Tribulation

“Stand among the ashes of a trillion souls, and ask them if honor truly matters.”

They say it’s an honor.
The highest honor a dragon could ever receive, a calling to serve their deities.
To be exalted is to be honored, remembered.
To be exalted was a death sentence.
Do you know what it is like in war?
Is it all honor and glory, to die fighting for your god? Is it honorable to be thrown as fodder, sent on a suicide mission as nothing more than meat shields in an endless fight?
I’ll tell you just what war is.
War is dragons with their innards hanging out, their flesh scorched from their bones and their blood boiling into steam. War is a child’s scorched plushie in the center of all the ashes, the child’s limp hand still attached to its bloodstained cloth. War is the tattered scarf that hangs limply from skewered branches where a dragon was also impaled. War is the god that wanders among the battlefield, seeing nothing but his own glory bathed in blood and tears. War is the battleground racked with wails and the chattering sound of pure grief as mothers wept for their children dead in front of them, as brothers tugged at limp severed limbs, hoping against hope. War is the creation from the darkness of the deities, the madness of the warlords who play god.
What are they, but mortals who have forgotten their place? A ghost once told me, her skull rotten from both time and neglect. The gods had buried her alive in the tunnels of the earth when the tunnels had collapsed and no one ever bothered to even look for her remains. Her name doesn’t matter.
She didn’t have one anyways.
She was exalted unnamed.
I have seen the gods, and how fickle they seem! Flamecaller is a wildfire, a loose cannon that devours herself. Earthshaker is a fool who remembers days lost, and Windsinger is a frivolous ruler who amuses himself as Wind collapses all around him. Why, I bet that he would still be laughing, ignorant in his bliss, when Sornieth consumes itself in flames! Tidelord is a cowards who abandoned his kin.
Of course, I could go on and on. But my time here is short, how about I tell you about my favourite pieces?
In one ironic twist of fate, Icewarden is more monstrous than anything he has ever kept in his prison. Anything.
Shade-touched, horrorbeasts, Silent Ones, there’s nothing that could ever hold a candle to him. After all he did, after all he had done… perhaps I could have found it in me to forgive him, unlike what I would have done to the Lightweaver. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t the fact he forced others to be like it, or the fact he pushed dragons into the battlefield in his name.
It was the fact that he simply didn’t care. Oh god, oh god, he was so cold, so emotionless when he watched them die. They were pleading for mercy, begging with their shrill hatchling cries.
He didn’t even flinch.

“Oh how they screamed.”

Pardon me, my mind gets away from me sometimes. I’ve got so much time to think, and so think I did. Sometimes I muse about the sheer darkness in the gods’ hearts, or the madness in their eyes as they grasp with greedy claws for Sornieth. Sometimes it’s about the foolishness of me to have once believed their hypocrisy.
I keep telling myself that it had started not so long ago, that the corruption of the gods was merely a symptom of some larger disease that plagued Sornieth. Perhaps the Shade. Perhaps the In-Between or the Silent Ones.
But it was a moot point anyways wasn’t it?
The gods aren’t afflicted by a disease, they are the disease itself. Greed. Glory. The eternal hunger that drives exalts to their deaths and worshippers into their tomb.
And how do I know all this?
To put it simply, I was there.

“Lambs to the slaughter.”

My tribulation started when I was barely old enough to fly. I remember the hushed voices, the parents who appeared to but simply did not care. I remember the prayers, the silenced screams of my brothers and sisters as we were led one by one to the pillar.
We are lambs to a slaughter, comrades into exile.
And one by one, we fell into the grips of the Lightweaver.
Life as an exalt was war, an eternal war as the Lightweaver pointed fingers and claimed the other side to be the true monsters, that Light must always conquer Shadow. I remember fighting in the Hewn City, fighting in the Sundal Terrace, I remember fighting and killing and bleeding for a god to whom I was just another exalt.
Just fodder.
Do you know what it was like? To be forgotten and thrown away, to be treated as if your soul wasn’t even worth the effort to save you. Glory, riches, lies. What use is glory to a dead man?
I remember watching exalts fall from the sky, wings torn from their delicate frames. I can see them as clear as day, annihilated under fire and ice as exalts burned to death on their own fat all around them. Have you ever seen your sister jump from the peak of a mountain, wings scorched and severed at the ends, tail pointed downwards as if that could save her?
And has the sight haunted you for all your years, not the way she hit the ground and shattered but the sheer hope in her eyes as she fell, as if the Lightweaver would swoop in at the last second and save her, as if she was going to be alright?
I have seen War.
The forgotten deity isn’t the Shade, isn’t the darkness or even the Thing Behind the Bars.
It’s Suffering. War.
It is Greed and Hunger, it is the madness of the deities and the hunger in their hearts.

“Your soul is black, Lightweaver. You suck the life from your children, and when you leave a trail of corpses behind you, you believe that each death brings you closer to your goal.”

My time as an exalt ended the same way it began, with no struggle and no great fanfare. I was marked as dead when an Ice v Light battle was lost, and what was another was-scarred veteran to a god? Lightweaver didn’t care, didn’t even bat an eye at the countless lost in that push.
On that day, an Ice paladin was gloating, her team behind her was cheering their victory despite the corpses strewn all around them. I remember seeing her badge that marked her as a high ranking exalt, and wondering how she(so young, so naive!) had managed to claw her way up the ranks.
Hm...I seem to have forgotten her name. It sounded something like Vengeance. She had been an Arcane Guardian, and despite the blood that splattered her armour, she was as victorious as could be.
So young. So naive.
I had held her gaze, and she had stared back at me.
I looked upon her with pity. Her grin faltered, and the Guardian took a step back. Confusion, anger, even fear flitted across her expression.
Once upon a time, I would have been her too. Ready to lay my life down for my deity, ready to fight until I fell.
I spoke a single sentence to her, and then I turned and walked away. Head bowed in sorrow, but that sorrow was not for me.

“Your tribulation has yet to begin.”

The paladin had returned to the other celebrating Ice exalts, looking unsettled and on edge. She had seen something in me that had scared her beyond any opponent on the battlefield, something that rattled her to her very core.
She had seen hate, but not for her or her comrades.
Hate for the gods.

“What is a god to a non-believer?”

I hate them, for what they made me suffer. I hate them for what they had turned that poor naive Ice paladin into. She was the incarnation of everything wrong with this world, she was all the exalts that had died in battle or even worse those who have yet to die.
Earthshaker, Flamecaller, Windsinger, Tidelord….
They are not gods.
Gods bless, gods heal but most of all gods create.
They do not create. They destroy, they devour and they curse the very land they stand on. They are false idols masquerading as gods, vampires that sap this land’s lifeforce and mortals who have forgotten where they belong.
I had left my life as a Light exalt long ago, wandering the earth with no destination in mind. I kept to myself, the exalts skirted around me and the ordinary dragons feared my battle scars. I wandered all over Sornieth, but only once have I visited the Southern Icefield. Perhaps in honor of that poor Ice paladin who was no doubt dead by now, or perhaps simply because I wanted to make sure that there was still hope for the gods should she still be alive.
I never found her again.

I travel Sornieth, silent and forbidding. They see my scars and they prod the wandering traveller that was me for detail. Where did you get this? Did it hurt? They all ask. Sometimes I lie for simplicity’s sake. Sometimes I speak the truth simply because lying would take too much effort anyways.
I got them in battle, bloodshed after bloodshed. This was from a flaming wing that pierced my leg, the bones were still attached to a burning body of a fellow exalt. This was from a dying Obelisk’s horns as they buried themselves in my belly, one final desperate attempt to drive off the winning Light side. This was from a lowly Lightning mechanic doing a fearless kamikaze run at my squadron. Her lab coat was loaded with explosives, her last words were “Praise the Stormcatcher!”.
I can go on and on.
I got them in war.
They always watch me with wide eyes, surprised at the suffering and beatings I have taken. Hilarious. They ask if my suffering was over when I deserted the Light.
I can never help but laugh then.
Of course not.
My tribulation has just began.
Come, little soldier, walk with me. Let me tell you about the push of the Moonportal. I remember it very clearly, of course you always remember the battle within which your siblings were torn to literal shreds and your only friends quite literally boiled alive in their scales.




When I was younger I was brave
A blessed exalt unafraid
We carried on through the storm
Just a few more soldiers in the war

It was for Lightweaver for whom we bled and burned
Mortals fighting a holy war
But when the lightning tore friends limb from limb
And the plague ate them whole
Our prayers went unanswered
The war must go on

When fire burned and water drowned
And earth crushed us down
Our deity ignored our pleas
Close your eyes and clench your teeth
The war must go on

Lady Light was blind as Icewarden’s wrath burned
And mercy there was none in sight
Not a soul upon the battlefield
Could have made it out alive
The war must go on

Our world is broken, our world is dark
The divine light has begun to rot
Nobody is guiding us
Because nobody cares
There isn't any god

Tonight I'll meet you on the battlefield
My suffering will be my sword and shield
We’re fighting for the gods of war

Oh dear Lightweaver
I have so many things to say
One day soon the dead will rise and tear you down
into the flames where you will drown
Your blood will burn as you descend
As your own exalts tear you from limb from limb
May your tribulation never end

One day soon your reign will rot
And while your children remain
You will not


lore and poem by @StormcatcherHere