End of an Era (Project Chrysalis Book 2), John Gold [ebook reader online txt] 📗

other, merging into a crazed muttering that chilled to the bone, words that scraped at the soul. The more Femida listened to the echo, the more terrifying Sagie appeared. And while she couldn’t make out what he was saying, the emotion and tone spoke of utter ferocity. Enemy, evil, killer, animal, demon, predatory - Sagie was abhorrent.

He continued muttering to himself. Covered from head to toe in blood, he was the personification of inhumanity.

But Femida could make out the last thing he said. It was the old Sagie, the one she’d known all along, the kind Sagie…

“Meteor. Maximum.”

The blood-red sky boomed, and even the gods looked up to see what was flying at them. It wasn’t a meteor, wasn’t a comet; it was something new and terrible. Even from a long way off, the meteor Sagie had created was gigantic. The closer it got, the more the air whistled. In the red shades, everyone could make out the large dragon flying around the castle as well as the other gods and beings hiding, invisible, above the battlefield. The bloody mist swept away their invisibility.

A second or two before the meteor struck, Femida noticed Sagie collapse on his side. She knew she was about to die, and she was glad; she wouldn’t have to see what was about to happen.

***

Leon watched the execution from beginning to end. He heard what Sagie said, his last words sounding like the crashing death curse of a mage. It’s the way people talk when they’re prepared to devote their life to vengeance. Meanwhile, his intuition screamed at him to run, screamed about the imminent danger he was in. For the first time, Leon felt it: the fear of death, inevitable, waiting on the threshold, knocking on the door, calling his name.

He looked around. All his senses told him to run, and he had always trusted his intuition implicitly, so he took off sprinting away from the castle and the field of battle. He said nothing, he heard nobody. All he did was run. The sound of the onrushing meteor was the final spur. He ran until he reached the edge of hysteria.

From the corner of his eye, Leon saw Rachel activate her strongest magic shield against the background of smoking ruins to protect the keep. Margul flew above the control building, fighting off attacks from the air; liches in their bone dragons were making a concerted effort to take it out. The undead had already breached the first of the ten castle walls. They were engaged in close combat, and four squads of war machines were already activated.

The meteor slammed into the ground with a wild crash. Leon had been able to get about a kilometer away, but the shock wave took his avatar and threw it another five hundred meters, where it landed in the crown of some trees. His health dropped seventy percent, his magic shield was taken out, and his maximum resistance was gone like so much tinder. For the first time in the past couple of years, Leon saw debuffs. He was stunned and blinded, his arms and ribs were broken, and he was bleeding. His mithril armor was punctured in three places, his chest plate almost completely demolished.

Leon healed himself instantly and shot up into the sky to look back at the battlefield.

The kilometer-wide crater from the meteor was centered around the area where Sagie and the dark gods had been. Nothing was left of the castle except the far walls, which were reduced to a pile of stones. Most of the mountain they had built the castle on had been wiped away by the shock wave. Even the clouds above the field had been driven away. Rachel’s squad stood among the ruins of the main castle building, however, where she and her paladins had been protected by an absolute bubble during the impact. They and Margul were the only survivors. The latter was still soaring around the sky, protecting the remains of the building, while the dark gods and liches were nowhere to be seen. The remains of the undead army were running to the epicenter of the explosion. Above, in the astral, the creatures there could still be seen flying around, as the red cloud had yet to dissipate.

The thought that two dark gods had just died cheered Leon up.

A wild, sepulchral shriek broke out from where the explosion had happened, and it was so loud that it could be heard a kilometer and a half away.

***

Idzumi watched the battle from his spot in the sky, safe under a canopy of invisibility and levitation. Tiamat and Set were there, too. Everybody was quiet as they watched and evaluated the potential candidates.

The problems started when the boy appeared. His parents were killed in front of him, leaving him to collapse into despair, and it was then that the odd red cloud appeared. As soon as the astral beings were revealed in it, Tiamat let loose a shout.

“The chosen one!”

Idzumi practically burst with happiness. No, it wasn’t Wendrew, but the red cloud and the changing color of magic were the same. In all of history, only one candidate had had similar abilities, though nothing like that had happened in any of the worlds.

Tiamat continued.

“There was a theory about how Wendrew gained his power. They said he possessed several streams of consciousness, one of which was responsible for his body’s normal functions, while the other dug deep into the different layers of the astral. The farther they went, the more power he could use. Once he got to a certain level, Wendrew could make his streams of consciousness and the astral resonate. It sounds simple in theory, but nobody knows how it actually works. Wendrew himself has never told anybody. Of course, all they can do in the workshop is theorize.”

It did make sense, though it was too