The central chamber of the fortress lay exposed to the sky. The middle part of the ceiling had been rent asunder, and a gaping hole reached up through all the levels of the fortress to the air above. Dark clouds above rolled and flashed with lightning. The dust cleared slowly, and the vast, threatening form of the Overlord stepped slowly out of the darkness to confront Diamond a second time. There was no sign of the damage that the dragonfire had done to the armor of his back; he had renewed his form, and he appeared to be stronger than ever.
"Clever little dragon," he said contemptuously. "You have grown more than you let on."
Thelvyn did not respond, knowing he had to proceed cautiously. He could fight and defeat the Overlord time and again and never win the real war. It was crucial for him to discover his opponent's secret, to find the source of his hidden power.
He moved slowly to one side, circling around his enemy and watching the Overlord closely for any clue to his secret. The source of his power was somewhere very near, he was certain, but he could not sense what it was. Nor could he see through the manifestation of the Overlord to his true self. The retreat of the Overlord from his first battle and his appearance here unharmed proved that this was not his true being. The source of his magic and his consciousness had always prevented him from going into any of the worlds he had conquered. Apparently he had brought it with him into this world, but with great difficulty.
Was it something large? Something difficult or dangerous to try to move? Or perhaps, Thelvyn wondered, it was something too delicate to risk. Somehow it managed to avoid betraying its presence as a tremendous source of magic even as it sent its full power direcdy to its manifestation.
Thelvyn was caught off guard, having given too much of his attention to his thoughts. The Overlord opened his massive jaws and let forth what at first appeared to be a flash of misty white light, except the light turned solid almost immediately. It struck Thelvyn in the shoulder with crushing force, smashing him backward across the floor of the dark chamber until he was hurled against the stone wall. The shaft of white shattered with the impact, fragments exploding in all directions. Shaken by the attack, Thelvyn was picking himself up when he saw that the object that had hit him had been a column of ice, which now lay scattered in shards across the floor.
Then another massive shaft of ice struck him, blasting him backward against the wall even harder than before. A third column of ice struck him, then another. Spears of ice continued to crash against him and the surrounding wall, like a hail of heavy stones from an army of ballistae, until the stones of the wall itself began to crumble and collapse about him. Thelvyn clawed his way desperately out of the rubble, pushing aside broken stones and emerging moments later from the top of the dusty wreckage.
He had been rather shaken by that last assault. He moved slowly at first as he climbed out of the debris and paced back out into the vast chamber to confront his enemy, his back and neck arched in challenge. The Overlord was watching him in growing rage, but Thelvyn also noticed a hint of fear.
"What are you?" he demanded. "What manner of creature have you become?"
Thelvyn had no intention of answering, but he would not have had the chance in any event. In the next moment, bolts of lightning streaked down from the dark clouds through the gaping hole in the ceiling to strike him. For a time, he could only crouch low, his face turned down toward the floor to protect his eyes, enduring the deadly touch as fingers of lightning played across his back. Even as powerful as he had become, the unrelenting blast of such tremendous energy was unbearably painful. He knew that if he tried to run, the lightning would pursue him. And so he crouched, waiting for it to end. The flash of brilliant light was blinding, and the stones shook with the blast of thunder.
He was not even aware that the attack had ended until he realized that the darkness had returned and the last echoes of thunder were dying away. He lifted his head slowly and beheld a remarkable scene. The hail of raw lightning into the depths of the chamber had filled even the vast space with a tremendous amount of power, burning away the air so that no mortal creature could have lived in that place. Wisps and streams of ghostly lights hung in the air like fog or crawled across the seared floor like mist, glowing in shades of red, yellow, and orange, filling the great chamber with an eerie radiance.
The Overlord stood in the midst of the thin clouds of fiery mists, his head raised high. The crests and spines of his grotesque armor shone with ghostly lights of their own, and he seemed to pulse from the power that he was drinking in, as if he thrived in the deadly environment. Now Thelvyn understood. The Overlord was so distracted with pleasure that he had just inadvertently betrayed his own deepest secret. It was the outer world that was alien to him, robbing him of his powers-warm sunlight and fresh, cool winds and green, growing things. He had nearly destroyed one world to protect himself from the lifegiving things that were like poison to him. Hiding himself in dark storms and deep, remote places like his strongholds renewed his strength.
The revelation told Thelvyn which of his weapons would be most deadly to such a creature. Lifting his head high, he summoned his powers as the Immortal Diamond. The pure, jeweled facets of his armor shone with blinding light, a pure, brilliant white that chased away the ghostly lights that played in the darkness of the chamber. Then, standing tall on his hind legs, he seemed almost to explode in the radiant pure crystal light.
The Overlord flinched and drew back, desperate to shield his eyes from the light. With nowhere to retreat, he tried to turn the heavy armor of his back toward the blinding brilliance, as if the light itself caused him tremendous pain. The white radiance began to cut into him with each passing moment, shredding his substance and tearing it away like scraps of paper. Diamond released a final sustained flash of intense light, and the massive, grotesque body of the Overlord dissolved in the glare.
But even that was not yet the end of the Overlord. Floating in the air where his body had been was the source of his will and power, the true self he had kept hidden inside the shell of the Overlord. It didn't even seem alive. What Diamond saw was a strange, utterly alien entity of crystal, bristling with quartzlike spikes of rose and gold and blue and green. This was a creature of the most remote of the outer planes, where all things were utterly different from the familiar life of the mortal realms. Long ago it had wandered through the planes, whether by chance or by misfortune or by deliberate choice, coming at last to a world where its unearthly powers had made it seem like a god. But mortal life was deadly to it, so it had been forced to create the protective form of the Overlord in which it could hide.
The pure light of Diamond's very being was destructive to it. The crystal structures of its being began to grow cloudy and pale, cracking and crazing. Then the dying shell exploded, and thousands of small lengths of crystal flew apart and scattered across the floor of the chamber, where they evaporated like mist.
Diamond subdued his brilliant light, transforming himself once more to the manifestation of his mortal form, the Dragonking. The battle was done, and he realized now that the Immortals had chosen their champion wisely, for the pure diamond light of his very being had proven to be his most deadly weapon. Spreading his wings, he leapt into the air and flew up through the great hole that had been blasted through the fortress. As he emerged into the sky above, he employed his powers a final time to seal the chamber and transform it into the tomb of the Overlord. The vast stronghold shook and began to collapse. In moments, the chamber that had been the