The tar retreated, seeping into the cracks of the city, pulling back from the surface where the dragon-fire raged. Amon watched through the fading eyes of a single tar-mouse, hidden in the shadow of a crumbled chimney.

  The city was gone, its stone buildings rendered to slags, and wood turned ash. The Reds were thorough; they had burned their own history to root out the infection.

  ‘But we won.’

  Deep below, the tunnels hummed. Thousands of mortals slept in the dark, their souls glowing like embers in the mist. Nine dragons—another five claimed before the swarm of insects had been defeated—were wrapped in cocoons of Preserverant, their immense Mana feeding the Garden.

  The mouse looked up.

  More wings filled the sky. Dozens of them.

  The initial four had been a vanguard, this was the army.

  Ancient Reds, massive and terrible, circled the mountain. They roared in frustration, bathing the empty fortress in fire, blasting the rock until it glowed cherry-red. But there was nothing to kill. The tar was gone, as too were the mortals.

  Amon severed the connection before the heat could reach him.

  He sat back in his stone chair, the silence of the deep earth settling around him.

  "They are angry," he murmured to Arbah.

  The fox, currently shaped like a small, tar-slicked child, nodded. It didn't speak, but its eyes conveyed agreement.

  Amon picked up his tar chisel.

  In the old days, a dragon’s anger meant death. It meant the village elder trembling, the tithe doubled, and the lash for anyone who dared look up.

  Now? It was just noise.

  ‘They cannot reach us.’

  He carved a line into the stone, working once more on the peaceful act of craving, as he contemplated how the balance had shifted. Even though dragons were gods, living embodiments of might. Against tar, the relentless, suffocating weight of the Preserverant?

  They were just fuel.

  And they were losing, for the Tharnells were not idle. The Mist whispered the news, how the invaders were bringing in their champions.

  The Demigods.

  These were not men, they were monsters of flesh and steel, their bodies augmented with soul-tech that burned through Mana like a furnace. They didn't sleep, they didn’t eat, and they never tired. They were fueled by Cores that had broken the fifth seal, maybe higher.?

  ‘They are like us,’ Amon realized. ‘But without the peace.’

  The Tharnells rift pulsed. The thing no longer just a tear anymore; it was a wound that refused to heal. The Tharnells were stabilizing it, building Pillars of obsidian and rune-glass to anchor the gateway.

  ‘They are staying.’

  This wasn't a raid anymore, never had been, it was colonization.

  Amon felt a shiver of true fear, while the dragons had been relegated to pests. The Tharnells were a plague, and growing threat.

  Then, the pulse came.

  It wasn't a sound, but a pressure wave in the soul.

  THUMP.

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  The tar reacted instantly. It didn't wait for Amon’s command. It spasmed, contracting violently, pulling everything—corpses, tools, Amon himself—deeper into the earth.

  Arbah whined, a sound of pure distress, and scrambled into Amon’s lap.

  "Hush," Amon whispered, though his own heart—or the memory of it—was hammering. "What is it?"

  A god.

  Not a dragon god. A Tharnell god.

  Amon felt Belugmah’s presence slam into his mind. It was heavy, vast, and terrifyingly focused.

  Hide.

  The command was absolute.

  Cease expansion. Dormancy. Silence.

  And then, a gift.

  Information flooded Amon’s brain. Lexemes. The words of power, and the syntax of creation. It hurt, a headache that split his skull, but he held on. He gritted his teeth, and absorbed the knowledge, the complex geometries of spell-casting etching themselves into his Core.?

  When the vision cleared, he was miles deep.

  But he could still see. Through a single, microscopic thread of tar that remained near the surface, he looked up.

  The sun was blocked out.

  Placed next to the outer perimeter of the Garden, it stood, four hundred terrifyingly feet tall. A humanoid, but only in the vaguest sense. It was a fortress on legs. Its skin was Glyphosic metal, etched with runes that hurt to look at. Its shoulders were gun decks. Its head was a sensor array that burned with a single, crimson eye.

  "Not here," the voice boomed. It wasn't sound; it was a broadcast on every frequency of reality.

  "You made a mistake this time, Scar. This is no spoiled realm. Fresh, young, ripe for our fangs. This is our meal, and you will not taint it.”

  The god raised an arm, and fired.

  The sound was the end of the world. Shells the size of houses slammed into the earth. The ground didn't just explode; it evaporated, and the shockwave turned rock to dust, and dust to plasma.

  The tar near the surface was annihilated. The mist was burned away.

  Amon flinched, even miles below.

  ‘He is killing the land to kill the weeds.’

  Beside the god, smaller figures—Demigods, merely fifty feet tall— within their own Battlemechs added their fire. They swept the area with beams of coherent light, hunting for any trace of the Garden.

  Belugmah did not fight back.

  The Mist thinned, and Tar hardened, turning into inert stone; playing dead.

  ‘Clever,’ Amon thought. ‘If we fight, they will dig. If we die, they will move on.’

  But Belugmah was not just hiding.

  Deep in the abyss, the pool churned. The black lake of origin, the source of all tar, began to bubble.

  It wasn't retreating, it was concentrating.

  A sliver of the pool broke away, and shot downward, racing through the strata of rock, bypassing Amon, bypassing the sleeping dragons, and merging with the tar reservoirs digging towards the realm’s unbreakable bedrock.

  Above, the Tharnell god took a step, and the land groaned in protest. It, and its lesser kin, marched toward the center of the garden, toward the place where the pool resided.

  As they neared, ready to finish their work, and claim the once peaceful, mist filled lands as their own, Belugmah acted.

  The abyssal pool expanded. Instantly.

  One moment, there was rock. The next, there was a lake of absolute, light-drinking darkness beneath the god’s feet.

  The constructs fell.

  The god fired its thrusters, roaring with the power of a thousand captive souls. It fired its cannons into the black. But one cannot shoot the void. Tendrils of tar, thick as mountains, lashed out from the darkness, they wrapped around the god’s legs, waist, and gun-arms.

  The god screamed, a mechanical shriek of stressed metal, and failing runes.

  You are mine, the darkness seemed to say.

  It pulled.

  The god sank. Suffering the same fate as the nearby Demigods mech had, with some lucky few, far enough away not be ensnared, blasting the edges of the pit, attempting to save their god, but they were too late.

  With a final, gargling roar, the Tharnell god disappeared into the earth.

  The hole snapped shut, and the surface view cut out; connection dead.

  Amon sat in the dark, the silence ringing in his ears. The blessing around him felt… thin. Tired. Belugmah had spent a fortune of power to claim that prize. A parting gift to them, as the Celestial had far more important realms to fight for, and preserve. As such, the blessing’s link was weak now.

  ‘We are alone.’

  The thought should have terrified him.

  But as he sat there, stroking Arbah’s tar-slicked fur, Amon felt something else.

  The underground Garden was safe, dragons were sleeping, mortals were dreaming. And somewhere, deep in the crushing dark, a god was drowning in tar.

  ‘Preserve what is left.’

  The command echoed in his mind.

  Amon smiled. It was a small, tight smile, devoid of humor but full of purpose.

  "We will," he whispered to the dark. "We will keep them all."