The air congealed into thick amber, imprisoning everyone within it.
Only Corlyon's hoarse chanting slithered like a slick venomous snake across the vast, oppressive platform above the blood abyss, its words twisted and utterly blasphemous.
He spread his arms. Beneath the intermingling pallid daylight and dark crimson glow rising from below, his gaunt body cast a long, distorted, trembling shadow.
He no longer looked at the bound sacrifices awaiting slaughter, nor at the expressionless guards beside him.
His entire world had narrowed to the boundless lake of blood beneath his feet, its surface rippling faintly.
"With blood as the pact... with souls as the guide..." he chanted, a near-mad flame burning in his sunken eyes. "Ancestor of Torregar... hear the final call of your bloodline... return... return!"
Henry struggled. The coarse hemp ropes bit deep into the wounds on his wrists, but the agony paled before the icy despair in his heart.
He stared fixedly at Corlyon's back, then turned toward the blood lake and its overpowering, sickly-sweet reek.
Carl stood beside him, her face white as paper, her lips moving soundlessly as though praying to some god who had long since fallen silent.
Just then-
The sky changed.
An indescribable sense of oppression descended without warning, as though the entire sky had sunk lower, weighing heavily on the heart of every living thing.
The daylight filtering through the fissure high above, pale as the belly of a dying fish, seemed to have all its color rapidly drained away by some invisible force. The world abruptly darkened.
Then an ominous, somber blood-red spread across the heavens at a speed visible to the naked eye.
It was not the glow of sunset.
It was as though an immense wound had been cut into the sky, and thick blood was welling from it.
"Look... up there!" an Ironborn bound to a stone pillar screamed, his voice warping with utter terror.
Henry jerked his head up.
An enormous crimson comet, trailing a long tail of flame, tore through the darkened sky. It crossed the heavens slowly and inexorably, seeming almost motionless.
Its light was not hot, but cold-a viscous, bloody radiance that stained everything below-the ruins, the stone pillars, every terror-twisted face-with an ominous dark red, like congealed blood.
For that moment, everything in the world seemed submerged in an endless sea of blood.
That was no light of hope. It was the heavens weeping blood, a proclamation of the coming apocalypse.
"Ha... hahaha!" Corlyon's chant broke off abruptly, replaced by utterly deranged laughter.
He looked up at the Red Comet and spread his arms as though embracing this auspicious omen of destruction. "It is here! The ancestor heard me!"
"The ancient star guides the ancestor's return! Even the sky sheds joyful tears of blood for this sacred moment!"
His laughter echoed across the empty blood abyss, intertwining with the grotesque celestial spectacle to form a vision of madness and terror.
Thud!
An indescribably deep boom sounded, as though from the deepest reaches of the earth-or like the sudden beat of an impossibly immense heart that had lain still for hundreds, thousands of years.
The entire earth shuddered violently.
The boom sent an enormous, sluggish ripple spreading across the blood lake.
Thud! Thud!
The booming came again, clearer and stronger.
The intervals shortened, gradually settling into a rhythm, like a war drum of death buried in the deepest underworld, struck by an invisible giant hammer.
Every beat seemed to shake their organs out of place, making their very souls tremble.
The blood lake began to boil.
It was no ordinary bubbling boil. Huge, dark crimson bubbles welled up from the deepest part of its center.
They rose slowly, swelling until they reached the surface and burst with a wet pop, releasing an even stronger, nauseatingly sweet, bloody stench.
The bubbles grew more numerous, more densely packed. In moments, the vast blood lake had become a churning cauldron of bloody gruel seared by the fires of hell.
"It's down there... it's coming out!" Corlyon's voice rose and warped with excitement as he dropped to his belly at the platform's edge.
His skeletal fingers dug into cracks in the rock, his eyes fixed on the boiling sea of blood below. His face twisted with a mixture of extreme fear and boundless fanaticism. "Awaken! My... great ancestor!"
Henry and all the survivors held their breath. The ever-louder, ever-faster beats of that war drum of death gripped their hearts, threatening to burst them.
Despair submerged them like icy lake water.
Yet just as everyone thought destruction was about to descend-
Everything stopped.
Thud!
The final drumbeat sounded dully, its echoes lingering between the rock walls before... fading away.
The boiling blood lake stilled instantly, with a speed that defied all reason.
The churning bubbles vanished without a trace. The viscous surface became smooth as a mirror, reflecting the ominous Red Comet slowly crossing the sky.
Dead silence.
An absolute silence, more terrifying than any moment before.
The wind stopped. The blood lake no longer rippled. Even Corlyon's frenzied laughter and chanting caught in his throat.
The whole world seemed to have been frozen in place, leaving only the comet's cold light falling soundlessly.
The ecstasy on Corlyon's face froze, giving way to utter bewilderment and incomprehension.
He lay there motionless, like some grotesque stone statue.
"What... happened?" he muttered, his voice dry. "The ritual... failed? No... impossible! I felt it... that power..."
A flicker of panic crossed his eyes, but deeper obsession swiftly replaced it.
"Of course... the slumber lasted too long... more sacrifices are needed! More blood!"
He whipped his head around. His eyes, ablaze with madness, swept over the Ironborn bound to the pillars, then Henry and the others held by the guards.
"Blood... more blood is needed...!!!"
At the very instant he roared-
BOOOOM!!!!!!
It was not a drumbeat.
It was a crash that shattered heaven and earth!
Below the platform, the center of the blood lake-only just restored to mirrorlike stillness-exploded!
As though an invisible sun had erupted in the lake's deepest depths, an unimaginable volume of blood hurled skyward, forming a terrifying wave more than a thousand feet across that linked earth and sky!
The blood surged upward with the force to destroy everything, instantly blotting out even the Red Comet's light!
The entire blood lake rocked violently and collapsed inward!
The rocks along the platform's edge shattered piece by piece and fell.
The stone pillars binding the Ironborn groaned beneath the strain. Two near the edge snapped outright, plunging into the churning blood below along with their captives, who never even had time to scream. They vanished instantly.
The enormous shock wave flung Corlyon backward. He slammed into the center of the platform, blood spilling from his mouth and nose, yet he struggled to rise, sickly ecstasy erupting across his face once more. "The ancestor has emerged! The ancestor has emerged!"
Henry and the others staggered and fell against one another. The guards panicked too, barely maintaining their formation.
Everyone stared wide-eyed at the top of the towering blood column, overwhelmed by incomparable terror and shock.
Blood poured down like a torrential rain.
Behind that gradually dispersing curtain of blood, a shadow of unimaginable size slowly appeared.
That was no living creature.
It was the ultimate blasphemy against life, order, and existence itself.
Its body looked as though countless twisted, wailing souls had been forcibly fused together, its colors an intermingling of rotten, festering dark red and corpse-gray.
There was no intact flesh or skin, only decaying tissue that constantly writhed, knitted together, and split apart, and exposed black bones as immense as mountain ranges.
Those bones were covered in congealed, dark scabs of blood and some viscous black fluid that gave off a foul stench.
Its wings... perhaps they could not be called wings at all, but rather two immense, tattered membranes riddled with holes, formed from hatred and death. Black ash constantly drifted from their edges.
A single unconscious flap whipped up a hurricane that tore through the air, laden with the stench of corpses and sulfur.
Most terrifying of all was its head.
It had no eyes, only two enormous hollows burning with cold, ghastly green soul-fire.
Its vast maw opened, revealing layer upon layer of twisted, broken fangs. Instead of a tongue, its mouth held a churning black vortex formed from countless agonized faces.
A dead dragon.
Or rather, the Progenitor Dragon of Torregar depicted in the murals-the Sea Burner!
An ancient being forcibly dragged back into the mortal world from an eternal slumber of death by the most blasphemous ritual and a boundless sea of blood.
Light dimmed around it. Sound was devoured. Even time seemed to grow sluggish and disordered in its presence.
This was no return. It was an invasion of the world of the living, a walking cataclysm.
"It worked... I did it!" Corlyon struggled to his feet, his face flushed with a mixture of utter terror and boundless fanaticism.
He spread his arms and shouted hoarsely at the blasphemous presence in the air. His voice warped with excitement, carrying a sickly, almost sobbing tremor.
"Look at me! Look at me! I am Corlyon!"
"The last blood of Torregar! I awakened you! I did! By the ancient pact..."
"I... I will command you!!!"
What he shouted was not a command, but an obsessive delusion, a crazed hunger for power.
As though responding to the cries of that insignificant insect, the blasphemous beast slowly turned its two hollows of ghastly green soul-fire toward the platform.
There were no pupils, no focus.
Yet everyone felt an icy, deathly still "gaze," filled with endless malice and the desire for destruction, sweep across them.
Then the beast opened its abyssal maw, seemingly formed from countless faces contorted in agony.
No sound emerged.
But an invisible roar that tore at the soul swept through the entire space like a tsunami!
ROAR!
Several guards nearer the platform's edge, along with the remaining Ironborn, never even managed to scream.
As though struck by an invisible giant hammer, their eyes burst instantly, blood streamed from every opening in their heads, and their bodies crumpled like sludge. Their lives were extinguished in an instant.
Their souls seemed to have been ripped straight from their bodies and crushed.
Henry, Carl, and the other survivors were farther away, but even they felt as though ten thousand steel needles had pierced their skulls. Their ears rang, and they nearly blacked out.
And that was only the beginning.
The dead dragon seemed enraged by the insignificant yet arrogant "summons" from the platform.
The churning black vortex in its maw spun violently. A point of ghastly green light gathered within it, then became a breath that annihilated everything. Like an underworld river bursting its banks, like boiling magma mingled with the shrieks of countless vengeful souls, it poured down upon Corlyon and the platform beneath him!
Wherever that breath passed, the air ignited with a scorched stench, and ominous ripples spread through space itself.
Dragonfire-a torrent of destruction that gathered death and hatred, blaspheming against life.
The ecstasy on Corlyon's face froze instantly, replaced by uncomprehending horror and the utter terror of his dream shattering.
"No-!... I am your..." His scream drowned in the thunder of the breath and the shrieking of the dead.
Destruction descended.