Assorted Ancient Texts

Love Long Lost

***Found this bitch tucked away behind some other files. It seems to be something I started and never got back to. And yes, despite most of these chapters being entirely different stories, I use and re-use names a lot.***

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen – from the way her hair flowed in the wind to way her eyes glittered in the sunlight. I have a keen sense of beauty, and she was perfect. She was beauty. She was always smiling, always so kind to everyone. My name is Michael, and I am part of an ancient race of people known as the Luitian. We were descended from animals, or something like that. I slept through most of my history class at the college, but the professors said that since we were direct descendants of animals we had the power to transform ourselves into an animal at will. This was a normal part of our society, as it may sound strange, but seeing wolves and lions and other great animals walk alongside people in my nation was a regular occurrence. Every person in the world learned what their animal was when they reached the age of 17, the beginning of adulthood. My friends were fierce wolves, great eagles, and tall bears. Claire was a lioness. She was as beautiful as a flesh-and-blood animal as she was a regular person. Now, I never talked to her for I was too shy, but I knew that the day I learned what my magnificent animal was I would profess my love to her in its marvelous form. The day came and I was...something else. I had no fur, I had no paws. I had no pointy ears. My own parents were scared I was a 'demon.' I was no demon! I had a tail, I had wings, I had claws, and I had a tale as long as my body. I had scales. I was a dragon.

In my society...hell, in the world, a dragon was a modern impossibility. They existed hundreds of years ago, but were nowadays extinct. I was a fluke. My parents, with tears in my mom's eyes and a thick vein in my father's wrinkled forehead, kicked me out of the house. They wanted nothing to do with me. My own parents! Why, because they were a deer and a lion? Was I something other? In my rage, I slept in the damp basement of the college a dozen miles from home. If my parents wouldn't accept me as a dragon, I wouldn't be one. I kept my form hidden from everyone, I kept myself hidden from everyone. Every day and every night for the next year I studied every book on magic that the library had. I needed to change. I failed half my classes and scraped by the rest with barely passing grades for those 3 semesters as I poured all my time into learning from every other book in the library. I read the entire library and performed at least four dozen spells I thought would change me, but to no effect. Someone eventually found out that my animal was a dragon, and my classmates started to poke fun at me. I was ridiculed. My own best friends threw books at me whenever they saw me around the college. I started to spend less time outside and more in the basement of the school, where I knew no one would come looking.

I spent another few months in there, trying frantic spell after spell to change my animal to anything but a dragon, but to no avail. Scales had started to grow through my skin as a side effect of switching so much under such stress. I was turning into a dragon permanently, and I had read every book. I decided that the only thing that was keeping me in the college was the fact that I hadn't professed my love to her. There were no books left to read, no transformation spell to try in vain, my parents had cast me out to the streets, and my own friends would snicker and sneer at me whenever I saw them. But I hadn't seen her in a long time. Now that I remember, she graduated her classes early and was under the teaching of the Grand Templar himself up in the top floors of the school, where all the geniuses and prodigies went. I hadn't seen her since my parents left me to the streets. She most likely knows I'm a dragon, but she was my lifeline to this world. I had to try, how bad could rejection be?

I was naïve. How could she ever love someone like me? My skin was dark and riddled with the beginnings of scales. I hadn't noticed until after I brought her that bouquet of roses, but my eyes had grown bright red. My teeth were razor sharp and terrifying. My hands had started changing to claws with nails as sharp as the knives in the cafeteria. But I thought she would be different...I thought she would understand and see that beneath all the scales, blood-red eyes, and claws that I was a normal person just like her. She could hardly look at me. And when she did, all she saw...was a monster.

The roses died in my little basement room on the floor. I cried for hours – for days. I broke things, I tore books. I was destroyed. There was nothing left for me in the world. My parents kicked me out of the house, my friends spat at me when I saw their faces, and the only thing in the world I had any hope in called me a 'monster.'

So I became one. I became a monster, and you know what? It was easy. Trying to adapt to the order of society, trying to be this or that, it was fruitless. It was pointless! With the entire library's collection of magic burned into my memory, I lashed out in anger at the sky, at the clouds, and at the world itself. I created tornadoes, lightning storms, and hurricanes. Kingdoms older than the Templars that inhabited them were destroyed within minutes. Towns and cities were flattened. After I had my fun little 'power play,' There was only one problem with my wonderful destruction.

The Grand Templar. He, along with the other, lesser Templars, wanted to stop me. They wanted to stop my fun. So I set in motion the events that would lead to their extinction. Drought. Famine. Disease. Their magic couldn't save them now. I sat back and watched as the very world that had rejected me was brought down to its withered knees before my power. I watched as over the years, the world dried up. Forests became deserts of old wooden stakes, only to erupt into magnificent fires during the summer. Oceans pulled back and lakes became salt beds filled with the rotting corpses of dead fish and other marine life. Rivers turned to empty troughs that cut through the land like a blade through bread. Then, when the crops were all dead, the people began to die off in even bigger numbers. My wonderful people began to dry up and die in front of me. I didn't need food or water, for I had my magic. I was so powerful that I needed no nourishment, and I sure all hell didn't need my people either. As the world kneeled in sickness before me, I merely observed as the people cried for mercy.

Forests were gone. Lakes and lands were gone. Nations were gone. Everyone on the planet was all gone, save for my very own town. The Templars had kept a handful of people alive with their combined magic as the torments of the outside world covered the stained glass windows with suffering and death. The Grand Templar tried to stop me, but his bones lie scattered over the college campus as a reminder to all who try to bother me. How they dared to stop my fun? Misfortunes of the weak, oh how they made me laugh. Laughing feels good, you know? I love laughter, and I have a fantastic sense of humor.

I don't know how, but a new Grand Templar came forth from the College...and she was powerful like none other. She summoned the rain. She dispelled the drought and the famine. She brought back the plants and the wildlife returned. I knew I could not fight such power and fled to a cave in a nearby mountain. My age of chaos was over, and I knew it. The new Grand Templar was coming. I tried to fight, but the hooded woman won the battle in those caves...what was left of them, anyhow. As I lied there on my back defenseless, she explained that she was sent to kill me. But she said had an even worse plan in mind. I stood up, ready to face anything she threw at me. I would try to fight this bitch until her remains covered these caves, even though I could barely stand. That was when she removed her hood.

It was her. She who had called me a monster so many years ago. She was right, you know. I was a monster...and I loved it. Before I could act, she summoned a spell and I was frozen in place. A great pain like no other tore through my entire body as my ankles themselves turned to stone. Every muscle fiber in my body was tormented and hardened as she turned me into a damn statue. The pain itself was unimaginable, but the worst part? The last thing I saw as my chest and neck were consumed by earth...

...was her. Fortunately, I have an excellent sense of beauty. For years, I was left to think about her. About me. About what I had done to everything. To everyone...to her. I was a monster. I really was, and it was too easy. Years went by as my thoughts consumed me. Centuries. It must have been a thousand years before I was released from my stone prison. Before I left the cave and saw the world again.