The connection severed.
Amon flinched in the dark, his mind recoiling as the vision turned white-hot and then vanished. There was no pain, not for him, but there was a sudden, violent absence. The tar on the surface didn't just retreat; it screamed into nothingness.
Dragon-fire was not like the chemical burns of the Tharnell shells. It was a cleansing. It didn't just heat the tar; it unraveled the magic binding it. Where the flames touched, the Preserverant simply ceased to exist, scoured from the reality of the realm.
Retreat.
The tar roots recoiled, diving deeper into the bedrock to escape the molten heat. But they did not stop. Like water finding a crack, they surged upward again, miles away from the inferno, breaking through the soil in the untouched districts of the city.
This time, there was no mist. No grand entrance.
The tar bubbled up silently, shaping itself not into wolves or bears, but into mice, sparrows and insects. Thousands of tiny spies scuttled into the shadows, their eyes scanning the burning streets.
Through them, Amon saw the devastation.
The Reds were thorough. They didn't just burn the infected district; they erased it. Buildings crumbled into glowing embers. Stone streets ran with rivers of lava. The dragons circled, their heads swiveling, hunting for any trace of the black stain.
They know.
The mist whispered the truth. Dragons smelled the foreign magic, no different than a predator picking up on the scent of freshly spilled blood. They could taste the etheric signature of the tar too.
‘Bait them,’ Amon sent.
In the center of the city, a swarm of tar-mice broke cover. They scurried across the open square, a wave of black motion against the gray cobblestones.
It worked.
Four massive heads snapped toward the movement. Four throats glowed with the light of a dying star.
Whoosh.
Fire rained down, and the mice evaporated instantly. But as the dragons focused on the decoy, the real invasion began. From the sewers, cellars, and the cracks in the pavement, insects rose.
Millions of them.
Tar-wasps, beetles, mosquitoes. They formed a cloud that blotted out the sun, a humming, buzzing nightmare that rose to meet the gods.
The dragons roared, a sound of annoyance rather than fear. They were Ancients, their scales harder than diamonds, and their blood magma. What could a bug do to a mountain??
They found out quickly as the cloud rushed them. The dragons roared, swiping at the air with talons the size of plowshares, but one cannot slash a cloud.
The insects descended, but they did not try to pierce scales, instead they coated the dragons, covering their eyes, clogging their nostrils, crawling into the gaps between their scales. The dragons thrashed, shaking their massive heads, breathing fire in wild, erratic bursts. But for every thousand insects they burned, ten thousand more pressed in, guided by Amon’s singular will.
One of the Reds, blinded by a mask of crawling sludge, thrashed in the air. It couldn't breathe fire without torching its own face, it couldn't fly without seeing the horizon.
Desperation overrode instinct.
The great beast raised a claw and raked at its own snout, trying to scrape the blinding filth away.
Tear.
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Adamantine claws met dragon scale. The sound was like a church bell breaking. A scale ripped loose, flying into the smoke, exposing the raw, wet meat beneath.
In.
The tar didn't hesitate. It abandoned the eyes and flooded the wound. It seeped into the cut, bypassing the magic-resistant scales and touching the vulnerable flesh.
The dragon shrieked. It wasn't a roar of defiance; it was the sound of an animal realizing it was prey.
The tar burned it like acid, not with heat, but with the cold, numbing relief of Preservation. It seized the muscles, and deadened nerves.
The dragon tumbled. Its wings seized, folding awkwardly against its flanks. It plummeted from the sky, a mountain of gold and crimson crashing into the city below.
BOOM.
The impact shattered a row of guildhalls, sending a cloud of dust and mortar into the air.
The dragon struggled to rise, its legs churning, its breath coming in ragged gasps of fire that melted the rubble around it. But the ground was waiting.
The earth beneath the crash site exploded. Thick, heavy roots of tar surged up, wrapping around the dragon’s limbs, and anchoring the dragon to the world.
Mist rolled over the fallen god, thick and white.
The dragon fought. It burned the roots, turning them to ash, but the tar was endless. It replaced the burnt tendrils faster than the dragon could destroy them. It wrapped the beast in a cocoon of earth and sludge, suffocating the fire, dimming the light, and allowing mist to effortlessly fill the Dragon’s lungs
Slowly, the thrashing stopped.
Three left.
The remaining Reds saw their kin fall. They banked hard, trying to climb, trying to escape the cloud, but the insects were already on them.
They were blinded. They were choking.
They crashed. Not from damage, but from disorientation. The Dragons slammed into the streets, sliding through buildings, their momentum turning the city into a furrowed field of ruin.
The tar took them.
It was a brutal, ugly work. The dragons burned acres of tar, their fire cleansing the earth, but they were finite. They had lungs that needed air, and eyes that needed light, the tar needed nothing.
It piled onto them, a crushing weight of earth and Preserverant. It filled their mouths, smothering the fire before it could spark. It dragged them down, breaking the cobblestones, pulling them into the deep dark of the under-city.
Got them.
Amon slumped against the tunnel wall, his chest heaving. There was no triumph, only exhaustion. The battle had drained the garden’s reserves to the dregs. The fire had destroyed so much.
But then, he felt it.
Deep below, the cocooned dragons stopped fighting. The dream took them. Their minds, vast and ancient, slipped into the illusion Belugmah spun.
And the power hit them.
It wasn't the normal trickle that fledgling Souls gave, little giving lights. These, these Dragon Souls, they were suns.
The Mana poured into the garden, filling the depleted reserves in a heartbeat. The mist above expanded, shooting outward, fueled by sleeping gods. The tar roots thickened, turning from brittle vines into iron cables.?
We are strong.
Amon looked at his hands. They glowed faintly with the overflow of energy.
"It works," he whispered to Arbah. "The gods can bleed."
But the cost…
He looked back at the mountain. The city was gone, burned by its own protectors. But the fortress remained.
Lavia’s mountain.
The tar had breached the outer gates. The great stone doors lay in fragments. Inside, the tunnels were packed with the last survivors, not soldiers, but Families.
Thousands of them.
They were huddled in the dark, listening to the screams of the dying dragons. They expected monsters.
"Save them," Amon ordered.
The mist flooded the mountain, it poured through the halls, gentle and cool. The mortals screamed at first, then sighed, then slept. They sank into the floor, pulled into the safety of the earth, away from the fire, away from the war.
They would dream of peace, and their souls would feed the wall that kept the nightmare at bay.
Amon picked up his chisel. The vibration in the floor was stronger now. The garden hummed with the power of four Ancients.
We can fight them now.
Then, the ground shook again.
A roar echoed from the sky, louder, deeper, more terrible than before.
Amon shifted his vision to the surface.
The smoke cleared.
Above the burning city, the sky was filled with wings, dozens of them.
Some were Reds, massive and angry. But there were others. Greens, trailing poison mist. Blues, crackling with storm-light. And leading them, a beast so large it blocked out the sun.
"We needed dragons," Amon said, his voice flat. He looked at sweet Arbah, who had stopped her carving to stare up at the ceiling.
"We got them."
