Tyrant Queen of Darkness
"A Dragon's Hoard."
Tags -
Cin
The sky over Morrigal cracked like a jawbone split by war.
Thunderhead clouds hung low and black, grumbling with pressure and unseen violence, as if the heavens themselves were balking at what had begun to awaken on this forsaken world. From horizon to jagged horizon, nothing but scorched wind and slate-grey stone. Morrigal had no songs, no prayers, no voices left that were not carved by flame and ruin. It was a dead world. And soon, it would be made to kneel.
Darth Virelia stood alone at the edge of a basalt cliff, cloaked in an obsidian shawl that danced like ink in the mountain wind. Her eyes—golden, sharp, endless—were fixed on the valley below. Charred woods and volcanic spires stretched before her like the ribcage of some ancient god whose heart had long since gone quiet. This place, she had decided, would be her throne. Not a throne for comfort or glory. No, this throne would be a spear driven into the heart of the Velgrath contest.
There were no guards. No escorts. No sentinels with halberds or grand banners fluttering in the ash-wind. She had come without pageantry. She did not need it. This meeting required nothing but her—and the one she had summoned.
Cin.
Her ally. Her weapon. Her experiment.
She had called to him not with desperation, nor command. No chains. No threats. She had given him a choice, once. And he had followed. That was the foundation she would build her empire on—will, not obedience. Fire, not fear.
A tremor rolled through the ground.
She felt it before she heard it. That low, tectonic groan that wasn't from Morrigal's crust but from the sky itself—a pulse of pressure. The air warmed. The clouds stirred.
He was coming.
Virelia turned her back to the cliff, slowly removing her hood, letting the wind rake through her dark hair as she drew one deep breath and exhaled control like a lover's name.
Her armor—blood-dark, trimmed with volcanic silver—gleamed faintly in the dying light. At her waist, no saber. No blade. Only her hands, folded before her, and the Force—her weapon, her doctrine, her religion. Power not worn like armor, but exuded like scent.
She lowered herself to one knee—not in subjugation, but in communion with the rawness of the stone, her palm spreading flat to touch the volcanic ridge beneath her.
"Come, Cin," she murmured into the ash.
"Come see what we will make from bones and fire."
The thunder grew louder. Not natural. Not ambient.
Wings.
Massive ones.
A shadow was drawing near.
And Virelia smiled—not wide, not wild, but sure. She smiled like one smiles when a promise is fulfilled. When a sin returns home to its maker.
This world would have its fortress. The Fourth Legion would know its future was not in banners or bloodlines—but in vision. In the union of unshackled flame and patient corruption.
And tonight, it would begin.