Congratulations Dragon's Tooth Soldier!

The earth rolls and roils above you, seemingly a solid mass, but you know in your bones this is false. It is but dust, tightly packed and surging invisibly. There are holds to be had if one knows where to look, places to grab to pull yourself up into the waking world and do what you born to do.

Once you’re called to do so.

You’ve waited there for thousands and thousands of years, entombed and alone, waiting for the sweet contact of seed upon skull that would tell you your time was upon you, and today the tooth will fall upon you. You’ll feel it clink on your skull and stir your bones. You’ll reach up, grab it, feel it cold and tight in your hand, and reach your free hand upward, beginning your arduous trek to the surface.

A mortal could not do it. Few men at all could, feel out the hard spaces in the earth, the few places truly real. Ancient stones, clumps of particles unmoved for eons, drops of consecrated blood, an infinitely porous network of all too-frequent items that make up truly solid walls of belief in a world governed by abstract concepts. But you were born, raised, and trained to move this way, and you do so with furious speed, your withered muscles creaking with the effort, surging with each success until you taste air for the first time since your seventeenth birthday and let your fleshless jaws slacken and smile.

You’ll take in the sunlight, the feeling of the wind on your sinews and the sound of life unmuffled upon what’s left of your ears. You’ll feel satisfied for the first time in thousands of years. That is until you open your eyes from your reverie and look around.

You’ll be struck by just how empty the field you’ve been called to is right away. Where are your brothers and sisters, myrmidons waiting for their clarion call to ride to one last endless battle? Then you’ll look at the summoning tooth and realize what summoned you: a hard, tiny little seed casing. An acorn.

Frustrated, you’ll search the field for someone who might’ve summoned you, a party to hold responsible for this indignity. You’ll search as you were trained, beating the ground for the tiniest marker that would show you what has passed. While you look for signs of an assailant who, for all you know, was just an errant squirrel who would never know of what he had done you’ll find tiny bones and scraps of clothing, remnants of an army long defeated. You’ll see rusted blades and bits of armor while your marks and realize, with terrible finality, that you’ve found what’s left of the only family you’ve ever known. You were to rise with them, to fight with them and, finally, die a final death at their side. It was never meant to be this way.

Tears will be an impossibility to you, that part of your body having left you long ago. But even if they were an option you’d still ignore them. You were never meant to weep or wonder. You were meant to persevere against all odds, until death.

So you’ll offer to your comrades a silent prayer, a moment’s thought and memorial, and then you’ll begin your march to the nearest city. When you reach the outskirts you’ll be a little surprised at how well the man sitting at a computer takes your outlandish appearance. You’ll be a bit taken aback at his lack of abject horror, but in a world with The Hills and Jersey Shore there are new monsters far more fearsome than anything from ancient tombs. It is a feeling you’ll come to terms with over the next few months, as you travel across the ocean in the holds of ships and in tubes filled with jet fuel, flung into the air and held aloft by force until they reach their target. There will be such things as you never dreamed of, and as you slowly rise to the head of the fearsome new Hydra that is the Wells Fargo bank, you’ll come to terms with them. But you’ll always feel a little bit of joy that your brothers and sisters didn’t have to live in such a world where horror was so much more terrible and subtle.

Congratulations Dragon’s Tooth Solider!