No one noticed precisely when, amid the shadowed folds of chaos and upheaval, Dago Heka completed the soul-shaking inheritance ritual.
As the Chief Prodigy of his generation, admired by countless peers, and the sole victor to emerge from the mountains of corpses and seas of blood in the Isidore Blood Battle, his name should have been engraved atop the monument of glory in the Southern Wizarding World, basking in the envy and praise of countless seekers of truth.
Yet conspiracy, like fermenting mold, had quietly bred beneath that glorious surface, finally erupting into this upheaval that eclipsed all his splendor.
But that did not matter. For wizards, glory was merely a by-product of power, not power itself.
The countless bolts of dark red lightning in the sky were no natural discharge of electricity. The power of the miracle domain, so dense it was almost tangible, collapsed madly toward the center, finally forced into those two jagged crimson ice blades forged from despair and extreme cold.
Boom!
A terrifying cascade of blood-red light and ice ignored the distance between spaces, brutally piercing the void.
At the edge of the great rune array, the strange, flowing runes disintegrated and shattered in vast swathes beneath the erosion of higher-order laws, like snow meeting hot oil.
The once-flawless energy circuits snapped in an instant. The entire array let out an overburdened groan, then ceased functioning, plunging irreversibly into the abyss of collapse.
It had broken!
The suffocating pall of death that had shrouded everyone's heads like a burial cloth was finally torn open by that savage strike.
The pale, feeble light outside now became the most dazzling dawn of survival, pouring wildly through the breach.
The eyes of the wizards below, who had long trembled in fear, instantly blazed with a desperate hunger to