The name ungiven
"Will you tell us your name?"
An ebony dragon blinked and turned his head slightly, to peer down at a human beside him. There were several of them on the cliff this late evening, but only one came to sit with him in silence, watching the twin Suns set over the ocean one after another with a blazing display of unearthly colors.
The group of humans held a respectful distance behind the dragon, but none of them could tear their eyes from the motionless figure framed against the burning sky. It will remain etched in their memory until the end of their days - a set of sharp backswept horns, crowning a noble profile of a wedge-shaped head, broad shoulders, extending to a set of large, partially unfurled wings, a thick, armored tail, coiling around the figure... the entire scene felt surreal, as if taken straight from canvas.
As the creature turned his head back to the sunset, the human sitting next to the dragon caught himself wondering again just where did their scaly savior has come from. Somewhere very far away, to be certain. While dragons weren't exactly known for socializing, they weren't entirely uncommon in these lands and even a child could tell that this one was very different from the kind villagers were used to. Besides an odd shape of the head, sporting an array of backswept fragile-looking seemingly quite flexible spines, the newcomer's neck was noticeably shorter and thicker, shoulders, front legs, chest and upper part of a belly armored with a much more pronounced plating, while the entirety of his back, on the other hand, held no spines or scale plating whatsoever, soft black and grey patterned skin flowing seamlessly from wing to wing. Stranger's tail was missing the iconic spikes too, leading to some confusion of the gender initially, before things settled down and braver villagers could have a good look. Taken as a whole, the dragon wasn't particularly large (standing but a quarter taller by the shoulder than the village's largest workhorse), but the entire body was sharply defined by pronounced muscles and sleek scale armor, seemingly meant to protect mostly from the front and from beneath, giving a distinctly aggressive outlook to the entire form.
"I have no true name of my own, human." The dragon's voice came as a deceptively loud whisper, always leaving the listener quite unsure if the words were said aloud or rang just in one's head. "But you may remember me as Niel," he added with a smirk, glancing back to the human again. It wasn't like him to disclose such details on a whim, but breathtaking sights like this always cast his thoughts to the nights long lost, when the true bearer of that name was still by his side.
Lost in memories for the moment the dragon paid no more attention to the human figures nearby. This world was but a short stop on his lonely, bleak journey. Its sphere held no traces of a major planar shift within the last five hundred cycles. Another dead end. A mental mark among a thousand others. It was time to move on.
Just as the last sliver of a second setting Sun disappeared beneath the horizon, the dark draconic figure reared, unfurled its wings and thrust serrated claws in to the empty night. The reality shuddered and split apart with a terrible howl of an ethereal hurricane, threatening to unmake the very essence of a materium itself. The dragon in the epicenter of an unfolding cataclysm calmly twisted his paw and with a swing of a grey-black wing sent the untamed discharge of the Void in to a preset anchors of an ancient spell. Silence fell like a physical blow, as the cliffside exploded in a brilliant red light, cast by millions of tiny red runes suspended in the air, extending in endless columns of incomprehensible incantations for miles in all directions. A large swirling gateway slowly pulsed open in front of the caster, radiating waves of monstrous arcane power, seemingly on the brink of breaking the invisible bonds forged aeons ago. The creature who called himself Niel dropped on all fours again, releasing the controls of a complex portal, and stepped through without looking back.