Mouthpiece of the Night (1)

Cassius flew through the castle, following the black mist. He saw the magic circles inside the iron cages flickering. Countless blood thralls wailed as they detonated, turning into ghostly black haze and surging in a single direction. "These blood thralls have all been sacrificed..." "Their destination must be the outside world." With that thought, Cassius stopped chasing the mist. Beating his wings, he surged upward, his massive draconic bulk violently smashing through stone walls and ceilings as he rampaged straight through the bunker. Soon, amidst the cascading collapse of the structures behind him, Cassius burst into the outside world. Yet the scene before his eyes had undergone a cataclysmic transformation compared to before. The world outside now held neither bright moon nor starry sky. This was a lightless night. The sky above was shrouded in heavy, somber shadow, like a pitch-black dome. Tainted by the ambient environment, colors had faded to a universal gloom, reduced to a bleak monochrome of black and white, while towering black peaks loomed in the far distance. Right above the Twilight Forest, countless masses of shadowstuff mist coalesced into a continuously churning vortex of dark vapors. Looking up at the blackened sky, Cassius muttered to himself, "This is a projection of the Shadowfell..." "No, that old bat punched through the barrier between the Shadow Plane and the Material Plane." The Shadowfell, also known as the Plane of Shadow, was a dim and dusky realm that existed alongside and coterminous with the Material Plane. It was a sinister domain of darkness and gloom, as well as a desolate, remote borderland of the unknown. It was teeming with amorphous entities formed of shadowstuff—barren, hollow, and utterly devoid of life. The aggregation of black mist in the sky was clearly an extraplanar vortex linking the Shadowfell and the Material Plane, poised to summon forth unknown shadow creatures from that realm. "No, I must stop him." Cassius finally understood what the vampire's dying curse—"You will all die"—meant. Once the shadow curse of the Shadowfell encroached, the entirety of Northwind Keep would turn into a dead city overrun by shadow creatures, subsumed by an endless, all-consuming gloom. Even he might be transformed into an immortal shadow red dragon. Girded by a shimmering barrier, Cassius forced his way in, trying to prevent the vortex of black mist from breaching the planar barrier. *Globe of Invulnerability.* Yet it was ineffective. The tier of this planar vortex was clearly far above the fifth circle; even the tried-and-true Globe of Invulnerability could not handle such a complex, high-tier spatial disturbance, managing only to smooth over the shallowest ripples. The red dragon opened his maw and unleashed a blast of searing flame breath. The roaring flames instantly ignited those shadow creatures, eliciting shrill, agonizing wails. Yet the vortex had already grown too colossal. Thousands of shadows had formed a massive maelstrom nearly a hundred meters in diameter across the sky. Even if the red dragon completely exhausted his dragonfire, he could not easily burn it all away. "A Weave disturbance of this magnitude..." "A scale like this..." "What on earth did that old bat summon?" A bone-chilling dread crept into Cassius's heart. Whatever was crossing into the Material Plane through this planar vortex was almost certainly far beyond his ability to defeat! With this realization, he did everything he could, hurling area-of-effect damage spells like Fireball, Wall of Fire, and Lightning Bolt into the vortex as if they cost nothing. Fire, lightning, and radiant brilliance crisscrossed within the vortex, yet they still could not prevent the dark mist from continually gathering and madly swelling, blotting out the sky. *I can't let this drag on,* Cassius thought. A terrifying pressure emanated from the vortex, sending tremors through Cassius's entire body. As an inherently mighty red dragon, Cassius rarely experienced such instinctive dread, but he felt it now—and it was overwhelmingly intense! "Roar—" Accompanying a deep rumble, the projection of a dragon shrouded in black mist emerged from the vortex, gradually coalescing into physical substance before his very eyes. For a powerful entity from the Shadowfell to fully descend into the Material Plane, a certain amount of time was required. Its massive frame, over twenty meters long, was covered in lusterless, coal-black scales. Its wings lacked webbing, resembling instead a translucent, incorporeal substance like that of a spirit. Most terrifying of all were its eyes: pools of utterly lifeless grayish-white, devoid of pupils or lenses, resembling bottomless abysses that threatened to swallow a person's soul whole. At this moment, those grayish-white eyes were fixed upon Cassius, and a raspy voice rang out. "A former kinsman, is it?" "A young red dragon? No wonder. I was wondering who could have driven my poor contractor to sacrifice everything." "Though, I really ought to thank you." The great dragon—or rather, the shadow dragon—licked its lips in keen anticipation, dripping intangible saliva of black mist. "To return to the Material Plane once again... what a delightful feeling." Cassius beat his wings with all his might, barely managing to hover in midair. Poised as if facing a mortal threat, he stared up at the phantom of the shadow dragon, which was far larger and more terrifying than himself. [Based on your strength, you can observe the following information:] Mouthpiece of the Night - Mortifer Basic Abilities: ??? Challenge Rating: 21 (33,000 XP) Evaluation: Mortifer arrived in the Shadowfell seven hundred years ago and took up residence there. He relishes its bleakness and desolation, venomously cursing all light and life, craving to spread its darkness and evil to the worlds beyond. He often manifests in the guise of a wizard calling himself the "Mouthpiece of the Night," forging trap-laden pacts with humanoids to lure them into corruption. Ultimately, he turns villages and even towns into dead lands teeming with dark phantoms, greedily gorging upon their power. "Legendary..." Cassius's expression changed drastically. A Challenge Rating of 21—an entity firmly in the legendary tier. Moreover, given the unique nature of true dragons, his actual strength would only be greater than what appeared on paper. In short, this was a being that an entire party of legendary adventurers could only barely contest! It was potent enough to trigger a disaster of planar proportions! Since arriving in Elezerg, Cassius had never encountered an adversary so powerful. Mouthpiece of the Night - Mortifer. Cassius had heard of this title in his past life; by then, it was already Version 4.0, the Planar Expedition era. Mortifer had purportedly been the final boss of Dragonshadow City, a notoriously difficult side dungeon in the Underdark. Yet Cassius had never imagined he would encounter a foe of this caliber so early. After all, in his eyes, the Great Anzetta Waste was merely a barren, remote frontier, hardly worth the attention of such major figures. However, his assessment had been flawed. Evidently, this shadow dragon was more than interested in sowing darkness and death across the Great Anzetta Waste, reducing it to a land of absolute desolation. In his past life, after Duke Brad's Ascension Ritual was shattered by an explosion, the duke had vanished without a trace, never to be heard from again. In retrospect, he too had likely met a miserable end at the hands of this shadow dragon. *I can never allow him to fully descend into the Material Plane!* That was the sole thought in Cassius's mind right now.