Night, ink poured over the world.
The wasteland lay stripped bare, a black sea without breath.
Only an uninvited figure surfaced over one low swell, then sank into the next hollow.
White-haired and alone, the girl walked a rough track like a pale reed in wind.
Boredom pressed like wet wool; the Little White Dragon lowered her head and watched scattered stones.
She kicked a pebble now and then, a firefly of sound in the vast hush.
Annoyance first, then habit; Lilith tugged the hood over her crown against the grit-laden wind.
The cloth was cheap sandpaper, a far cry from the weaves she’d pilfered in the Dragon Territory.
Picture the future in this stuff, she thought, and the road turned tunnel-black.
She smirked at herself; she wasn’t some cosseted bloom.
When she hunted the Demon King, she’d swallowed every hardship like gravel.
It’s only rough cloth, and it stays warm like a banked ember.
Tonight she wore an off-white high-collar trench, a winter skin she could tuck her face into.
A hood, a shade whiter than the coat, covered the White Dragon girl’s modest horns.
It drooped to her eyes, a curtain trimming half her bangs.
Under the coat sat a white turtleneck sweater, warm yet willing to run.
Below, Tartarus’s mischief had swapped in a pure-white knee skirt, clumsy as a snagged net.
Thankfully, white tights lay beneath, a calm lake against any reckless move.
Bandage straps wound her limbs and waist, white vines patching space she lacked without a backpack.
Trinkets hung off calves and forearms, little moons tinkling against the march.
Two satchels rode her hips, packed with her go-to papers and two spare vials of Stellar Liquid.
On her left arm swung rations enough to feed a small dragon for two days, a humbling pendulum.
Good thing she’d kept her human appetite; otherwise food would be a mountain on her back.
The taste was poor now, but she’d freed space and worry alike.
The Shattered Ark and the Astrolabe crossed into an X on her back, like twin ribs.
If a fight came, she could draw in a heartbeat, a spark off flint.
The only snag was the trench; her short dragon arms might catch on cloth.
Even so, she refused to change it; Spuiset’s air bit colder than the Dragon Territory.
Even a Silver Dragon would add layers here, silver scales under snow.
Truth was, someone back home had left little “gifts” on her neck, blushes shaped like bites.
She wasn’t about to parade those; better a drab coat than flies of rumor.
Head to toe in white, Lilith walked Spuiset’s ink-black flats like a flare on a highway.
If anyone lived, they could spot her from miles, a lighthouse on legs.
She didn’t worry; the ground underfoot was a dead hearth, the Vampires’ home turned barren.
Within a dozen leagues, she was likely the only beating warmth.
Before setting out, the Little White Dragon raided a library, cramming lore on the Vampires’ domain.
At the world’s dawn, five primordial gods rose like pillars.
One was the Grim Reaper, the Nameless One she’d once seen, a shadow behind the veil.
Their faithful were called Necromancer Cultists, dwelling in Udis, a hidden country hung in the sky.
Two thousand three hundred years ago, the cult split and birthed a war the ages named the Great Cataclysm.
Udis shattered like stained glass and rained fragments across the continent.
Under Gaia’s feet in the Dragon Territory floated the last remnant, a broken island of sky.
The Cataclysm didn’t stop there; it tore the Nameless One’s blessing like a ripped banner.
Even the deity’s body went missing with Udis’s fall, a candle snuffed in storm.
Rampant divinity lashed the three races born from the schism, a storm that became a sentence.
They were sealed forever within three fallen shards, prisons masquerading as lands.
One race, under a Black Sun that gnawed the sky, would never welcome newborn cries.
One race, drowned in moonlight that swamped the earth, wandered fog where death would not come.
One race, ruled by warped dust, lost the right to live, their days ground to ash.
Spuiset was the Black Sun’s scar.
For 2,300 years, no child had opened eyes here, a cradle turned to stone.
Even if she lit fireworks over these rolling fields, no life would turn its head.
The nearest town outside the capital lay almost a hundred kilometers away, a star on a far shore.
Without constellation resonance, Lilith would trudge a week to reach it, step after sanded step.
And the capital?
In border towns along Spuiset’s edge, she’d asked for news and gotten only silence.
Each year, the Black Sun Devouring grew stronger, shoving the towns farther outward like receding tide.
Even this wasteland was the Death Forbidden Zone, a no-man’s land where breath froze to glass.
This past week, only she had crossed it, sheltering in a special tent soaked in Star Energy.
Her dragon-born body held out against the Black Sun Devouring; anyone else would wither at the threshold.
She might be the first outsider the capital had taken in for decades, a lone comet.
The Little White Dragon stopped at the mouth of a rocky hollow, a dark eye in a raised ridge.
To night-blind folk, it was just another hill with a coincidental dent, ordinary as a yawn.
But her draconic night sight picked out pipes veined beneath the grass, metal roots under skin.
She knew she’d found the door, a seam in the world.
Lilith let out a long breath and lifted her gaze to the hill in disguise.
Below it hung the lost city, upside down under the earth.
The capital of Spuiset.
The Dead City, Morris.
