Chapter 64: 64. Truth II

“Not immediately,” Chronara corrected, her Reptilian features pulsing with sorrow.

“First, he tried justice. Went through the proper channels and demanded the humans who killed Elara be brought before Council for judgment.”

“Let me guess,” Owen said. “…humans refused.”

“Worse,” Dominus replied. “They celebrated. Declared it a righteous act for the gods, the elimination of a witch who consorted with monsters. Built a monument to commemorate their deed. Named the day after her burning a holy festival.”

The dragon’s voice hardened.

“That’s when Vorthraxx’s grief transformed into something darker. He began speaking of humans as a plague, a mistake in the natural order. Argued that dragons’ true purpose wasn’t to protect mortals but to rule them—or eliminate them entirely.”

“Some dragons agreed with him,” Chronara added. “Younger ones mostly, who had experienced indignities from humanity. They formed a faction. Called themselves the Liberation, arguing that dragons had shackled themselves to unworthy creatures for too long.”

“And you opposed them,” Owen said to Dominus.

“I had to. Not because I didn’t understand Vorthraxx’s pain—I did. I grieved with him. But his solution would have destroyed the balance we had spent millennia maintaining. The Will of the World created dragons specifically to prevent Celestials and Demons from dominating mortals. If dragons became the dominators instead…”

Dominus’s wings spread slightly, a gesture of frustration.

“The war that followed was catastrophic. Dragon against dragon. Unrestrained use of powers that could level mountains, boil oceans, crack continents. Mortal civilizations caught between us suffered terribly. Cities vanished. Entire kingdoms erased. The death toll was… incomprehensible.”

“But you won?” Owen said.

“We defeated the Liberation in direct combat,” Dominus confirmed with a sad expression. “Killed or imprisoned most of Vorthraxx’s followers. Cornered Vorthraxx himself in what should have been the final battle.”

“Should have been?”

“We underestimated his desperation.” Dominus’s voice carried regret now. “And his willingness to abandon everything dragon-kind stood for. In his defeat, seeing no way to win through conventional means, Vorthraxx did the unthinkable.”

“He sought power from the Outer-Divinities,” Chronara added.

“Specifically, he consumed the miasma of the dead outer-divinities at the Shadowgraves,” Chronara said. “Its corruption was still fresh, still potent. Vorthraxx absorbed it directly, letting it rewrite his fundamental nature.”

“Becoming the first Demonic Dragon ever seen” Dominus said.

“The transformation gave him power that rivaled my own,” Dominus said. “Made him functionally immortal, able to regenerate from any wound, immune to most forms of magic that had previously affected him. He became something new. Something that existed outside the natural order.”*

“So what did you do?”

“We allied with those we had previously fought separately,” Dominus replied. “Dragons, Celestials, even Demons who saw Vorthraxx as a threat to their own interests, mortal mages of sufficient power. All of us, united against a single enemy who had become something worse than any faction alone.”

Chronara’s form dimmed slightly.

“The Second Cataclysm, mortals called it. Though really, it was just a continuation of the first. The war against Vorthraxx the Desecrator raged for decades. Reshaped continents. Killed billions. And in the end…”

“In the end,” Dominus continued, “we sealed him rather than killed him. Couldn’t kill him—his demonic regeneration made that impossible. So we created a prison dimension, used the combined might of every faction to trap him in a space outside normal reality.”

“Sealed, but not destroyed,” Owen said. “So he’s still out there. Somewhere.”

“In a manner of speaking.” Dominus’s tone suggested this wasn’t the most important part of the story. “But Vorthraxx isn’t the real threat anymore. The prison that holds him is stable, maintained by wards that will last millennia. What you need to understand is what happened after we sealed him.”

Owen waited.

“The Will of the World awakened,” Chronara said simply.

“Awakened? I thought it was always active, always managing the world’s balance—”

“No.” Dominus cut him off. “The Will is closer to a sleeping guardian than an active administrator. It awakens only during periods of extreme crisis, when the world itself is threatened with destruction.”

“Like when the Celestials and Demons first invaded,” Owen said, remembering what he had been taught in the tower of royals.

“Exactly. The Will awakened, saw beings of god-like power treating the mortal realm as their battlefield, and created dragons as a balancing force. Then, crisis resolved, it went back to sleep.”

“And the war against Vorthraxx was a crisis big enough to wake it again.”

“The damage was catastrophic,” Chronara confirmed. “Ninety percent of all mortal life destroyed. The world’s mana networks fractured. Reality itself showing stress fractures from the forces unleashed during the conflict.”

Dominus’s voice grew heavy.

“The Will looked upon the devastation and made a decision. It saw the Celestials, the Demons, and the Dragons—all three races it had created or allowed to exist—and determined that beings of such immense power were fundamentally incompatible with the world’s long-term stability.”

“What did it do?”*

“It rewrote existence,” Dominus said quietly. “Spent the vast majority of its accumulated power on a fundamental restructuring of the world.”

“First, it deleted the Celestials. Not killed—deleted. Unmade their existence retroactively, erasing them from reality so completely that within a generation, mortals would forget they’d ever truly existed.”

Owen tried to process that. An entire race of god-like beings simply… removed from existence.

“Then it sealed the Demons,” Chronara continued. “Couldn’t delete them—as it had exhausted most of its power and couldn’t carry out large scale powerful race deletion, I assume… But it could contain them. Forced every demon in the mortal realm onto a single continent, then sealed that continent behind barriers that would take millennia to breach.”

“And then it turned its attention to us,” Dominus said. “The dragons. Its own creation. Its supposed protectors.”

His golden eyes met Owen’s golden ones.

“The Will decided we were a mistake. Too powerful. Too prone to causing catastrophic damage when we fought among ourselves. It looked at what Vorthraxx had become, looked at the destruction our civil war had caused, and determined that dragons were too dangerous to exist.”

“So it destroyed them,” Owen whispered. “All of them.”

“Easily,” Dominus confirmed. “We were its direct creation. Our power came from it. Unmaking us required barely any effort compared to deleting the Celestials. One moment, there were thousands of dragons. The next…”

He spread his wings.

“The next, there was only me. The last. And even then, only because I had seen it coming.”

—

Owen’s eyes snapped back to the present, his memory of the conversation pausing as he processed what he had just relived.

Dominus had seen the deletion coming. Had known the Will of the World was about to erase all dragon-kind, and had somehow survived.

No, not survived. Planned.

Owen pulled up his system interface again, this time focusing on a specific section.

[Dragon King System]

[Function: Support Dragon King’s growth and development]

The system within the system. The power structure that had given Owen his skills, his rapid growth, his connection to draconic heritage that shouldn’t exist.

It had never been part of the Will of the World’s design.

It was Dominus’s final gambit. His insurance policy against extinction.

Owen closed the interface and settled deeper into the cave, preparing to continue his memory of that impossible conversation.

Because the revelation about what the system really was, about what the Will of the World actually represented, that part came next.

And it changed every way he thought about the world.

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