High in the mountains of Aradjiah, east of Aht Urhgan—

Worn atop a mountain like a crown, the temple of Areuhat stooped beneath a cloudless sky, caught perfectly between the layers of earth and heaven and the towering teeth of Vana’diel—the other mountains of Aradjiah which rose high all around it. The temple was cast of stone and bronze and pearl, and shaped vaguely like an egg, with swooping curved walls carved into the ridged, angled divisions of a wyrm’s wings, wings that were folded around the body of the temple as if to shield it. Between these wings, the gates stood shut beneath a narrow arch, with a slim transom looking out over the gates at the winding approach that fronted the temple.

From the transom, one could look out upon the world. The west was laid open to the eye, where passing clouds played a game of show and hide with a world that seemed, from this high place, a fragile illusion; where on the horizon, air and ocean met in some distant dream of blue. At dusk, the lights of Al Zahbi could be seen to flicker at the furthest reach, at Land’s End, and all that could be surveyed in between was the wild untamed realm of the adventurer.

More to the point, from the transom one could look down the mountain path and see for miles—nearly to the foothills that bred it from the land—and so none could easily approach the temple unannounced.

So the coming of the dark visitor was known well in advance of his presence at the gate, and not just by the sight of him—a silhouette with a dire lance borne across his back—but by the tremor his unnatural aura sent through the air of a natural world.

The priestess of Areuhat called the servants of the goddess away from their reveries and into the safety of the temple. She had the gates drawn shut. Two Immortal Sentries flanked the foot of the stairs that approached the gate. A cloaked hierophant stood before the steps in the custom of greeting. The priestess herself watched from the transom, her cleric’s cap pulled back from her head so that she might see and hear the transaction that would shortly occur.

The visitor was soon upon them, and his form was undeniably ominous, clad in the black and red draciform armor of what could only be a Dragoon. He was hume. His armet was a fiercely scowling ebon wyrm, with wings swooping back from his skull that were black on the outside and vermillion on the inside. His collar was high, and over it, long blond hair spilled from a part in the back of his armet. His mail was black, etched with white patterns, and ribbed in scarlet. As he moved, leather creaked beneath the shining black carapace he wore, and the whole effect was not of armor but of a binding that made him more than just a man, but the melding of man and wyrm. His very form exuded a black-light radiance that worked to stave off the miracle of daylight.

“H-hail, traveler,” stammered the hierophant of Areuhat.

The Dragoon pushed him aside with one hand, but did not chance the boundary imposed by the Blue Mages, who stood still and quiet, their eyes looking straight on past him. Neither did he spare them a glance, but instead looked directly up at the priestess, who lingered in the shadowed transom.

It was she to whom he spoke: “I come as a knight seeking succor according to the old and hallowed ways.”

There was silence from the transom. In that moment, the Dragoon saw that he could easily leap twenty feet to surmount the gates, but less likely was it that he could fit through the space there. Still, he had little use for tarry. “Know that should you refuse me, I will unleash my dragon.”

At this, the Immortals drew their scimitars, but were furthered stilled by his hand, which drew taut on the robes at the hierophant’s breast.

The priestess, also a hume, leaned a little from the transom, her voice still, monotone, resolute. “You will find no rest here, weird knight, not by any voluntary status of we who hold in trust the love of our maiden.”

“Then you will meet the wyrm?” he asked, perhaps giving them one last chance, or perhaps he had decided on this course of action long before asking. But there was silence from the transom. The priestess had gone.

“I see,” said he, and cast his free arm out behind him, sweeping it back out over the western sky. Immediately in the furthest distance there appeared a black speck, which, within seconds grew to a terrifying mass, and in seconds more turned in the air, briefly coiling around the sun like a chickensnake around an egg, before spreading its wings and diving over the back of the mountain and out of sight, its passage whipping up a gale like the breath of a hurricane, throwing up leaves on risers of dust.

“Goddess!” said the hierophant, still in the clutches of the dark Dragoon. “Maid Areuhat would not fain allow the presence of one so vile in her sacred halls!”

The dark Dragoon threw him down at the foot of the steps, where the Immortals had retreated a few paces, and were now looking worriedly to the skies for any sign of the beast that had just flown over.

The hierophant crawled backward up the stairs, scooting on his hands in a way that was almost pleading. “What is the name of that which threatens us?” he cried. “A name for both of you or are you one in the same?”

The Dragoon took a single step forward and the Azure guardians turned as one to point their blades at him.

“Back!” one of them hissed. But he doubted their conviction. He smiled and placed his boot on the bottom of the stair.

“We are as one, but we are also apart,” said the Dragoon, and there was a genuine note of approval in his voice, at the astute nature of the question. “I am the Dragoon, Alkharn.”

“Why have you come here? To threaten our maiden?”

“Your maiden is naught to me but a pleasant fiction for the hand, and this—” he gestured around, “—is but a stop on my journey, and not my object. You should not have refused me.

“I go to the new world, where I will slay the Dragoon Master and make his order my own.”

His eyes glittered. He took another step. Now the sound of wing-beats were approaching, and the sky rumbled as if with thunder, but there were no clouds. The wyrm roared, its voice echoing off the mountains, and it appeared once more, black and terrible, a legless serpent with mighty wings that threw the air into a tumult as it lowered its belly to the dirt at the base of the temple and leaned in to appraise its roof with an inquisitively canted head.

“As for him,” said Alkharn, turning heedless from the swords to regard the wyrm. “He is Czernobog, who battled Midgardsormr in the Gargan Roo deep beneath Vana’diel, and was trapped there by his enemy. After a thousand years, he sacrificed his legs to escape, and now he has returned to count the faithful and dine upon the rest.”

He turned back to them and said: “He will sup well. And you, you shall be the breaking of his fast.”

With that, he drew his lance, and was on them with the speed of a vampire.