The wind howling through the cracked ivory arches of Caelum’s Reach carried more than high-altitude frost; it carried the stench of approaching slaughter.
Seraphina and Kaelen stepped back onto the blood-slicked terrace of the Sun-Mirror. The purified amber beam continued to blaze skyward, tearing the necrotic gloom apart, but the air suddenly plummeted twenty degrees below zero.
The dimensional fabric above the mountain shuddered.
A jagged, sickly viridian rift, thirty paces wide, tore open directly over the eastern cliffside like an infected wound in the sky. Corrupted lightning snaked down the ivory towers, shattering marble balustrades into showers of deadly shrapnel.
From the rift stepped Warlord Azgorath, the Scourge of Caelum.
His sheer physical presence choked the air from the terrace. Twelve feet of hulking muscle clad in barbed colossus-plate, his four massive arms gripped four notched executioner’s blades dripping with corrosive black ichor. From behind his horned iron visage, four burning green slits locked directly onto Seraphina.
Behind him marched a dozen hulking Dread-Corsairs, their heavy iron boots cracking the white marble as they fanned out in a lethal execution cordon.
"Vance," Azgorath’s voice was an avalanche of grinding gravestones, rattling the very bones of the mountain. "You always were a sentimental dog. Chasing stray blood across the threshold while your own mountain burns."
Kaelen didn't waste breath with insults.
With a terrifying, deafening crack, his eighty-foot shadow-wings snapped wide, releasing a shockwave of dark-matter gravity that forced the lead corsairs onto one knee. Gloom-Weaver flared with blinding abyssal lightning as Kaelen stepped in front of Seraphina, his molten silver eyes burning with lethal sovereign rage.
"You speak of burning, Azgorath," Kaelen rumbled, his deep baritone vibrating through the stone. "Yet you brought only scrap-iron to face a king."
"I brought the end of your line, half-blood," Azgorath sneered, pointing his upper right blade at Seraphina. "The Sun-Brat dies today. Her heart will unlock the Chicago rift, and your precious Night Court will be ground into dust beneath the heels of the Maw."
"Then come take it," Seraphina snarled.
She stepped out from behind Kaelen’s guard, her twenty-foot wings of solar starlight bursting into an incandescent fan of pure thermonuclear heat that illuminated the entire mountain peak. She unslung her sunstone recurve bow, drawing the string back until three plasma arrows screamed with unstable, blinding fury.
Azgorath laughed—a wet, booming roar of cruel amusement—and lunged forward.
The terrace erupted into violent chaos.
Azgorath moved with impossible, supernatural speed for a creature of his size. His four executioner’s blades carved through the air in a hurricane of black-iron arcs, clashing against Gloom-Weaver in a deafening shower of kinetic sparks. Kaelen met the titanic warlord blow for blow, his dark-matter broadsword weaving an impenetrable defense of void-gravity, each parry sending concussive shockwaves tearing through the marble floor.
Simultaneously, the twelve Dread-Corsairs charged Seraphina with serrated halberds.
Seraphina released her bowstring. The three plasma arrows detonated among the front line, turning three corsairs into screaming torches of white ash. Dropping her bow, she drew her twin sunstone daggers and leaped into the melee.
She moved like living sunlight—fluid, surgical, and devastating. She ducked beneath a sweeping halberd, driving her left blade into a brute’s throat while her right wing snapped forward, the razor-sharp edge of crystallized plasma severing another corsair’s weapon arm at the elbow.
Yet despite their lethal prowess, the tide turned fast.
Azgorath’s lower left arm suddenly whipped outward, bypassing Kaelen’s guard. A spiked iron chain exploded from the warlord’s gauntlet, wrapping tightly around Kaelen’s left wing. With terrifying, monstrous leverage, Azgorath wrenched Kaelen off his feet, slamming the High Sovereign through an ivory pillar.
"Kaelen!" Seraphina screamed, spinning as she vaporized the last corsair.
Before she could reach him, Azgorath was upon her.
Two of his massive swords descended in a crushing vertical cleave. Seraphina crossed her sunstone daggers to block, but the raw, ungodly mass of the warlord’s strike shattered her daggers into smoking shards, driving her violently to her knees on the cracked marble.
Azgorath loomed over her, his four burning eyes gleaming with sadistic victory. His fourth blade rose, aimed straight at her exposed chest.
"The Void-Mother hungers," Azgorath purred, driving the blade downward.
A deafening roar of absolute, unbridled fury shook the heavens.
A living comet of pure dark matter crashed into Azgorath's flank. Kaelen had broken the chains, his armor cracked and bleeding, his face transformed into a mask of pure, demonic wrath. His claws sank into Azgorath’s throat, tackling the twelve-foot titan over the balustrade and plunging both of them off the two-thousand-pace precipice into the boiling cloud bank below.
"Kaelen!" Seraphina bolted to the ruined edge, her heart seizing as the shadows swallowed them both.