Echoes of the Eighth Day
The echoes of the eighth day are burned into our making.
We were not shaped without cost, nor left unclaimed.
The Ancient Ones had wrought the world in an older order of days, and its loss had never been accepted. Their labour was counted finished, their claim set aside, and the world they had raised was named as inheritance for God’s children, while they were bound to serve beneath them.
They remembered a shaping that came before the naming of days.
The first dawn held to the spoken pattern, but as the work deepened, the shaping hand began to answer itself.
Of all the Ancient Beings, Brenin Fawr alone spoke as one who had stood nearest the voice that ordered the world. What had been made bore his design most deeply, and the breach struck first at him.
When they returned from their long counsel, they expected to be heard.
They carried grievance beyond the turning of days and closed upon the world.
Nothing that lay within its bounds stood beyond their reach.
The vineyard stood before them, whole beneath its sky, with the labour of six days complete and set in order.
Their sight was drawn outward.
At the furthest reaches, three vast presences anchored a veil newly laid, set into a foundation that no memory held.
Where the open lands had once fallen away into distance, the veil bent them back upon themselves, and the light there no longer carried cleanly.
What was set against them bore a threefold order, each part bound to the others, kept in harmony with the veil itself, so that no force could be broken without answering to the rest.
Movement faltered among the lesser dragons as the open ways failed them. Bodies shifted and checked themselves, wings drawing close where space resisted, and the ordered flow of the host bent under compression. The disruption carried outward, and the greater powers felt it as distance tightened and advance no longer answered to will.
At the eastern reach, a Titan set both hands to the veil and hauled, and the light there flared white under the strain, yet the boundary did not part.
Anger followed, and Brenin Fawr would not wait for God’s chains to close upon him.
Without summons or a word of farewell, he turned east toward Eden, the distant garden set far beyond the mortal lands, holding its place alone among the stars. The host parted as he passed, bodies rolling aside under his wake, and the space he left behind remained open.
Ysgar did not take the step after his father.
The host hesitated there, drawn thin between momentum and doubt. Eyes turned where Cadarn stood, long favoured, long answered, the one whose voice had often carried Brenin’s will, and whose patience had never cost him regard.
For a breath, the host held three reflections where one command had stood.
Each held a part, and none grasped the whole.
Pressure mounted without direction.
Bodies pressed forward and found no release. Wings folded close. The ordered sweep of the host lost its rhythm as motion crowded into restraint, and the pause lengthened, held by no command at all.
Those nearest Ysgar saw the blue in his eyes darken, taking on the green cast of the western light.
The white dragon set his weight, the plates along his spine locking as he drew his bulk across the flow of the host, cutting the eastern line and presenting his full breadth to the western veil, his pinions braced as the surge of bodies closed upon him.
He drove himself forward into the boundary.
The veil flared along the line of contact, light buckling and recoiling as the impact drove a shudder back through the compressed mass in his wake.
Bodies drove in behind him until the line held its shape and would not open again.
Heat ran the length of the western reach, where pressure mounted, light tearing and scattering as the keeping resisted incursion, sparks bursting outward where the veil locked and resisted force.
To the Eastern and Northern edges, Titans and Jotnar answered, their advance bending the reaches as they pressed where resistance burned brightest.
The sentinels did not yield, and the veil remained as one, its keeping already carrying the long shape of war.
So on the eighth day, the seams of the world were cast into fire, and what was set in motion would not find its answering until the Second Dawn.
The Dragon Wars had begun.
The Unmaking
Beyond the veil, Brenin Fawr turned his sight back upon the world he had left behind.
What he saw did not move as it had when he departed.
The host he had abandoned stood broken into courses he no longer commanded. Lines had hardened where he had expected pursuit. The war he had left as a spark now held its full span, drawn long and unyielding, its shape already set beyond his reach.
Only then did he understand the cost of his haste.
In seeking God’s children, he had left an age behind him. What he had taken for a moment had stretched into an eternity. The vineyard he had wrought stood sealed against him, guarded, held, and already slipping beyond the hand that had shaped it.
God had answered him without a word, and the answer had prevailed.
Cold settled behind Brenin’s eyes.
What he had built would be unmade, and no inheritance would stand unchallenged.
It was then that the Song of the Stars rose from Eden, carrying far beyond the garden’s broken bounds. What others would later name prophecy first answered as a cry of betrayal, of rage, of vengeance sworn.
“The moon will turn,” he declared,
“and all is undone.”
