eat sh*t and die } LUPEI

[Tarnished]

We are the children of fire, we are the lions

(You cannot escape death, I would know.)

He collapses when he finds her, sobbing—it wasn’t supposed to be like this, he wasn’t supposed to be gone that long. He’d only left to find Rome. He was only trying to find Rome. But Kreios had Rome, somewhere, and he knew he was safe—the scent trail didn’t lie, wherever the boy was, he was with his father and he was safe; Nyxia was not. Nyxia had come looking for her father and he wasn’t here. Tarnished had failed her when he had promised her so many times that he wouldn’t. He curls around her broken body and cradles it against him with one great wing. Paying no mind to the damage, he presses his lips to her forehead and runs a clawed hand through her wet red mane.

And then it hits.

It surges through his veins like a tidal wave of hate—it sweeps through him, crushing everything in his path until only one thing remains clear. He wants them all dead. They, who wage war for nothing; their great pissing match had cost him the life of the daughter he had raised and for that he would try to take all of theirs. He doesn’t blame Straia, this doesn’t smell like Straia—but the war is going on in her happy home, the fires burn at her door and they draw him in like a moth to the flame.

Whomever had done this would pay dearly.

(I have tried, I have tried so many times.)

The mountains shudder, the ground begins to open up beneath their feet--as if from the depths of hell itself, the great scaly beast pulls himself up from the dark with his tentacles and spreads his great tattered wings, casting his shadow across the whole of the kingdom. A growl akin to thunder rumbles out of his throat and he looks down upon them all, sneering. The Dark God had told him, once, that he was a creature meant to be feared—not loved. Tarnished had disagreed, then begged like a child to be let go. He was good, deep down—he was a good boy. He had screamed it at the top of his lungs, screamed until his vocal cords bled and blood gurgled up out of his mouth; Carnage took him apart, then, to show him--to prove a point.

He was a monster.

And so the Dark God, after making him see, had spat him back out.

Something else, something different.

A creature meant to be feared.

“Beqanna wanted war!” Tarnished bellows, his thick gray tentacles curling and uncurling all around him. Hundreds of feet long, they twitch and flick in anticipation—he expects the magicians to attack, wants them to. All of them. He doesn’t care whose side they’re on, nor which side of the moral spectrum they happen to fall on. He spreads his arms wide, as if to embrace them, and then: “Well here I am, here I am...!” He trails off, chuckling. The wind whistles past him and he notices the ice below—fire and lightning, wind and rain, utter chaos. He expects nothing less of Gods charging into battle and they, in turn, should expect nothing less from a being only a head below them. Without warning, the creature gives a mighty flap of his wings and lunges forwards—intending to bring his fists down like hammers on the nearest horse.

tarnished

( vanquish x nocturnal )

TD;LR: Tarnished found Nyxia murdered, lost his shit, remembered what Carnage told him (sort of), went Cthulhu-like and kind of looks like this. And he's basically flying through the air tryna smash. Heyo.