>>5278357>>5278360>>5278393>>5278447>>5278456>>5278584>>5278587You avert your eyes downwards respectfully.
“My Lord, I…”
You want power, status… But also freedom. This feels like the opposite—like you are selling yourself into slavery. Even in relation to a Dark God, doing so feels… Wrong. Antithetical. You are suddenly very aware of how young you are, how inexperienced—how impulsive. This was foolishness.
“I decline the offer,” you force yourself to say aloud.
“You are certain?” Death asks. “It was YOU who called upon ME, dragonling. YOU who proposed vassalage.”
“I know, but…”
But no children? No preservation of life—not even as an option? It seems a grim path into a barren future, in service to… To this terrible (albeit magnificent) THING before you. You can scarcely comprehend the scope of it—a LIFETIME of servitude to a single being, when you may live to be over ten times your current young age!
“Very well,” Death says, when you cannot finish the thought. “But there will be consequences. There are ALWAYS consequences. They are inevitable.”
“Is there not some necromancer I can slay?” you ask hopefully. “I am happy enough to pledge myself to the destruction of the undead.”
After all, how many such beings can there be?
“Oh, yes, the destructions of mages and other lesser entities who threaten the natural order by which souls form and flow… There is a great deal of work to be done to maintain that equilibrium. And you… You WILL play a part in that design.”
“And the Great One?” you ask. “What of my brother’s freedom?”
“A Death Knight bears status greater than a Chaplain,” Death answers, “but you are no Death Knight. I can offer nothing more.”
Death spreads his wings, which unfurl and unfurl and unfurl, until they are a hundred times the span they had been while folded. They are cloaked in scales and swirling smog, an odourless cloud of dark miasma which enshrouds you both. Gods Below and Beyond… THIS is what you were bartering with? It’s… Elemental.
“If you wish to learn what drove the Serpent Priestess to take her life, travel downwards,” Death suggests. “Remember, though, child: if you would call upon me again, you will not find me; if you call upon another God, you had best consider your decision carefully. My siblings are not as patient as I. They have spent long in isolation from the world. I am well-fed, but they… They hunger.”
With a single beat of the world-spanning wings, Death ascends like a shooting star, straight up. The dark fog goes with him, swirling behind him like fire behind a blazing arrow. As he strips away the bleak blackness with his passage, you find in the room once more… Alone, with the long-dead priestess whose fate remains almost as mysterious as it was before.
