The woman let her smile stretch slowly, as if savoring her own anticipation. With a delicate gesture—as light as the breath of a feather—she released part of her aura.
It was as if a crater had opened in the center of the hall.
The temperature plumted. The mist around her figure thickened and grew, casting shadows that writhed across the walls like hungry fingers. The arcane lights flickered, and the floating symbols on the ceiling spun in disorderly spasms. One of the elders faltered on his throne, the veils of energy over his face trembling with the force that now perated the space.
But then Strax took a deep breath.
And the world responded.
The ground shook beneath his feet, not like a distant tremor, but like the muffled roar of a heart rising to war. Her aura exploded like a wall of fire and ash, pushing the air with enough force to displace the cloaks of her companions. The columns of the hall, though made of enchanted stone, began to vibrate, creaking under the increasing pressure.
The woman’s aura advanced like a cloak of night. Strax’s responded like the sunrise on a battlefield.
She tried to intensify it. Her feet now touched the ground, her body tense, her eyes burning. The runes on the walls glowed in warning, activating ancient spells of containnt. But even Draythir’s charms could not contain the fury that was beginning to erge from Scathach’s son.
Scarlet took a full step back, shielding her eyes with her forearm. Ouroboros clenched his fists, ready to intervene if the situation went too far. Tiamat just watched, but her eyes were wider than ever—a mixture of respect, calculation... and perhaps a hint of fear.
"Enough!" shouted one of the elders, but his voice was lost in the growing hum of conflicting energies.
Strax took another step forward.
And his aura grew.
It was like looking into a star about to collapse. Waves of heat and pressure reverberated from the incandescent veins in his arms and shoulders. His gaze pierced the woman like a living spear, and all the arrogance she had displayed until then disappeared in an instant.
She faltered. The shadows around her trembled. The mist that enveloped her began to dissipate, consud by the scarlet glow radiating from Strax’s body.
A second later, she fell to her knees.
Her hands touched the ground in an instinctive gesture of support, but even that was not enough. The pressure intensified, as if her bones were being compressed by a force coming from the very core of the world.
Strax tilted his head slightly.
"You wanted to know if I really am her son?" His voice was now two—his own, and sothing deeper, older, as if an echo of the gods themselves had attached itself to his timbre. "Then feel it."
With that last word, he let go of all restraint.
The aura exploded.
The hall was filled with an intense, almost blinding red light. The thrones shook. The runes flashed like alarms. And the woman—the shadow that had previously floated like a misty deity—scread. A brief, sharp sound, and then her body fell to the side, unconscious.
Silence.
Everything ceased at once, as if the world had held its breath and now did not know how to release it.
Strax took half a step back. His aura retracted abruptly, as if it had never been there. He shrugged slowly and looked at the thrones.
"Any questions?" he asked, with a twisted little smile.
Silence still hung over the hall like a thick fog charged with electricity. The unconscious woman lay motionless on the floor, the cloak of mist slowly dissipating like smoke blown away by the wind. The elders remained in their positions on the raised thrones, but their veils vibrated with unease. None of them dared to break the silence.
Strax looked up, shrugging his shoulders as if he had just awakened from a long and uncomfortable dream.
"Right. Now that the dramatic part is over..." He took a step forward, his eyes fixed on the center of the hall. "I want to know how I get into the fucking volcano."
So of the elders stirred. One of them, whose voice was as deep as stones sliding under the sea, spoke:
"You an Pyraeth. The volcano isn’t just a geological formation. It’s a crucible of primordial magic."
"Great," Strax replied dryly. "Tell how I get in anyway."
Another elder, with a more feminine voice, cold as breaking glass, replied:
"You demand access to one of the most dangerous places in Caelum as if you were asking for a common key. Why? What do you hope to find there?"
Strax glanced briefly at Elyssar, as if seeking so silent permission. The general said nothing—she just crossed her arms and stood still.
He then took a deep breath, and his voice ca out lower, but charged with raw intensity.
"Because soone ssed with my mother’s body."
The hall froze again. Even the veils over the elders’ faces seed to hesitate, fluttering in a slight spasm.
"Scathach fell decades ago," said an elder in a tone of restrained reverence. "The whole world saw her pyre lit. What are you implying?"
"I’m saying that damned Ignisar not only attacked the Duchy of Vorah without provocation..." He paced as he spoke, his words coming out like blades. "...but that soone, or sothing, violated her grave. And that was not an act of war. It was personal."
The silence gave way to tense murmurs. Scathach’s na still carried weight among the elders, a na sacred to so, feared by others, and for all, a reminder of absolute power.
"How do you know this?" asked the elder with the deep voice.
"I owe no explanation to anyone who doesn’t even care about my mother." He clenched his fists. "Her body is gone, and her aura is here in Caelum. So it’s one of two things. Either she’s alive around here, or soone is playing with her body."
The elders’ veils fluttered violently, as if an invisible storm were sweeping through them. One of them, the oldest, rose slowly from his ornate throne—a gesture that at any other ti would have been ceremonial, sacred. But there, in that dense tension, it was pure nace.
"You dare to desecrate this hall with insolence and blasphemy," he growled, each word intoned as if it carried the weight of ages.
Others followed him. One by one, the elders rose from their high thrones, veils of energy expanding in furious spirals, filling the air. The floor shook, this ti not from Strax’s aura, but from the union of the ancients. Magic circles appeared under their feet, engraved in forgotten languages. Sparks of spiritual energy streaked across the ceiling, zigzagging like lightning contained by a thin thread of patience about to snap.
"You co in demanding. You accuse, you threaten, and now you insult the protectors of order," said an elder woman whose face was covered by silver veils that vibrated with living runes. "You may be Scathach’s son, but you are far from inheriting her wisdom."
Strax didn’t even flinch.
"Ah... dealing with idiocy... it’s beco a constant..."
A chorus of energy rose from the elders—not words, but cries of aura, like the roar of a magical wall collapsing to crush him.
And then... everything stopped.
Two presences took over the hall. Not with imdiate violence, but with the inevitability of a rising tide. First was Ouroboros. The woman took a step forward, and the ground beneath him simply... broke. It didn’t crack — it shattered like fine crystal under the weight of a colossus.
Her aura rose like a shapeless dragon, made of cosmos, serpents, and spirals in eternal rotation. Ti seed to slow down, the particles in the air hesitant. The veils of the elders lost their coherence and flickered as if they had been torn out of sync with the present.
Beside him, Tiamat moved without a sound. Her presence was cold, precise—a goddess with a thousand eyes, and each of those eyes was now turned toward the thrones.
Her aura opened like a flower of destruction: multiple layers of power shimring in colors impossible to na, each denser, more oppressive than the last. Fragnts of the ceiling began to fall like glass rain. The columns bowed away from her, as if afraid to touch her.
The elders were thrown back into their thrones by the combined force of two Divine Dragons.
One of them tried to remain standing, summoning a sphere of containnt around his body — but the sphere cracked before it could fully form. Another fell to his knees, his hands over his ears, as if trying to expel the roar of Ouroboros’ presence from his mind.
Gasping, suffocating, bent under a pressure none of them could contest, the ancient lords of the Circle Chamber looked like children facing a storm they had forgotten how to control.
Tiamat spoke, and his voice did not co from his mouth, but from every corner of the hall.
"I’ll assu you’re intelligent. So you’d better tell whether you know where Ignisar is or not."
Ouroboros added, his voice deep as underground thunder: "I want to go enjoy the day with my husband, so hurry up and spit it out before I kill you all and devour you."
With each word, the aura of the two beca denser, as if reality itself were giving way.
Scarlet, in the background, let out a low whistle. "I told you the eting would be fun."
User Comments
0 comments from readers