A torrent of destruction poured down.
It was no longer flame, but death made tangible, a surging flood of hatred.
Where the dragonfire passed, the air shrieked and twisted, reeking of sulfur and scorched souls.
The horror of shattered dreams had yet to fade from Corlyon's face when the world-ending breath reached him.
Space and time seemed to stretch beneath the corrosive dragonfire. He could clearly "see" the anguished faces churning within the flames and feel his skin, hair, and even his soul recoil instinctively before that aura of destruction.
At the last possible moment, a dark figure slammed into him, knocking him aside-the silent Guard Captain.
Corlyon fell several feet to the side. The rough ground scraped his palms and cheek, tearing his velvet robe.
Almost simultaneously-
"BOOM!!!"
The blasphemous dragonfire engulfed the spot where he had just stood.
There was no sound of an explosion, only the hiss of space being erased.
The altar's base, harder than steel, vanished instantly like ice and snow beneath the sun. All that remained was a mirror-smooth depression, its edges gleaming like glass.
A few splattered droplets of dragonfire ate through the ground, leaving holes with no visible bottom.
Corlyon looked back, every trace of color draining from his face.
It was not belated fear, but the bewilderment of having his entire understanding overturned.
The logic he relied on to understand the world seemed so laughable before this sheer, brutal destruction.
"My lord! Move!" the Guard Captain roared, hauling him to his feet. Rubble had gouged a long wound in the captain's arm, leaving it drenched in blood, but he still swiftly dragged Corlyon toward the heaps of broken stone deeper within the platform.
"No! It's mine! It must answer the call of my blood!" Corlyon struggled, his eyes fixed on the blasphemous being overhead, flickering with defiance and abject pleading.
Yet the Death Dragon, only just forcibly dragged back into the mortal world, had lost interest in the "ant" lucky enough to escape.
Its chaotic consciousness, filled with hatred, saw this world teeming with life as the greatest affront to "death."
"ROOOOAR!!!!!!"
Another soul-rending roar rang out, even more frenzied than before.
The Death Dragon's immense body writhed violently in the air. Its rotting wing membranes beat against the wind, whipping up a storm of death laden with a bloody stench.
It no longer singled out a target. Instead, it vented its boundless fury at being dragged from eternal stillness upon the ruins below, the blood lake, and the sky.
"BOOM!"
A sickly green blast of breath swept over an ancient altar beside the blood lake. The altar and the corpses evaporated instantly, leaving only a deathly still expanse of glass.
"BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!"
Like a brush wielded by the reaper, dragonfire painted trails of destruction across heaven and earth.
On the high slope, Henry, Carl, and nearly a hundred survivors captured one after another elsewhere in the ruins faced certain doom.
They had been restrained and bound together in a line.
Dragonfire swept in like a tide, and rocks vanished without a sound.
A young mercenary screamed shrilly, desperately trying to break free of the ropes and retreat.
"Idiot! Stop!" a companion shouted in fear and anger, but it was already too late.
The force of one person's sudden lunge traveled instantly through the taut ropes.
Cries, curses, and the sounds of falling bodies erupted together. The bound line jerked like a chain being yanked, sending seven or eight people tumbling into a heap amid tangled ropes and billowing dust.
That slight disturbance might have been insignificant in a world ruled by the dragon's roars, yet like cold water splashing into hot oil, it instantly drew the blasphemous being's attention.
The Death Dragon's mountain-sized head abruptly stilled, then turned toward them with a slowness that threatened to stop their hearts.
Two enormous hollows burning with sickly green soul fire "looked" toward the hollow, toward the survivors tangled in a heap and struggling to live.
Time seemed to freeze.
Henry felt the cold of that gaze pierce his skin, bones, and marrow, freezing his soul itself.
He saw utter terror mingled with the deathly stillness of resignation on Carl's chalk-white face.
Around them, only chattering teeth and dying gasps remained.
The Death Dragon's abyssal maw slowly opened once more.
Deep within its mouth, a dark vortex formed from countless anguished faces spun violently. A speck of sickly green fire began to gather and swell, heralding destruction.
Despair descended like the deepest night. Even struggling had lost all meaning.
Like insects trapped in amber, they awaited their utter erasure.
Henry closed his eyes.
Carl lowered her head.
Death descended...
One breath, then two...
The annihilation they expected never came.
There was only deathly silence, and a terrifying warning growing ever clearer in their minds.
Henry and Carl snapped their eyes open.
A sight they would never forget met their eyes:
The Death Dragon, poised to unleash its dragonfire, had frozen with its head suspended in midair.
The sickly green fire gathered within its maw flickered, but did not emerge.
Its hollows of burning soul fire no longer "looked" at them. Instead, they slowly lifted toward the cloud-darkened sky above.
Its immense body curled back slightly, its rotting wing membranes folding tightly against it, as though a wounded beast had sensed its natural enemy approaching and was guarding against it with utmost vigilance.
A terrifying pressure, older, deeper, and more ineffable than the Death Dragon's aura, swept through heaven and earth like an invisible tsunami.
"The sky... it's changed..." Carl murmured dazedly.
The sky had indeed changed.
Clouds thick as ink surged in from every direction and pressed low, swallowing all light and sound, bringing the suffocating sensation of being submerged in a boundless ocean.
The light over the ruins dimmed rapidly, plunging them into the murky boundary between dusk and night. Only the faint glow of the blood lake and the Death Dragon's soul fire offered an eerie illumination.
"CRACK!"
A dazzling bolt of golden lightning tore through the dark clouds and vanished in a flash.
Its radiance was so brilliant, sacred, and majestic that it instantly illuminated the ruins below, the Death Dragon's body poised against a formidable foe, and the astonishment on the survivors' faces.
A second bolt, a third... more and more golden lightning darted and flashed through the dark clouds, like countless thunder dragons roaring deep within them, their rumbling thunder like the drums of heaven and earth.
Against that chaotic backdrop of alternating light and darkness, behind the low-hanging, ink-black clouds...
Perhaps it was an illusion.
A hazy outline flickered in and out of view, so indescribably vast that it seemed capable of holding up the sky-or crushing it.
The silhouette seemed to possess more than one head, twisting and shifting amid the flashes of lightning.
But the absolute menace it radiated, towering above all living beings and all things, made every creature in the ruins-whether the Death Dragon, Corlyon, or Henry and Carl-shudder in their souls that instant, their blood all but freezing.
Something...
Had descended.