Brady Nallis shudders again as the door jumps. Hands clasped down over her mouth, she screams into her fingers, sitting on the trap door of the Gal Street tower, the red sky stretching out all around her. All of Danfalla stretches out before her, a city she has called her home her entire life, a place she has put countless hours into trying to make a better place, turned to hell in a single night. She holds back her tears, even when the growling men beat against the trap door again; it is the only sense of control she has.

Smoke climbs everywhere, billowing from the fires spread throughout the city. She wants more than anything to walk to the edge of the tower, to look for her home down in the city, to find out if it is still there. But she is afraid to leave the trap door, afraid that the moment she does, the shrieking madmen below will break it open and drag her inside, afraid of what she might do if they manage to get it open while standing at the edge.

Again, she mutters a prayer into her hands, pleading to all the gods she knows: Glis'Merinda, Exeter, and even the heathen gods whose names she only half remembers, begging for any kind of salvation. But Danfalla is forsaken, just looking up at the sky, seeing the blood moon rise over the city and that hideous tree reaching up toward it; all the doomspeakers piling into the city, exciting the refugees, they were right. Her whispered prayers come out muffled through her fingers, only to be stolen by the hot wind the next instant.

Through the tears welling in her eyes, she sees new light spreading across the sky. An amorphous mass of color, all blue, orange, and green, moves through the air, tendrils of light striking out. As Danfalla burns beneath the red sky, Brady watches a nightmare incarnate drift over the city. This is the end, it must be. The door beneath her shakes again, and Brady quakes.

It is so hot, everything, his chest especially. Shedding his shirt didn't stop it, ripping off his pants hadn't either. Smashing in that asshole Mason Mutrow's face hadn't stopped it either. The clawing heat kept welling up inside him, pushing him, not letting him stop, not letting him rest, not letting him even think. It just wanted everything to break, every part of the world to feel his dominance over it, to let everyone know that Jud Rapso was the toughest man there was.

But now, lying flat on the stones, feeling the water from the fountain he and the boys smashed run over his arms, soak into his underclothes, and pool on the ground around him, he knows the heat was wrong. It still pulls at him, like his bones were made of hot iron, but no matter how he strains, he can't move an inch. The boys lie around him, pinned to the stone, their chests heaving as they try to draw in breath. They have no air to scream any longer, to bay at the blood-turned moon, to vent the fury bubbling up inside. Even the fury is pressed to the ground, its weight too great now to lift and swing about.

Twelve madmen, bent on beating each other to death just a moment before, stare up at the sky from their backs, watching the color. Jud remembers it from tales he heard as a boy: a hydra, a monster that comes straight out of a nightmare. His wide blue eyes strain to take it in, the shifting cloud of color, larger than even the mill-owner's home, hovering a hundred feet above the city. Four heads of different colors: blue, green, orange, and gray, shift and snap out, the air itself groaning in the wake of it. The very buildings beneath the monster sag, supports snapping, trying to bear the weight of it as it combats a darting figure high in the sky. A hydra is what it is, Jud thinks, a nightmare.

Tena watches from the window. She's not supposed to, her mother told her not to, but her mother is gone, running out the door after her father, both laughing and bounding together down the street hand in hand. Tena closed it after them, knowing that she should do that much at least. Who knew what might come inside if she left the door open, especially on a night like tonight?

With her mother gone, there was no one around to keep her from the window, and so she sat on her stool, staring out at the pretty new sky and watching the moon. Then the buildings started to shake, the clouds themselves ripping apart, windows all down the block shattering as the scary, colorful cloud moved over her home. Tena wanted to run, to hide under the bed like her mother told her to do, but then she saw that many, the one with the strange eyes, fighting the cloud high in the sky. Despite her fear, and despite the strange emotions growing inside of her, she can't help but watch the man fight the cloud, can't help but watch the man fight the new nightmare.

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It swings around, a column of sand shining with silvery light as big as a barn door. Ferro braces in the air, the magic of his weapon buzzing through the soles of his feet as he stands on his conjured weapon. Two more swords of iron in his hands, he moves, the sword beneath him flashing through the sky under the power of his magic. Only, he isn't fast enough. The column reaches out like a cat's paw falling flat on a fleeing mouse.

The two iron blades in his hands snap when he turns to meet the tendril of magic, snapping beneath a metric ton of solidified weight. His collarbone snaps beneath the strain, one of his thumbs ripped away as he is swatted from the air. Yet, he keeps his awareness, his hold on the magical greatsword. As he tumbles through the air, sent careening like a stone down toward Danfalla, it flails along beside him, the hilt straightening within the influence of his aura, snapping into his hand before freezing in the air. His shoulder dislocates as his body is dragged to a stop, but he does not let go.

Around him, inside his aura, remnants of the steel-colored sand shift, transforming into swords of iron beneath the influence of his magic. Like the greatsword he made, these weapons hold some of their former magic, some of the intense hardness of the tendril that struck him. As the largest slides into place beneath his feet, giving him a platform to stand upon, he turns and finds her.

Charlene, he had learned her name before, but now he feels as if it is the first time seeing her. She hovers in place more than a hundred feet away, a tide of writhing sand spreading out from her, the darkness of the grain taking on power and color as it reaches out, like the four biting heads of some evil beast. And there she is, in the middle of it all, a dark creature of magic and fury, eyes burning as she stares at him.

Despite the power running through the sword beneath his feet, Ferro feels it begin to crack and shudder. He feels her, her soul, pressing down on his own, making him heavy and sluggish. Rather than despair, Ferro can't get the smile off his face, wouldn't even try to if he could. The air shudders with a groan, the weight of his body seeming to double in the moment as a shadow blocks out the moon. He has just enough time to look up, to support the sword he stands upon with another, before meeting the burning emerald sand that falls upon him like a tree trunk.

Ferro screams as the sand washes over him, his skin burning, his mouth filling with corrosive magic as he fights the sand with his powers. It burns away, the swords he conjures from the material rising in front of his face to form a shield, but there are too many gaps. Even without cohesion, the emerald sand pours over him, his platform of blades shattering as those he summons to protect him are melted away. When at last the green wave passes, the bisected tendril spreading out into an untenable mess beneath him, only to reform and connect to the whole a moment later, Ferro clings to his greatsword once more, his rock in the stormy tide.

Acidic smoke rises from his body as he holds tight to it, his skin blackened, weathered, and thin. All along his body, patches of muscle poke through. Even his eyes are gone, his only view of the world around him granted by the aura that continues to flare. He hovers, alone in the dark, lost in a world of agony as his body tries to hold itself together.

Ferro feels her there, feels her desire to end his life pressing down on him, making his muscles stretch and groan as they try to hold him together. He knows something is already heading for him, some other strike from the magnificent woman, his whetting stone.

This body isn't good enough. It never was. He remembers what Sigrid told him about it, how to reach the terminus of what he was now, but only now does he begin to see what she meant. The one time she showed him before, her true form, she told him that she found it beautiful. For him, a man that only ever found things ugly in the world before, the concept of beauty was a foreign thing. It was something others would call a thing, a word that others used, and that he only vaguely understood the trend of. But now, now he has seen something truly beautiful. In the dark, his body using the last dregs of the power he had taken from the blood of so many, he looks out to where he knows she is.

That woman, she was beautiful, and there was no chance that she was human any longer. So, why should he be afraid to not be.

Together, two mounds of burning sand, blue and orange dragonfire, crash onto Ferro from either side. The air above Danfalla ripples in the wake of the concussive blast as the two magics meet, mixing, fusing into something potent and terrible.

He feels it crush him, try to mash his body to paste while burning and freezing it at the same time. More than that, Ferro feels a sense of relief, like a weight he didn't know he was carrying falls away. The fire tries to scorch his skin, but it finds no purchase as he begins to take on the dull-gray pallor of iron. The cold tries to rip at his face, only to find a mask of metal there keeping him safe. The fury bearing down on him tries to sunder him, to crash his soul into the dirt and grind it beneath its heel, but his spirit remains resilient as his mouth can no longer do anything but smile.

His magic spreads through the magical sand like an infection, his soul contesting the will trying to smite him as the sand congeals, becoming hundreds of spinning and burning swords that rain upon Danfalla like the most lethal hail. Then, left in the spot where the two roiling powers tried to grind him to dust, Ferro stands upon his crackling blade. His humanity lies abandoned, forgotten in its entirety, and he turns his eyeless gaze upon Charlene.

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