Night of (Broken) Hearts

They say the end of the world would come with fire, blood, and despair. It sounds like this would involve a war, the wrath of a genie, a dragon attack, or worse, a war involving dragons and genies.

Yeah, that last one pretty much sums up the last ten years of life on Orobia. The dragons and genies had gone to war over... well, it's a little hard to explain, but apparently, a legendary brass dragon smith named "Gargec" fell in love with a genie noblewoman who liked to bless lands with abundant produce called "Awdue", and they, in their humanoid forms, produced a hybrid child. Their two races, already tense over the dragons encroaching on the lands of Orobia that were under genie rule, found this union to be a violation of their limited peace. They set upon each other with magic and elemental breaths, destroying each other and everything between them.

And unfortunately for us smaller races, we were between them.

I watched in horror as the farm town I was born in was razed to the ground during the Battle of Gwyer Fields towards the beginning of the war. Friends, neighbors, honest, good people, even children... none were spared as the "collateral damage" of titan-sized warriors tearing each other apart. No building was safe from the damage inflicted by the reckless creatures. My family's own farmhouse, with my grandmother trapped inside as she told me with her last words to me to flee, was used as a bludgeon to kill an ifrit. That's how little we mattered to these "gods" that oversaw us.

All because they finally had their precious "excuse" to destroy with little care of whom they hurt, they did so in earnest.

I found my grandmother's broken body in the wreckage of our home. She was small, just like any halfling. But instead of saving anything else in our home, she chose a locket. A golden heart with faded writing, but I recognized the names on it. My parents' names. Opening it, the locket revealed their faces to me... both had died shortly a month after I was born, so I didn't know them, but Grandma remembered her son and his bride with pride.

After I gave my grandmother and all of the other villagers a proper burial--because gods forbid the dragons who won the battle did it, and genies usually don't leave corpses-I made a vow. A vow to find Gargec and Awdue, and make them answer for this needless violence.

I spent the past ten years hunting for information on these two... anything that would lead me to their location. They had fled the main continent shortly after the war started with their little "family"... self-imposed exile, some claimed. Others would call it cowardice. At this point, all I saw this as was an inconvenice. Still, I helped those suffering in need, and even dodged the dragons and genies when I could, since I didn't need THAT many enemies... but if conflict was inevitable, my luck and skill had greatly improved over the past decade. Too bad my luck was short on information about my targets.

Until recently, where a traveler from the continent of Argelia claimed to have seen a massive swirl of magic alongside a brass-scaled dragon that stopped the eruption of Mt. Escen. Coincidentally, the region had become suddenly abundant with crops... like the ones Awdue would grow.

I found them at last.

Unfortunately, my chase was delayed by two things: my short stature, and the fact that other beings had heard about the incident, and the dragons and the genies were able to pursue the lead first. I didn't get there until after a massive battle that, yet again, ended with a desolated land, burnt or crushed crops, a few dozen civilian survivors, and a destroyed farmhouse. All that was there to greet me was aa graveyard. And in that graveyard was but a single dwarf with a set of bandages poking out from inside his shirt, kneeling in front of a gravestone, and holding a set of broken fragments, but with heart-shaped gemstones scattered around him.

The stories say Gargec's "short for a dragon" in his humanoid form, and his preference to smithing leaned to the dwarves. However, there was a little-known fun fact about Mt. Escen that I found out before I arrived in the region: dwarves stayed away because they KNEW about the volcanic properties making it too unstable for them. Only a fire-breathing creature would bother attempting to use it as a forge.

This was Gargec, all right. A survivor had told me that Awdue had died in the battle that had taken place before I managed to get there. There was no sign of their child... maybe she too, had perished in the fight. But there were several, several graves. It turned out, that the war was decided here. The dragons and genies had their forces wiped out by something, and there were now only handfuls of each that they couldn't afford to keep fighting, and called a truce.

All of this pain, suffering, devastation, destroying the world... for nothing? My grandmother and village were wiped out for NOTHING? Orobia was reduced to a battle-scarred wasteland for TEN YEARS... for nothing!?

I pulled out a dagger--I know, not much against a dragon at first glance, but the steel was designed perfectly for slaying the damned beasts, and this was Gargec in his most vulnerable form--prepared to silently strike, to make him answer for his crimes. But he turned and spotted me. In my emotional state, I was hardly going to be able to challenge a dragon to a fight by myself. Gargec could easily turn to his true form and treat me like a snack for even bothering him at what was probably his wife's funeral. However, he instead kneeled down, placing the fragments in his hand into what looked like a heart, and closed his broken brown eyes, as if in acceptance of death at my hands for the past ten years.

I was stunned by this. The hearts? A reminder of my grandmother's last keepsake of my parents. I pulled out my own locket, and looked at Gargec, practically at peace save for a tear or two. A pair of broken hearts in that graveyard, him and I. Broken... but still beating, despite everything that's happened to us.

I saw, at that moment in this cemetery, not the one who pulled the trigger of an inevitable war, but a man who lost everything to this senseless war, someone who did not ask for this suffering. Someone who was now alone in a burned world with nobody to support them, and just wanted everything to END.

I saw myself in that disguised dragon.