Cerva

As powerful as they were, dragons weren't all that hard to slay.

Granted, the soft forms lying half-buried in the snow were that of three days old hatchlings but a scant few months ago they had been of fully grown Imperials. She had to discard them, though. It was as if their souls somehow persisted beyond their death and defied her as she laid them on her table and tried to make them into something better. She had scoffed, glared at their glassy eyes and mocked the futility of their stubbornness but they would not relent. As powerful as her magic was, she could not cow them. She had almost abandoned back then, screaming her anger into the void had a piece of it not detached and come to whisper secrets in her ears.

She heeded them and started over again, this time with hatchlings. They did not have the willpower of adult dragons and they were far easier to shape, just like the void shard said. She was also able to obtain a lot more than adult Imperials as well. Not only were they less trouble to obtain but they also took far less space. She found herself spending countless hours poring over their prone forms, splitting them and sorting them by quality until only the best were left. With that done, she set to work on assembling what would become her life’s work.

She would build an Emperor.

It would be small at first but the void shard had assured her it would grow. It would mature and it would obey her every whims, it had sworn with a smile. She assembled the bones, sewed the muscles and tied the sinews and wrapped them in the loveliest skin she could find. She carved out her own antlers to adorn the main head with them. She made sure all four heads were of different elements and after many moons of intense work, she completed it. It finally laid there in her magical circles, motionless, looking as if it were merely asleep. She had smiled and cast her spell to breathe life in the beast she had created.

But it remained lifeless. It mattered not how much she empowered her magic with sacrifices or how many times she would redraw her circles. The thing she had created refused to come to life. Had the void shard lied to her? She screamed at the sky some more and to her surprise, it returned. It laughed, at first, mocking her failure but eventually, it told her what she wanted to know, the key to bringing her Emperor to life.

She would need a soul as powerful as the creature she was trying to make and just like the monster she sought to animate, it could be made by merging enough souls together.

She had slain dragons before, but capturing them alive turned out to be far more complicated. She needed strong souls, but these tended to wound her and, in time, these wounds would accumulate and weigh her down. She settled for capturing weaker dragons but as they started to grow more numerous within her lair, it became increasingly difficult to keep them caged. The sorceress fought onward regardless, toiling ceaselessly to gather enough souls to breathe life into her Emperor. Even as her body wilted from the abuse she put it through, she refused to abandon her hubris.

Despite her efforts, however, she would find herself in her innermost sanctum, cradling the body of her creation as her captives finally breached the last set of doors to get to her. Weaken, her fur matted from neglect, she still sought to fight them back as two dragons set to destroy the little body she had worked so hard to create. The stitches of the extra necks were the weakest ones and the first to give under her prisonner’s claws. Despertate and incensed at seeing the fruit of her labor being broken, she incanted and the magic circles adorning the room shone to life, blinding the dragons. One cried out to have her silenced but it was too late. The sorceress completed her spell and the world went white.

When the light subsided, only one being stood. Weakened, bloody, confused and short three heads, the effigy looked around itself and the still bodies littering the room. The roar of voices in her head was distracting and it was hard to make out relevant information from indignant screams but she would never know any other reality. They drew her to the lifeless shapes around the room at first and she would feel a strange familiarity towards each of them as if they were familiar outfits she used to wear. The shape of the antlerless, emaciated and filthy wendigo was the one who caused her the strongest feeling and she spent a few minutes observing it, unperturbed by the voice that became louder than the rest. Her investigation of the room done she sat down for a moment, exhausted by the mere effort of walking to and fro. As she cast her gaze around her once more, she became aware of a nagging feeling in her stomach. She wondered if there was anything edible around here. She would need to eat to regain her strength, some voices told her. One in particular drew her attention to the bodies around her. They were made of meat, after all. The outraged cries of the other voices soon drowned it, but not before it made the effigy consider its words.