With everything not wanting to swim into focus, her first thought was to wonder just why she couldn't see properly. After that, it was about managing the dreadful pain. Slowly, what had happened came slinking back. Sure she'd unleashed her magic into the king's whelp of a pet, what had happened next seemed utterly improbable. From what little she could recall, she'd been impossibly thrown through the air for some distance. After that it was, like her vision, just a blur. Flooding her limbs with warm, pleasant, healing magic, bones cracked back and bonded into place as skin knitted itself together, all the time the pain kept under control. Standing, visibly traumatised, she shook her head half a dozen times in the hope that her vision would recover. It did, but not quite fully.
A thick, all encompassing blackness that didn't seem real greeted him when he opened his eyes. His first reaction was to get to his feet, but all his limbs were weighed down, almost feeling as though they were made of lead. Next he tried to sit, but could barely lift his head away from the floor. Instinctively he reached for his magic, desperately hoping to find something of assistance there, but quickly it became apparent that it had somehow become either lost or had been forcibly taken away. Horror at the thought of being without even the tiniest spark of natural power hastened his breathing, clouding his mind, threatening to render him useless. Most magical beings would have been in trouble, but he'd been ruthlessly trained by one of the best, brightest and most stubborn of beings... one that wouldn't take no for an answer, and one that had ultimately foreseen a day like this. It had been a cruel and calculated move on the master mantra maker's part in taking away his young dragon charge's magical ability, on a quiet day long ago, but he regarded it as 'tough love' and knew that it might at some point in the future save the young dragon's life. Knowing that he'd get no thanks, and certainly not expecting any, it had torn apart his insides to activate a rare and obtuse mantra that had been part of a hoard he'd recovered from the Silla dynasty. A long standing empire that had ruled the Korean Peninsula between 57 B.C. and A.D. 935, founded by the monarch Bak Hyeokgeose, whom legend held had hatched from a mysterious egg in a strange and haunted forest and married a queen, born from the ribs of a dragon. Not quite true of course, but nearly. Instead of being born from the ribs of a dragon, the queen herself was a dragon, and a very powerful and cunning one at that. In spite of the fact that most of the history surrounding this time period had been either lost or deliberately destroyed, Gee Tee had recovered what little was left, all of which made invaluable reading. After that, he'd made it his purpose over a period of decades to go searching for anything of magical relevance from that time period and culture. Token trinkets here and there had come into his possession, along with the odd spell book or two. But his luck had really changed one long weekend nearly eighty years ago, when he'd been exploring a system of underground ruins buried in the centre of an estuary, situated in the middle of a widespread lava formation deep beneath the human city of Daegu in the south east of the region. After a long hike and an even longer flight, he'd donned the mystical necklace/ring combination that had been handed down to him and set off looking for the merest hint of magic. And this time, unlike his previous four escapades, he'd stumbled across something almost straight away. While he'd found the hint of power almost immediately, it had taken him nearly eighteen hours, and that was using no small amount of magic, to unearth the treasure trove itself. The thrill of discovering something covered up or cast away was totally eclipsed by the haul of treasure: trinkets, weapons, spell books, carvings and a huge cache of one-off mantras, one of which was the mantra he'd used on his young apprentice. Of course the work hadn't all ended there. Translation, documentation, testing, research and development as well as finding the most appropriate place to store all the goodies came next, and were almost as time consuming as finding the stockpile. While the contents were hugely valuable, on the day that he used the one-off mantra on young Tank, he considered none more so than that particular spell. Having your abilities inhibited, your powers removed, was so utterly shocking and devastating, something he could testify to firsthand, that he wished someone had surprised him with it, well... almost. And so it was that although the young rugby playing dragon had been stripped of his magic, finding himself helpless beyond belief, feeling lonelier than the occasion after rugby when all his teammates had stolen his towel and clothes and put them in the middle of the clubhouse and he'd had to walk in wearing only his kitbag to cover up his modesty, it wasn't his first time. So remembering the feeling, and his boss's wise words of wisdom, he gained control of his breathing and started trying to figure out exactly what was going on.
Decades in the making, the plan had not only been timed to perfection, but had been implemented as precisely as it had been laid out, throughout the rest of the dragon domain of course. Dark dragon infiltrators and disguised nagas had spent years planning, and then eventually sowing the seeds of misery and destruction. Almost nowhere had been spared. Larger swathes of dragon society beneath the earth were currently suffering horrendous casualties, as well as the indignity of being cut off telepathically from any form of outside help or knowledge about what was happening across the rest of the planet. Subterranean cities search as New York, London, Moscow, Sydney, Paris, Berlin and Madrid amongst others, had been devastated by mighty ground quakes, whilst the destruction of pivotally placed lava dams had wreaked havoc in or around Delhi, Athens, Rome, Wellington, Perth and New Orleans. Death and destruction had visited in the form of chemical, biological and conventional terrorist attacks. Darkness had descended on dragon civilisation in more ways than one. Across the planet the power was out, cities and outlying regions only lit up by the rampaging fires from the torched buildings and the scorched bodies. With the power out, the scrubbers and filters that recycled the stale air of the domain for fresh air from the surface were no longer working, meaning the thick, corrosive black smoke from the fires and evil that had been perpetrated had nowhere else to go. Across the realm smog ruled and magical beings struggled to breathe. Oddly, no nursery ring had been so much as touched. Manson had issued strict orders about this, on pain of death and the beings under his command had made sure to obey them to the letter.