Daily artwork #271 // Rage (Patreon)

Hey guys!

I'm gonna start this week with some musculature work with the thane. It was a challenge to make sure the anatomy worked to my advantage. I'm still unsure if I was able to pull it off! but I hope you will like it :)

As usual accompanied by a story written by Aksan <3 I hope you enjoy!

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Purple flames dripped from black scaled lips as the footsteps faded; splashes of arcane magic, burning the stones beneath his feet. Crackling with energy, the scar on his back was torn open, bolts of energy arcing to the stonework around him as it blackened and crumbled away.

Within his head the screaming, screeching anger cut through all logic and order like red hot pokers into flesh. Distant, heavy footfall rang back through the corridor, accompanied by vocal shrieks and explosive, thunderous blasts. A deep snarl drew his lips back over the long, vicious fangs that lined his maw; the rising roar from his lungs was matched by an intense bone shaking thrum. Bright purple-white light flooded the chamber and his shadow reappeared before him.

Her first word was screamed before comprehension, a storm of arcane bolts and snapping teeth. “Bet you love having me on a chain!” she snarled when blazing rage cooled into discernibility. Mentally words were long gone, the connection between them a flood of cruel vitriolic notions and violent intent.

“Leave!” he bellowed, shaking charred ash from the walls.

“I tried!” she snapped. Islands of reason, discovery, dissolved in the seething acid sea of hate that their joined minds had become.

“I just want you gone!”

“Then kill me!” she dared him, stepping forward, pushing out her chest and exposing her throat. A furious hand wrapped her throat and lifted her easily from the ground; the shaking of the muscles, a struggle within their master. Huge jaws opened and closed noiselessly. “Can’t bear to kill another?” she taunted him.

Musclebound and ash streaked, she watched his broad chest rise and fall with deep breaths and he tried to speak. Eventually he forced twisted, snarled words, “Can’t bear to kill you . . .”

“Why not?” she barely managed, his anger compressing her throat.

“I’ve never killed another dragon,” he growled, staring at her from beneath heavy, angry brows.

“You slaughtered the Ferals!”

“They were barely alive,” he murmured like the grinding of a boulder about to break free, “They knew only destruction.”

“You laid waste to the Inigne.”

“They hated me.”

“I hate you!” she screamed, “Or would you rather not kill me?”

Glowing, scarred eyes broke from their intense gaze as he looked away. Waves of dark twisted intent pulsed through their minds, threatening to drag them under and sharp and jacked rocks of revulsion rose.

“You always did prefer that to killing them,” she called down at him scornfully.

Slowly the monster drew her close, bringing them eye to eye. Bolts of arcane energy crackled between them as he searched for words, meaning, anything he could discern within his head.

“Wouldn’t get rid of me, but at least you could–” Her words were cut short as she flew across the room. Slamming into the wall with a sickening crunch of her spine, she scrambled and jolted, climbing to her feet and she replaced and rebuilt broken bones.

Luminescent beyond the aspirations of the sun, she opened her mouth and unleashed a blinding torrent of magic upon him. Beautiful scales of black and violet blistered, bursting and being remade by the immense power coursing through them.

‘You’ve done far worse,’ she willed the words into his head.

“As if I don’t know that!” he yelled into the light.

‘I have to live everyday with the memories of your atrocities!’

“We both do!”

‘They aren’t my memories,’ her mind all but pleaded.

“Are they any more mine than yours?”

Darkness fell, and for the longest time the still room was lit by the light of their scars alone.

“Your body,” she began, despair conquering anger as her melodic speaking voice returned, “Your flesh, betrayed and defiled so many.”

“Our mind,” he muttered from his knees, “If it could be called that.” The inky dark sea had long swallowed their incandescent rage, and now began to crawl over them.

“I still feel the memories as though they were my own acts,” she said, the pair letting the words echo to silence in the craterous space that remained around them.

“I wish I were allowed to say the same,” he growled.

“You were continuous!” she said, the room illuminated by the flaring of her eyes.

“And you weren’t?” he snapped.

“Your mind!” she snarled, “Your flesh and blood birthed us both!”

Rich blackness, a resistance to light, the sea of their minds. Intense energy raised thrumming spires, spikes of untamed rage mapping their entwined nature.

“If you’re something so different why are we still bonded?” he roared.

Her softly shaking head, accelerating in tempo as she built to words, was snapped forward by his callous hand. Rising from his knees he struck her neck with all his mass, flipping her, slamming her onto her back. Towering over her now their blazing eyes met as he once more sought for words. Flames, magic and saliva dripping onto her face from his huge jaws, moving above her delicate features like a rabid dog on a leash.

“Why can’t you get out of my head‽” he snarled down at her, staining her face with the products of his barely tamed energy.

“I tried!” she whimpered. The spires fell. The sea evaporated, crags and rocks sublimated. A beating heart, a glowing stone, all that remained in the void beyond light and dark. His hand relaxed slowly. Two cores closing, orbiting, as their immense golden horns met, in the wake of their destruction. Once more her trembling lips reached for those words. In the desolate crater they had made and in the empty void of their minds, they rang clarion. “I tried.”