The moment the Fire Spirit Lord turned to leave, cairn daylight shattered. Wind howled, clouds convulsed. sky and earth traded places. A thunderclap, raw, explosive, ripped across the heavens, loud enough to make bones ring.
Those black clouds had banished moments earlier regrouped, thickening into a bruise-dark canopy that flushed the firmament blood-red.
The Fire Spirit Lord halted mid-stride. For the first time, gravity etched his brow. He faced the vault of red and, just for a heartbeat, surprise flickered in his ancient eyes.
Everyone craned their necks. Above them, crimson clouds spun like a colossal wheel, carving a whirlpool into the sky. Bolts of red lightning writhed inside that spiral, snarling, each crack louder than the last.
At the eye of the storm yawned a black hole-vast, lightless, hungry enough to inhale the sun itself. A blast of suffocating terror rolled out of that maw, curling around their ribs like icy wire.
“W-What in all realms is that?” Yuliana’s voice shook so badly the words scraped throat.
Aurelius went pale. “That aura… It dwarfs the Soul Devourer!”
Artemis clenched staff until knuckles whitened. “Is another demonic creature breaking through? A stronger one?”
Flaxseed gave a grim shake of the head. “I don’t know. But whatever is coming, it’s the kind of nightmare legends warn us about.”
The valley, still trembling from the recent clash, fell into an even deeper silence. It was a hush so complete that every survivor heard the frantic drumming of his own heart.
Out of that hush came a shrill streak of sound, high, metallic, almost gleeful, before a dark-red pillar of light speared down from the churning void overhead.
The beam hung there, molten and alive, and within its fiery column a blurry silhouette struggled into focus, limbs coalescing as though being forged in a furnace.
When the glare thinned, a man stepped forward, a man, yet somehow more. He wore a robe the color of fresh blood. His face was arrestingly handsome, but a wicked curve haunted his lips, and his eyes burned like twin furnaces, casting sickly red reflections across the broken stone.
Ink-black hair fanned around his shoulders, each strand tipped in smoldering crimson. An unearthly fire swirled around him, thin at first, then thick enough to warp the very air.
Every breath seemed in danger of catching flame. Worst of all, a living brand rippled upon his brow, an ever-shifting flame totem that crawled across his skin like something starving and sentient.
“W-Who is this?” Onneas whispered, the words snagging in throat before they ever truly formed.
She felt it in marrow, the newcomer’s power rivaled, perhaps even eclipsed, that of the Fire Spirit Lord himself.
Jared and the others had survived terrors a moment ago, yet the presence of this stranger turned their triumph to ash. Compared with him, even the Soul Devourer was a child playing at nightmares.
Across the rubble, the Fire Spirit Lord stood rigid. His calm veneer shattered, fists clenched so hard his knuckles popped. Disbelief flashed in his fiery pupils.
“Fire Demon Lord?” His voice cracked, the title half question, half horror. The mere naming seemed to steal what little breath remained in the valley.
Fire Demon Lord?
The name rippled through every shaken mind, an unfamiliar legend that nonetheless tasted of doom.
If a being who could cow the Fire Spirit Lord truly existed, then the scale of their peril was beyond anything story or scripture had warned them to fear.
The Fire Demon Lord opened his eyes at last. Two ribbons of flame swept the valley, pausing, almost lazily, on the Fire Spirit Lord.
“Well, well… Fire Spirit Lord. It has been far too long…” purred, every syllable a flick of embers across dry tinder.
His smile curved higher, silk over steel, smoke over smoldering coal, drawing every eye with the intoxication of something both beautiful and lethal.
