Chapter 276: The Hand of Darkness II
The expressions on the Sovereigns of Everburn Aerie- Azuryan the Verdant Fla and Solmyron the Golden Pyre, turned ashen.
They stood frozen for a heartbeat too long, gazes sweeping across the vast region now revealed to be infested with shimring golden spores. They were everywhere. Drifting in the wind. Clinging to the feathers of phoenixes. Humming with an unseen, insidious life.
“INSOLENT!”
HUUM!
Solmyron’s voice thundered like a sun.
With a flare of golden wrath, stellar flas poured from his colossal wingspan, descending like a celestial punishnt. They scoured the entire region in blinding light, disintegrating every visible spore in their path. Mountains wept under the searing heat. The air twisted. Entire swaths of sky turned white from the blaze.
At the sa ti, Azuryan stepped forward in her humanoid form, her delicate fingers curling into a fist.
With that single motion, dozens- hundreds- of green flaming chains erupted from the scorched skies. They lashed out, coiling around every phoenix found harboring spores within them. Majestic beasts, once proud, now wrapped in bindings of sha and uncertainty.
The flas dimd.
The world fell quiet.
Only the breathing of giants remained.
Selamira descended slowly, her golden horn glowing faintly, her face shadowed by coldness. Her eyes, pitiless and cold, swept across the subdued phoenixes.
Her voice cut clean through the silence.
“Your phoenixes that have even a single one of these spores inside their bodies… You can consider them effectively gone.”
…!
Azuryan’s lips parted. Solmyron’s flas wavered.
Selamira continued, her tone unflinching.
“The enemy who did this… is sowhat terrifying. They’ve already claid the bodies they touched. You’re not looking at phoenixes anymore. You’re looking at vessels.”
…!
A wave of silence thundered louder than fla.
Then…
“WHO?! WHO DID THIS?!”
Solmyron’s bellow was a storm of suns. Golden fire spilled from his body again, barely held back by the weight of his rage.
Selamira floated down among the bound phoenixes, her gaze narrowing as her feet touched scorched obsidian.
She stopped, stared directly at the hundred glowing eyes.
Eyes that now shimred with radiant purple and gold.
Her own starlit gaze locked with theirs.
She did not blink.
“Are you in there?” she asked softly. “Are you listening? Watching this unfold? Do you not know just who you are offending by doing sothing as aningless as this? Do you not know of the Primordial Light of Darkness?”
BOOM!
Her voice shattered the air like a hamr.
The bound phoenixes stopped struggling.
Stillness.
Then, they looked at her.
All of them.
Hundreds of massive heads raised in eerie unison, green flaming chains groaning around their necks and wings.
And then…
They spoke.
With one voice.
Not of the phoenixes.
But his.
A calm, noble voice of iron command!
Achilles.
“We did not choose this conflict,” the hundreds of phoenix mouths said in eerie synchrony, their tones emotionless, their ssage precise. “We rely respond to your aggression. If you scurry back and remain in your hos, you will be left alone. But if you dare continue, and have designs on conquest or grandeur after the Long Slumber…”
Their eyes glowed brighter.
“All of you may find yourselves returning into an endless slumber.”
WAA!
The threat struck harder than any fla.
Solmyron’s body pulsed with contained fire. Azuryan’s brows furrowed, her figure buzzing with rage.
Selamira did not tremble.
But her eyes narrowed even more.
She stepped forward.
Raised her hand.
White light gathered at her palm- slowly, solemnly. It spiraled outward like a newborn star, so pure it made the very land shiver.
“I will give you a warning today,” she said, her voice no longer cold, but glorious.
“Since you do not yet understand who you’re offending… nor what you’re truly facing…”
Her hand pulsed.
“I will carve this warning into your soul. When death cos… I want you to feel it.”
…!
The mont Selamira’s final words fell, the terrifying white light at her fingertips flared.
And her hand landed squarely on the head of a nearby bound phoenix.
WAA!
In an instant, the majestic creature crumbled into ash, its imnse form vanishing into weightless dust that scattered in the wind.
…!
The silence that followed was broken by howls of rage.
“SELAMIRA!” Solmyron bellowed, golden flas erupting like a broken star. “You go too far!”
Azuryan’s eyes burned viridian, her aura snapping with fury. “They were still ours. We can simply burn the spores from their bodies!”
But Selamira only floated calmly above them, her expression devoid of emotion.
“All those infected must die,” she said, voice resolute. “If even one remains, the entire Everburn Aerie Continent will be consud. Is that what you want?”
…!
And before their fury could burn brighter…
The bound phoenixes…twitched.
Their bodies bulged.
Their feathers darkened into rotten hues of green and violet.
Then…
BOOOOOM!
A dozen phoenixes exploded at once, their bodies becoming massive bombs of miasmic green death. The sound was soul-wrenching. Mountains cracked. Air warped. The skies darkened as the green miasma spread outward like plague-stained auroras.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
More followed. Phoenix after phoenix ruptured in horrifying spectacle, spilling waves of infectious rot across the flaming lands of Everburn Aerie.
And just when the horror seed to peak…
WUUUM!
The ashes reford.
The sa phoenixes stood again, wrapped in eerie white flas… only to explode once more in waves of toxic light and sound.
It was death on repeat.
A living nightmare.
“ENOUGH!!” Azuryan scread, her body erupting into a cyclone of viridian flas.
Flaming tears slid from her eyes as she closed them briefly.
She gave a silent prayer to the hundreds of phoenixes.
Then, she opened her eyes with a light of pain and decisiveness!
She beca a vast phoenix, green wings spanning miles as she slamd her might upon the ground. Massive chains of viridian starlight erupted, crushing the twisted phoenixes into oblivion.
Beside her, Solmyron had already transford.
The Golden Pyre, in his full wrath, glowed like a collapsing sun. He released a sky-bending roar as beams of solar fla blotted out the air, vaporizing infected phoenixes in waves of pain and anger as it was like killing one’s own family!
Starlight rained down.
The sky was no longer green.
It was gold and green fury.
An execution.
An extinction.
Selamira watched silently.
She hovered above it all, untouched, her horn dimly glowing. Her voice was a blade of cold inevitability.
“If this place is affected by this enemy…”
Her gaze turned toward the distant horizon.
Toward the floating oceanic continent that shimred with blue majesty- the Thalassphere Arx.
“…then so might the Thalassphere Arx be as well.”
She turned her eyes back to the Sovereigns of Fla.
“I can trust you both to finish this? Kill every last infected phoenix. They are no longer yours. Their souls are bound to another.”
…!
Azuryan and Solmyron, covered in ash and light, gave slow, heavy nods- faces carved from grief and fury. They did not speak.
They couldn’t.
The onslaught continued below them as both unleashed more of their full might, not to protect- but to purge.
Selamira said nothing more.
A single pulse of white erupted from her horn.
And in the next breath…
She vanished into a spear of white light, shooting across the sky like judgnt itself.
Heading for the Thalassphere Arx!
Onward!
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