She didn’t look at me, she only stared at the chaos around us, the wounded and dead soldiers on both sides.
The priest stumbled over the words, but quickly regained control.
His hands were shaking as he was reading verse after verse, bringing us closer to completing the harnessing.
He was reading in a low voice, so I couldn’t hear the incantation he was reciting. It was impossible to tell at which point of the ritual we were, how much time was left.
The shouts outside the shield were getting louder, the court of Wisdom was clearly dominating the fight.
Somnaris separated from the group and stepped inside the circle.
“Your men are good, Auretheos, but I think it’s time to bring out the real monsters.” He laughed, raising his sword and ramming it into the ground.
The sky darkened.
Not with clouds or nightfall, but with an unnatural twilight that stretched across the heavens, staining the horizon in hues of deep violet and gray.
From the heart of this twilight, something emerged, a swirling, nebulous mass of shadow and light that coalesced into a form too fluid to define.
The air grew thick, almost suffocating, as though realityitself was resisting the presence of this otherworldly entity.
Time faltered.
Seconds stretched, feeling like hours, and then snapped back, disorienting everything around us.
The Gods, gathered in preparation for battle, felt the distortion too.
The normally firm ground beneath their feet seemed to shift, as though it had lost its anchor to the natural world. When the creature finally descended, it did so in utter silence.
I felt an unfamiliar chill wrap around my heart, like a cold hand grasping the edges of my mind. The whisper was barely audible, but its effect was immediate, a subtle, gnawing despair, a reminder of forgotten fears and long-buried doubts.
“Nytheris,” I breathed, and Maelis’ eyes widened slightly.
Before I could make sense of the fear in her eyes, Nytheris attacked.
Its form unraveled into tendrils of dark, living mist, each one moving with terrifying speed and precision. These tendrils did not strike with brute force but weaved through the Gods like the currents of a nightmare, twisting around them and distorting reality.
Iriath, the God of Light, summoned forth beams of pure radiance to drive the entity back, but Nytheris absorbed the light, twisting it into a sickly, fading glow that flickered and vanished into its form.
Velora, the Goddess of Strength, tried to charge forward, her war cry echoing through the battlefield, but as she reached Nytheris, her momentum was lost in the time-warped haze that surrounded it, her strikes landing against empty air.
The screams of the soldiers were deafening, and the priest had stopped chanting, his mouth gaping open at the horrors that unfolded before us.
“Priest, carry on!” Maelis shouted at him and grabbed the dagger from his belt.
He started reading again and she stepped towards me.
Several Gods had managed to make their way towards the circle and began attacking the shield around us.
There wasn’t much time left, and Nytheris was taking out my men one by one.
This was no fair fight, and they needed me at full strength if I was to win this battle for us.
Maelis took a shattering breath and dragged the dagger across her palm.
Blood pooled in her palm and she winced at the stinging pain.
She reached over to me, I tried to fight her off.
