[WP] The Deep Woods are a fearsome place, filled with screams and lights and terrible magic. But in the depths of the forest lives an ancient dragon who constructs all the sounds and sights to keep people away, because he just wants to be left alone.

...

The leaves of the Forest were just beginning to fall, spinning down from high-top canopies in tiny fluttering droves and clumps before the crystal blue eyes of the ancient drake. Hidden away beneath layers of deep and powerful currents of mana and time, Motionless as frozen ice, the Dragon watched as it always did; both the leaves themselves, and all that lay beyond them. The entire world was visible, should it only desire to look.

Ever since Merlin died, the expanse outside had well and truly gone to shit.

Such description was not to say the world itself was made from fecal matter, or even consisting of a higher percentage of the material than ordinary (although the recent populations orcs to the west seemed to produce such substance in rather high quantities) but more accurately to state that the world had gotten worse with time. Like a roll of cheese left out in the sun to spoil, covered with mold and all manner of tiny crawling things with far too many legs. Whenever those great eyes of blue glass looked West, rarely did they witness a pleasant sight.

To the Great Dragon of the Legendary and Sacred Deep Woods, the outside world had never been a place of much direct interest. Since its youth millennia ago, Uncountable years had been passed without going out beyond the borders of its forest, and if all could be held constant and predictable such a trend would undoubtedly continue. Still, even the ancient drake could absently note how much worse it had gotten over the past centuries.

War... Strife... Demonic creatures and abominations: If there was one defining cause to be found for all these things, the Dragon knew that blame could be placed almost solely on the Dark Lord.

That evil and twisted caster of unholy magics was at the root of almost everything in recent memory one might define objectively as bad: Merlin's beloved, betraying, soul-sucking, good-for-nothing apprentice had gone and surpassed the limitations set down by the old ones, and royally fucked it all up worse than any human had ever managed during the Dragon's life time. That was truly saying something, considering the Great Dragon of Deep woods had been alive longer than the human race in its entirety. Scaled and blessed by the ancient gods, it had been watching the world for a long, long time- and it had seen was mankind was capable of.

As much as the Dragon had liked Merlin, there was no denying humanity's roots ran deeply into violent trends. Man drove out the children of the first forests- scattering the Elves into fragmented tribes or slaves. They bought the Dwarves into servitude using the mountain folk's own greed, and they slaughtered the Seafolk to extinction without so much as a second thought as their powers grew, and the ocean became a resource. Harnessing the lightning of faith, the Dragon had even watched humans from a distance as they struck down his vengeful counterparts- guardians of mountains and hills abundant, before crushing the lessers beasts of power with sharpened steel and promises of gold.

Be it magics, kingdoms, armies and knowledge: The Ancient Dragon was all those rose and fall like waves, each slowly reaching up further upon the coast on a tide that never seemed to let- but the Dark Mage was a tsunami. No matter what damage mankind had done before this singular arrival, it paled in comparison.

That one being alone was the cause of worse calamities than all before combined, was not a simple feat: The Dark Mage of the West held extraordinary power. A solitary reason for all the bad, and none of the good. Year by year, the man's very existence pushed the world further out of balance with increasing severity.

Soul drinking.

Just the thought of it made the drake's scales itch, and how the human had discovered such a vile art was still up for debate (or it would be if the Dragon kept company for such purposes.) Regardless of how it came to be though, that ability was the source of the rogue Mage's Dark and terrifying power. It was the one reason for which the Great Dragon knew better than to attempt taking matters beneath its own claws to restore balance through a personal effort.

No matter how powerful an ancient drake might be, magics took time to gather. A failure now meant certain death, with no chance of trying again. It was much better to wait... Quietly.

With Soul drinking came strength and immortality, and thought strength might be rivaled- with immortality came an abundance of time to learn and meddle with things that should be left alone. Arts, magics, powers and skills: Combine an unnaturally long life with a human's already excessive capacity to learn, and there one could find a disaster in waiting. How many years since the Mage had shown even the slightest regard for another life? Hundreds... Thousands?

The Dark Lord may have started a simple apprentice, but considering that tenacious refusal to accept mortality and die like the rest of life on this world, he had gone above and beyond expected measures of normal humans. One immortal mad-man, and the boundaries were pushed farther than even the worst of previous outliers stacked on top of one another; so much so that the Great and Ancient Dragon of the Deep woods refused to move so much as a flick of his mighty tail, even within the Deep woods of illusion and terror.

Certainly not since his relatives in the west were smited for sport.

Recently the Dark Mage was even toying with the spheres of chaos: Artifacts that could bind worlds and realities with the pressure of forces that can't be rationalized. At first this had been thought of as a glimmer of hope- that the Mage might kill himself upon the rocky-shores of uncontrollable powers- or potentially blast himself into another realm, but he had survived. In time he had even seemed to perfect- honing the knowledge to sharper and more deadly edges.

The Dragon would rather sit, still as stone and slowly calcifying into rock and glass, than have its soul sucked by a historic aberration. If the Mage's attention fell on it, the Dragon knew for certain clarity the fate that would result.

Indeed, the Dark lord was trouble.

Trouble and immeasurable in power, the west was recently nothing but a source of untold misery and bad news. That was where such thoughts and considerations began, and also where they ended; the twisted mage was so unrivaled, that the man wasn't worth thinking about. There was nothing the Dragon could even hope to do, and thus it could logically conclude no good could come of such thoughts anyways- although that wasn't going so far as to write off the world as a whole.

Humanity as a species (Dark Mage and the controlled western territories being ignored as a dramatic exception) seemed to have quite the inspiring potential.

The Holy Kingdom of Dotera, the borders of which surrounded the Deep Forest of the Dragon's keep, had made progress of a decent sort. A lasting era of peace (quite long considering humanity's blemished track-record of the total opposite) under a similar belief and commonality, a public encouragement for laws and justice, and most impressively- a habit of finding advancements that magic had no say within. Creations known only by the foreign terms of "Science," and "Logic." Complicated things of metal and refined dirts, with intricate pieces, heat, and reactions.

The Great Dragon watched these through all-seeing eyes with marked interest, for even great and powerful as it was, such new creations to the world were rare- and they were much more interesting than the undead monstrosities wandering the blackened western lands. Any resistance to the wests slowly creeping tarnish was welcomed with open wings, and the longer it took for the Mage to reach the Deep Forest- by far the better chance of the Dragon's survival. Though even with such a bias, it was still a fair assessment for the Dragons to conclude that Humans were making strides in the right direction (if there truly was such a thing.)

Certainly progress of a different sort, regardless of what it was: The Dragon found such things promising. Not promising enough to move from the Deep Forest that grew around it, or to disperse the ancient magics that fed the roots of looming trees and cast untold terrors for any who entered the sacred grounds about it- but certainly promising enough to watch safely from afar. These were the things that the Drake wanted to see come into the world- a future that transcended the lowly origins of its creations, and pushed on without assistance of the magics many took for granted. Year by year these things advanced, and the humans created strange and marvelous wonders- the likes of which brought the Great Dragon only further curiosity.

What would these humans think of next? It would wonder, gemstone eyes searching among the cities and towns. What strange contraption will they craft in the coming years?

Indeed, if the Dark Lord hadn't ripped open time and space to summon other-worldly creatures to the Great Dragon's plane of existence such questions and observations might have been continued indefinitely, but alas that was not the case.

Just as it has been said before: Truly, the Dark Mage of the West had fucked everything up.