters right now is lives that don't end in death."     But this? This isn't a dark-magic mind. 'The last of the proper dragons'... That means Flamel might be able to find him. If he's only videoconferencing, that's fine; clairvoyance should pick him out of a swamp of dark magic like a shining fire in the dead of night. If Flamel can find the time, the room, to continue advancing, he'll be zeroing in straight on this 'Jahn'.
Nobunaga	Nobunaga leaves the chaos of the battle outside in the capable hands of Cecilia and the rest, entering the Dragon Temple while slowing to a jog. Once she's certain there's little chance to be shot from outside, she slows further to a walk, casting her eyes up through the chambers and their draconic carvings.     "A history, or a premonition? The monks wrote of Samsara; the birth of a world, a time of plenty, a time of strife, and a time of collapse; only for the world to be born again. Spring into Summer, into Autumn, into Winter, and back into Spring." She pauses, tapping the saya of her sword against one of the reliefs, "Were that the case, then how many times has this happened? How many times has Iðunn stood here in this very temple?"     "But, were that the case, we must then consider the breakdown of magic Bramimond warned us of. Unless... this, too, is part of 'Winter'."     Just because she *hates* warrior monks doesn't mean she's ignorant of their writings. The Buddhists of the Ikko-ikki had quite a lot of material to go through when she was done with them. --     Her sword joins the others in keeping the half-animated draconic sludge at bay, keeping the left flank under control while Sophia leads the team deeper.     > "Is the child your captive? How strange."     Nobunaga pauses. She doesn't lash out like Rutger did, whether she sensed it was a projection or just doesn't have those reflexes isn't clear. What she does do is fix Jahn's projection with a disdainful, bored expression.     > "Why have you come to your deaths early?"     "As the Demon King, I am merely here to check on the progress of one of my adorable understudies." She raises her free hand, flicking her fingers dismissively, "I have no further time to waste with ignorant and disrespectful retainers unless the next words you speak are 'I shall escort you to her' or you wish to kill yourself as a final act of redemption at my feet."
Angela	''Is the child your captive? How strange.'' "It's real exhausting hearing people talk like we're being so cruel to the kid we all adore." Roland says, not managing heat because of how exhausted and bitter he's feeling. "You're all so blind to love it's embarrassing. Who even are you?" Gebura, it should be noted, also immediately swung for the projection but pulls back her blade at the last moment upon sensing the transparency and lack of materiality. "Last of the..." Gebura begins. "You forgetting about someone?" "He's saying he doesn't consider Idunn a dragon. Hell, even called her a 'thing'." Gebura frowns. "Like a weapon." She is all too familiar with how one's power and strength gets viewed in the eyes of others. "It's just a bit lame spending your last days cowering, what's twenty four hours anyway? It's a weekend, all I'm losing out on would be another day at work." Roland can't help but chuckle at Gebura's quip there, tiredly, sadly, but he does think it was funny. ''--More dragons will die'' "Flamel," Gebura says. "Guy already said he was the ''last'' of the proper dragons. He doesn't see Fae as one, he doesn't see Sophia as one, or even Idunn." She looks to Flamel. "It sounds like he's the one who knows the most about Idunn. Here's your chance." She can't do any investigation on this front that isn't talking to this guy and hoping he spills beans. "Anyway, if you don't got anything useful to say, we're in a bit of a hurry." She pushes forward, cutting through shadows as she must. Roland and Love linger behind. Love, of course, immediately understands Jahn as the dark force that has led Idunn down the path of becoming a dark magical girl and is, thus, the greatest evil of this land who must receive a giant pink laser to the face. But he isn't here! She can't laser him! This sucks! She looks towards Flamel, hoping that he'll tell her 'go shoot one of your giant pink lasers over here!'. She bounces up and down on her feet like an antsy antsy girl. "What is your relation with Idunn?" Roland asks. "Did you ... introduce Zephiel to her or something? What's going on here?" He lingers behind, partly because he's in no rush to face down a dragon god and also because he is comfortable in the darkness, even as it's trying to tear him to shreds. He's more focused on keeping the shadows off of Fae.
Desire Stars	I should have known you vermin would rather attack than entertain me. Don't waste your energy on a projection. Or do.     "You'll have to forgive my bodyguard," says Geats, a little too out of breath to land the air he's going for, "You're beholding the last of the proper actors, and I pay her to keep the backwoods gentry at arm's length." Why have you come to meet your deaths early? If you ran, you'd have another day or two before that thing you call 'Demon' put you to your ends.     "I thought the location would make a good spot for a theatre. Of course, we'll have to knock these walls down, clean up all this gunk, pay some guards to keep the shoeless riff-raff out..." He pauses. "No offense." Despite the repartee, his fingers curl uneasily at his side.     "Assuming you actually want a serious answer... I'm not sure I can even give it to you," Na-Go says, gripping the massive Gigant Hammer anxiously. It still spatters the ground in places with conjured dragon viscera-sludge. "Is that what you would do? Just run and wait for death to come and take you?" She shakes her head. "I doubt it. You wouldn't even entertain the possibility, would you? I can tell by looking at you. You wouldn't, or... didn't?"     "It doesn't matter. Where is she?"
Lilian Rook	Lilian doesn't carry a Divine Weapon, but for once, here, Night Mist is serving its ultimate purpose as an instrument of humanity's defiance against the hateful Other. She'd already verified that, until the war dragons are solidified as fully living things, her sword's violent rejection of that which claims no firm place in the mechanisms of natural law is perfectly effective against the shadow-dripping extrusions of Iðunn's magic.     So for a time, she can be one of the heroes too. Not the dejected kingslayer, nor some nosy busybody Elite who had stuck her head in where it wasn't asked, but a knight who can walk side by side with those chosen by Elibe and cut down the grasping, slavering shadows as they approach, adding her blade to the cause. It does a lot for her morale, as well as her momentum. Enough to spare words for "They're not real, Fae, much less anything like you." and "They're far older than Sofia, so it's only natural; but it was sensible to ask." between "Left side." and "On point." and "Slice right." and "Above!"     'Is the child your captive? How strange'     Any then, without thinking, "As opposed to a possession, like usual? You sound that type." She says it before she even understands who she's looking at; long before understanding how shocking it is to meet anyone but Iðunn here. Long enough for Rutger to take a swing fifty times over, too.     'Yes; you behold the last of the proper dragons. I believe the name your kind gave me was 'Jahn'.'     "Never heard of you." Lilian says; because she already doesn't like him; because the only ancient dragon who deserves the slightest gravitas in her mind right now is Iðunn; because this late arrival, at the eleventh hour, as if to claim credit for the fate of the world, offends her in a way she has known for seven years, and his unimportance to her is a weapon at hand.     "What a disappointment, too. Iðunn made you people seem so noble and mysterious, but I suspected all along you were exactly the same as everyone else. You've even got your own designated freak who does all the work." She says that without the slightest clue what his distinction is; only that it is meant unkindly.     'If you ran, you'd have another day or two before that thing you call 'Demon' put you to your ends.'     "Can't kill you unless we go this way." Lilian snaps again on pure, irrational irritability; on projected frustration that finds a convenient outlet. The metal shards overlapping a hand's-width of her scabbard like scales tick-clatter agitated. "Don't you feel embarrassed talking like that? You lost before. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson?"     Lilian, with no real authority to command, motions the others forward.
Odette Raskins	"If you're hurt, Odette and I--"" "That's right! The faster we move, the faster we're in cover!" Odette shouts, trying her damndest to usher everyone forward and fighting her instinct to just go as fast as possible. Seeing the sheer size of temple's entrance has her slowing down a bit, too, but only just before she continues keeping up with the advancing force. "So much for dropping it on top of her..." Holding in a strained breath, the EMT's eyes keep darting around as she sees the etchings and raises her handgun towards them at first. Thankfully, those aren't real dragons once she gets a better look at them, and she breathes out a low sigh of relief before taking a moment to look over the etchings. "These pictures are already dragon sized... Were these made by the ones that lived here way back when?" She asks, looking over at Sophia and Fae to do a brief visual size comparison. Realizing she's just trying to distract herself, however, she quickly smacks her cheeks, then scurries forward to once again keep up with the group. Seeing those shadows moving around more often, Odette cranks the flashlight on her PDA up to try and dispel at least a little bit of that darkness before drawing her sword. "Incoming... St-stick close, and they won't pick us off!" With more confidence in her sword arm, she's actually trying to contribute to the shadow-slaying efforts on the way in. "Miss Echidna's got the right idea! Chad, Lugh! Stick close to Father Lucius and me. We can make sure they don't split our group in half from here." She tries to sound reassuring even though her hands are still shaking each time she swings her blade into a shadow-creature, only somewhat subsiding by the time an unfamiliar voice comes from a man in red. "Captive? No, we-" She starts to answer the voice without thinking too much of it, yelping and throwing her arms around Lucius, Lugh, and Chad less than a second later to get their heads out of the way once she realizes that that it's not a familiar voice. Somehow, she's doing that even without realizing right away that Rutger's already swung for him. "E-entertain? We're not here for that! We-" "I thought the location would make a good spot for a theatre." Odette shoots Geats an incredulous look despite snickering at his response, turning away briefly to recompose herself. It takes her a second. "God, Mister Ace... We're here to stop Idunn from destroying everyone. E-everything!" She answers warily, sword still held in front of her and steadied once she's able to turn back to Jahn. Like Roy's crew, she's not rushing in to swing at the projection right away, but only part of that is from noticing that he's just a projection. "J.. Jahn. Right. Um. My name's Odette, and I'm an EMT with the Company." She answers, following Flamel's lead and then realizing neither of those words probably mean anything to Jahn. "Er. Medic. Healer. Wh-whatever word you want to use. We... I'm not running because I actually like the people of this world." She answers with an anxious swallow, eyes still shifting around as she watches out for more of those shadows, sudden projectiles, oncoming soldiers... Too many things that could come out of darkness to try and kill her. "Not just the humans, but the dragons. There's more than just Fae around, and more that just want to live in peace. None of us want this war to go on longer than it has already, a.. And the longer this war drags goes on, the more people that are going to get hurt or killed. That's why we're here to put an end to it, so the dragons of Elibe can rebuild and thrive again." Despite Lilian not having real authority, Odette starts moving forward once directed, ready to walk right past Jahn's projection if she must. She has to fight a little not to look too closely at him if she gets too close.
Lilian Rook	'Did you ... introduce Zephiel to her or something? What's going on here?'     Lilian, with silent desperation, hopes that Jahn will say yes. That someone will reveal themselves of the grand architect of all this sadness, and gloat and swagger about all the death they've caused in its execution. It'd be so simple, so stupid, that it'd make her feel much better. In a way she knows in her heart of hearts that she doesn't deserve to.     'The Scouring is over, the only thing that matters right now is lives that don't end in death.'     "He gets off on it." she hisses, baselessly instead. "He can have a head start running."
Petra Soroka	Once inside the cavernous Temple, the grimly contemplative silence that seized Petra for so much of the boat ride across the lake loosens, rather than worsens. Eckesachs' massive form, large even for Zephiel, is carried across Petra's entire body with both hands to support it. It glitters, little lines of Maltet-solder adjoining the Silver like one continuous metallic spiderweb, in the light of the Binding Blade, unwieldy tip held just short of scraping the wall as Petra strays close to it. "Sophia, can you make any sense of these carvings?"     "... It's sort of reassuring that there's art in here, actually. I don't know why."     If Sofia can't make sense of them, then Petra can't either. Maybe if they weren't marching towards the Demon Dragon while a battlefield rages behind them, they could spare the mental real estate necessary for art criticism; but there's no guarantee that the temple will still be standing 'after', even if all of the purported heroes are.     Petra shifts Eckesachs to one hand to free up the other. The process of doing so is momentarily arduous, unsteady to keep a grip on it one-handedly and needing to extend the Silver wrapping further up the blade to stabilize it-- watching Petra wrestle with it elicits the image of Zephiel's apparent ease in dual wielding Eckesachs and the Binding Blade for the brief moment he had both. She withdraws a ratbot from her mirror, and has it take pictures of the carvings passively while keeping pace with the group.     "I guess it's because, like, it would feel cruel if there wasn't anything. The desire to make art is the most sympathetic impulse a person can have, across time, and between humans and dragons too. That the dragons here like, wanted to impart some kind of meaning, to people who would see it after they were gone, even a thousand years later..." Petra trails off. "... I guess I just don't like the war dragons very much."     And then speak of the Demon and they appear. For how difficult it is just to lug around, Petra's utilization of Eckesachs against the shadowy extrusions from the melted cave walls is brutal and swift. The Silver leverages force through the sword like a much taller wielder could, and with vicious precognitive intuition as to each emerging enemy, the slow rise and backswing to each slash of the sword is skipped like an animation cutting frames ahead. Each booming report of lightning cleaving from the sword comes steadily after another, overlapping echoes off the vast temple walls and cutting down quasi-real limbs like grass. "Aa----uohh--au..."     Shadow saliva and gore are distinguishable in the aftermath of gouging through an oozing maw that closed halfway around Petra before being vaporized by a flick of Eckesachs. The black trails begin to dissipate, and Petra wipes them off her face with the heel of her palm, reaching out to scritch Fae's side despite the viscera and the dragonslaying weapon in her other hand. She's very aware of the presence of both, and her tone is flat even when she tries to joke to cheer Fae up.     "Aw, Fae, you're adorable. If I put my head riiiight up inside your mouth, the only thing I'd have to worry about is your breath being stinky. These things are actually scary."
Petra Soroka	. . . "I believe the name your kind gave me was 'Jahn'."     The tension of walking through a forest of zombified dream-limbs to reach Iðunn in the heart of the Temple is the kind of narrative drudgery necessary for this kind of moment. Surely, somewhere in the core, Iðunn is performing some kind of ritual to undo the Ending Winter and restore the world, and the dragons bubbling out of the ground outside, and the hazy dreams of them flooding the tunnels in here, are the magical wake of her workings, inattentive wildflowers of violence. So having some other fucking guy show up, untouchable, who hasn't even heard of the *war* and doesn't have the disaffected distance of Iðunn to explain it, feels *voyeuristic*.     "Hi, Jahn," Petra responds with the dull lack of enthusiasm of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.     Eckesachs doesn't have enough life in it to spare on a projection even if he did move to attack them. The sword stays down across Petra's body as she stares balefully over it at him. There's something about his tone when he says 'proper', and all the questions everyone immediately leaps to ask to allow him to elaborate about it, that makes Petra's stomach churn in revulsion, shying away from the topic by instinct.     Instead she says, "Are you here overseeing the ritual Iðunn's doing?"     Then, because he's really already gotten under her skin and she can't help spitting her irritation, "And, what, where the fuck were you a thousand years ago? Are you *soo* certain that we'll die here, when humanity slaughtered every other one of you, because *you specifically* are dragonkind's secret hidden weapon? And you've just been waiting to unleash the fucking beast? You'd think watching every other dragon die and somehow escaping with your life would inspire literally any feeling besides acting like an incurious fucking dweeb."
Marigold	"It's art, but... I don't like it..." Sophia murmurs to Odette and Petra. Before Jahn grabs her attention, she lays a hand on one of the simple vertical scratches around the dragons' feet. "People... will always have 'culture'... but, what kind of culture sees people like this...?"      'theater'      "Not only drivel, but insincere drivel. Why do I waste my time?"      more living pure-blooded dragons      "If you speak the truth, the Demon will spare them. If you lie, the miscegenated filth will die along with you. Half-vermin is still vermin, after all," he says, with a little 'shoo' gesture to Flamel.      'kill yourself'      "Oh, I'm not far ahead. I've no intention of forfeiting the duty of killing you to the Demon," Jahn purrs. Flamel's clairvoyance confirms it; the path towards him is nearly straight, and difficult but not long. "I was a... hm, the best word you have for it is 'warrior'. Shallow, but that will do."      'just run and wait for death?'      "I have always stood and fought where there was a chance of victory," he drawls at Neon, seeming particularly amused. "Were there none at all, I don't know what I'd do. How fortunate for me that I am not human."      'you lost before'      Jahn's projection slides the robe off its shoulder, showing a horrible burnt-red scar that starts at his collarbone and carves towards his navel at least a foot. "Oh, one of your Eight Generals dealt me a blow," he says with a serene superiority. "But I live. And they are dead. And shortly, their legacy shall be too." "That burn... did you fight Roland, or Hartmut?" Even though the man in front of him is so detestable, Roy remains almost earnestly curious. "Why would I bother to learn their names? But no; I wouldn't say I fought them." "You said you were a warrior..." "When your 'divine weapons' choked the magic out of the world, we dragons had to lower ourselves to human form to save our strength. The Generals found us here while we were helpless, and butchered us without mercy. I suppose even vermin can be sensible, sometimes." "Ugh. I suppose you would have done the same..." "Naturally. And now that my strength has returned and the Weapons are shadows of their former selves, I will."
Marigold	'did you introduce Zephiel' "What an odd human that 'Zephiel' is. Was? I assume you've done away with him," Jahn goes on in that bored tone of his. Roy's face wrinkles with something like horror. "Don't say it so casually." "What do you care? But no. Some time after he found the Temple and unsealed the Demon, my wounds finally began to heal, and I awoke. 'I intend to deliver the world to your kind', he told me. How could I object? I've maintained this haven for the Demon since."      Jahn vanishes, just then- and a second later, from further down the hall, a hideous mass of dark magic surges out like a clot pumping down a blood vessel. It's two or three war-dragons, not yet fully formed and separated; red-scaled and clawed extremities surging their way down the corridor out of a body of writhing black.      "Lugh!! Get back!" Lucius yelps, hurriedly hand-drawing the sigil to blast the horrible mass nearly in half with a beam of light; Rutger eagerly completes the parting. But that only forces its pieces to differentiate and mature, drawing more mass from the shadows and armoring themselves in scales to turn on you...      Once you've overcome that, the rooms beyond become steadily more abyssally organic. The shadows are thick and wet enough that they cling to the walls like primordial slime, almost impervious to light. Fae rubs her head against Petra for comfort as they proceed, looks like she's thinking about soft-mouthing her right now, and then thinks better of it. "Aa--uuaoao..." "She says 'thank you'... " "Haou--au." "And also that she brushes both her sets of teeth..." "Uu."      For a merciful moment, it seems like Jahn might be gone for good; but in the next slickly-dripping chamber he re-materializes among the grasping limbs and gnashing jaws, unbothered by the danger.      "Well. You're doing your best to make it far enough to die by my hand, so I may as well indulge your curiosity more." "... You never answered what makes a 'proper' dragon." "Hm? I thought it was obvious. Your child there is a dragon in blood only. She's been denied a culture, a homeland, and a family." "Aa--uuao----!!!" Fae says, agitated. "I mean a proper family, girl. But perhaps it's not too late to save her. She'll have millennia to unlearn what you've filled her head with. Perhaps someday she'll even become my mate?"      "I'm starting to understand why the Old Man threw his stone in the ocean," says Igrene queasily. It's silly for her to pull Fae's multi-ton body against herself protectively, but she does so anyway. Even Lucius gives Fae's leg a little pat-pat, when he can relax his vigilance.
Marigold	Even Roy is beginning to lose patience, walking through Jahn's projection and shining the Binding Blade into the next room to reveal a chamber that's almost floor-to-ceiling churning evil goop. But he knows there's use in keeping the smug dragon talking.      "And Iðunn? I thought she was the greatest of all the dragons. Why are you calling her 'it'?"      "'Iðunn'? Ah, right. That was what Zephiel called the Demon," Jahn recollects. "Tell me, boy. What does humanity know about it?"      "... That she created the war-dragons that nearly exterminated humanity. That Hartmut spared her with the Blade, likely because she was young, and he hoped she could change. And that some say she was once kind to us. I don't know what changed. Maybe she felt her family was threatened, and she gave up too much of her heart to dark magic for power..."      "Ha! If only that were true. No; we devised the war-dragons, when humanity forced our hand by forging the Weapons. But to produce them, we needed a sacrifice."      "...!!"      "Only a dragon of the 'Divine Tribe'- like your indoctrinated child, there- would do. But most of them had fled Erev. Your 'Iðunn' was the only one we could get, and it refused to fight for us. So we destroyed its soul, and rendered it an empty shell. All the better to wield dark magic."      Roy feels a tinge of relief that, with his back turned, Jahn can't see his horrified and blanched expression.
Riku Asakura	'Oh, I'm not far ahead. I've no intention of forfeiting the duty of killing you to the Demon,' "...So there is no way to convince you that there is no need for us to fight, and that we're only here to stop Idunn from destroying the world?" Riku asks, already harboring a growing dislike of Jahn.  There is something about his attitude, his mannerisms, that reminds him of people who consider themselves in a higher social class than a would-be orphan.   'I suppose even vermin can be sensible, sometimes.' Riku hates that this was considered an acceptable strategy; he hates it even more that it's considered 'sensible' by this man.  What one side might have done out of desperation, the other side would have done because it was 'sensible'.  All the more reason he hates war: the sooner this ends, the better in his book.  "Only a monster would consider slaughtering the other side 'sensible'." Riku is glad when Jahn vanishes.  Even though it means more shadow dragons, he'd rather deal with them than deal with this guy again.  Though he still holds back, even though he wants to activate Geed, he has to conserve his energy and time as Geed for when they need it... and if this guy is ahead, they're going to need it, especially with Idunn farther in.   'Perhaps someday she'll even become my mate?' "You're disgusting," Riku immediately spits out.  Never mind the huge age difference, but the idea that the 'foolish ideas' that she had come to learn... the idea of her family as something she could be 'trained out of' is disgusting to him.   'I'm starting to understand why the Old Man threw his stone in the ocean,' Riku looks towards Igrene sorrowfully; he doesn't like the idea of someone being so disgusted with themselves that they'd throw a part of themselves away.  At the same time, he understands it... Especially with the shadow of Belial hanging over his head.  "I don't think all dragons are like this jerk." 'Your 'Iðunn' was the only one we could get, and it refused to fight for us. So we destroyed its soul, and rendered it an empty shell. All the better to wield dark magic.' Riku looks horrified at this revelation.  "You destroyed an innocent woman's soul just to make a monster to destroy your enemies?!  What the hell is wrong with you?  Do you not hold life sacred at all?" Riku was actually very angry, his grip on the Riser becoming nearly white-knuckled. He was almost regretful that he bothered asking if he'd NOT fight them... but there was too much at stake not to have at least tried. Riku glances towards Roy as they push through Jahn's image.  He can't imagine what is passing through Roy's mind... He puts a hand on his shoulder, just making sure that Roy knows he was there for him.
Nobunaga	"I've no intention of forfeiting the duty of killing you to the Demon."     "If you continue to steal breath from the world when I reach you, it will not be pleasant for you," Nobunaga states simply.     After that she only listens, but her mind is already made. While he claims the title of 'warrior', Jahn clearly doesn't fit any definition of the word known to Nobunaga. An aristocrat playing at war is the closest she can reach; the most predictable of all the generals she recalls ever facing.     The tunnel surges, throbs, and disgorges half-formed dragons into the group's path. In response, Nobunaga plants her feet and thrusts her free hand forward. A burst of bright orange-red flame erupts behind her and from within it unfolds three pairs of great black-charred skeletal arms, followed by the large torso and fire-eyed skull. Its back arcs as if inhaling deeply. When it leans forward, the jawbone drops open and the cursed skeleton unleashes a dense jet of hellfire directly into the faces of half-formed, sludgy drakes.     That should soften things up for fists and swords. > "No; we devised the war-dragons..."     Swiftly crossing the chamber, Nobunaga ignores the projection of Jahn but not the words he speaks. Glowing crimson eyes narrow just slightly in the darkness. The burning skeleton behind her lets out a hiss, sinking back into its flames and extinguishing. > "Your 'Iðunn' was the only one we could get, and it refused to fight for us. So we destroyed its soul, and rendered it an empty shell."     "I see. So you wish to die."     Flames lick around her heels as she walks, approaching the ooze-filled room. When she comes to a stop, it is in front of Roy, and she raises her voice to address Jahn.     "Use these precious final moments to carve this truth into your body: My path is one where even Gods burn to ash. None are capable of stopping me for I am the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven."     "Tenka Fubu!" Originating at her feet, a radius rapidly expands out from Nobunaga, enveloping the chamber and all of those in it. The melted-wax stone takes on a flame-kissed, charred appearance, split by thin cracks that glow orange-red with inner heat.     "All who oppose me shall be incinerated, as sure as the sun rises and sets. Your barriers are not going to stop me or anyone else in this room."     Her free hand extends, fingers curled upward like claws. In response, the floor along the walls cracks apart. Jets of red-orange Hellfire burst upward, curve at her command, and pour into the horrendous ink of malformed dragonspawn.
Odette Raskins	"what kind of culture sees people like this...?" "Half-vermin is still vermin, after all," Although Odette didn't have an answer for Sophia earlier, one does start to come to mind by the time Jahn speaks. It's not an unfamiliar outlook on other people, but it's not one that's heartening to see from someone that's apparently been alive for so long. She starts to open her mouth to say something to Jahn, but the way Petra addresses him in particular has her reconsidering that. If he really was a secret weapon, he should've been used earlier. He should be angrier than he sounds now. He should be... More? More of everything than what she's seeing here. Even Roy's curiosity can't push down that feeling in Odette's chest that's been kicking around especially hard after Lilian's sort-of-order to advance. "Living that ways sounds really.. Sad." She says, more to the group than to Jahn himself, not even looking back  after she passes by and the dragon disappears. She doesn't even notice that he's disappeared, even, until after the mass of magic appears further away, only glancing back for a moment to warn anyone behind her in the precious few moments she has to process what's going onw. "Incoming!" Catching sight of Lucius preparing a spell to blast the mass, Odette drops to a knee as she takes a few shots at the split mass, then recalls what had worked the last time she had seen writhing shadows from Idunn's work. "Light should do it... Look away and cover your ears in five!" She warns while shoving a hand into her pocket, arming a flashbang grenade and counting down the extra second before hurling it further down the hall into the mass of shadows and hastily turning off her earpiece just in time to wince at the loud burst of noise and flash of light that erupts as predicted. She doesn't try that same trick again as they keep going through those grosser and grosser rooms, though, seeing as how her PDA's light is barely even making a dent. Instead, she goes right back to focusing on healing, and then... "Perhaps someday she'll even become my mate?" "... Wh. Y. Hh. Dude."  Odette's face contorts visibly into one of startled disgust. "There's a lim... Eugh. Fae, whatever you do, never lower your standards. I'd bet this guy has never once brushed his teeth." She says, shifting over to give the floofy dragon a pat on the side as well while her disgusted look is mixed with one of grossed-out concern. "N-never mind toothpaste, there's all this gunk that... Is there even anything to rinse with here?" Odette's already abandoned trying to hold back, grossed out as she is. Worse yet, however, is what Jahn reveals as Roy continues his own questioning: "So we destroyed its soul, and rendered it an empty shell." Sucking in air through her teeth, Odette lingers near Fae as she gives her another reassuring pat on the side while trying to hold her own temper back. "Going that far , even by using your own... If there were more Divine Tribe dragons than just Idunn, would you have done that to all of them, too?" She gives Fae another protective squeeze, notwithstanding the size and strength difference between them. She didn't quite catch on to Roy's questioning until now, so she can at least try and keep it going while drawing attention away from the young lord's reaction. "W... Would you have sacrificed yourself to do it, if you were one of the tribe?"
Flamel Parsons	Flamel forward movement is unstoppable, cutting his way through goop long before it's lit up by Roy, navigating on clairvoyance and focus. When Lugh is at risk, especially so, ripping scales from bodies with telekinesis and driving them tip-first into jaws and hands and eyes. "The psychic foundation of your culture is too narrow to sustain what you're trying to do." He says. "If you make this launch, *assure* this *destruction*, there won't be enough dragon or enough Elibe for 'Erev, ruled by the dragons' to exist. If you want a thousand-year victory you should reach it sensibly. You have to stop this launch."     "And you need," He tears a jaw from the goop, and jams a dripping jawbone into a hand. "To clear your head. You're refeeding. Starving this long and finally having these elementary forces again is messing with your head. Let me clear up your psychic systems."     ---     Records come in through Language Processing. An assistant scrambles to the Director, shouting, "Sir, this is the last one, the only person who can explain what happened to Iðunn."     "Then what Zephiel saw when we--" The Director starts.     "Yes, sir! I think it might..."     The Director is already standing, though. "Get this down to the lab. And get operatives in *there*."     "Where?"     "We're deploying to Jahn."     "But we couldn't get near Iðunn, or Zephiel, or..."     "No. Zephiel was host to a high-class intergenerational psychohazard. And Iðunn, we now know, was mutilated to destroy the door we'd use. But him..."     The Director stands from his desk, walking to a display of Jahn. "This one, men like him, I've handled from the day this Institute was founded." He turns around, picks up the phone. "Get me the reserve anomaly."     ---     Flamel's telepathy links with... Fae? <Fae. I'm going to deploy you into his mind. I want you to know: You are right and he is wrong. You've had dozens more loving families than he has ever had and the truth you know is a dozen times stronger than his. Lugh and I are going to get you in deep. Then, I want you to be very, very big. As big as you can be while the stars are like this. Very, very big, and very, very true. Can you do that?> He slams and slashes and rips through, charging up an astral projection to aim at Jahn the moment he's in sight...     <And all you have to do is look, just a bit, for Iðunn in there, that scary lady. Just see what he knows about what happened to her.> In his chest, he feels a swelling sensation, a rising warmth, a fire burning. He has it, every ingredient he needs: The experience of Zephiel's truer, better life. Arcadia, the land where just a few dragons still live. The clear shape of a procedure, a psychohazard, that he has to eliminate... And, at long last, one simple, clear, straightforward warmonger, whose mind is shaped like the MAD-men he was built to fight.     Get in there, Fae. Get so big and messy.
Lilian Rook	'If you speak the truth, the Demon will spare them. If you lie, the miscegenated filth will die along with you. Half-vermin is still vermin, after all'     Lilian can't believe what she's hearing. Stopped dead in the middle of the dragon temple at the very end of the campaign for the fate of Elibe, likely mere minutes their final encounter with the singular woman with the power to relitigate the foundational structure of the world as everyone knows it, this is what she's hearing, from a guy this two-dimensionally rancid and evil. It beggars belief.     "Are you lost?" she says, blinking and stupefied, entertaining the idea that Jahn might be a lost Elite from elsewhere, just for a moment. "I think we have to kill this guy." follows an incredulous moment late.     'I was a... hm, the best word you have for it is 'warrior'. Shallow, but that will do.'     'I have always stood and fought where there was a chance of victory'     Briefly, miraculously distracted from the war raging outside, Lilian says "Okay. Let's see about that." and re-readies her sword.     'But I live. And they are dead. And shortly, their legacy shall be too.'     "So you cowered in here for decades until they died of natural causes. A cunning strategy." God she hates this guy. Every second he's around, the final confrontation with Iðunn because more strange and implausible in her mind. "And allowing a human to conquer the world for you? A bold move." She doesn't care about the context. She's mad now.     Being mad serves her well when the shadowy mass of half-remembered draconic violence boils up through the hall. She joins with Rutger without a moment's hesitation, hacking apart dark ichor in snapping teeth and dripping claws with a flurry of weighty blows from her very temporary 'tenth weapon'. She storms ahead into the throat of the temple at a fuming pace, hacking away shadows from the walls only for as long as it takes to vent some of her momentum, then fingersnap-conjuring her ghost lights after. "Please don't worry Fae. We all love you. Okay?" is an odd thing to say when she's this upset. "He doesn't deserve to speak to you."     'Hm? I thought it was obvious. Your child there is a dragon in blood only. She's been denied a culture, a homeland, and a family.'     It's proven so aggravatingly quickly that it makes Lilian's blood boil. Every word he speaks of Fae, of Iðunn, peels away layers of something somehow 'sacred' that Lilian had built up around this conflict without realizing it. Everything he says chips away at a foundation she needs to make sense of this cruel arc of history; even just to tolerate it existence; and establishes in its place the primacy of the grim and sordid political story that she had heard secondhand about humankind's ancient slavery. She can feel something inside her constricting so badly that her vision tinges red.
Lilian Rook	'So we destroyed its soul, and rendered it an empty shell. All the better to wield dark magic.'     "Your life wouldn't pay for cleaning your blood from my shoes. I'm revoking your permission to breathe." Lilian takes a single step forward, announced with a sharp click of her armoured heels, and then she flickers straight up to Jahn like a nightmare, finishing "--Bláthanna." in the same instant as unleashing a flurry of thrusts so unrestrained that multiple phantasmic blades appear amongst the--     '<Fae.>     Lilian overhears the thought. She pauses with a resentful hiss of breath, in the midst of her onslaught, just long enough to shout "Why?! Why him?! Why does he deserve to live?!" But she can't kill him herself if Fae is inside his head.
Flamel Parsons	Lilian Rook shouted, "Why?! Why him?! Why does he deserve to live?!"     "I'm built to solve this." Flamel replies. "And you don't get a thousand years of peace by killing everyone who deserves it. That's what Elimine *eventually* taught." Another wrenching, fleshy crack as he telekinetically pulls through these dark monsters. "...And he's the one with leads. On the very, very last piece of what I've been trying to do this whole time." He mutters. "Because I need to try to heal Iðunn."     Crunch. Crack. Crush. "The monsters," He says. "They're different now. Look. Without Zephiel to talk to her, every day, constantly, about the dragons, she's forgetting them. Her mind is changing. It can change. It *can change*. And that means it can heal."
Nobunaga	> "Because I need to try to heal Iðunn."     "And THEN--" Nobunaga turns at the waist and shoulders to fix her gaze on Flamel directly, "--his life is forfeit." It isn't *phrased* like a question.
Angela	''Half-vermin is still vermin, after all.'' It's almost hard for Roland to believe. After all of Zephiel's words praising the superiority of dragonkind--that he'd see this guy, have even one conversation with him, and not immediately either fall into despair or give up his plans upon seeing just the kind of person this Jahn doesn't even hide being. "I guess he didn't talk that long with you, I imagine even he might've had second thoughts if he had really gotten to know you." This guy really rubs him--and Gebura--the wrong way. Only Love seems utterly serene in the face of this man. He might not be the behind the scenes master of all but he does feel like someone who fits in that rough general vibe if only by virtue of how he's acting in spite of not introducing Zephiel and Idunn. Indeed, not doing things you don't have to is kind of a big trait of big semi-final boss types and this man makes her think of Nihil and that means she's so very excited to end him and free this land of the last of the Dark Kingdom even if it means she'll have nothing left to fight for. Nothing left to push for. Even if she will eventually leave for a long time because she just..has to... have something to fight. Her hand clenches around her staff. Gebura looks towards Lilian. She reaches out and places a hand on her shoulder, wordlessly. "No point in bragging about who is better at killing. We'll be finding out soon enough." Roland grimaces as Jahn reveals his connection, such as it is, with Zephiel. He rushes forward to help provide cover for Love who is metaphysically designed to fire energy beams into black formless masses of dark energy. Little gives her greater pleasure. ''Your child there is a dragon in blood only. ... I mean a proper family, girl.'' "Shut up." Roland says. "Just ''shut up''. You disgusting freak, first thing I'm gonna do is tear out your tongue. Is this the superior dragon culture? Is this what this stupid fucking war was all about? Couldn't you at least pretend there was something Zephiel saw in you? ... No, he saw it in Idunn, right? Maybe he assumed you were like her and in that moment you had the bright idea to hold your tongue so he wouldn't see how SICK you are and realize his mistake?" Roland can do little else but place a hand on Fae, giving a small nod to Igrene. "Sorry we've let him run his mouth for so long." ''Your Idunn was the only one we could get, and it refused to fight for us. So we destroyed its soul, and rendered it an empty shell.'' It might be easy to forget that Kali was once one who fought for the right for everybody to leave their truest self, unburdened by the crushing force of society. But she has never truly imagined that a soul could be eradicated in its entirety. That even in the stupidest asshole hotshot of a Wing there was something, someone in there that dreamt of more than profit margins and endless grwoth. It's thet first time Lilian would have seen a truly horrified expression on Kali's face, the hardened mercenary hero who had seen it all briefly shattering into the woman she always has been. She remembers when she had been taking under old woman's protection. How she told her that she would have inevitably been snatched up by some Wing if she hadn't found her first. How they would have used her, molded her, bent her into an ideal shape suitable for their wishes. She remembers her Strength stumbling and struggling to bear a load all her own, but at least it was her choice. Her mission. Gebura's grip tightens against Mimicry's shaft. The eyeball looks around excitedly for something to consume.
Angela	Love, still smiling, "We're gonna have to kill this guy, Roland!" Roland doesn't argue. Only Gebura has lost her step in that moment of horrified disgust. How does Roland handle it even half as well? Is he used to it? Has the City grown even darker in the time she was trapped in LobCorp's abyss? That spark of her old self before she met Rita and Lilian reminds her: 'This is why you made slaughtering monsters your mission. Even if they always came back, so long as you are there to keep cutting them down, you can protect them.' But she is a Color. She is The Red Mist. She can't just be like everyone else and express an intent to slaughter the guy who is just so killable, readily saying the things to rile up everyone else. She has to keep her cool. She exhales a sigh, like someone waking up on monday morning and realizing they've got a double shift today. "The dragon race couldn't have been so cruel as to have you as its champion." Gebura says, her tone calm as her face recomposes itself. The worst part is, of course, that in some deep pit of her stomach she knows she doesn't have as much right to judge this man as she'd like. Oh, he's certainly the most disgusting piece of filth she's ever met, but there was a moment in time where she wasn't really all that different, few of the original Sephirah were. You can reverse time... But you cannot reverse a tale. Gebura brings a hand to her head as a sudden pulsing pain hits her. She remembers. She remembers a face of a girl before her. She remembers a face of a child in an adult android body but was nonetheless new to the world. She remembers the child nervously reciting lines in front of her like she had just received a script. She remembers the demands of an Observer in Carmen's notes--originally Ayin, but eventually the child--someone who could fear, someone who could suffer, someone who could feel pain and compassion and struggle through it all--how that was necessary to produce the 'Canned Experiences' to grow a tree. And she just accepted it as part of the project. She stood by. She waited. She accepted. Because she, too, was just a warrior. It was just her job to go along with the horrid plan. And she did, because she told herself it was justified, that the Light would be worth it. It was just one Observer, after all. Sweat drips down Gebura's face as her heart rate quickens. Her EGO reacts to her heart, hair bursting into vibrant red flame-like energy as it surges behind her. "Lilian... We made her into our demon, didn't we? Just as thoughtlessly as this. And it's only thanks to you and yours that we failed. We didn't even see it. And once we did, we only saw a threat to our plans." She looks to the vision before her. "You said you were a warrior... If this ... is a warrior's attitude." Heedless towards Roland's stares in her direction as black and crimson armor forms around her body, a ragged crimson cape billows behind her. But Lilian can tell. Her EGO is TREMORING. Something in Gebura's world has been shook by meeting this guy and, in turn, realizing something about herself. She swings Mimicry, incinerating evil group with each swing. "If you're what counts for a warrior. This is my last day as one." Gebura declares. Meanwhile, Flamel is trying to shove a girl in that guy's mind. "Wait!" Love tells Flamel. "How about me? I'm sort of dragony, maybe it can be me? Fae's my friend, I don't want her to have to go in there, and then nobody has to worry about fighting him. I don't think it's right to put Fae in there. Please? I thought you weren't supposed to do this with kids. And um... I know a little bit what it's like to lose your mind, okay? So... I'm sure there's enough commonality without using Fae. Okay?"
Desire Stars	Not only drivel, but insincere drivel. Why do I waste my time?     "Hohhh?" Geats tilts his helmet upwards, evidently amused. "Leave it to a fellow old-timer to set me straight." He wags a finger in mock-appreciation. "You're right. The least I can do is scrounge up a little sincerity in the face of death."     He pauses for a tense few seconds. "...'Even brute beasts and wandering birds don't fall into the same traps or nets twice.' You got a second chance that people much better than yourself never did--and here you are, dreaming of graveyards, stewing in your own hatred, *proud* of living in spiritual filth. How can you be the same frightened little man you were, so many centuries ago, and not feel ashamed of yourself?" Were there none at all, I don't know what I'd do. How fortunate for me that I am not human.     "You fight anyway, because you don't want to die having given up on what you want the most. You at least know what it's like to want something that badly, don't you?"     "For you, we're just a bunch of nobodies, and this probably seems like an afternoon's work. For us, this is the last chance we're going to get to put an end to something horrible and ugly." She drops the Gigant Hammer into a low guard. "And you're choosing to be in the way of that."     When Jahn disappears, Na-Go guns the throttle on the hammer, lowering the head against the ground to send herself spiraling into the air with the thrust. Easing up, she twists at the apex of her jump, waiting until Lucius' blast and Rutger's bladework separate the nascent dragons. At that moment, she guns it again, turning a hovering overhead into a meteoric frontflip-smash and flattening a slowly-growing mass of scales with enough impact to send cracks spreading through the floor below.
Desire Stars	All the better to wield dark magic.     Geat's fist clenches tightly enough that his armor creaks. Beside him, Na-Go makes a staggered, disgusted gasp.     Part of him wants to charge forward, to go digging through the shadows and decay to find Jahn. To put strength against strength, to make an offering at that base altar that Zephiel spoke of, the oldest force that men have ever worshipped, older than the name they would one day give it. Thinking of Zephiel halts his advance, as if Na-Go had put her hammer out to bar his way.     Why are they here, if not for another way? Why should this pitiful man be the focus, when his own words have revealed his terrible crime and the victim that still suffers? What good is personal satisfaction when peace, long-sought and hopelessly scarce, could be delivered, instead? Not just the peace that this whole world cries out for, but the personal peace which is due to so many, and now, to one more?     "Change is permanent," Geats says in response to Jahn, shattering a reforming dragon with a fiery standing roundhouse. "*Changes* aren't." Why?! Why him?! Why does he deserve to live?!     "Ithunn deserves the chance to look him in the eye, tell him that he failed, and then turn her back on him. And he deserves the moment where he realizes his life is a sentence and not a reward."
Petra Soroka	". . . but, what kind of culture sees people like this...?"     "Tools inform the medium of art," Petra starts, while clutching Eckesachs. "Art informs culture, and culture directs what tools are made."     "I wonder if they never saw a reason to draw something as small as a human before at all. Maybe, like, the entire duration of the war was so short in a dragon's cultural memory that their priorities didn't shift. But that's still interesting, isn't it? The kind of shapes they saw as important. Like, this close to the end, I'm sure they meant to express humans as faceless tally marks to mow down indiscriminately, but... they did have claws."     Petra, alongside Sofia, presses her hand flat against the wall. "You know, a human handprint is basically the most universally understood gesture of presence and solidarity. What was it for dragons? I guess I can think every single individual from back then sucks, and hate the entire culture, but I can't really look at art unkindly like that." "If you lie, the miscegenated filth will die along with you."     Petra makes a low whistle, shifting her grip on Eckesachs. As Jahn goes on, though, she starts to get more and more irritated at him, on the *behalf* of dragonkind, as he just goes on and on. "I was a... hm, the best word you have for it is 'warrior'."     "Are you *fucking* kidding me?" Petra raises her voice, stepping forwards with Lilian. "You're just some fucking *meathead* that survived by a fluke, and now-- look what you've fucking done! Look at the fucking *legacy* you're making by accident, you fucking moron!"     Petra swings Eckesachs to gesture furiously towards the wall; misjudging its length, she gouges a line through one of the carvings. "You might really, genuinely be the last dragon that's willing and able to talk about what your entire *people* was like! And the image you're presenting-- as a fucking civilizational endling-- is that you're a smug cocksucking dull slimeball with less awareness of cause and effect than a fucking houseplant! Are you kidding?! Did you survive out of some karmic character assassination for the dragons' sins?! Did every single ally and enemy you had just forget that your sorry ass was alive?!" "Why would I bother to learn their names? But no; I wouldn't say I fought them."     Oh god. Jahn looks like a fucking teenager, practically. Petra has no basis to extrapolate any dragon's visible age beyond nine hundred, but she's suddenly seized with the thought that Jahn was a child, hiding in the Dragon Temple, disabled by the world's magic draining away, and stabbed haphazardly in passing. Fuck. That'd explain why he's so culturally baseless and smugly hostile too, fuck.     Petra winces. "How many of you were there here? Did you really just survive because of... coincidence?" "'I intend to deliver the world to your kind', he told me. How could I object? I've maintained this haven for the Demon since."     There's still something uncomfortably lurking under the surface of every exchange that puts Petra's hair on end. Her tail swishes warily, flat-laying ferrofluid spikes rippling up and down its length. What she says, with a flick of Eckesachs, is, "He's dead. Yeah."
Petra Soroka	The shadow-infested room has a line cut straight through it extending from Petra when she swings Eckesachs. Arms out to their maximum extent, she wheels around with her full body to cleave the sword through a half-formed dragon, skipping ahead where her insufficient height would cause it to crash into the ground. The pillar of lighting that's flung from its tip carves the room from end to end, parting the sea of darkness though the edges creep back in a moment later.     Another subsequent explosion of electricity conducts through a squirming scaly flank that roiled up beside Petra, coursing down and around her to vaporize the rest of the piecemeal monsters. The Silver sheathe that keeps Eckesachs anchored to her hand sweeps down its length, flicking off lingering crackles of electricity like blood. "Haou--au."     "I know you do, sweetheart," Petra burbles back to Fae, gravitating back to the other dragon-and-a-half. "And I'm so proud of you for keeping that up even through this whole big journey. I know we're juuust barely not done yet, but you've been such a good girl for keeping the promise you made when joining the army. So thank you for that." "Perhaps someday she'll even become my mate?"     In the same low, soothing tone, Petra continues saying to Fae, "And since we're still in the war, let me just remind you, do as I say and not as I do."     There's only one way for Petra to properly convey the white-hot seething disgust she feels flare back up in her the moment Jahn opens his mouth again. After charging Eckesachs with a bolt of lightning that blows the upper half of a writhing dragon-silhouette into splattering chunks, she clears her throat and proceeds to say the foulest word Fae taught her in the dragon tongue, directed towards Jahn.     "Auokhh--hauu--" It's probably, like, the draconic equivalent of 'poopface', given that it's coming from Fae. But it's the thought that counts. "Fucking count your last minutes as the last of your civilization you fucking irredeemable shitstain. Whatever family you had raised you wrong." "But to produce them, we needed a sacrifice."     The carnage of Eckesachs through the dense strings of shadowy monsters gets frenzied, the longer Jahn talks. Petra's spine stiffens, white knuckles around the Divine Weapon's hilt, to hack through the conjured defenses to finally get to the motherfucker that keeps talking and see how well the degraded weapon still holds up against a living dragon.     "Don't tell me that she's fucking *innocent*?!" Petra's shout of disbelief sounds like she's accusing Idunn just as much as Jahn and every dragon he represents. "*No*! Are you kidding?!"
Petra Soroka	The image of the past that Petra had held was similar to Zephiel's, though assembled mostly independently. The dragons were bad, she knew, she could accept; she can't approve of slavery over the human race, and the uprising of the heroes back then was one that was steeped in desperation. She could still pity their fate, and for the last of them, when the balance of power had flipped so thoroughly that she fought a war alone for her exterminated people fueled by her hatred and the dark magic void where they once were, she could see the tragic vision that drove Zephiel to do what he did. It all made *sense*.     But this smirking motherfucker is the only sane dragon they'll ever speak to, and the 'Idunn' that Zephiel worshipped never even existed at all, so--     "Why the *fuck* didn't you say anything to Zephiel when he came here?! You slimy fucking coward! You were *depending* on him to cause all of this, while you fucking *sat* and *hid*! *Die*!"     Petra's wrist twitches upwards, and the broad blade of Eckesachs collapses into its tip, splitting like a trident. With the guard slamming upwards to brace the spherical gem between the three tines, the grip elongates into a long shaft, to reconfigure into a spear. Electricity tangles in its head like seaweed, and Petra twists to fling it in a column thundering down the hall towards where she hopes Jahn's actual body is hiding. "Why does he deserve to live?!"     She holds the spear-Eckesachs there, not following it up in order to not hurt Fae. Breathing heavily, "I don't want this guy to live. I don't even fucking want Idunn to live." "Without Zephiel to talk to her, every day, constantly, about the dragons, she's forgetting them. Her mind is changing. It can change. It *can change*. And that means it can heal."     For some reason, Petra takes nearly as much issue with this as with what Jahn said, inarticulately frustrated. "Did you look outside, you fucking moron? There's a billion fucking identical-ass war dragons to the billion we saw before. This is just *whatever's left*. Nothing's changed."
Marigold	'a human handprint is basically the most universally understood gesture of presence and solidarity. What was it for dragons?' "I don't... know..." Sophia says to Petra, but she looks relieved just to have something else to think about besides this awful man. "Dragons use just handprints now, too... whatever we had... maybe it wasn't as good. The old man is hard on himself... but... he says we didn't have writing, either..."      It's odd when she says 'we humans', and when she says 'we dragons'. Normally she thinks of herself as neither. Maybe it's just this place making her feel that way.      'You're disgusting'      'disgusting freak'      "Disgust. What a human feeling," Jahn's apparition purrs from behind as the group carves into the all-liquid-shadow chamber ahead. It roils and gnashes, and more flows in almost as fast as it can be torched, hacked, and flashbanged away, but you can make it.      "We are beyond such petty emotions. Even now, you don't have the power to disgust me. I don't even hate you. No more than I hate the weeds in a garden, or the dirt on my claws. You are merely... something to be washed away."      Roy touches Riku's steadying hand on his shoulder, grateful, and his own fingers tremble. Maybe with fear, or maybe with anger. It's hard to say.
Marigold	'My path is one where even Gods burn to ash.'      "Gods, too, are a human concept. Curious. Do you yearn so badly for something to bow to?"      'How many of you were there here?'      "Four hundred? Five hundred?" Jahn says, indifferent or feigning indifference. "Most of the dragons left on the continent. The Eight Generals sealed the exits and butchered us like animals in our human forms. I was buried among the rubble and the dead. They should have been more thorough, wouldn't you agree?"      'Would you have sacrificed yourself to do it'      "Hmmm. Perhaps. But it's far lighter to sacrifice a traitor like the Demon, than a dragon loyal to his race."      "Why the *fuck* didn't you say anything to Zephiel when he came here?!"      "I tried, once. He told me that she was my better and I should mind my words," Jahn says with a little airy shrug. "So I... minded my words. Why would I anger someone so useful? Look at you; I suppose all humans hate nothing so much as the truth."      'How can you be the same frightened little man'      "I'm not frightened," he insists a little too indignantly. "... Hhhahh. I'll admit, not even we dragons are perfect. We were foolish, failing to anticipate the craven depths to which you'd sink. We were irresolute, losing some of our race to treason and cowardice. And we were hesitant, trying too long to re-enslave you when you should have been exterminated from the start!"      Fae nuzzles down, first at Roland and then again at Petra, flapping her wings restlessly and nodding. She looks melancholy but resolute, especially after backing up the insult with a little "----uu!!"      On the other side of that hideous slime is solid dry bright stone, thankfully. And in a large chamber, on a pile of rubble from some long-ago battle still bearing the marks of ancient Heroes' weapons, sits Jahn. It must be the real one, this time. He stands with subtle urgency, and the cloth of his robe rustles.      "So," he says with the weight of ages, as he spreads his arms and lifts his red crystal.      "KREEEEEEE-- GHHCK!!"      Before he can do much more than muster up a mouthful of flame, Lilian's savaging him, Rutger is lunging in to puncture his throat as she's learned to, Echidna is hurling her axe straight for his head, and Lucius is blasting him dead-on with his light magic.      He lashes out with claws and fiery wings, but after all that, he's no more dangerous than that first war-dragon you fought in Juteaux nearly two years ago. Fae and Lugh have a rush job ahead of them with Flamel to smash up his mindset and grab the intel before he's just slain, as does anyone else trying to get in a kick.
Flamel Parsons	Love asks, "How about me? I'm sort of dragony, maybe it can be me?"     "Fae has been good, for this whole trip. Just like she promised. So she can tell you to do it instead, if she wants. But she's been waiting to find a decent family for a long time, so rejecting a bad one is important too. And I think... She deserves to get to hit this guy."     Petra Soroka says, "I don't even fucking want Idunn to live."     "Nothing's changed."     Flamel's look at Petra is just sort of dead-eyed.     ---     "Cut her feed now."     "Sir? What about the Cinder Accor--"     "Cut her feed. This is the end of the world. I don't have time."     "And there's the *Library*, they're--"     "If the apocalypse isn't enough for her, nothing is."     "...Cutting feed, sir."     ---     It's like someone pulled a plug out of a sound system. His eyes unfocus and he just seems to stop seeing her. A psychic sense might see something sort of like a censor bar. Someone with eyes just sees a sort of look of disgust crawl across a face that always has nothing but bright positivity -- or at least some sense of benign-to-empty sympathy.     ...     Getting that information out of Jahn is a brutal, fast affair, but it happens. Flamel has to pull in ahead of a few others, and the sort of brutality of it is something he isn't used to. But he has practice, by now, at least. Maybe this was, in some way, the model the war-dragons were built from. Is this the template? Are they Iðunn's mental image of this man, or someone rather like him? ...Well, getting Fae a nice kick for her own feelings is good too. She was never given the chance to choose someone to *reject* from her family. It's a muscle, Flamel knows, that needs exercise.     He hopes there will be a world, tomorrow, for her to use it in.     As for what will be found in there...
Marigold	Inside, Fae's brave light rampages through Jahn's mind like a kid in a monster costume through a toy city. And while he fights her off, Flamel can dig.      Deep down there is a dossier. The pages of that dossier are marked with claw-scratches, forming the simplified shapes of dragons like on the Temple's walls. The series of images tells a story. That story goes: . . . The Demon was a prideful, willful child. She was a prodigy of body and mind, and giftedness had made her arrogant. Her family had fled Erev already, like most of the Divine Tribe, and only she had remained. She remained because she believed she could bring about peace. I still remember the day, fifteen hundred years ago, when the Demon barged in on our council of elders. She looked pathetic in her misery, like a sick animal. "Please, stop! Don't you know the humans are thinking and feeling beings, just as we are? They only wanted freedom from servitude. They will have peace if we offer it to them! Why won't you end this madness, if it will only take a word?!" . . . We beat her until she was nearly dead. Still there was no end to her arrogance. Even when our dark magic had perfected her, the Demon was ungrateful. Given the power to cleanse the world and bring true peace, she would not use it. There was still no end to her begging. At last the elders devised a magic to excise her soul. At first she would not even breathe until commanded to. 'Obey your masters' was the first order written on that blank mind, and the second was 'cleanse the world'. Slowly the Demon became a more functional machine. But when the last of the elders was slain, once again she fell nearly limp. How did that strange human awaken her? I may never know.