Ahead, Rith sent, do you feel it?
Yes, replied Darigaaz. Yes, I feel it.
Past the salt marshes, past a wide stretch of quicksand, there lay a deep, black place. It was a tar pit. Nowhere else in nature was there a place as black as that. It seemed a tear in the world, giving view to the nothingness beneath. Any living thing that wandered into it died. Meat and brain and bone all disappeared. Oblivion.
Here, Rith said. We circle here.
Rhammidarigaaz and the three Primevals bent their wings. They banked above the tar pit. The dragon nations followed smoothly in their wake. They formed a whirling, multicolored vortex.
The creature in that pit drew Darigaaz. It completed the music in his soul. Open fifths became major chords. Dull drones gave way to symphonies. Music aligned his jangled spirit.
It was more than just music. It was raw power. It magnetized him, aligning the particles of Darigaaz's being. His heart pounded in synchrony with the Primevals' hearts. His muscles ached with energy. This was what it was to awaken a god.
What sacrifice must we make? Rhammidarigaaz asked Rith. Immersed in the soul symphony, he would have sacrificed anything to raise the final Primeval. How many must die? How must they die?
Rith's smile glinted like a dagger. You're beginning to think like us. But no-no mortal dragon must be sacrificed now. Only we four. Only we Primevals."
Darigaaz stared at her. We four?
All this while, you did not sense it? Even knowing your name?
My name?
What is the Old Draconic meaning of Rhammidarigaaz?
In dread realization, he whispered, "Conception."
You are the first Primeval. The Phyrexians only destroyed your corpse. They did not know you were already reborn. For a thousand years, you have lived, Rhammidarigaaz. For a thousand years, you could have awakened us. Why didn't you?
Her words pinched the sinews of his heart. I didn't know-
Yes, you could not have known. You were hatched as mortal dragons are hatched. You had to learn to eat, to fight, to believe. You could not have known your destiny and should not have known it until the fullness of time. The invasion cut time short. Szat became your teacher. He showed you your grave and taught you the stories you had forgotten. He sent you out to awaken us, and you have.
I am one of you?
Yes. One of us four, who must die to raise the fifth.
Only a moment ago, Rhammidarigaaz had learned he was god. Now, his life-his eternal life-would be required of him. Hollowly, he repeated the thought, We must die to raise the fifth…?
In dying, we will awaken our final brother. He is death and has dominion over death. He will raise us all as new creations. As new gods.
Even had he been in his right mind, Darigaaz could not have resisted, but he was nowhere near his right mind. He would sacrifice his life, yes. He would shuck his old flesh and don a new, immortal body. Rhammidarigaaz would become one of the gods.
Yes, Rith, he said. Let us complete the circle.
Rhammidarigaaz tucked his wings to his sides, leading the dive. It was only right. He was the first Primeval, the red dragon whose name meant conception. He would lead the four down to death. Wind whipped across his horns and down his red-tasseled back. Rith fell in line behind him, and after her Treva, and Dromar. They dipped downward, away from the cyclone of serpents.
Black tar loomed up. Aloft, it had seemed placid. Now Rhammidarigaaz could see the steamy bubbles that burst upon its surface. They belched heat into the air. This would be no simple suffocation but a burning death. Darigaaz did not close his eyes. He wanted to face death head-on.
His face struck. The tar burned. He plunged into it. Goo encased his wings, his shoulders, his arms. It swallowed his belly and his legs. Darigaaz thrashed. He roared. Sound could not escape his mouth. Tar sucked down his throat. The symphony in his head ceased. There was only the mallet of his heart.
He was dying. He was alone, and he was dying.
They tricked me, he thought. His consciousness poured out like a wineskin. They tricked me into sacrificing myself. I am no god. I'm no longer anything at all.
He tried to drive toward the surface. It was useless, but life always fights, even when the battle is lost. Darigaaz fought.
There was no more time. Rhammidarigaaz was dead. He was suddenly, surprisingly dead.
At first, the notes were scattered and uncertain, as if the players were warming up. A tone here, a trill there, but nothing that amounted to music. Soon, there came a quickening, the pulse of a drum, insistent and irresistible. A drone joined it, the long strident breath of a bagpipe. The basal rhythm invited melody. Strings added their voices, then winds, reeds, and brass. They converged. They crescendoed. They sang.
In all its loud cacophony, life reentered Darigaaz.
He fought again toward the surface. The tar grew watery- slack and tepid. It could not grip him. His flesh was new and slick. He surged upward. Wings hurled back the muck as if it were air.
Rhammidarigaaz's head broke the surface. Tar peeled from his jowls and eyes and horns. It sloughed from shoulders and arms, wings and waist, legs and tail. With a mighty stroke, he shot from the blackness. It closed beneath him.
Darigaaz's roar was a volcano. It spewed straight up into the eye of the dragon cyclone. He followed the fire skyward. Life had returned and brought rage with it. He was done being subordinate. He was done being tricked, done suffering fools.
Darigaaz's body was new-scaled in rubies, youthful and lithe, quick and powerful. His mind was new too, bursting with the sorceries that are a god's inheritance. Even his soul was new, not the suffering spirit of a mortal creature but the unrepentant heart of a god. Darigaaz's time had come to rule-he and his sibling gods.
Rith burst from the black well of death. Her flesh was solid emerald. Voracious clouds of spores fountained from her roaring jowls as she took to the sky. Angelic Treva followed, a creature of white light. Radiance poured up past her teeth. Then came Dromar, who breathed a shaft of distortion that shook matter apart. And, last of all-Crosis.
The black dragon god had bat wings and a cobra's body. His legs were powerful, his talons were tipped in razor claws, and the whole of his being gleamed like onyx. From his mouth came a black column that slew anything in its path.
This was Crosis, the one the other four had died to raise. He had nullified death and raised them all again as gods.
The five Primevals vaulted up through the vortex of dragons, rising faster than mortal wings could have borne them. They owned the heavens.
Except that there, beyond the coiling serpents, a ship dared to fly. She had a massive prow ram and a sleek hull and shimmering wings of metal.