So much blood.
Rainwater dilutes it at the boots of the murderer.
I twist my head to my parents as the rift of time closes behind them. My mother’s eyes turn crimson lacunal—not just pink, but filled with old blood, wide and with a god-eater fury, pupils expanded planetary black.
The world recoils around her as those lips peel back. And her chest heaves upward, arms casting out, erupting in a scream that wakes the heavens and weakens hell.
That scream is a command to the one true king, DaiSzek.
The sky cracks with a tinnitus of gods, as if even the air above recognizes a superior sovereign has been unleashed to be the ruin of cities, the massacre of civilizations.
DaiSzek’s ears and fur stand upright at the death of his old friend.
And he opens his maw, drawing from the abyss of his lungs—a celestial flame that is stronger and unlike what we saw in the battle of the Dralutheran. His draconic shriek destroys the oxygen around him, blasting so ferociously, it turns the courtyard into a womb of annihilation.
A pyroclastic lungful that shoots out of his mouth.
Bodies sublimate to ash mid-scream.
Captives are spared as they scatter, chasing freedom far from here.
The torrent of rain vaporizes in a spectral mist and steam.
Before his fire can reach the stage, my father crosses the distance with a stride fueled of vengeance, moving the way a predator strikes. And the flames do not outpace him, they follow his lead, covering his six and any other blind spots. Dad flies over burnedcorpses, over barriers meant to hold captives in. Boots rattling the ground, sending gravel flying like shrapnel. And as he reaches the stage, his right hand unsheathes the sword strapped to his back.
The executioner does not see him coming. The inferno tidal wave stuns the man in place.
And as he wields the sword, a shockwave pulses the air, shuddering within the marrow of my bones.
The blade whips straight through his stomach, separating the executioner’s upper body from his hips.
And DaiSzek does not stop.
The tendrils of the hot blaze eliminate all life but leave Uncle Niles’s bodyuntouched. And the dragon-like roars can be heard from oceans away.
Among the burned carnage, I find Vrath frenziedly drawing his equations out in blood, checking DaiSzek’s movements with tantalizing doom.
I do not try to contain my fatal, murderous urges.
Vrath will die today.
Krimson cuts down Niklaus’s ropes first. Then releases me from mine and catches me before I can fall.
“I was too late,” he cries, holding me up. “I’m sorry, Sapphire! I was too fucking late!”
My brother never cries. I’ve seen it happen maybe once or twice, so the quivering of his chest against mine has me whimpering against his chest.
“I tried to save him, Krimson! I—I should have gone back further! I got it wrong!”
Niklaus guts me at his position on the ground. One hand on his stomach, the other sinking into the mud as he stares out at the bloodbath. He—he just lost his father.
We all did.
Before we move to the stage, I free Dellilian just as she begins waking up. I kiss her on the head once, leaving her to recuperate on her own.
After the fire dies down a little, we gather on the stage.
Niklaus stares down at his father’s body, for only a moment, before looking up to the bird’s nest. Vrath is gone.
