The black dragon screamed.
Chunks of scale ripped free. The sound was like thunder gnashing its own teeth. The sky quaked with the blast.
Damien hovered in the smoke, watching the wound pulse.
He hadn't won.
But the dragon was bleeding.
The dragon bellowed, more insulted than injured, and lunged through the smoke with a roar of spatial disruption.
Damien disappeared again, skipping through frozen time like steppingstones, reappearing behind the beast with a narrow dagger of compressed chronomantic death clenched in his palm.
He plunged it into the base of the dragon's skull.
The wyrm screamed—louder this time—and thrashed wildly. Its tail lashed into Damien mid-air, hurling him into a stone cliff hard enough to crater it. But even as his back struck rock, Damien vanished again, reappearing below with another rune in hand.
This one didn't detonate.
It whispered.
A prayer in the tongue of the Remnants. A binding chant pulled from Vel'khara itself.
