“Soon..” grumbled the half-dragon that was dragging the limp Axis by his foot. “Soon we’ll all be rid of you.”

With one more sharp tug, he pulled Axis up the last few stairs and reached the door leading to the prepared place. With one hand gripping Axis’ ankle with a force that could crush steel, he had one hand free to push open the door and expose himself and Axis to the outside air.

Another few sharp tugs dragged Axis across the floor and over to what some would call an altar. He looked down at the mind-fucked teenager and then over at the ‘altar’ and sighed. He would need to use both hands for this, and he hated that.

He paused, and tried to think of a way to make sure that he could yank Axis up and onto the ‘altar’ with just one hand and not have him tumble off the side and down a several mile drop to the ground below, but he couldn’t be asked to think more than was needed. He would just have to wash himself that much more.

He already was tainted as a half-dragon, having the filthy, inferior blood of a member of the Races coursing through him and making him an abomination by birth, and so he was, of course, hesitant to ever consider touching a member of the Races in any way other than to inflict pain and suffering. And that was when he hit upon an idea.

A smirk crossed his reptilian face and he grabbed Axis’ other ankle and, with a swift motion, flipped the teen over his head and onto the ‘altar’ to the sound of a satisfactory impact. He did hold onto the bastard’s ankles, though, and because of that the teen stayed put where he lay, and the half-dragon nodded to himself as he began to depart.

Then, as if his body wasn’t already tainted by the mongrels of the Races and their masters enough, he was polluted further when a rip formed in reality and a glitchy hand reached out and ripped something from inside of Axis’ body. As it retreated, the half-dragon howled in misery as he realized that he had just exposed himself to the taint of the Wardens and not died in the process.

Now he would never be able to purge the sins of one side of his bloodline from himself, and no amount of penance or forgiveness would ever be able to cleanse him of that shame. He could not go back to the others now, for he was now a vector by which the damnable Wardens would spread their filth.

No, the only way to keep the rest of his cursed kind from being further corrupted by the taint of the Races and their dark masters was to end himself in a way that would forever prevent any trace of himself from being seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or felt. He walked to the edge of the balcony and looked down towards the distant lake of bubbling lava, and he knew what he had to do.

He did not close his eyes as he launched himself from the edge, and he forced his own body to shut off all of his innate protections against what he was about to experience. He fell for what was to himself an agonizing eternity of shame and humiliation, and only when he impacted the lava did his suffering end.

He slammed into the surface of the bubbling molten rock and, as it was indeed still rock, the shock was roughly equivalent to what it would have been had to fall onto regular stone. However, the rock was molten, and while he broke almost all the bones in his body upon impact, he did sink beneath the lava for a time before being shot back up and onto the surface where the temperature difference between his own body and the lava resulted in him skimming the surface until he eventually burst into flames and slowly, eventually sunk beneath the roiling magma.

In his final moments, before darkness claimed him, he felt nothing short of a sense of comfort despite the pain that wracked his body. He was satisfied that he had, through his death, purged the taint of his mother’s people from his body, and that of the Wardens as well.

Death was his kind’s only way of escaping the torturous torment that was their existence, and only through that transition could they hope to be reborn as a true dragon-blooded being, and not some filthy, hideous, monstrous abomination that they had been born as. He, at least, had won against the Races and their cursed line.

His body, as it died, was being purified, along with his soul, and soon he would ascend to the Wheel, and be reborn again. Darkness finally came for him, and he welcomed it as a long-desired lover.

…

He opened his eyes and beheld something unspeakable. He was not reborn as a dragon-blooded being, much to his overwhelming dismay.

In fact, he had not been reborn at all and now stood in a line before a massive set of doors that were open wide and being flooded with beings of all shapes and sizes. Some of the Races were among them, but most were beings that were by no stretch of the imagination anything close to being a member of that inferior and abominable set of lineages.

He was about to be pulled through that massive door by some unseen force, but he was yanked off course and found himself seated at a desk with a Celestial seated opposed to him.

“Name… unneeded.” the Celestial said. “Are you prepared to die many times more for the Alliance and purge yourself of the last vestiges of the Wardens’ corruption?”

“Wipe my soul clean and erase me.” he said back. “If I cannot be reborn, then I will never be free of this taint.”

“That is up to the higher-ups to decide, boy.” the Celestial replied. “So, will you continue to fight for that which you love and to destroy that which you hate, or are you simply going to let the Wardens win in regards to your mind, body, and soul?”

“I… I want to destroy them, but I’m… I’m impure…”

“So, join up with the Draconic Celestials and help us kick those bastards into oblivion.” the angelic being said matter-of-factually as if it was the only logical thing in existence.

“If I do, will I die?”

“Yep. You’ll end up dying about a hundred thousand times by the end of the first week of active combat alone, based on your current level. More than enough times to wipe away the corruption you half-dragons seem to believe you have. So, you interested in fighting the Long War?”

He paused and thought for less than a fraction of a second before he made up his mind.

“Sign me up.”

The Celestial smiled with his pure-white, almost plastic face and extended his hand across the desk and shook that of the half-dragon’s. “Good! Welcome to the true front lines of the War!”