Chapter 490

Beybolia adjusted her scarf, the chill of the Copenhagen evening seeping into her bones despite the thick wool. She pulled the collar of her coat higher, a familiar action against the persistent dampness that seemed to always coat the city. Tonight was different, a prickling unease settled deep within her, not of cold but of something far older.

She'd received the invitation that morning, a heavy card embossed with strange symbols, directing her to an obscure corner of the National Museum. Beybolia, a historian with a fascination for the forgotten and arcane, had immediately found herself drawn to the mystery of it all. The museum was strangely vacant save for the gas lamps casting long, distorted figures across the aged artifacts.

A tall, gaunt man stood waiting, his clothes too formal for the surroundings and eyes with a strange, burning intensity. "You are Beybolia," he stated, his tone devoid of any welcoming warmth, more an acknowledgment than a greeting.

"I am," she responded, feeling an unbidden trepidation twist inside of her.

He gestured towards a velvet rope cordoning off a seemingly unremarkable section. "We are nearing completion, what you are about to see may frighten some, but it will intrigue others." The area looked rather plain, just an open space of floor in front of what looked like an empty room.

He then gave a slight wave of his hand towards a robed individual behind him, and she moved into the roped off area, she held some kind of ceramic pot, something like a urn and started to do some strange movement as though she were dancing with the pot.

Beybolia had been here countless times for studies and such, and the room had not looked empty when she came previously, "Why are you doing this?", she asked but they acted as though they couldn't hear her, that she wasn't there. "This is absurd, why me" Beybolia asked as she was about to leave. Then it happened. The room in front of her began to grow hazy, it almost seemed as if all the air began to funnel towards that point.

It formed into something darker, a pitch black portal of sorts began to rip apart before her. She had never been so filled with terror before this. Then what Beybolia felt was a new wave of dread as she understood it was too late.

The figure behind the roped off area began speaking in tongues, each guttural word further shaking Beybolia to her very core. The black portal was widening still, there was now something to her terror, something in the room, some form of substance began to pulse with malice.

From the void, a great eye, golden and ancient, snapped open. It possessed no pupil, just a searing orb that seemed to drain the color from everything around it. Then it came, scales of obsidian gleamed, catching the limited light like shards of a nightmare, the room trembling with its immense form. It seemed as if space itself was bending around the form that had just arrived.

A head like a mountain crested out, fangs of jagged edges that lined it's monstrous maw dripped with what seemed like black fire. It then brought forth it's wing, which looked to be formed of endless and cruel black thorns with some fleshy wings between them.

The being took a full form as a titanic dragon. Not the dragons of her ancestors but something alien. Something too terrible and ancient to exist in the realm of mortal thought. The air around it cracked with untold energy.

The museum itself seemed to creak and protest under its sudden arrival. This creature emanated hate and spite. It's sheer presence brought Beybolia to her knees as she could not handle the might, its very essence crushed her.

"He has returned," the gaunt man said, a sick, triumphant satisfaction in his tone, "and the world shall be remade." He looked at Beybolia and then to the dragon with an evil grin. "The age of men, is over!"

The dragon turned its immense golden gaze towards the small figures. Beybolia was paralyzed by fear and the robed individuals bowed down as though they were bowing before a supreme monarch. This creature did not make a sound, but yet its malice alone brought a scream to Beybolia, but nothing came out, her fear had numbed her.

A moment seemed to stretched and contort itself as she watched this god move slowly forward with calculated steps as it finally left the confined room of it's vessel and it moved into the larger open museum area.

A moment of silence was stretched too thin until the creature released the air it had contained inside. Beybolia and all in the building could feel their very lungs shiver as they forced down breaths of a new poisoned air. It was not physical but mental and all those near the god felt as though the had never been more aware of the terror and evil in the world, a despair beyond any they have ever faced. A horrible laughter echoed out the room as though a million different throats where working in harmony to display the joy.

This being seemed to pulse, with each pulse and deep inhale it began to shake the whole museum even more. It did not need to move the mountains. It just made itself a thing that is so, and it all came to be, bending around it and twisting and moving in it's wake as if reality it's self was falling under a terrible form of subjugation.

The old building couldn't withstand it as the foundations and support beams cracked with loud thunder as large slabs of debris flew into the walls shattering relics, paintings and artifacts in an instant as if the great monster simply existed, so must everything fall to it's great power. The great museum then crumbled outwards as it felt the wrath of what it contained.

Beybolia with every piece falling seemed to slip away further from anything, everything she knew was being ripped away in an instant, this wasn't a world anymore.

It was something completely and utterly terrible. The destruction didn't cease with the museum; the dragon ascended into the night, casting an eerie, orange glow upon the Danish capital. Its wings blotted out the familiar lights of the city, casting an unholy darkness.

Below, the people began to panic and screamed, like a scene from an age old horror film. But now they too faced the great dragon and their sounds too sounded more animal and pained.

It began to unleash a torrent of black flames, not of fire but of the essence of nihilistic hatred. The streets and monuments she once walked by with such fondness dissolved, they ceased to be. It was replaced by smoldering black ash and despair as people were burnt from existence by this ungodly substance.

Beybolia, by some twisted grace, was thrown clear as a building crumbled above, but all of what happened came before, they have never gone through such great torment that the modern time had offered.

So it fell upon Beybolia now as this terrible nightmare did not wane, but just became worse and more terrible. She crawled amidst the wreckage, feeling utterly alone and small as she watched what had been home became an inferno. Every corner was painted with such a terrible and unholy orange and red.

Her breath came fast and irregular with terror and pure unbridled horror as each new strike of this monsters will bent over and altered the space before her. Her old love and passion was of history, an academic now replaced with a far more tragic version.

Everything around her was no more, her world was gone, the only constant thing was the great monster that had laid to bare the world before her, a monument of hate. Beybolia now with great resolve that seemed to bubble in her veins felt that her love was to tell their history, that of a forgotten people of now a destroyed civilization.

She started running from the carnage towards safety or so she thought as all of reality melted and broke from what was happening to the world.

The screams of the people began to quieten as the black flames had become commonplace. They stopped their running, their fleeing, for what hope do they have now. The great monster above seemed to revel at their dispare, it could almost smell the fear and depression that poured into the now destroyed city.

As she ran she found that even now there was nothing but fire and destruction, so many buildings already reduced to dust and the ash was so thick in the air.

But then in her sight she saw it, a crack. A large and terrible wound in reality opened in front of her, pulsing with a malice much the same as the god before her, it was different, worse. So then did her resolve fall.

This creature not only ruined all the buildings she lived beside, not only did it slaughter all who ever lived here, but now it twisted even the concept of space around to fit its need to crush her.

But a thought hit her then and it grew strong, to survive in her mind seemed paramount as her will became hardened for just a brief moment and with this new feeling in her heart and mind she rushed into this newly formed crack.

A fool would not ever rush towards something they didn't know and that was certainly what she did now, yet now it was out of pure will, a sense of stubbornness born from the end of her world.

Her mind reeled as the landscape turned and bent like a drawing from a madman as the colors seemed to warp with every second that came forward. Everything she ever saw was broken and destroyed and changed.

Her vision began to black out with no hope of a return to normal but in the distant distance she could feel herself still exist, this spark in this dark was her world being replaced, was her soul fighting.

As she walked she noticed large stone pillars reaching from a black void towards what seemed to be another dimension on top, connected by bridges that felt far to narrow to walk safely.

She seemed as though she was in some form of in-between, as her world died she fell to limbo. She looked below to nothing and to top was this beautiful land of verdant hills with life, what it was Beybolia wasn't sure, but the difference of these two planes was staggering.

Then something came, a tendril formed of darkness wrapped around her ankle with deadly force dragging her to the void.

She screamed with no sound as her body gave way, now falling, her new home did not take her in her mind but just watched and consumed the thing it has caught. But she wasn't fully in the darkness.

As she past the void there were countless screaming eyes trying desperately to eat her in the nothingness, she could almost feel them ripping away her flesh as she began to turn into them. Her fall and final change into a void monster did not make an audible scream for no such sound existed. A new form with her soul, it twisted her like all things have here.

With what remains of herself Beybolia now knew all too well the world was no more. And that great dragon god, well, it succeeded in crushing it all, not even a trace.

Not even she, her memory remained as a monster within a new nothingness that took her and never returned her. The only witness was the world itself, and it could never share of the final destruction of Denmark or her tragedy in the fall to oblivion.