rpbooks Chapter 117: Black Fire
Chapter 117: Black Fire
Kael charged.
He went directly toward the oncoming dog with the committed energy of something that had decided offense was the only acceptable response, his wings driving him forward with a speed that contradicted his size entirely.
His mouth opened as he moved — wider than the proportions of his head seemed to allow, the jaw dropping in a way that suggested the small golden-horned creature had dimensions that its resting state didn’t fully advertise.
The fire that came out was black.
Not dark orange, not the deep red of intense conventional flame — black, completely and purely, a torrent of it that poured from Kael’s open mouth with the pressure and volume of something that had been waiting behind a door that had just been opened fully.
It moved through the air between them and hit the dog before the dog had completed its charge, consuming it with a completeness that left no part of the animal unaffected.
The scream that followed was unlike anything the forest had produced in recent memory.
The dog’s voice broke against it — the sound of pain that had overwhelmed the animal’s ability to process pain quietly, forced out of it at a volume and pitch that the dense old trees caught and held.
It wasn’t a bark or a growl or anything that resembled the aggressive sounds from moments before. It was pure, involuntary agony.
And it kept going.
Because the black fire wasn’t behaving like fire.
Normal fire consumed from the outside — surface contact, heat transfer, gradual destruction working inward from whatever the flame touched first.
What was moving through the dog’s body right now was operating on different principles entirely.
The animal could feel it in places the external flame hadn’t reached, moving through its flesh with an intimacy that conventional combustion had no mechanism to explain.
It was eating from the inside out, in a way that went beyond physical destruction and into something that felt, to the screaming animal, like being unmade rather than simply burned.
Kael watched it burn.
He didn’t look away, didn’t soften his gaze, didn’t perform any of the gestures that might have suggested pity about what he was observing.
He simply watched, hovering at a comfortable distance above the scene, with a smile spreading on his face.
"You think you’re my match?" he said, his voice directed at the thrashing animal below him with the particular tone of someone delivering a verdict rather than asking a question.
The words came out with a contempt that had nothing performative in it. "You lowly creature."
The dog kept screeching.
And then it stopped.
The screeching cut off with the finality of something reaching its endpoint rather than being interrupted, and the dog dropped.
It hit the forest floor with the heavy, total collapse of a body that had exited the business of being alive — no gradual settling, no residual movement, just down, completely, the massive black-furred form reduced to stillness in the same moment its voice went silent.
Black smoke rose from the corpse.
It moved upward in thin, twisting columns from multiple points across the animal’s body, the color of it identical to the fire that had produced it — not the gray or white of conventional combustion’s aftermath, but black, genuinely black, curling into the forest air with a quality that seemed to absorb the light around it rather than mixing with the atmosphere the way ordinary smoke did.
Noah stood and watched all of it with his eyes wider than they had been at any point since he’d entered the forest.
"That’s..." He paused, his eyes tracking the smoke still rising from the dog’s still form. "That’s the dragon breath I’ve read so much about."
The books had described it. Several of them, across different texts he had moved through during his time in the library — references to the legendary power of dragons, the fire breath.
If anything, it was one of the most believed things about dragons, and seeing Kael use it, Noah learnt that dragon breath wasn’t a myth after all.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"Except," he murmured, more to himself than to anyone else, "he’s not breathing out fire."
Not the fire described in any of those texts, in any case. What had come out of Kael’s mouth bore the same mechanical relationship to fire — exhalation, combustion, sustained burning — but the substance of it was something the books hadn’t prepared him for.
Black wasn’t a color that fire was. Not naturally, not in any phenomenon he had encountered or studied before this moment.
Kael turned at the sound of Noah’s voice, and the excitement that had been sitting in his expression since before the charge found a new peak at the recognition that his master was reacting with something that looked distinctly like surprise.
He hovered closer, circling once above the burned corpse with what could only be described as pride, before orienting himself toward Noah properly.
"Correct, master," he said, the word carrying the warmth of genuine pleasure at being understood — or at the process of being understood beginning, which was perhaps even more satisfying. "Except those fantasy stories don’t describe my greatness properly."
He paused, and the pause had the quality of someone deciding that words alone were insufficient and that a demonstration was the better choice.
His mouth opened again.
A small blast — controlled, deliberately reduced from what had consumed the dog, sized for illustration rather than destruction — came out and angled upward, directed toward the open air above the canopy gap.
It moved fast, the black fire traveling the distance between Kael’s position and the sky with the same absolute certainty that the full torrent had moved across the clearing.
It hit the open air above the trees.
The atmosphere around it wobbled.
It was a subtle distortion, visible for only a moment — the air bending slightly around the point of contact the way air bent near extreme heat, except that the quality of the distortion was different from heat’s signature.
It wasn’t a shimmer. It was closer to a compression, the space around the black fire being affected by it in a way that conventional flame didn’t produce.
And then the fire vanished.
Kael turned back to Noah.
"What I breathe out is black fire," he said, pausing for a moment.
His golden horns caught a shift in the filtered light and held it for a moment. "...a fire of darkness."
He let that establish itself properly before finishing.
"It will consume all those who stand against me." The smirk returned, smaller this time but warmer, carrying something that was almost playful underneath the grandeur. "Hehe."
Noah couldn’t help it.
The marvel moved through him before he had any opportunity to manage it, arriving with the unguarded quality of a reaction that had bypassed the usual filtering entirely.
His eyes lit up — a genuine shine in them, the kind that showed up when something connected with a part of him that stayed engaged regardless of how composed the rest of him was trying to be.
"A fire of darkness," he murmured.
The words came out with a weight that had nothing to do with volume — quiet, almost reverent, the tone of someone turning something extraordinary over slowly to look at it from different angles.
"That’s really cool."
His mind was already moving, reaching back to the information he had gathered when he had first scanned Kael in those early hours after the dragon’s emergence.
The Eye of Truth had returned a clean result — two elements, both of them sitting outside the range of what the academy’s curriculum had prepared him to understand.
Shadow and Darkness.
And since that day, he hadn’t understood much about those two elements.
His understanding of both elements remained thin compared to what he knew about the conventional magical disciplines — lightning, ice, the elemental affinities that had centuries of documented study behind them and entire sections of library shelving dedicated to their properties and applications.
Shadow, at least, had given him something to work with through direct exposure.
Tara had used it when she tried to assainate him, so he has an idea about how it was now at least..
Then Kael’s shadow travel had added to that, giving him a clearer picture of what the element could do when it was being used by something that had genuine mastery of it rather than a corrupted approximation.
He had the rough shape of shadow, at least.
Darkness was different.
He was completely clueless about it — and he was honest enough with himself to use that word without softening it.
Not uninformed, not under-researched, not approaching it from a different angle. Clueless.
The darkness element had appeared in none of the texts he had studied with any depth or specificity, referenced occasionally in the same vague mythological context as other things that human magical tradition had decided were either too rare or too foreign to document properly.
And now he had just watched it work.
The black fire that had consumed the dog, moving through it from the inside out, a behaviour which matched none of the elements he understood.
It operated on different principles, produced different effects, left a different kind of nothing behind it when it finished.
He turned his gaze to the corpse on the forest floor.
The black smoke had thinned to almost nothing now, the columns dispersing slowly into the surrounding air, and what remained was simply the dog, or rather what remained of it.
It’s thick black fur had been burned to a crisp, leaving nothing but ash, something which normal fire could have never done.