The Black Monster

The Black Monster is a legendary figure and character-defining villain in the 1999 video game The Legend of Dragoon. Introduced as a near-mythical demon that has roamed Endiness for eleven thousand years, the Black Monster's sole purpose is to eliminate the newborn Moon Child when it reincarnates once every one hundred and eight years; along the way, it also kills anyone who has been in close proximity to the child, often destroying entire villages in its attempts to annihilate the young messiah's supporters.

Dart, the protagonist of the game, has emerged as the apparent sole survivor of the Black Monster's most recent atrocity - a massacre that ended with the destruction of Neet village, the assassination of the infant Princess Loufia, and the death of Dart's parents eighteen years prior to the events of the game. Determined to avenge his mother and father, he has sworn to hunt down and kill the Black Monster, but despite a five-year search spanning the length and breadth of Endiness, he has failed to find any trace of it by the start of the game. However, as The Legend Of Dragon continues, frequent references of the Moon Child and the Divine Moon Objects seem to imply that the monster is somehow involved in the ongoing conspiracy.

However, during the climax of disc three, it's eventually revealed that the Black Monster is none other than Dart's mentor and fellow Dragoon Rose. And far from being a straightforward antichrist figure, her purpose is far more complicated than the legends purport...

The Dragon Campaign
Rose was born over eleven thousand years prior to the events of the game, and like much of the human race of this era, she spent much of her life as a slave to the Wingly Empire; as the 107th race given life by the Divine Tree of Soa, the Winglies believed that their impressive magical powers made them naturally superior to all other forms of life on the planet, and used this belief as justification for the wholesale enslavement of all other races in Endiness. Her life as a slave remains an enigma that Rose is unwilling to elaborate on even once her secrets are revealed; however, what is known is that the cruelty of the empire gradually drove the enslaved peoples to rebel in large numbers, many of them rallying to the banner of the human revolutionary known only as Emperor Diaz of Gloriano - and Rose was one of them.

But to defeat the magic of the Winglies, the humans needed a military advantage of some kind, and eventually found it in the form of dragons: by means of a slain dragon's spirit - manifested as a tiny pendant-sized sphere - the humans found that certain individuals could transform themselves into Dragoons, great warriors empowered with the supernatural gifts of flight, enchanted armor, mystical weaponry and impressive magical powers. These legendary knights could also tame and command live dragons, particularly in the form of the vassal dragons born of those killed to acquire new spirits; as such, though only seven compatible warriors could be found, they became Emperor Diaz's lieutenants and humanity's great trump card against the Winglies, and it wasn't long before the war between the two races became known as the Dragon Campaign.

Rose was one of these seven warriors, having acquired a spirit of her own under the guidance of Zieg, the Fire Dragoon. From then on known as the Darkness Dragoon and accompanied in battle by her vassal dragon Michael, Rose became one of humanity's greatest champions over the course of the war. However, she also formed lasting friendships with her fellow dragon knights, particularly with her mentor Zieg; eventually, the relationship between them blossomed into a romance, and the two of them planned to marry once the war was over.

However, even with the combined might of Dragon and Dragoons, even with aid from Winglies sympathetic to humanity's cause, the war was still a long and bloody conflict: though Dragoon magic and human ingenuity sent the flying cities of the Wingly empire plummeting to the ground, imperial reprisals resulted in the deaths of countless innocents, and the giant Virages employed by the Winglies exacted a vicious death toll on the dragon population. As each side grew more desperate, the clash between human and Wingly grew magic grew more and more savage, and Rose was forced to witness the deaths of many of her friends and loved ones as the Dragon Campaign reached its climax.

Eventually, the human forces closed in on the Wingly capital city of Kadessa. There, while Rose and her friends slew the Virage army and destroyed the city's defenses, Zieg killed the Wingly Emperor Melbu Frahma in single combat. However, this final victory came at a terrible price: with his dying breath, Melbu Frahma cursed Zieg to eternal petrification, and Rose could only watch in horror as the man she loved was slowly reduced to an inanimate statue; she never even had a chance to recover his body, the ongoing destruction of Kadessa sweeping her away before she could reach him. Once the fighting had died down and the remaining Winglies had surrendered, it was discovered that all the other Dragoons had died over the course of the battle - including Rose's best friend, the White-Silver Dragoon Shirley.

Thus, the Dragon Campaign ended with humanity victorious, the Wingly empire dissolved, and Rose as the last surviving Dragoon.

The Black Monster
At some point following the end of the war, Rose was contacted by Charle Frahma, one of the Winglies who had sided with humanity over the course of the Dragon Campaign - and Melbu Frahma's sister. Over the course of their meeting, Charle revealed that her brother had discovered the existence of a 108th fruit of the Divine Tree, a creature they called the Virage Embryo: known as the God of Destruction, this divine entity was formed solely for the purpose of destroying Endiness and creating a new and better world to replace it. Realizing the threat it represented, Melbu had magically separated the god's body and soul to ensure that its cataclysmic birth could never end his reign, and eventually transported the vacant flesh into space, where it became popularly known as the Moon That Never Sets.

Unfortunately, Melbu had been too greedy to abandon the wellspring of potential power that the God of Destruction offered: imprisoning the god's spirit within a crystal, he used it as a source of limitless magic, boosting his powers to levels unseen even by the Winglies. In the final battle at Kadessa, the crystal had shattered - leaving the soul of the Virage Embryo free to be reborn as a human known as the Moon Child: with the divine power and knowledge it possessed, the Moon Child would eventually seek to complete its original mission by reclaiming its original body. Worse still, even without its original body, the Moon Child possessed the ability to bewitch the minds of anyone in close range, guaranteeing an army of followers. With only the aging magical defenses keeping the Moon That Never Sets in the sky, someone had to stop the Virage Embryo before it could begin its apocalyptic crusade.

So, while Charle and her fellow Winglies did their best to maintain the signets protecting the god's body, Rose set herself the mission of ending the threat of the god's soul, seeking out the Moon Child and killing it. However, this was only a temporary solution: even once the Moon Child died, the Virage Embryo's soul was unharmed and free to be reborn once again - though the process would take at least a hundred and eight years to complete. So, Charle gave Rose a magical pendant that granted the wearer immortality, ensuring that Rose would be alive to seek out the Moon Child when it finally manifested once again.