Waning

Below, the battle raged.
Army crashing upon army, steel to fang, magic to magic in horrific arcs careening into the sky, into ally, into enemy.
Feathers came alight with spark and ignited the storm on brewing clouds.
The moon choked behind it, blackened skies raining ash down too familiar to the stories told when just a chick, huddled safely in a nest, the apologies for lack of hunting coming to ear as though as fresh as the day they came from her mother’s beak-
Ryou hated it, but dove just the same. The lightning came as it did- easily, a typhoon easy to conjure as breathing the fresh spring air of her home, like without thought had to be put to it.
Lightning screamed across the field, tearing into anything it could.
Dragons were always larger than mortals, aside from their young, and were the first struck down. It ignited them, from the inside out, bodies roiling on the inside and flames spat from their mouths not their own or of attack, but of pure death.
In the back of her mind, Shia hummed with satisfaction.
Shi always liked seeing things cut down and put in their proper place- that all, in the end, were beholden to death, and that death oft was unexpected and unplanned.
How those who thought themselves invincible were oft the first to fall.
Those war songs, by the wolf’s children, did little to soothe her heart, arcing again, diving again, slicing through and electrocuting anything in the way or fool enough to think themselves immune to the need of breath just moments before she ripped it from their lungs, suffocating and asphixyating just so easily. They sung, many her praises as her body carried her across the sky, only visible for the brilliant gleam off her feathers in the inky black.
The god of wind was also the god of song, but these gave her nothing but an ill churn to her gizzard.
Haunted melodies calling for death and blood and war and empowering all who sung to be as vicious and cruel in turn, they cascaded off of her and instead came to the wolf. Below, his army, his pack, lined behind him atop horse and war wolf, snarling, snapping their jaws, a precession she had only seen a few times, but knew tale of many older.
Ferventi’s followers banged a beat on their shields that masked the chatter and plans of the dragons, covering their words.
It was a smart tactic, Ryou had to admit. The low drone echoing off glacier and mountain jumbling their bassy words together, just as those of the mortals were lost under roars.
God of war he was, Ferventi was smart. His appearance on the field a distraction and boon in both, forcing the enemy to look at him, and not those encircling from the fringes, those planting charges nearby to the dragons’ side, those hauling the bodies of the dead and dying.
Shia laughed at the pity of it.
Mora only hummed gentle and stern, to the idea of life always trying, despite the worst.
It was what mortals did.
Another song caught her ear. Familiar voices alone, but never naught to sing together, much less the same tune in tandem. The Deer and the Finch, hated enemy of another, bolstering the forces as Appylon stirred a false sun from little but air in the middle of the camp for warmth.
Such old and forgotten songs, of home, plenty, and liquor.
Ryou liked that much better, and dove again. Another streak of lightning, the full fury of a hurricane condensed into a single streak behind her tail, splitting the air until cracking apart the drake intent on chasing down her flock harrying it like wet tissue.
The wolf, ever gloating, called out across the field once he had finished shaking the sodden corpse of a lunar that flew too low to dodge her winds.
“NEIA! You yelp like a beaten dog, even as you hold the whip! Are you also such a coward that you shall not face us yourself?!”
The wolf’s words echoed like howling storm across the tundra, silence befalling his parade of warriors, until they erupted in their own jeers and taunts, more banging on shields. The great silvery dragon, echo of moonlight herself, laughed from on high on her perch, the crumbling glacier none yet could reach.
If only she could give the crane a clear shot, through the smoke, the haze, the fog and cloud.
She was, after all, the god of wind, and such a thing came easily as Ryou landed beside the wolf- Air coiled behind her, invisible, poised just as her mate was with his fan to unleash it. Yung’s tricks with the fire whirls were good- but better were the ones that the dragons could not see until far too late.
Devout of Yung, devout of her mate, began to shout. He only stopped when he grabbed him, and the man threw himself to the ground, smearing his eyes with blood-
The wolf bristled in a way she only heard tale about.
The dragon’s eyes were of the moon, reflected in his, locked onto her form as though she were prized prey, and then they turned onto the nearest.
Ferventi’s own generals fell, one by own, to his jaws.
The shock made her lose grip on the torrent of air, seeing the God of Fathers tear into his own young. Not even Hikaru, with those turned to vermin, was so merciless. Limbs torn from body, bodies left as splatter with naught but handfuls to recover.
It was shameful in how she froze. Even Yung remained with enough sense to hurl a broiling tornado down the tundra as Neia stalked forward, forcing her to be at bay, and did so one handed as he dragged his blinded devout to his feet. The man’s form shimmered and he took wing, not back into the brutal battle as he had before.
He had the sense to flee that Ferventi’s own did not.
Confusion, betrayal, panic ripping through them as not Ferventi alone was under the spell- Yung’s devout shouting over the chaos to get out of the moonlight.
It took too long for Ryou to release her grip on the stormclouds and let them rush back to fill the open sky, obscuring the light, filling the field with shadow. So few likely even heard it over the noise. Crack of bone, splatter of fluids, agonies and wails a cacophony symphony Neia was treating as the most delightful song from her perch.
“How low to bring a god, so easily.”
None but she heard the dragon’s words- that she knew. Whispers carried on the winds to her ear, and finally Ryou was able to bring herself to move, but only too late. She too, had the sense to flee, as the lunars advanced with fire on their lips.
An entire battalion down in seconds, reduced to cinders and ash on her winds.
Whatever organization the wolf’s forces had vanished as they scrambled. The only light the embers on the wolf’s hide or dragonfire, giving brief flashes of the chaos. Missing limbs, children and devout follower alike devoured. Spear, bullet, lance alike brushed off like the snowfall. More chaotic noise erupted that even as she fled, tail and wings burning under dragonflame, Ryou couldn’t help but look.
One of their kindred kin, rushing for the wolf, and just as the mortals, just as his own pack, falling and torn asunder. A head fully cleaved, and despite the torrents and rivers of blood, the wolf continued to rage. That rage now turned on the sodden corpse of the omnia, Ryou spied his son cowering just beneath. Barely, she made it onto a spire of ice formed when the Crane shot at the glacier, just barely able to catch her own breath that did not want to come.
Whatever advantage, confidence, and… At this point, she did not know what. Anything that could have been done was gone, and only chaos remained. Surely, it would be a delight to the serpent, the coyote, the polecat, were it not their own hides also on the line.
Another fire erupted on the field, this time in the west.
Briefly, Ryou had forgotten that Neia alone was not their sole enemy today, as The Heretic coiled and squirmed his way around her friend.
Even in death his venom worked.
Vega grew sluggish, still calling up the world’s mightiest of fires, attempting to burn his putrid form. Long had she known his vision was failing, under dusky cataracts that spread across his eyes in a pale film. She had seen them at their festival only just last year, so thick and glazed she had doubted he could see much beyond simple points of light, the lanterns that flew at close of one festival and the start of the next. That seemed long ago now, and the burning in her lungs kept her clung onto the ice, helpless to do none but watch him miss, miss, miss.
To see him struggle and fall on his knees, gasping for air as that sorry sack of hide wrapped his coils around his neck, and bite yet again on his throat.
At the festival, Vega had boasted his war paint alone, not his stories or legends, was enough to end wars against him, for any who struck him would fall to its poison.
Evidently, the poison did not work on those already dead, as Hilathu proved with another strike followed by another and another, each with venom, each making the great boar’s next shot die a little more until naught but ember on the wind.
Ryou had only felt the world shift so once, on death of her mother, on her own ascension, and joyous as it was to take her place, there had been a hollow left behind by it in what it meant.
That then, had been agreed and prepared. Not death but retirement, and the peaceful call of her word that she would always remain and carried through her too-
She doubted.
She doubted it could work so when Vega was so full of venom he simply heaved into the snow when released, abandoned by The Heretic as nothing and his form slid into the icy water. Even with breath now, Ryou felt the return of cowardice she had long tried to hide. She could fight yet more, but what point was there?
Neia, even returned to the battlefield, harried by all, shrugged them off.
Fervent continued to rage.
He tore out her throat and she fluttered and flailed, under control of none but fury he kept on.
It was fool’s errand to think, at all in any sense, this was anything but a loss on the grandest of scale.