Always More
Ruled by Sin
By Pearple Prose
There are few things more enigmatic in this world than the dragons.
Ancient and unknowable, no-one truly knows how long dragonkind has existed on the plane of Equus.
Their power is great—the greatest, in fact. Even the immortal Royal Pony Sisters themselves fear war with the beasts. Yes, the dragons are formidable opponents indeed. A wyrm of average age and size possesses the strength to pound boulders into dust and a flame hot enough to melt steel, and they only get stronger as they age.
It is said that the oldest of the dragons slumber far, far below the surface, so monstrously powerful that the tiniest of movements can cause earthquakes.
Even the dragons themselves are unsure if this is truly a legend.
But if this race is so feared, why do they cower in caves with hoards of gold and gems?
Although they are revered for their wisdom, dragons are isolationist to the extreme. The only time they will leave their lairs is breeding season, when they fly as a mass of controlled chaos to volcanic pits. The specifics of dragon sexual biology are unknown, but all living beings in a hundred mile radius are advised to flee. Quickly.
There is one more distinctive trait that every dragon shares: greed.
Why are such a knowing, magical, powerful people slaves to their own vice? Why do they distrust one another so vehemently?
To find the reason, you would have to travel back in time. Before the rise of the Solar and Lunar Diarchs, before the chaos of Discord's Reign, before the founding of Equestria.
To know the truth of the dragons, you would first know the Reign of the Dragon Kings.
The Hearth's Warming tale would tell you that before Princesses Celestia and Luna arrived from the aether to command the Sun and Moon, respectively, the heavenly bodies were moved by the world's most powerful unicorns.
This is a lie.
Or rather, a half-truth told to fill in the blanks. The unicorn spellcasters only moved the skies after the great nation of Equestria was founded through the unity of the three tribes.
Before that, there were the dragons.
Dragon magic is misunderstood at best, and completely unknown at worst. No dragon in living memory has ever truly realised the vast potential of their Flame.
This was not the case during the time when dragons ruled. The power to move the heavens was only scratching the surface.
They could do more. Oh, so much more.
The dragons of old were both very much alike and vastly different to the dragons of today. They had a kingdom. A culture. Physical currency was nonexistent; value was synonymous with strength, age and wisdom. To dragons, these traits are one and the same.
And the strongest of dragons were the Kings.
While all dragons are magical, there were a minute few who could manipulate their Flame—their life essence—to alter the world around them. The single most powerful among these few held dominance over the rest, who were akin to advisors. Dragon-kind slumbered, pondered, and laboured, accepting with what they had.
Except for one.
There was one dragon who was not content with the status quo. Where other dragons were submissive and aloof, there was one black sheep who refused the ways of his people.
Rather than be satisfied with the powers granted to him as a dragon, this dragon wanted more.
This dragon's name was Sin.
The legend of Sin the Black is shrouded in mystery. Every detail about him was an oddity to the dragons: his unnaturally dark scales, his insatiable ambition, even his birth.
Sin was said to be born from magic. Either accidentally or deliberately, his egg was hatched through an infusion of thaumic energy. From the advent of his very creation, he was regarded as an omen.
Where other younglings revelled in their innocence before the weight of maturity crashed down onto their shoulders, Sin simply observed, watching and learning with an insatiable curiosity, one that frequently stumped his elders.
While other whelps practised their newfound flight and fire, Sin meditated and reflected on reality, deciphering the intricacies of nature in his bid to learn more, ever more.
By the time he became an adult, Sin the Black was seen almost as a monster. His powers were truly unheard of, especially for one so young. At the tender age of 5 centuries, Sin could bend the world to a degree rivalling those twice, perhaps thrice, his years.
It was not enough. Sin wanted more.
And so the black dragon almost literally disappeared off the face of the world. Whether to deal with demons, surmise with spirits, or simply meditate at the very edge of the Void beyond the boundaries of our realm, Sin the Black had well and truly faded from memory.
In his absence, the dragons continued with their passive existence, unchanging despite the millennia that passed.
Change flew over the horizon in the guise of a spectral black dragon.
To the King, the draconic magician that appeared on his doorstep was an oddity. When the oddity declared his intention of defeating the King in a duel and taking the throne for himself, he was rapidly redefined as a delusional fool.
The very fact that he was King meant that he was virtually invincible. The monarch was not determined through birthright—such things hold little meaning to a dragon—but through strength. And Scales was by far the strongest.
When his soul was returned to the cycle, the heir would be chosen through combat between the Archmagi that governed him. The black dragon was not an Archmage; he would never be able to take the throne directly under any other circumstances before his death.
But the King made his final mistake that day. He chose to humour him.
The two great lizards simply watched one another, daring their opponent to strike first. Then, with a thunderous applause, the space between them exploded. With a shockwave of fathomless power, the dragon of blackest night and the dragon of tempered gold shattered space in their frenzy. Wisps of ethereal energy danced along their scales and tore at the very fabric of reality itself.
The combatants flew and coiled around one another, bending gravity and tugging on the atmosphere to brew a vortex of the elements that tore at the heavens themselves. Reality flipped again, and the vortex collapsed on the duellists, but the two had already blinked away with a flick of a thought. The world stopped still as time struggled to compensate, but the dragons would not give an inch.
They continued to fight, relentless and bloodthirsty, oblivious to the destruction of their world. Eventually, Scales flew miles up into the atmosphere, then condensed countless rays of sunlight into a beam that reduced the land to wastelands of volcanic slag. The weapon of sunfire honed in on the streak of pure black with lethal precision and intent.
The black dragon hooked his claws into the weave of the world and, with a defiant roar, tore open a hole into nothingness.
It was unstoppable. The sheer power of the artificial black hole and its immense gravity bent and sucked the light into the null space of the Void, creating hurricanes with the force of its pull.
With a snap of Scales's taloned fingers, the rift collapsed and disappeared as quickly as it arrived. The golden dragon leapt at his foe, and locked him down with pure force.
Sin didn't retaliate as his opponent smashed him with augmented strikes that disintegrated his bones. He didn't fight back as the golden monster of a dragon tore away at his flesh with claw and jaw.
When Scales went to cleave his head from his shoulders, Sin cast his spell.
Chains of gore and bone, held together by solid shadows, wrapped around Scales' arms, legs and wings, restraining him and sending him crashing to the ground. Before he could react, Sin grabbed his head in both his claws, forced him to look into his blank white eyes, and brought forth the Void.
The blackness ate away at the King's body. Muscles rotted away; bones creaked and splintered. Blood blackened and thickened in his veins.
Eventually, there was only a skeleton containing a raging orb of white flame. The remains of Scales' soul hardened and crystallised into a perfect fire ruby. Taking the gem into his palm, Sin spoke softly to his enemy:
"I want more."
And devoured the Flame whole.
When the dust settled, King Sin the Black rose to rule.
Sin was a very different king to his predecessor; rather than remain impartial, he raised an army and took complete control of the continent, shaping the land to his whim. Precious jewels were pulled from the earth and used to create magnificent structures as a symbol of the power of the dragons.
When every race on the continent was enslaved, they moved out to the rest.
In time, every country, race, and creature was in servitude to the dragons and their all-powerful King. Fearful whispers among both slave and slaver spoke of how King Sin, in troublesome times, blinked onto the battlefield and proceeded to slaughter every enemy in a controlled tempest of shadowy death, before teleporting back to his mountain roost when finished.
Yes, every living being in the World feared Sin the Black, and not without reason.
Sin had a secret however. When dragons reach the end of their long lives, their bodies would crystallise and disintegrate, while their soul would escape the confines of their forms and flow back into the Aether.
Sin, however, was not so fortunate. Despite his immense magical power that had no rival in this vast World, his body was unable to cope with it. It had not the time to grow to contain the Flame that fuelled him, unlike Scales, and so his body was eating itself from the inside out. Painfully.
It was after a particularly horrendous fit of agonised screams that Sin realised the truth. His soul would subject him to his only weakness: mortality. The only thing that Sin had left to fear is death itself.
And fear it he did.
It is believed that Sin was driven mad by his inevitable fate, disappearing for years at a time on a wild hunt for a solution, but it seemed impossible to escape. The Black King was going to die an early, agonising death and his Flame would snuff itself out, denying him rest and possible rebirth.
But Sin was the impossible. He refused to be bound by any rule, and so he did what he did best. Obtain more.
In the heart of the Everfree Forest, the black dragon prepared to open a door into the Aether. He would defy death by becoming a god with the souls of the deceased.
But something went wrong.
For you see, dragons, as powerful as they are, are not true gods. They do not make the rules, nor can they break them; only bend them. The real masters of creation do not take kindly to those who dare enter their territory.
After all, mortals are not meant to see what lies beyond.
Sin's soul was torn apart by the divine. Beings beyond our comprehension, in all their terrible purity, took the black dragon's Flame and pulled it apart. One piece taken from the whole was divided among the dragons, each receiving a part of Sin's gift and curse, his drive and his torment. Dragonkind was cursed with the Greed.
Another piece was what remained of Scales the Balanced, driven mad and corrupted beyond recognition. It no longer held any of the order he cherished. It was chaotic, an anomaly, and was discarded.
Finally, there was the black spark of what remained of Sin. It was thrown into the Void with the rest of the mangled dragon, to drift for the rest of eternity outside time and existence.
This event nearly brought about the Apocalypse, for the dragons had never experienced true want before. Greed brought with it envy, and with that, dissonance. The dragons were reduced to frenzied monsters that destroyed and stole everything in sight. Countless thousands of the most ancient race on Equus were killed in the near-genocide, the survivors fleeing with the hordes of wealth they had reaped. The hate-filled souls of the slaughtered dragons rose again to become spirits of the cold arctic wind. The Windigoes were born from the despair of thousands.
The world seemed empty for a long, long time.
Until three races of colourful equines formed a tentative alliance with one another, and sought to build a new world and forge a new history from that which had been lost. The Windigoes were banished by friendship and Harmony, and the truth behind the dragons was forgotten long before Celestia and Luna led the budding nation of Equestria to new heights.
King Sin the Black was gone, and with his dying breath he nearly destroyed his entire species and the World along with them.
Only one fragment remains, and even he has forgotten his true nature.
But do not despair.
For there is always more.