Tartarus

by Cutinstincts


by vizarding


by Punchlines


The forest is pitch-black at midnight, but it echoes with strange screams and cries from a million different creatures. The Viridian Labyrinth is never silent. He stops a moment and listens to it. Overhead, something is whirring and chirping. The rich smell of loam fills his lungs. Water drips from the leaves, the chill soaking into his bones. Home.

He keeps walking.

He isn’t afraid of his hunters. It’s his game to play. He slithers among the roots and soil as silently as he can, amused by his own caution. He could destroy his pursuers—every one of them. But he wants to see what will happen. As always, he is one part curiosity, one part impulsivity.

Will they come?

A part of him wants to know that he mattered to them once.

He walks snail-slow, at peace. He won’t be back; the jungle is too dangerous, even for him. They have all turned against him and he can’t blame them. He brings destruction in the same way a tornado does. It’s a side effect, he thinks, and chuckles. A bird, startled at the sound, screams and takes wing. Two eyes blink along his spine at the creature’s passing.

He pauses again, taking in the night scents of the rainforest and the screams of protomanticores swinging from the branches above. Nobody is coming. If they had been coming, they would be here by now.

He casts a spell anyway—spite, curiousity, whatever the reason—and watches it swoop away through the trees like a hunting hawk. The spell takes hold and clings to the trees like a spiderweb. Reproachful eyes of animals watch him from the bushes. He leaves without another word.

No one, not even the animals, will step foot there for a very long time.

---

Haunted, hunted. Tartarus revels in the feeling of outrunning himself. He’s always one step ahead of his undoing, but only one. He always craved the adventure of the forbidden. Now, his life is the adventure—in exile, everything is and adventure and most things are forbidden.
He accepts the hatred flung at him with a nod and a shrug. Tartarus can’t say he doesn’t deserve it. Broken clans litter his past like angry ghosts. An earth clan here, a light clan there, once an ice clan deep in the floes. The echoes of a Plague clan mar his body. He has destroyed them all.

But what tornado flinches at its own wrath? He knew that every step he dared to take would lead him here someday. It was inevitable. Ruin is the price of understanding.

Still, some of his memories follow alongside him as he walks. They aren’t real; he knows that. But that doesn’t make them disappear. They watch him with baleful eyes, a punishment that he accepts. He can’t deny the guilt that curdles in his chest, pushed down deep as it is.

Gone, gone.

He treasures the feeling. It means he's still one step ahead.
---

When he washes up on the edges of the Tangled Woods, it reminds him so much of home that he staggers. Twisted trees arc and curl over his head. It’s so much quieter here than in the Rainsong Jungle—but there’s just as many eyes on him. The ones on his body look back.
There is a mirror watching him. She has been watching him for a long time now. It is so hard to miss anything nowadays; he knows too much, sees too much. The knowledge is wearing him down to the bone. How much longer will he stay one step ahead?

He lets her head him off at the next crossroads.

“You are a powerful mage, but there’s dust on your claws. An outcast, then. Stay,” she says. Her stare is cool and calculating. He looks her in the eyes: a challenge, thrown down in front of her. Is this what you really want?

When she doesn’t back down, he nods.

“Alright.”

What does he have to lose? Nothing more than she does.

---

He makes a tower for himself. It’s a vast tree, crown reaching above the ever-present fog, so like the ones from his home. Its trunk is hollow and empty. The mirror asks no questions, but she seems to understand.

Sometimes, there are things we have to do.

When he enters his new palace, he seals it behind him. He grows twisted and hungry there, eyes focused ever more inwards. But this is the price he pays.

The ghosts, at least, are quiet here.





by TheDragonEmperor


by smerdyakov

an extremely knowledgeable and skilled sorcerer who ended up dabbling in the dark and forbidden arts to become more powerful. Eventually he became corrupted and more off the rails, hungry for more power and darker spells to master. Tartarus has no family and prefers to be on his own, living in a tall tower. He was accepted into the clan despite being banished and on the run from various other clans because Lady Macbeth takes in and protects the darker and dangerous dragons in exchange for their service to protect and fight for the clan.

first awakened: ensorcelled volume
second awakened: graveyard guardian