73. EXTINCTION EVENTS

Kihrin’s story

The Korthaen Blight

Just after the comet strike

I didn’t stay dead.

This was not the blessing it might have seemed.

The massive flaming chunk of ice, dust, and debris, easily a mile across, smashed into the Blight at an incredible speed. It instantly vaporized itself, a section of the world’s mantle, and the ruins of Kharas Gulgoth, finally completing the destruction that had begun thousands of years before.

And it vaporized me. At least, I had no reason to assume otherwise.

Molten stone, superheated gas, plasma, and dust exploded with enough force to be felt all the way in Yor.1

The Korthaen Blight had already been a weak point in the planet’s crust, again thanks to me. The caldera formed by Vol Karoth’s birth had left far too many weak spots, mostly expressed as toxic vents and alkaline hot springs. It was the last place on the planet that should have been hit by such forces twice.

The world cracked open. The entire Blight turned into a roiling ocean of plasma and stone so hot that it didn’t just liquefy but turned to gas.

I took no pleasure in knowing that Ompher had fucked up. I wasn’t sure if Ompher had genuinely made a mistake or had simply reached the point where he no longer gave a damn what happened to anyone else with Galava gone, but he’d put too much force into the strike. The comet had hit too fast and too hard.²

And so, high above the boiling inferno of the Blight, Ompher tried with all his power to keep the escaping catastrophe contained. He used his powers to drag all the debris back to earth, collapsing rocks, plasma, and dust back in on itself. The old Ompher—the one S’arric remembered—would have fought with all his might to keep this from being the act that destroyed the whole world. Perhaps that Ompher still existed.

But I didn’t think his good intentions would have been enough. Left to his own devices, the man would have unleashed a world-breaking catastrophe on the very people he’d tried to save.

As it turned out, however, Ompher wasn’t on his own.

Tya and Khored appeared nearby shortly after the initial impact. Tya screamed something, demanded an explanation, but there was neither time nor the ability to hear above the howling winds and screaming tumults of the blast. So instead, Tya spread her hands wide and created another Veil.

Why not? She’d created the first one too. If that one had been crafted to protect the planet from a sun that had become catastrophically large, this one was more localized. Once again, she was cleaning up the messes made by her fellow Guardians.

Tya’s smaller Veil was a dome-shaped barrier of pure tenyé surrounding the Blight. Maintaining the Veil had always been a taxing endeavor, even for a Guardian. I’m personally of the opinion that a great deal of Quur’s bullshit had only gone unchecked through the empire’s existence because Tya had been left too weak to kick the right asses. Maintaining a second barrier—one actively being pummeled by a violent conflagration—took all the energy Tya had remaining. Sweat broke out all over her as she struggled to keep the spreading devastation within from spilling out and destroying—well, certainly, all life within a large radius. Khorvesh. Marakor. The northern Manol. But eventually, the majority of life on the entire planet.

Khored helped too, destroying any rocks or bits of lava that escaped, but his abilities weren’t an ideal match to the problem.

Inside the dome, the trapped energies of the massive explosion rebounded off Tya’s shield before being pulled back down by Ompher’s gravity. More stone melted. What had been an explosion became a forge. Hundreds of spontaneous eruptions gushed lava and poisonous gases into the air, while any rock that might have solidified immediately turned molten once more.

Slowly, though, equilibrium returned; as the plasma melted rock, it cooled enough to become liquid.

The land outside the Blight for several miles in every direction heated, sagged, became lava. Had Stonegate still been inhabited, the entire city would have perished in an instant. It was a small blessing that limited the death toll, but even so, well over a thousand people—Khorveshan and morgage, vané and thriss—died in seconds. A section of the Kulma Swamp boiled, so it was just as well that the morgage hadn’t moved in yet. The last few mountains in the Dragonspires chain began erupting.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as what it could have been. The stone absorbed a great deal of the energy, Tya’s newly created barrier halted the spread of death.

Inside the dome, it was every bit as horrifying as one might expect. The temperatures were so hot that it vaporized everything inside, person or god, in a heartbeat.

I knew this because my body kept attempting to re-form only to be destroyed by superheated gases again several seconds later. It was too much energy even for me, which was my second clue (the first being that initial attack by Ompher) that my body had limits to how much energy it could devour at once. I hadn’t thought I had limits. I was wrong.

Interesting—

—I don’t seem—

—to be able to—

—die, I thought in the brief moments of existence before the pain became too intense, before the screaming began. Although I wasn’t being given much time to think through the ramifications, on some level, I knew that this was an anomaly, different from the other Guardians, different from the dragons. Or perhaps not so dissimilar to the dragons, but where it might take them hours or days to regenerate after a fatal injury, it seemed to take me seconds. Around eight seconds. I counted.

I could die, technically. I just wouldn’t stay that way for long.

Eight seconds was enough; I could work with that.

After four iterations of this treatment, I’d recovered enough to defend myself, able to concentrate on absorbing and consuming all the energy around myself instead of letting it overwhelm me. But I couldn’t absorb the entire explosion. I was more powerful than any single Guardian, but now I was choking down that ugly fact about limits. My physical body could only hold so much power. Trying to devour the entire explosion might easily jump my entire system into the sort of explosive overload that would surely finish what Ompher had started.

Gradually, I pushed out a sphere of influence around myself, a buffer against the firestorm’s onslaught. Past the storm clouds of rock vapor, dust, and flying magma, Tya’s magical field was a glittering dome over the Blight. A beautiful shroud to keep the rest of the world from burning.

By that point, I was aware enough to make smart choices (or choices, in any event),³ so I teleported myself outside Tya’s barrier, to fresh, cool air. The absence of pain was so abrupt it felt like knives.

Below me, Khored put a hand on Tya’s shoulder, sharing tenyé with the woman. On the ground, Ompher visibly strained to contain the planet-killing forces that he’d created.

I had to give credit where it was due; it looked like they’d largely succeeded in stopping the explosion from leaving the Blight. Or from dumping enough dust and ash into the atmosphere to create a winter lasting years.

That’s not to say I wasn’t tempted to hit Ompher at that moment. It wasn’t a nice thought. Let’s call it a Vol Karoth sort of thought, the sort of idea worthy of my older, angrier, cursed self. The one who wanted to survive more than anything. The one who didn’t believe these people had ever really been his friends. That anyone had ever been his friend.

That Vol Karoth still lived in me, much to my regret, and he screamed at me to strike while I could. Ompher’s entire attention focused on the seething chaos inside the Blight. The Guardian hadn’t noticed that I’d worked my way free. I could’ve killed him right then.

You should. You know you should. Look at all that tenyé. You know that would keep you fed for days.

Okay, so maybe it was also the demons talking. I really needed to rid myself of those bastards.

Ompher wasn’t my enemy. I knew that. Of course, he’d attacked me. Of course, he’d spent centuries figuring out what he would do if Vol Karoth ever freed himself and, in that final calculus, had decided that the deaths of all these people was an acceptable loss for taking me down. It was a far smaller number than Thaena had been comfortable sacrificing. As far as Ompher knew, the alternative was the death of everything.

It’s not like I was in a position to sit him down and spell out how this was all a big misunderstanding.

I should’ve left. That would’ve been the sensible option. No one knew I was there—the last anyone had seen of me, I’d been vacillating between solid and gas inside the Blight. And much as I hadn’t wanted to be forced to fight a single Guardian, I really didn’t want to fight all three surviving ones.

But my timing was off. Even as I started to give thought to where I might go, the universe provided me with ample evidence that my earlier theory was correct. That a fight between myself and the other Guardians would be guaranteed to draw the attention of Xaltorath.

***DO YOU KNOW, IN ALL THE TIMES I’VE DONE THIS BEFORE, THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED?***

Damn.

Xaltorath appeared, this time in female form. She had six arms, all of which ended in stingers or bone swords. Three of those arms pointed back toward Tya’s wall, clearly the “this” in her statement, which pulsed in rippling waves across its surface as the fireball inside its area churned.

Yes, fine, this had been part of my plan. I admit it. But I can’t say I was happy to see how it was playing out. I’d harbored a faint hope that I could warn the other Guardians first, maybe even enlist their help. That was the whole reason I’d dropped by to have a chat with Dorna.

Xaltorath sounded so pleased with herself. Almost giddy. She gave the scintillating magical wall one last fond look before she turned her attention to the Guardians. She paid no attention to me. None whatsoever. I might as well have not even been there. Her red eyes passed right over me. Lest I felt slighted, however, she did the same to Khored and Tya.

Because Xaltorath could never pass by the chance to stick her thumb into an open wound.

***COME JOIN US, OMPHER. YOUR WIFE MISSES YOU,*** the demon taunted, arms held wide as though inviting Ompher to join her in the world’s most ill-advised hug. She was so obviously provoking an attack that anyone could see closing in on her was playing to her strengths.

Ompher didn’t care. I’d been right about that too, to my deepest regret. Because Ompher forgot about the mess he’d made in the Blight, he forgot about me, he forgot about saving anyone. He forgot about everything except revenge. That part he remembered just fine.

Ompher screamed as he lunged at Xaltorath, while the earth around them shattered into razor-sharp spears.

Meanwhile, Khored locked eyes with me.