• Published 26th Sep 2018
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Queen of Storms - Via



An endling drakoness finds her world taken from her. An ancient force as old as Life enacts his vengeance on the world - and the bells begin to ring, as the Queen of Storms begins to stir.

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[13] Drakon

Drakon


What...are you?


What is a drakon?

There was a time where you could mistake a drakon for a dragon and be at no fault. But that time was gone - washed away in a sea of ketchup hotter than lava and a blizzard of super-heated sand and scales. No, the definition of drakon had changed now - as Chaos left only one. So - what was a drakon?

In a drakon, the bones came first. The bones were offered from the Earth and formed a foundation. A towering mass, a head taller than the ancient drakon king of past himself and barely a fledgling. In a drakon, the elements followed - a body filled with passionate flame, the fluidity of water, and the might of the sky itself.

In a drakon, the body came next. Shaped after the last remnants of her kin - the dragons who stood in defiance against their chaotic eradication. Grandiose antlers that reached up towards the sky - containing more ley than bone or keratin. Eyes that could see minutiae from miles away and a heart that pumped kind blood through her body.

And amidst the stark black void of Discord's accursed night - an alabaster drakon opened her eyes for the first time. And for a single moment, she asked herself this question. What is a drakon?

She was something new, she determined. Power coursed through her veins - a stark intelligence mixed with feral primality was evident in her eyes. She was without peer, the only scale of comparison being the mountains themselves - as the gods had all long fallen.

The world was like mist. Distance and durability was a suggestion more than a strict limit, as it had been before. She was the Air itself, she was the Order that ran the world. There was no realm off-limits to her, no mortal-made structure that she could not tear apart as easily as one might blow the dust off a shelf. No constraints. No limitations. That was what a drakon was, surely?

A soft voice spoke in the back of her head.
No, but she could not hear it.

The world was like dust. Was this why Chaos did what he did? Did he realize the futility of it all? Just as easily as she may create a sculpture without peer, she may grind the mountains down into dust with her bare hands. What was the point in mortality? In immortality?

The voice spoke up louder.
This is wrong, but she could barely hear it.

This was what a drakon was, yes.
The power to create.
The power to destroy.

The power- the world blurred, and...

"It's a force of nature." I looked down at her. She didn't know what I know. She didn't feel what I felt. She didn't see what I see. How could she? But I know - that eventually she would. Eventually. It was only a matter of time.

"Not destructive for destruction's sake," my talon prodded into her scale lightly. If I so wanted, I could push the talon through her scale and into her heart. "But destructive because it is destructive, and it cannot be not destructive. A storm is a storm; a storm cannot be a breeze. But it is necessary."

"Something that the Spirit of Chaos doesn't seem to understand is that destruction should not happen for the sake of destruction, but destruction and chaos should exist to bring change."

The line blurred just as much as the world had. It was all continuous. The drakon remembered hatching as a gryphon just as much as she did hatching as a drake. There was no endpoint; it was all just - just one. Death, rebirth. Death, rebirth.

What - what am I? The eye had barely opened. Clouds roiled. Thunder and lightning tore the world apart.

Please, a voice pleaded. Listen. So soft, but the drakon's attention wandered as something pricked at the back of its consciousness.
Yes, Tempest. A stronger voice spoke dominantly. Listen.
Focus.

There was a flower. A blue flower, with a perfectly smooth white circle at its bud.
It tucked into her mane. And I knew at that moment what I would be. What I fought for - what my purpose was. Everything clicked into place.

All I wanted was what was best for them.

I would be gentle, but strong.
I would be fierce, but kind.
I would be flexible, but stalwart.
As the last of the drakons, I would bring honour to the fallen.

I was not the destroyer.
I was not the creator.
I was not the Spirit of Air.
I was not the Spirit of Order.

I was - I was just...

Tempest.


We brought it into Order: a thousand lifetimes, an infinite amount of memories. A time so inconceivably vast - yet even as my body was forming, my mind had just barely begun to still.

I reached out with glyphless magic for the first time. The books described that Spirits didn't need to use Mys for their element, but it was more than that. I saw it now: glyphs were just a shaping tool for magic. I could reach past that now. I could do magic.

I was the Air, so I plucked what I desired from the sky. I fashioned my wings after the Alicorns who had formed me so, a rolling amorphous mass representative of my element. Two wings made of storms curled around my body. And I wanted - to fly.

You know how to, Order spoke from deep within me.

They snapped out, and I took flight. The ground cracked and trembled underneath me as I broke the sound barrier from a standstill. I hurtled through the clouds moments later, my wings spreading out with practiced ease that I never had. But I had flown before when the part of me that was Air had been Gryphus instead of Tempest.

I flew up, up, up - and then took a sharp turn. At the angle I was flying at, it should've been slow, inefficient. But the air itself seemed to lend its speed to me, and I found myself moving faster than I had thought possible. The world blurred beneath me, and then for a moment - I saw it.

It was beautiful.

It was impossible to describe the true extent of its beauty. First - it was ingenious. I could see it now, how everything was connected. Every river, every blade of grass, every tree, every living creature - all of them were connected by one intrinsic force. Magic. Leylines were the arteries of the world, the Nexus its beating Heart - but we. We were the capillaries, the arterioles, venules - the veins. We were just as much a part of the world as the ground below us or the skies above us.

It was diverse, too. Wherever I looked, I could see the elements and how they interacted with each other. The Water that shaped the Earth, the Air that made the water violent, the Fire that boiled and burned deep within the organs of the planet. There was so much of it, and there they were, and they were beautiful. Ponies - dots of glimmering light among the darkness. Deer. Buffalo. Wolves. Rams. Goats. Cows. Ponies. Dragons. Kirin. Wyverns. There was so much life that adorned the world, and it made my heart swell with strange pride.

I followed the arteries of the world to their connecting point and found an abberation. Where the Nexus should have been, instead - there was a gap. A void, a rift in magic itself that the leylines were slowly paving through. A part of the ocean where there was no magic. Discord hadn't destroyed the Nexus, no - such a thing was impossible without the extinction of all magic, and therefore all life. Instead, he had simply moved it.

It was disgusting. On top of that, the leylines were thrumming with an equal amount of disgusting magic, a thick, viscous sludge of pink, yellow and red that ran all over the world. I followed these leylines - and saw the sheer extent of the chaos Discord had wrought.

The world had been corrupted. The landscape was a shifting hellscape reminiscent of the one that had destroyed my family. The sky was plaid, checkerboard one moment - then the next, it was day, and the sky had decided that it didn't want to exist anymore, and anyone who looked up saw into the maddening void of something that I simply knew to be the Outer Beyond. Whether that was something inherent to its nature or something inherent to my nature as something unique, I wasn't quite sure.

Night or day, it never lasted for longer than an hour - and there was nowhere safe from Discord. Even where my storms had been placed as a mortal, Discord didn't have to so much as lift a finger as the arteries of the world pumped chaos magic into the air and let them erode over time. Villages, though, had the most attention from Discord. Especially pony villages.

Buildings were moved to floating islands reminiscent of the ancient Alicorn Pantheon of old, spinning around in lazy patterns. Discord had turned ponies into twisted versions of themselves - I saw one with a mark for animals butchering animals. They were inverted, corrupted, destroyed. The land was moving too much. A hill was coughing, spraying out clouds of smoke as it turned into a volcano - a face without eyes forming on it as it wheezed occasionally. Other landmarks were pulsing, or wriggling, spraying out molten chocolate and lava.

I noted that the chocolate was hotter than lava, and the lava was colder than ice with an inspection of the spell work. How cruel. There was no trace of him, though. Even Order - his ancient enemy - couldn't find any hint of him on this continent. His magic had saturated it, but he wasn't here. Was he simply not on this continent? Was he deciding to torment another species instead?

I knew, though, that I had the element of surprise. While Discord would detect ascension - I hadn't ascended, had I? I had been resurrected. He didn't know about me. But he would undoubtedly figure out something was wrong if I dispelled all this chaos instantly. No, I had to think more - long term.

My wings beat once, and I crossed a quarter of the continent in the span of a few short minutes. The ground trembled underneath my bulk as I dropped down right beside my home - right beside my first home. Mt. Draelos.

The mountain top had been carved into a sheet of impossibly colorful stone - a swirl of eye-searing rainbow shade that stung the eyes. Discord's throne - a tall, uncomfortable-looking chair with antlers poking out of it, was the lone accessory of the mountain-top. For how majestic the landscape of Mt. Draelos was, it felt offensive that Discord embellished it simply.

It was not, however, the only adornment of the whole mountain. Merely the mountain-top. Littered around the rest of the mountain were bones. And I knew by the magic radiating out of them what they were. They were the bones of all the Spirits he had killed. There was another set of bones, though. Right at the top of the mountain - above all others. A skull with four horns sticking out of it, leg bones that didn't quite match up. A fourth of a tenth of my size. Yes, I knew these bones.

They were my bones. I spread my wings and tore myself up from the ground with another flap of them. I had dallied long enough.

Yes. A strong voice agreed. You know what you have to do.
I did. I had to find them.


The world itself seemed to shake under the force of the storm.

They turned to me with terror. They begged, "Oh Great Sun, stop this storm." I wished I could. But even if I had the ability - I didn't know if I could.

I hadn't seen a storm this bad before. No, that was a lie - I had seen one this bad four months ago. The rain that poured down in such a heavy stream and drenched everything. The constant barrage of lightning that tore the skies apart and struck down in semi-predictable patterns, targeting trees and large swaths of land rather than coming near anything deserted.

"It's all in this." Her claw tapped against the writing that curved in strange ways that hurt my head.
"I don't understand." My voice was soft. It was always soft around her. I couldn't help it.
"It's a glyph."
"I figured that much. But what does it mean?"
"The word is Ignum. It's the concept of Ignore. To avoid, to work around, to - well. To ignore. You can't really define a Glyph with a Glyph, but it's a little hard to explain in non-magic terms. All these glyphs shape the way the lightning works. So - look at this. This is Tesrun. This is the idea of lightning. This is Dos; this is Asptra, this is - well. I could define all of these glyphs, do you, but that's beside the point." She shrugged.

"This one is the most important. Ignum Virtrus. See this?" She scratched a little nook underneath what she had defined as Ignum. "Again, that's ignum. Virtrus is life, so this makes the lightning ignore anything with life."

She rambled on more and more after that. I didn't listen too much to it. No, my attention was focused on something that Tempest hadn't mentioned. Two glyph sequences - drawn earlier. Drawn before even the Tesrun. I wasn't too good at recognizing glyphs, but there were two I knew by heart.

I stared at the Ignum Cel and Ignum Lun.

Luna sat down by my side. Most everyone was in their tents now. The storm had been raging for at least an hour now and had shown no signs of slowing down. There were certainly times where the storms had gotten more violent, seemingly at random - the running theory between me and the only other two unicorns who were sane enough to know anything about magic was that Discord's chaos magic was increasing the strength of the storms occasionally. But it had never gotten this bad. This intense. My heart beat ever so slightly faster - and I found myself thankful that Luna was by my side.

The air itself seemed to bubble and ripple in waves. The ground trembled as the lightning grew more intense. Thunder split my eardrums. Wind struck, so violent that it sent the glimmering outline of chains that adorned the trees around the plateau flying up into the air and pushed both Luna and me backwards. Rain pelted my coat, feeling like bee-stings pelting me endlessly. I held a hoof over my eyes to protect them and faintly felt something in the air. I couldn't describe it as anything else than a pushing at my ears. Like such a massive amount of air was being displaced that I could feel it going up and down - and then I heard the beating of winds, and I saw it.

No, her.

Her eyes gave her away. Monstrous, terrifying - regal, beautiful. A towering mass of glimmering scales more comparable to a mountain than the massive being that I had known that had carried herself so low to the ground. Her chest puffed out, and the sky itself seemed to pull and wrap around her in the form of Storm itself. There's an important clarification there - her wings were not made from storms, but the idea of the storms.

Her antlers - not horns, but rather regal antlers - were like hands of bone that reached the sky. They were similar to Discord - they seemed to shimmer and vibrate and looked out of place with the rest of the world. Instead of a conflicting, painful manner like Discord, it was more of a...thrumming, for lack of a better term. Reality seemed to expand and collapse in her very presence. There was a fire in her chest. It glowed and filled her entire body with a warmth that rolled off of her in waves. There was a strength in her stature, yet a fluidity in her movements and power in her actions. She was something more.

But her eyes. Her eyes hadn't changed. They were sharper now - but there was still the same mind in them. There was a fierce rage. There was gentle wrath. There was earthen steel. But behind all of that - there was only one thing, and it left no doubt about her identity.

Kindness.

Tempest broke the silence with a roar. The storm parted. The rain stopped falling.

There was silence.


Surprisingly, Celestia was the one who broke the silence.

"You died." Her voice was weak. Broken. The strength had begun to fade from her. She looked like she was eating well, at least - but there was a haggard gauntness in her eyes that was impossible to dismiss. She was tired. She was tired.

I pushed my snout down. It was undeniably a drakon head - Life had changed my form with aspects from all the dragon forms. The stature of a drakon, the length of a wyvern, the sleekness and spines of a dragon. But my snout was still the same.

"I got better." The first words I had spoken since my return. Their ears went flat against their head - my voice was something out of nature. It was the sound of cracking mountains, rolling thunder and blinding lightning. Every word carried the weight of my sphere and the force of the elements.

Order quickly drew on my memories and pulled my vocal cords in a way that reduced my volume to a much more manageable amount. It was still thunderous - something my size couldn't be anything but. But it wasn't elemental.

"I got better," I repeated.
Celestia looked like she was about to cry. Luna, with a little bit less self control - was crying. She broke the distance between us and buried her face into my snout, curling her hooves around me. Celestia stumbled over and put a hoof on my snout.

I didn't give either of them the chance to be physically reserved. Instead, I wrapped my wings around them and squeezed them tightly. The three of us sunk into the storm - the world melted away save for the clouds and echoing thunder. But it didn't hurt either of them - no. The storms would never hurt either of them.

"I will never leave you again," I whispered. "I promise."


The storms parted moments later. Every pony in the town had gathered at the impossibly strange sight - their elected leaders speaking to a not-dragon who had stopped the eternal storm overhead. It wasn't as if Tempest's magic was tough to pick apart. Any mage with a passing knowledge of storm magic could - but there were no mages. Not anymore.

I stepped backwards away from Tempest, wiping tears from my eyes. I put a hoof on Luna, leaned in and whispered - "you should check on everyone in the quarantine. Please."
Luna frowned. "But - but..."
"We'll be right behind you. Tempest has to see."
I pulled back. Luna nodded reluctantly, glanced at me - stared at Tempest for a few moments before she began heading towards the quarantine building.

Tempest's eyes were wandering over their surroundings.
"The Chained Forest." She spoke. Her words were imbued with a power I had felt once before - they were imbued with the power of Order that she had died trying to get. This very forest was infused with the same essence. It was what kept us safe from Discord's more active magic - but even then, I couldn't help but cringe in its presence. "It's a surprise that Discord hasn't attacked here earlier." Her voice was strange. It was still her voice, but it was...colder. More methodical. "It's close to his throne room. He must have a reason for not attacking here."

"I don't know why. Eight months, and I haven't seen Discord since...well. You." My voice had become so soft in the end. I had shown such steel, such strength in the presence of the ponies who looked and adored my sister and me - but immediately when Tempest showed, I couldn't help but notice how tired I was.

"He knows we're alive. He has to. I can't - he wrestles the sun away from me. But I always make sure that there's an hour of it a day. An hour of night a day."

Tempest thought for a moment. Her head strangely docked to the side it always did when she was deep in thought. "He's ensuring his reign. He has the ability to destroy this sanctuary whenever he wants. The only reason he wouldn't is if there are still threats to him out there. The world is large."

"...Are you going to kill him?" I whispered. My heart pounded. My mouth felt wet and dry at the same time. My blood felt like sludge.
Tempest stared at me. She smiled wistfully, with age so beyond her. She was a year older than me - but she seemed more than that. She seemed ancient, almost.

I knew what she was thinking of. I saw it in her eyes. It was that conversation.
"I'll tell you everything from now on." Those words. They echoed in her ears the same way they were undoubtedly echoing in me. No, I wanted to whisper. Lie to me. Tell me everything is going to be okay. Tell me you can fix it all.
"I'm going to try." She spoke honestly.

My heart would've broken had it not already shattered.

"...You need to see something," I whispered. I knew little of Discord. I knew of his magic, of his actions - but I had only ever had the one direct encounter with him. Some part of me wondered if Tempest was the one who knew him most. But she had been gone. She had been gone for so long. She had seen his work - but not the aftermath. She needed to see this.

I turned to look at Luna. The building door was open. She nodded at me. I glanced up at Tempest. "Can...you..." I gestured at the building, not quite sure how to formulate my words.

Tempest thought for a few long moments. It was strange - she went silent, her eyes went foggy and white - more white than normal, that is. Then, after a few moments, her antlers pulsed, and in her place was an alicorn. Still, colossal compared to a pony - roughly the size Tempest herself had been pre-ascension. On top of that, she clearly wasn't an alicorn. Storms still formed her wings, her head was still draconic, and her antlers were - well, antlers. But an alicorn was the closest comparison.

I pointed to my side. "There's the beds." It was the first building we had constructed. The trees had been hard to cut down before me, and Luna had come - only we had the ability to break their chains. Wood had been a valued resource, gathered in long trips of twigs and branches. After us - it was plentiful enough that the few earth ponies who remembered how to construct buildings could create.

"Everyone sleeps together." Memories resurfaced how they started construction on a separate building just for my sister and me. I had quashed that project quickly - but it was good that construction had started early. It meant building the quarantine room was easier.

"It's easy to farm here. Apples are good." I glanced over her shoulder at Tempest.
"How do they compare?" She spoke. I opened my mouth to ask for clarification, but Tempest provided it regardless. "Compared to my food."
Memories of going on with an empty stomach, of chewing on grass when the few scraps of tomato and bread that she could cobble together weren't enough. Where the constant burning of hunger had been just that - a constant.
I opened my mouth. Tempest snorted. "That bad?"
I nodded dumbly, a slight smile tugging at the corner of my lips. Tempest had that ability. The grimness, the darkness of any situation - and even when she took it seriously, she still somehow made me find the light in it.

I stepped by Luna and put a hoof on her barrel. "How bad are they?"
Luna opened her mouth. She couldn't find the words. I didn't blame her.
"Cmon, strong girl." I curled my wings around her in a hug. "Go get yourself a snack." Luna nodded limply and walked off in a direction.

It always hurt looking at those that the blight had settled into. But it was important that Tempest had to see. That none of them were lucid, either - if they were to attack Tempest...

I wasn't afraid of them hurting her. No. I was afraid of them grinding themselves into a bloody pulp against her scales. The last time - the last time that they attacked...gods, the blood- No. Focus. I snapped to myself. I stepped into the quarantine building and pulled Tempest with me.

And I showed her by far the most sickening thing that Discord had done.

"It had sprung up a few months after we had come. They called it the Chaos Blight. It's an ugly name - it's meant to cause concern, meant to make you uncomfortable and afraid."
"It happens sometimes. He inverts them. He does it through dreams, through magic - through the sky, even. And - and they can't handle it." I trailed off as we reached the containment room.

We filled it with the broken ponies that Discord had created. They had been inverted, flipped to the opposite of what their marks signalled them for -and their psyche can't handle it. So they scream and gibber and drool, as they do now. They bang their heads against whatever they can, and we have to stuff wood into their mouths and strap them down so that they don't bite their own tongue off and bleed to death. Some of them scratch at the wall, carving into it with their hooves - until their hooves begin to peel away along with the wood in long, thin strips of keratin.

One of them had done so until the bone. She bled out, and we couldn't save her. It was by far the least horrific act of self-mutilation that those afflicted by the Blight had done, though. My presence seemed to soothe them - even now, as I entered the room, their movements stilled, and their whimpers quieted. I had visited once - and one unicorn had torn himself into shreds trying to get to me. He tore so violently from his restraints that his bones broke and jutted through the skin, and as we slammed the door shut - he tore his own stomach open on the glass as he jumped through the window.

There was no more glass after that.

I turned towards Tempest.

"This is what you're fighting against, Tempest. Please. Remember that."


For a time, I wandered amongst them. I spoke to ponies. They told me about Celestia and Luna - about how Celestia was oh-so-gentle but had a soul of steel, and how Luna was firey and passionate - a talent for architecture showing itself among her skillset. I learned second-hand about those two Spirits - my two Spirits, and I found myself sombre that I had to hear about these experiences second-hand.

Night passed. They slept. They slept peacefully, no doubt - without the rain pelting them and the thunder echoing overhead.
I could not. No - my mind was ordered, but there was too much to think about. Too much to do. I had no desire to sleep, even as I lay with wings curled tightly around the fillies pressed into my chest.

You know what you have to do. A voice spoke. It was not my voice. It was not the voice of the elements, the voice of air, or even the voice of Order. It was a softer voice - one feminine, immaculate, pure. A voice that sparked some vague sense of familiarity within me. Not me, but another me - one of the many me's that had come before Tempest. Yes, I knew this voice. Harmony's voice was unmistakable.

I found myself wandering. It was a blurry haze of foggy details. Twists and turns that I knew I would never be able to mimic - chains that curled around me but bent as they felt my soul burn with Order. A twist, a dip, a divot- and I was there. I was there.

The Tree of Harmony glittered in front of me.

The symbols for Cel, Lun, and Mys were carved into it beautifully. Not the glyphs, but rather the symbols. I knew not what they were - but they were some archaic form of magic, one that predated even Order, Discord, and Harmony. One that predated all but Life and Death themselves. My form shifted, my equine shape shedding as I took one more comfortable - running my claw over her branches.

"Help me." I pleaded. We pleaded. Order lent my words strength as I imbued them with desperation. "You can stop him." I added.
"No," a glittering tone responded. "I cannot."
"Can I?"
"No," a sombre tone mourned. "You cannot."
My eyes shut. The endless storm of my wings ceased, and I felt my blood run cold.

"But we can." She added.
And I knew at that moment what I had to do.

My soul began to burn as power flooded it. This was a familiar burn - but it was softer. Gentler. My scales began to glitter like crystals; my horns glowed and pulsed with power. For a moment, I nearly lost myself in power - but I had done so before. I knew how to find my way out of it.

I focused on them.

But behind all of that - there was only one thing, and it left no doubt about her identity. Kindness.

"Yes, Luna," I whispered. "I'm proud of you."
I couldn't have been more honest.

"...That makes one of us," I said. Celestia's head snapped up as she stared at me, having caught the implication quicker than her sister. Luna thought on my words for a moment before she snorted.
Then giggled.

"...all I want is what's best for you," I said after a moment. Luna looked up at me with wide, tear-filled eyes.

"I will never leave you again," I whispered. "I promise."

The cave was gone. Celestia and Luna stared at me. Power thrummed from me.
I broke the silence.
"Leave the Chained Forest. Take them far, far away. Take them to Olympus. It'll be safe there."
Luna was the first to respond.
"You're going to fight him, aren't you?" She whispered. "You're going to fight him."
"Yes," I spoke softly. Even as mountainous as I was, it was still a whisper. So soft I could barely hear.
Celestia shut her eyes. "Will you win?"
"I'll try."
"And if you don't?" Luna pressed. She stepped closer towards me. She was angry, angry - her eyes were filled with loss. She had lost guardian after guardian, and now she felt as if she might lose another.

I tore the largest scale on my body off and gave it to Luna. My scales were small and glimmering - but this one was still the size of her torso. It was the scale directly over my heart.
I tore the strongest scale on my body off and gave it to Celestia. It was the size of her head, but it was the most important scale there was - it guarded the base of the skull and the brain stem.

"The heart scale." I gestured at Luna. "And the forescale." I gestured at Celestia. I kneeled and brought my body as low to the ground as I could.
"Be true, Luna. Be loyal. Be light. Be honest. Be passionate, be fiery - be Luna." I turned to Celestia next.
"Be smart, Celestia. Be generous. Be kind. Be strong. Be Celestia."

I brought myself to my full height. Then, I turned around and spread my wings fast. The power that coursed through my body - even my new divine body...I didn't have all the time in the world. And I knew that if they asked me to stay - I wouldn't be able to leave.

"Tempest," Celestia called.
I glanced over my shoulder.
"...Good luck," Celestia whispered.


Claws planted down into colorful stone. Wings of storm spread, lightning and thunder echoed in the distance. The ground itself began to split as her power begin to draw into herself. The world itself began to warp - reality began to pulse, and veins of harmonic and order magic split the ground. The leylines began to pulse, and the wind kicked up.

Wind is just air pressure. High-pressure areas of air moving into areas of low pressure - because everything wants to reach an equilibrium, a balance, and Wind is not the exception. But this was no wind, no. Physically? Maybe. But no - in reality,

This was wrath.

Wrath, not wind was the force behind this. Whipping through the air like blades with the strength to tear anything in range apart. The trees, chained to the ground by a force as old as the mountains itself were torn from the ground, freed from their chains and splintering into fragments of wood. The ground was torn asunder, sprays of dirt and rock flying into the air and staining the ground. These kinds of things tended to happen when wind moved faster than the speed of sound. Few creatures could survive these kinds of winds. Almost all races would be ground up to dust. Unicorns and Rams would be able to fare slightly better by virtue of their active magic, but very few could survive for more than a handful of seconds at most. Pegasi and Gryphons would be able to survive for the longest, but even they would be torn apart soon after. The only creatures with a true hope of surviving would be those of draconic or divine origins. Dragons, Draconequi, Spirits, and of course, a Drakon.

There was only one Drakon, now. And there was only one other who could survive this. A beam of light shot up into the sky - parting the clouds themselves as a roar echoed over all the world. Every creature, every animal - prey, predator, young, old, weak, strong - all heard her. They heard her rage. They heard her loss. They heard her power.

"DISCORD!" The Storm Queen howled.
"Tempest," The Trickster God answered.

-

Author's Note:

The penultimate and titular chapter of the Queen of Storms will come sometime this, or next week.