Chapter 85: The Exile

Fjall, the land of eternal winter where snow that turned flesh to frost and winds that cut like knives reigned supreme regardless of the season. It is said that aside from the undead wastelands of Undir in the southern edges of Terra, Fjall was the most dangerous land of the entire realm.

Thus, it was no coincidence that the humans of this land grew strong.

Even before the Convergence, the humans of this land were a mighty people, their bodies clad in great cords of muscle and their skin grown pale and resistant to the bitter cold.

Before the gods, the Fjallan tribes were considered monsters themselves. Humans that never settled in one spot for long, always following the Great Storm to find fish and water and monsters to survive upon.

And in times the Great Storm grew too small, its vortex of waters and ice too drained, the Fjallans became raiders that brought untold misery when they sought land and food from the weak and sun-kissed peoples to the south of them.

Even Post-Convergence, the Fjallans stayed true to their nature, taking upon them worship of the war goddess and honing their strengths to even greater heights.

Even now, when the gods granted the Fjallans the city of Middir to settle upon so that they would no longer have to war and raid and follow always the untold dangers of the ever moving, ever cycling Great Storm, Fjall produced the highest number of strong warriors in proportion to their population.

It is said that among adventuring groups that to have a true Fjallan warrior in a party was akin to charging into battle with a ferocious beast, and what better way to best a monster than with an equally fierce and savage monster?

Atop a snowy peak of one of many mountains forming the Rift, where the air and clouds grew thin and few men ever dared to tread, there lay the dying body of one such fierce and mighty Fjallan warrior, fully marked in the ceremonial tattoos of his people to show that he was honored and worthy even among his own.

His muscle-clad barrel chest heaved with croaking breaths on snow-tipped rock as he looked first at the handle of his Everfrost battle axe sticking from his stomach, its spiked tip impaled through his stomach in a fatal wound.

Several of the mountain tops around him were shattered from the impacts of a great battle. A battle he had lost.

His fading eyes looked up at…at a dragon?

Impossible, he thought again. Dragons were extinct, Leif Gunnarson knew this. Everyone knew this.

He knew it just like anybody who knew anything of the old myths knew. He knew it like how even children knew the sky was blue.

It was a fact of life. A simple truth. One that the gods told over a thousand years ago and the elders continued to tell even now, generations upon generations later.

Once, monsters ruled this world, and dragons lorded above even the monsters. Then the gods had emerged, and with the Convergence, united the realms and brought an end to the reign of the dragons through the Draconomachy.

Every child across all Common Realms grew up hearing this tale. How the gods ended the dragons and thus started an age not of monsters, but of men to rule the world.

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But here…beyond the mountains of the Rift that divided the territory of Vintr- the northern World Dungeon- from the lands of men, perhaps it was possible for a survivor, for some bit of the ancient dragons to have survived.

Leif had to report this back to the League. It seemed unlikely, but they would believe him. He had six stars to his name. All he had to do was get back and tell them of the danger.

This monster was strong. Strong beyond measure. It was no ordinary beast that fought with its jaws and claws.

It was almost unbelievable, but it knew how to fight. Martial arts. Axe wielding. All of it, it knew. It adapted to Leif's own fighting style mid-fight and grew stronger before his eyes with honed, almost beautiful movements.

It was as if the monster was trained by the mighty war goddess herself.

And it would keep growing and getting stronger if left unchecked. That much, Lief knew as a martial artist himself.

He tried moving, but only blood filled his mouth as his own axe pinned him down. The dragon grasped his axe and drove it further down, ensuring he did not move. He slumped back down to the icy ground and stared up at the dragon.

Though the draconic being did not…did not entirely look like the dragons of old.

Leif looked up at the monster's circular, ghostly white eyes, at the slit black pupils that narrowed at him.

Or at the least, he tried his hardest to stare back into those eyes, even as he died and felt his body grow weak, for a true Fjallan never looked away from the eyes of his enemy.

The monster's face was utterly inhuman with a sharp, elongated snout encased in white scales. It reminded Leif of the sharks he and his father fished up in the Great Storm, back when he was just a boy.

The beast knelt on two powerful, thickly muscled lizard like legs, the feet ending in three toes tipped with icy white claws.

Though, as Leif knew well, the beast could just as easily move around on all fours with a raw speed and agility that he had never encountered before.

Its face loomed over Leif's, and the creature…smiled. Its jaw was proportionally huge on its face and lined with three sets of sharp, hooked teeth protruding from thick, pale pink walls of visible gums.

And from that utterly monstrous mouth came sounds. And as Leif realized-

The monster spoke. It spoke the Common Tongue.

"Name…," said the beast, its voice a deep, raspy echo entirely unsuited to vocalizing the Common Tongue. "Your…name."

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"Leif…son of Gunnar." Leif coughed, the effort of speaking driving his axe's handle deeper into him and sinking him further into death. But no Fjallan ever shied away from declaring their name when prompted, not by god nor monster.

"Leif…Leif," said the beast, its pronunciation awkward, as if it was still learning the language. "Good name. Good." The monster nodded at Leif before saying, "You die now."

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Leif saw as the monster grasped his axe with a massive, scaled and clawed hand, and then twisted the handle and drove it up, smashing it through his ribcage and into his heart.

That was the end of Leif Gunnarson, six-star adventurer and next in line to be chieftain of the Boar clan.

==

Valtr gazed down at the human he had slain.

The human's eyes went wide as his life slipped from him.

Valtr took his fingers, retracted the icy claws from their tips, and drew down the human's eyelids to close them. He did not know why the humans did this, but it seemed they liked to do this to their dead.

And Valtr had enjoyed fighting this human. Leif…that was his name.

Valtr stood up, his slightly hunched, thickly muscled and white scale-plated back bearing all the sturdiness and mass of a fortress wall.

"You were strong, but you reached the limit of your potential. It is good that you die now," said Valtr in his own tongue to the corpse. He felt several cracks in his scales and a few shallow cuts into his flesh regenerate.

Two blue draconic wings made of pure energy started to flicker and form to his sides. "I thought maybe below the Rift, everything was strong.

The White Voice always told us never to go below the Rift. I thought it was because of you humans."

He looked at the human's dead face.

"You are fun. Fun, but not strong. Unworthy of my curse."

Valtr looked ahead, down the mountains of the Rift where below, the rest of the world sprawled.

And soon, this world would face the End. It was ordained by the White Voice.

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And Valtr would be the End's herald.

But now was not the time to move.

Soon, though, soon.

Valtr smiled, all his fangs rattling in anticipation.

Oh, how wonderful the End would be. He would get to fight and fight and fight and prove his Blessing of Destiny wrong.

No, not a blessing.

Only now that he was strong did the others call it a blessing.

It was a curse. The very curse that had made him once an exile among his own. A curse that he would break soon.

Valtr turned around to go back to his domain, but then stopped.

"Oh, I almost forgot," said Valtr. He turned back to the human's corpse and picked the still body up by the axe handle embedded in it. "You humans like to bury your dead, too. Like the Jotun.

Unfortunately, I do not know your burial customs."

Valtr's eyes did not narrow – they physically could not, open in permanent battle-ready wideness as they were. Cold, almost dead eyes.

He scanned the endless white landscape beneath him, at the constantly raging, ice-veiled winds and clouds forming a thick layer of violently clashing elements under the mountains.

It was impossible to tell where this human came from through all that.

All Valtr knew was that he belonged below the Rift. Somewhere down there, wherever it was, he did not care too much.

Maybe someone of his kin would find him.

Maybe not. At the least, it was good to give the body a chance for the fun it had provided.

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Valtr drew back the axe handle like a javelin, the human corpse pinned to it, and then threw it.

A shockwave of force gusted out from his throw, and he saw as the corpse parted a few clouds down below before being swallowed up by the endless winds and snow.

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