Even as I catch that glimpse of our King, still holding on, I see how his Bloodshield is weak, the last of his life guttering out. The Usurper’s hell-oil boils all through the black cavern now, along with the Rift’s. Nearlyfinished with its mend, the Black Dragon roars its terrible heart-curses up at the battle as it test-flaps its wings.
Even though we have the Usurper grounded, the Archangels’ containment is failing. Archangel magic is no match for our dissimilar Bloodwalker might, and their net spirals through with infernal darkness now as too many of its white sigils burn out.
The Black Dragon roars its terrible madness to the world, still inundating the battle from the ground. As it does, I suddenly see Olander Mortensen, then Mathilde Eriksson, crash down into the seething tentacles of the Rift.
The Rift’s hell swallows their dragon bodies. Bjorn roars in fury, and Ström screeches in horror, as I see how both our allies had the heart-curse of the Black Dragon spiraling right through their chests.
As Svanhild Magnussen gets nailed by the Black Dragon’s heart-cursing roar next, with Mormor Annika falling as well, I share in the wretched horror of my drakes.
Rageful wrath goes rioting through our Bloodbond; and it’s not just me, it’s Ström and Bjorn, even Mikkel and Baldur, as we watch so many beloved to us perish. I try to stabilize that dark place inside me with my brightest light, but I’m already failing. We’re all failing, as my drakes begin to seethe and boil with darkness now, losing their connection to our light.
As my cousin Halfdir suddenly gets hit by one of the Black Dragon’s blasts, everything inside me screams, so dark. All three of my stepfathers also plummet from the skies now. They’re swallowed by leviathan tentacles as power surges inside the Black Rift a thousandfold to have eaten such potent fuel.
And as the heart-cursing roar of the Black Dragon scorches into the cavern’s pit from its thrashing, it hits King Huttr’s Bloodshield. His shield shatters now, as that strike pierces right to our King’s heart, and I watch my beloved uncle fall.
Dead.
Madness surges in me, then—exploding all through me like a bomb.As my anchor of light flashes out, I seethe with diseased, violet-crimson death.
The sigils that spiral all over me are catastrophic, as annihilation claims me. I am not coming back, as I feel myself tip over into that cavernous brink.
Falling fully into that endless pit inside me.
I have entered the Rift inside me, as I am devoured. Something tears within me as that place takes me now, deep into my furthest heart and soul. A sensation like gouging talons and snapping jaws rips me the fuck apart as I am sundered, and everything inside me becomes unhinged.
Because I have been forever divided. A Bloodwalker who walked away from my power in my youth; a Blood Dragon royal who abandoned my people to live and work at the Red Letter Hotel Paris. A woman in love who constantly tore up my relationship with my first lifemate. A daughter who was so contentious with my adopted mother, we didn’t talk for twenty years, leaving Maryse almost a stranger to me when she died.
Division has torn me apart for decades, and it swallows me now, even as my drakes fight to resist it.
But the biggest division is that fate has finally mastered me. Though I roared and railed at my Bloodwalker fate to always do the will of my Ancestors, I have succumbed to it now, and I am not coming back.
Though I have always battled my destiny, believing in free will, I am trapped by it now. I can never escape my fate as an all-black, diabolical mamba, devoid of all life and feeling, coils deep around my heart.
Because it is me, as I am lost to my own Black Dragon. I fulfill the most diabolical fate Hedda and our ancient Ancestors set out for me, as I roar and wrath to the skies now, Berserk and Wraith both as a massive burst of black-crimson and ultraviolet wildfire surges off me.
The place where I once found unity with my drakes tears to smithereens, as that black fire bursts from me. Because it kills everything it touches, just like the Black Dragon’s own magic; it hits my drakes, makingthem crash-land amidst the seething tentacles of the Black Rift as they try so valiantly to resist this madness overtaking me.
But they can’t. Even now, they’re almost gone, roaring and claimed by their own infernal darkness and mine—as I understand Baldur’s sister Hekla was right about the infinitesimal odds of our success against the Black Dragon.
Because the brighter Blood Magic drakaina inside me is gone, snuffed out to my diabolical black chasm within. Even my Bone Magic’s starry skies vanish within me as they are shredded to the division energy’s cosmic might.
Having either Blood Magic or Bone Magic was never the problem; it was the division between the two.
And I have only division left, as all of it goes out now, black.
Roaring up as my most diabolical black dragon, I have only one mission now—to end our foes in the skies. The actual Black Dragon roars with me as I surge into the battle again, unhinged in my terrible might.
My drakes try to roar up with me; they try to seize me and ground me, so they might heal me and stop my transformation before we all die to this terrible darkness. But I do not need to be healed; I need wrath and retribution as I set off after my sister now in the battle-ruined skies, to bring her down.
I am the Black Dragon now, as I lose everything good inside myself. All my righteousness and my blazing heart are just suddenly gone. All my valiant honor has vanished as I resonate fully with the Black Dragon, and we scream in unison, our endless madness resonating together at last.
That madness makes me want to rip and gouge, to punish my enemies eternally as I shred their very souls to pieces and banish them in the cosmos. My darkest desire surfaces then; to make my enemies suffer endlessly for their crimes. It overtakes me as I roar with a diabolical midnight energy boiling from me, the eyes of the Black Dragon filling my mind.
But those eyes are white-violet and crimson; not the Black Dragon’seyes, as I realize what I’m seeing are the ancient eyes of the cosmic rift energy itself, inside me. Death is in that gaze, annihilation, as I stare into those vast, empty eyes and see the very force that tears all the cosmos apart.
I feel how it wants to take me like it took Hedda, then Lithava, even those ancient Blood Dragons who first made the Black Rift, and forever make me its instrument. For this is the power Hedda used to shred her sister Aesa’s soul to the furthest reaches of the cosmos; and I want to become its bearer, as I find Lithava now, hammering her with a towering blast of Bloodspears so evil, they skewer right through the sudden shield-wall she throws up.
My blast is so utterly vicious that just the concussion of it makes Lithava and her drakes fall from the skies. They crash-land in the Black Rift’s boiling taint; as they fall inside the cavern, I scream like a harpy of the end worlds, wanting to punish Lithava for everything she’s done, and all the disaster it has wrought.
