Coiled around Perzandebilis, I was a wyrm without a prayer, rocketing into the sky. The experience was a lot like flying with my car, only this time I wasn't the one responsible for keeping us in the air, and thank the Angel for that.

For once, I think even my ability to multitask had been pushed to its limit.

Never oh ever had there been a knight as unlikely as me: a Norm out of nightmares, bearing a fallen Angel's Sword, riding through the sky on my silver spacecraft steed.

Three Vyx modules had just fired their death rays at us.

Tal—our pilot—dodged the attack by sending Perzy into a corkscrew, but it didn't make the cut.

"Doc!" Tal yelled.

Thankfully, with Azon's blade in hand and &alon's power at my beck and call, it was easy for me to make up the difference.

Clasping the Sword in both hands, I raised it up and conjured its power. The dials and tabs written into its weaves spun about and clicked into place as I summoned my dual ward from before, combining force and an anti-magic barrier into a double-layered, spherical ward that enclosed Perzy and myself.

Three death rays struck us from different sides. The weight of the lasers' sheer power squeezed my mind like an oppressive thought, but—letting out a roar—I drew on &alon's bottomless reserves. My shield brightened in my third eyes, visibly thickening. It reflected the beams a moment later, scattering them in several directions. The reflected lasers revolved as Perzy rolled and pitched.

The redirected beams seared through the flesh of passing giants. Segments of wyrms and flying fungal behemoths sloughed off their owners' bodies and plummeted to the sea below. The most massive pieces sent up walls of water hundreds of feet high.

"Thanks for the save!" Tal said.

Enemy ships tried to ram us, but Perzy evaded them, twirling around just in time, the enemy modules' shields sparking as they scraped against mine.

The maneuver generated a gnarly centrifugal force that pressed me down against the hull. I had to give myself a pataphysical strength boost to my arms and upper body just to be able to lift myself up and swing Azon's blade.

I aimed for the shields of one of the passing ships, and fed power to the Sword right as the blade hit its mark. My magic cut through the energy field like a knife through a hog's belly; the broken defenses exploded with a percussive burst that bashed open holes in the enemy hull. With no time to waste, I followed up with an empowered force strike. The invisible arc of energy arc that swept out from the Sword cleanly sliced the Vyxit starfighter in two. I got the briefest glimpse of the vessel's interior before it exploded in a burst of blue and red.

Gah!

Retracting myself, I hid beneath my shield, pressing myself flush against Perzy's hull. My back spines reflexively flattened against my back in response to the onrush of searing heat.

The land sank away as we soared ever higher. I could see the earth beginning to curve beneath us. Dozens of Vyx modules flocked toward us, the lights of death rays building at their noses. Remembering our allies' sigils, I swung the Sword at the enemy modules in our path, sieving the bogies from the rest of the bunch

Arcs of pure force sliced through enemy shields. The magic crackled across the Night. With the help of Suisei's guidance and Nina's raw intuition, I was belting out wonder after wonder, using the Sword's plexuses was like a hecking stick shift drive, shifting from one spell to another. I'd stick out my arms and spawn granitic vortices to slurp up enemy ships. The magic spun them around and tore them to pieces, and not even the ensuing explosions were strong enough to resist the spell's pull. I made beam-reflecting shields spring up around countless wyrms, foiling the enemy's efforts to carve us to pieces with their furious rays. And I didn't feel the least bit drained. &alon and her wings blazed with a fiery aura where she rode upon my back, constantly feeding me raw power to be channeled into the Sword.

That being said, all of these light shows had definitely put a target on my back.

More death rays streamed at us, but I turned the Sword's plexal dial with a thought and summoned shields to redirect the beams.

"Doc," Tal yelled, "we've got aegises incoming!"

I looked up.

Oh fudge.

My spines stuck out stiff. A handful of aegises came our way. I saw a mecha-dragon, something like a grand drake but with swords for arms and engines for legs, centaurs galloping down pathways of light, spider-headed jellyfish with tentacles outsplayed, and many more.

Hundreds of twEfE swarmed toward us. I had to reduce the strength of my second pair of eyes to keep myself from being blinded by the sound of so many buzzing wings.

"Dad?" Jules yelled. "Dad?!"

As I panicked over what to do, the Sword warmed in my grip. All of a sudden, the tabs in its energy-weaves spun around and clicked into place of their own accord. I recognized one of the settings: it generated the gravity vortices. But the others?

No clue.

"It's helped you so far, Genneth," Suisei said. "Use it!"

I raised my arm and let my power flow. The energy moved through my body in waves of heat as the Sword spiraled with strands of imaginary color. Several gravity wells shot out from the Sword, along with an inner layer unlike anything I'd seen before. Its power left afterimages flashing across my wyrmsight.

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The approaching Vyxit managed to negate a few of the gravity wells with their gauze weaves, but the bulk of them hit their mark and drew their targets toward them.

Then the inner layer struck, shattering the negating gauze as its horrific effect took hold.

It stole my breath away. Many of my spirits gasped in horror.

Everything that had been drawn inward suddenly blossomed in scores of motes of metal and blood. Bodies simply ripped apart in sprays of particles, atomizing before my eyes. But only blood and metals were affected. Everything else was left untouched. The particles flowed inward, like a collapsing jewel. The dragon aegis' body was ripped to pieces. Blood flew out from underneath armor, scales, feathers, carapaces, and skin, carrying streams of flesh along for the ride.

Perzy's shield shattered like glass. The crew screamed as the ship deformed between my coils. The hull's outer layers began to peel away. Nearby ships—both friend and foe—suffered similar fates. The ones closest to the magic's epicenter were almost instantly shredded. The flames and particulates spewed out from the detonating ships got sucked toward the epicenter, though some bits of dust and ash floated freely, totally unaffected.

Twiginix shrieked through the comms. "Off! Negate! Cancel!"

"Dr. Howle!" Nina screamed.

A volley of death rays blasted toward us, only to circle around the deadly blossoming.

The Sword's tab flared again; I flicked it, and the magic stopped. Perzy shuddered between my coils as his body began to repair itself.

With the Sword's supernatural magnetism no longer operational, the death rays were free to speed away from us, blasting into several enemy modules. Meanwhile, the great mass of metal and meat plummeted toward the sea.

"Don't use that spell when allies are nearby," Suisei said.

"Obviously!"

We continued to climb skyward. Beneath us, the world was a matte of dark colors kindled by intermittent patches of magic and flame.

More and more of the battle's true scope came into view the higher we rose.

Angel's breath…

It was like the sky was filled with stars, only the stars were moving: wyrm's golden eyes against silver Vyx modules.

The Vyx capital ships were holding their position. So far, it looked like hUen-dE's loyalists were focused on deploying as many starfighters as they could. The capital ships were more than just flying fortresses, however. They were hedgehogged with small to medium-size artillery, whose lasers they used to defend their emerging fleets, cutting through fungus and rebels alike.

"Do it now!" EUe yelled. "All forces go!"

The broadcast was for the rebel Vyxit; the long-awaited signal had finally come.

Whether it was the capital ships, the smaller cruisers, or the individual starfighters, I recognized the rebels' ships by the sigils they bore. In the chaos of the battle, hUen-dE's forces must not have noticed that the wyrms weren't targeting ships bearing certain sigils—or, if they had noticed it, they hadn't yet acted on it.

But all of that was about to change.

Immediately, a new dance took hold of this battle's brutal ballet.

Vyxit fired on Vyxit, starfighters and cruisers stabbing their allies in the back with an eruption of countless volleys of laser fire. The rebel capital ships revealed their true colors as they trained their artillery onto the Loyalists forces. The bombardment tore through hundreds of squadrons. Scores of mid-sized cruisers blasted apart. Starfighter swarms detonated in popcorn rhythm, blazing fireworks across the dark in flaming blues, streaming reds, and pulsing greens.

And it all happened in a matter of seconds.

One moment, the two sides were nearly evenly matched, with hUen-dE's forces in the slight majority; the next, almost a third of the Loyalist contingent was reduced to clouds of shimmering debris raining down through the Night. The Loyalist modules that hadn't been blasted out of the sky were left tumbling in disarray, ripe for the wyrms to strike them.

Claws tore through exposed hulls. Spores streamed through weakened shields, dissolving the ships beneath them. Blue jet engines choked on the green clouds, sputtering and failing. Countless silver lilies fell like petals in a wild wind; they corkscrewed and twirled.

Then, from out of nowhere, a phosphorescent beam nearly a mile wide cut through the battlefield, bridging earth and sky.

Had my third eyes' wyrmsight not already been tamped down to a low setting, I might very well have gone blind.

The beam swallowed up many hundreds of wyrms, ships, and aegises. The devastation went beyond mere destruction; they were just gone, crushed out of existence.

The beam cut one of the rebel capital ships in half. The beam pulled on the massive explosion that followed, forcing it to orbit around it in spreading lacework of fire, metal, and light that was swallowed up a moment later.

&alon screamed and screamed. "It's over! It's all over! Help me, Daddy! Help!" She pushed and shoved, battering me with her hands. "Run! Run!!" She squeezed my back so tightly, I'd thought she'd bitten me.

The beam continued to pierce the starless sky. It passed beyond the Vyxit capital ships, continuing on into the very fabric of the Night—and the Night responded.

Until the day &alon came to my world, the most awe-inspiring work of nature I'd ever laid eyes on were the waterspouts that had struck the Costranaks off the coast of Vaneppo on my honeymoon. Pel and I had been out on the water for the day on a glass-bellied boat. The ride gave paying customers like ourselves a close-up encounter with the wonders of the Vaneppo reefs, complete with a Trenton-language guide, no less.

Not long into the tour, however, the weather changed on a groat, as it often does down in the tropics. It started with the sky turning a cantankerous shade of green, as if we'd been transported to another world. The guide started yelling instructions to everyone, explaining what was happening. Once the warnings were given, Pel and I clambered up the stairway to the deck. We emerged right as the funnel clouds touched down onto the water.

It was awe-inspiring. Some of the waterspouts tore through the ocean's upper layers, making their towering heights blaze with trails of displaced sea. Others were translucent and surreally smooth. The waves tossed the boat to and fro, dragging us through a hypostyle columned by water and wind.

Pel and I held each other close, to keep each other from flying away.

Now, I saw the Night repeat that wonder in full. The starless sky reached down to the earth and the sea like the waterspouts from my memory. I didn't have my wife to cling to and comfort, just a silver flower in the deepness of the sky to squeeze in my coils as I held on for dear life.

The Night turned fluid. Lens-like distortions appeared across the battle overhead. The distortions grew rapidly, and it was sheer luck that Tal panicked as quickly as he did.

The sky was a roof beneath an ocean of Night, and the ceiling was giving way.

CRACK! CRACK!

WHOOSH.

The darkness let loose its many waters. It spewed forth in torrents, one break after another.

"God almighty…" Mr. Himichi muttered.

I craned my head up and then swung it down, following the nearest column as it gushed down and punched bottomless voids into the land and the sea.

Anything in the torrents' paths was washed away, reduced to nothingness.

Two Vyx capital ships lost half of their hulls to the dark, detonating moments later. Explosions blossomed all around, illuminating the many-columned temple of flowing, falling Night. The Darkness spilled on the land, anointing it with the abyss' kiss.

Then, in my hand, the Sword began to glow.

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