“Some of us don’t divide by kind, but rather by friends and foes.” The air in the huge cavern began to shimmer and grow painfully hot. “But that’s something monsters like you will never understand.”
Bravurn shook out his cuffs, then stood tall. “There. I find myself quite restored. Shall we get this over with?”
Xandera’s gaze narrowed. “Yes.”
Violence exploded in the red-lit space. Bravurn manifested his Ferula even as he cut left and loosed cylinder after cylinder of iron from his other palm, so that beams of black energy and huge slugs of metal traced Xandera’s arcing path as she flew about the cavern, carried by her pillar of lava.
Vast blocks of iron dropped from the darkness, each narrowly missing the blazeborn to slam into the ground and punch into the floor below.
Scorio shook his head, dazed and still half-drowned by memories of another world, another time, another self.
But there wasn’t time for any of that.
Bravurn needed killing.
Scorio summoned his Heart.
It arose before him, baleful and huge, impossibly spherical, its surface immaculate and made all the more potent for his having become a Pyre Lord.
Pyre Lord.
The words hit him like fists.
He was a hells-bedamned Pyre Lord.
And he’d seen what he could do.
He reached out to the ambient mana and found his awareness fracturing. Four points of reference flew out blindly from him, causing him to sense the mana from five directions at once. The effect was bewildering, overwhelming, and he nearly keeled over.
His vortices.
But he didn’t have time to focus on them, to figure out how best to wield them. So instead he engaged the Delightful Secret Marinating technique, began drinking the ambient Iron, and ignited. Power flooded into his being.
His scales and form were healed. Scorio rose to his feet, pulling himself free of the sucking lava, still blisteringly hot but cooling now to dull orange. Up he rose, and gone was the pain, the aches, the vestigial exhaustion from the running battles on the Bone Plains. Gone was the leaching effect of the Blood Ox’s assault, that painful rawness that had made using his powers a challenge.
He was reborn, refreshed, and the strength that flooded into him was like nothing he’d felt before. His muscles swelled beneath his scaled hide, the tips of his talons burned so brightly they looked dipped in Noumenon, and his scales felt like armor invincible, a coat of ebon mail that could withstand the greatest attack in all of hell.
But this was but his humanoid form, horned and clawed as it might be. Tall and magisterial, august and terrible, but still limited, still weak, still small.
There was more.
Reaching into himself, he found intertwined with his soul of fire a deeper truth, nascent and ferocious. It promised destruction. It promised death and ruin. It was what had made him the horrific fiend that had garnered those terrible titles.
The Bringer of Ash and Darkness.
Scorio opened himself to that power, embraced it, and evolved.
His bones stretched and thickened, bent and changed. His scales grew. His neck elongated, his head distended, his tail burst forth. He fell to all fours, rising even as he did so, becoming massive, becoming a force beyond anything he’d previously understood.
His fiery core, that spirit he could summon so as to become a silhouette of fire, grew into an inferno. His chest felt like a barrel of Copperfire into which a burning ember had been dropped. The pressure was terrific. He needed only open his beaked maw and it would spill forth to drown the world in crimson and yellow.
Wings. Wings larger than his greatest previous extent, vast like sails on a whale ship, and all of him of the purest ebon, from the crown of horns that now adorned his skull to the bladed tip of his tail. The fiend that had destroyed the king’s army, that had been unstoppable, feared, hated.
Scorio the Scourer.
The monster whose legend had been so terrible it had drawn the Archmagus back nearly five centuries.
All of this took but moments. One second he stood as Scorio, the next he was ten or fifteen-yards long, massive in the chest and tapering to the hindquarters, his neck sinuous and serpentine, his legs panther-like and strong, his white-hot claws digging into the lava and clay.
Turning his head was now a sinuous, fluid movement, calling for a total recurvature of his serpentine neck.
Bravurn was slowly backing away from Xandera’s assaults, his Shroud impenetrable, his Ferula and iron blasts chasing her across the great expanse of the cave, but he sensed the terrible change in power within the cavern, and when he looked over to Scorio his expression blanched.
Xandera herself slowed her flight, her fiery eyes widening in shock.
Scorio picked his way forward, tentative still in this draconian form, shaking out his wings and furling them down his back. His tail was a new extension of his sense of self, but he loved it, how it balanced him out, gave him a sense of fluidity, balancing out the length of his neck, helping him move, and no doubt turn when he flew. The lava sucked fruitlessly at his feet as he prowled forward, looming over Bravurn, whose eyes had widened in horror.
“No.” The Blood Baron shook his head in sharp negation. “You just made Dread Blaze. You can’t be a Pyre Lord yet. You can’t have this form.”
“I beg to differ,” rasped Scorio, his voice magnified and deepened by his new form.
“No! How? This exceeds our expectations!” Bravurn’s face darkened as fury curdled his expression. “But very well! You wish to be ostentatious? Then die! We have other tools at our disposal -”
And he raised his palm and loosed a great cylinder straight at Scorio. Two feet long, made of solid iron, and perhaps a foot in diameter, it blurred through the fire-lit gloom to slam into Scorio’s heavily scaled chest.
And bounces right off.
It felt like a solid thump, the kind Leonis might once have given his shoulder in jest. Noticeable, but little more.
“Try again, Bravurn.” Scorio resumed prowling forward. It was incredible how feline he felt, how lithe and graceful.
Bravurn grimaced, broad upper lip peeling back from his teeth in a silent snarl, and now he clenched his fist and Scorio sensed movement just above him.
Predictable.
As quick as a snake, he slid aside, and the giant cylinder of iron crashed into the ground to shatter its way into the quarters below.
“Very well,” shouted Bravurn. “A Pyre Lord you may be, but I am a Blood Baron, and -”
A wave of lava washed over him, drowning him and his Shroud completely.
“Scorio!” Xandera’s cry was exultant. “You are grown! I love your new form! You are royal, majestic, beautiful!”
Scorio couldn’t smile in this form, but his mouth widened, no doubt revealing scores more fangs. His gaze remained on the great mass of subsiding lava. Two of the enhanced Titans were clambering up from below, unharmed. The sound of fighting had grown; other members of the Iron Vanguard had arrived, and they, too, would soon join the fight.
It was time to end this.
Scorio leaped. His wings beat once, carrying him across the cavern, and he landed upon Bravurn as the top of his Shroud appeared, lava sliding down its curvature.
Landed and brought his front claws crashing upon the Shroud’s spherical perfection.
Pure might. Muscles larger than he’d previously been tall contracted beneath his scales, and he dug his talons into the golden Shroud, their points finding purchase so that he could rend and pull the shield apart.
Bravurn’s face appeared as the lava continued to slide off, panicked, determined, and he pointed his Ferula at Scorio and loosed a beam of black death at point blank range.
Scorio met the assault with a blast of his own. Opening his maw, he released that terrible pressure, that burning ecstasy of destruction. Flames that had incinerated entire regiments screamed down upon the Blood Baron, hotter than any forge, as dark as the deepest night, and utterly immolated the man even as Scorio continued to tear this Shroud apart.