The world did not wait for Cassian's rage to peak. As the words left Alistar's bloody lips, the black stone beneath their feet trembled. It was not the shudder of the ritual's energy, nor the aftershock of so many deaths. This was a deep, resonant thump that came from far below, a bass note of pure, predatory hunger that dwarfed even the Sand Demon's approach.
The Altar of the Fallen Sun, the epicenter of their desperate struggle, suddenly became the target.
The sand around the base of the dais exploded upwards. This was not the controlled eruption of the smaller worms, nor the terrifying upheaval of the Demon. This was a cataclysm. A colossal ring of sand geysered into the air, encircling the entire structure, and from the center of this annihilating halo, a leviathan emerged.
It was a worm of a different order. Its hide was not pale, but the colour of cooled magma, cracked and seamed with lines of faint, malevolent orange light, as if a river of fire flowed just beneath its skin. It was thicker than the Sand Demon had been, its segments armored with jagged, obsidian-like plates. Its maw was a spiraling abyss of concentric, rotating teeth, each one a shard of darkness that seemed to drink the light from the very air.
The creature did not roar. It screamed. A sound that was less a noise and more a physical, psychic assault that felt like shards of glass being driven into their minds. The remaining purple energy of the ritual shattered, the channels on the altar going dark as if snuffed out.
Cassian, his face a mask of thwarted fury, stared at the behemoth. "No! Not now! The convergence is not complete!"
The worm's head, a battering ram of living stone and fury, slammed into the base of the altar. The entire platform lurched violently. Alistar was thrown from his feet, his body screaming in protest as he skidded across the blood-slick stone. Cassian stumbled, his newly acquired power flickering uncertainly around him.
The worm struck again. A massive section of the black stone ramp sheared away and tumbled into the sand. The creature was not trying to climb the altar; it was trying to devour it, and everything on it.
"You see?" Cassian shrieked over the din, his voice cracking with hysteria and rage. "This is what your interference has wrought! You broke the ritual's containment! You drew this… this thing!"
Alistar clawed his way to his knees, his [Enlightened] mind fighting through the poison and the disorientation. The energy of the ritual. The spilled blood. The released life force. It was a beacon. A dinner bell. This creature was an apex predator, drawn to the concentrated power they had so carelessly unleashed.
The worm's head reared back, its glowing, magma-like seams brightening. It wasn't preparing to strike the base again. It was aiming higher. At the dais itself.
Cassian's eyes widened in pure, undiluted terror. All thoughts of killing Alistar, of completing his ascension, vanished. The scion of House Vor was faced with a force of nature that did not care for his bloodline or his ambitions. He turned and ran, not towards Alistar, but towards the far edge of the platform, leaping over the bodies of slaves and soldiers alike.
The worm struck. Its maw, a pit of grinding darkness, closed on the edge of the dais. Stone shattered with a sound like the world breaking. The platform tilted precariously. Alistar slid, grabbing onto the central altar bowl to keep from falling into the churning sand below. He watched as Cassian, in his desperate flight, began a frantic, guttural chant. The stolen energy around him—the shroud of a dozen souls—coalesced into a violent, swirling vortex above his head. He wasn't trying to fight. He was trying to force the ritual, to seize the power prematurely and use it as a shield, or a weapon.
The stolen life force, raw and unstable, slammed into him. Cassian arched his back, a silent scream on his lips as the violet energy wreathed him, sinking into his flesh. His wound sealed in an instant. His body seemed to grow denser, more potent, the air around him crackling with barely contained power. He had Ascended. But it was a flawed, desperate ascension, like forcing a key into a broken lock.
He turned back to face the worm, his eyes now blazing with solid violet light, his features stretched into a rictus of agony and ecstasy. "BEHOLD!" he roared, his voice layered with a chorus of stolen screams.
He thrust his hands forward, and a wave of concussive, purple force shot towards the worm's head. It was power on a scale Alistar had not imagined possible. The blast struck the leviathan square in its maw, staggering it. Chunks of its obsidian teeth shattered and flew like shrapnel. The worm screamed again, this time in genuine pain.
For a moment, Cassian stood triumphant, a dark god in a legionnaire's disguise. But the victory was fleeting. The worm, enraged, recovered with terrifying speed. It ignored the minor annoyance of the magical blast and surged forward again, its true target still the altar's core—the place where the power was richest.
Cassian's face fell. His grand display had been a flickering match against a tidal wave. He unleashed another blast, and another, each one smaller, less controlled than the last. The stolen energy was already dissipating, unable to be properly integrated. He was a firework, bright and spectacular, but burning out fast.
The worm's head slammed into the platform directly between Cassian and Alistar. The impact threw them both backwards. Alistar felt his ribs crack, the pain a white-hot brand against the constant, grinding agony of the poison. His [Super Regeneration] went to work, a frantic, internal fire brigade trying to put out a dozen blazes at once.
He saw his chance. While the worm was focused on Cassian, its massive body blocking the scion from view, Alistar forced himself to move. He wasn't the primary target. Not anymore. He was a piece of debris, a speck of blood on the stone. He crawled, dragging his spear, towards the relative cover of the shattered altar bowl.
He watched the fight from his knees. It was not a fight; it was an annihilation. Cassian, for all his stolen power, was hopelessly outmatched. He was a fly stinging a bull. He zipped and darted across the tilting stone, firing blasts of violet energy that scorched the worm's hide but did no lasting damage. The worm was methodical, relentless. Its tail, a whip of armored segments, swept across the platform and caught Cassian a glancing blow.
The sound was like a bag of wet sand bursting. Cassian was flung through the air, his magical aura flickering and dying. He hit the far edge of the dais with a sickening crunch and did not get up.
The worm, sensing the diminishment of the largest power source, turned its attention elsewhere. Its head swiveled, its senses locking onto the residual energy of the ritual, the blood-soaked stone, the latent potential in the air. It began to methodically tear the altar apart, chunk by massive chunk.
Alistar pressed himself against the cold stone, making himself small. The world narrowed to the hammering of his heart, the sizzling repair of his body, and the earth-shattering destruction around him. Hours bled together. The sun crawled across the white sky, its light doing nothing to warm the chill of death and futility that had settled over the ruins.
He could not fight this thing. He could not outrun it. His only hope was to outlast it. To be the last piece of un-consumed debris when the beast was done.
And so, he waited. He watched as the worm devoured the power in the stone, its glowing internal fires burning brighter with every mouthful. He watched Cassian's body, a broken doll, slide and shift as the platform was demolished around it. The poison in Alistar's veins slowly, agonizingly, was neutralized. The fire receded, leaving behind the deep, profound ache of catastrophic damage and the exhausting, relentless work of regeneration. He was a ruin, but a stabilizing one.
Finally, as the sun began its descent, painting the sky in the colours of a fresh wound, the worm's feast seemed to be over. The altar was a skeletal ruin, less than half its original size. The creature, sated, began to withdraw. Its colossal body started to sink back into the sand, the grinding of its plates a funeral dirge for the dead.
But as it retreated, one of its massive, glowing eyes, like a pool of molten rock, passed over Alistar's hiding spot.
It stopped.
The eye fixed on him. There was no malice in that gaze, no hatred. Only a bottomless, ancient hunger. It had tasted the power of the ritual, of Cassian's ascension. And now it sensed one last, tiny morsel. A spark of something… different. A sealed potential. A paradox.
With a weary, ground-shaking sigh, the worm changed its mind. Its head rose from the sand once more.
A profound exhaustion washed over Alistar. He had survived the poison, the betrayal, the chaos. He had waited through hours of apocalyptic destruction. And it was not enough. The universe, it seemed, demanded his total annihilation.
A strange calm settled over him. The cold fire of his will, banked for hours, roared back to life. If this was the end, he would not be a morsel. He would be a thorn.
He pushed himself to his feet, his body protesting every movement. He was whole, but he was empty. His stamina was shattered, his muscles felt like water. But his grip on the spear was firm.
The worm lunged, its speed belying its immense size. Alistar did not try to dodge. There was nowhere to go. Instead, he ran towards it, a final, defiant charge into the mouth of oblivion.
As the shadow of the creature fell over him, he dropped into a slide, skidding on the bloody stone under the colossal jaw. He saw it then—a patch of hide, just where the head met the first segment, that was a shade darker, a network of fine cracks from where Cassian's wild blasts had struck true. It was not a weak point, but it was a point.
The worm's head crashed down where he had been standing, shattering the stone. As it lifted its head for another strike, Alistar was already there. With a yell that tore from the very core of his being, he drove his spear upward, into the center of that cracked patch.
The spear bit deep. Ichor, hot and reeking of ozone and rock dust, fountained out, drenching him. The worm bellowed, a sound of pure, outraged surprise. It was a pinprick, a bee sting to a giant, but it was a sting in a sensitive spot.
What followed was not a battle, but an endurance contest between a god and a cockroach. The worm thrashed and slammed, trying to crush the insignificant irritant. Alistar clung on, his world reduced to a cycle of dodge, roll, and strike. He never attacked anywhere else. He focused all his remaining energy, every iota of his [Enlightened] perception, on that one wounded spot. He would stab, yank his spear free, and scramble away from a crushing blow or a lashing tail, only to dart back in and stab again a moment later.
He was a machine of pain and persistence. His [Super Regeneration] was the only thing that kept him alive, healing the bruises, the fractures, the torn muscles just enough for him to take the next step, land the next blow. He was not winning. He was simply refusing to lose.
The worm, for its part, was growing weary. Its sated sluggishness, combined with the constant, nagging pain from the spear wound, was taking its toll. Its movements became slower, less coordinated. The glowing seams in its hide dimmed.
The white sky deepened to twilight. The fight had lasted for hours more, a brutal, grinding war of attrition under the vast, uncaring desert sky.
The end came suddenly. The worm, in a final, furious effort, tried to crush Alistar against a remaining pillar of the altar. Alistar saw it coming, but his legs finally gave out. He couldn't move fast enough. The impact was immense. He felt bones break, felt something rupture inside him. He fell to the ground, his vision greying, his spear clattering from his grasp.
The worm loomed over him, its maw opening for the final, consuming bite. But the effort had been its last. The damage Alistar had inflicted, the thousands of tiny wounds to that one vulnerable spot, had done their work. A major artery, perhaps, or a critical nerve cluster. The great head wavered. The light in its eyes guttered and died. With a final, shuddering exhalation that smelled of ancient stone and deep earth, the leviathan collapsed. Its head hit the ruined dais with a final, definitive crash, its maw landing a mere foot from Alistar's broken body.
Silence.
The only sound was the whisper of the wind returning, timidly exploring the new ruin. Alistar lay in a pool of worm ichor and his own blood, breathing in ragged, shallow gasps. He was alive. He had outlasted it.
It took him nearly an hour to move. His regeneration, pushed beyond all limits, worked with agonizing slowness. When he could finally stand, he was a shuffling wreck, leaning heavily on his spear like a crutch. The shaft was cracked, the point chipped and bent.
He looked across the devastation. The altar was a field of rubble. The worm was a mountain of cooling flesh. And there, near the edge, was a flicker of movement.
Cassian was alive.
Alistar shuffled towards him, each step a minor victory. The scion of House Vor was propped against a chunk of black stone, his legs twisted at unnatural angles. The glorious violet light was gone from his eyes, leaving them dull and human. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, and the wound in his side from Alistar's spear had reopened, staining his stolen legionnaire uniform a deep, ugly crimson.
He looked up as Alistar's shadow fell over him. A weak, bitter smile touched his lips.
"You… you are the most tenacious… cockroach I have ever… had the misfortune to meet," he rasped, each word a struggle.
Alistar stood over him, leaning on his spear. He felt no triumph. Only a vast, echoing emptiness. "You played your part well," Alistar said, his voice hoarse. "The tormented idealist. I never suspected."
"Of course you didn't," Cassian coughed, a spray of blood accompanying the sound. "You see logic. Cunning. You don't see… the heart. Or the lack thereof. You were the perfect tool. I just… I didn't account for the tool having a will of its own. Or being quite so… difficult to break."
"Why tell me all this?" Alistar asked. "The family history. The heresy. Why not just kill me quietly?"
"Pride," Cassian whispered, his eyes losing focus for a moment before sharpening again. "A fatal flaw, I'm told. I wanted you to know… who it was that outplayed you. I wanted you to die… understanding the magnitude of the player you were pitted against. A last courtesy… from a higher caste." He laughed, a wet, gurgling sound. "It seems I was… premature."
Alistar looked at the ruin around them. The dead slaves, the dead soldiers, the dead monster. All for one man's ambition. He understood it, in a way. The feral will to grasp power, to climb out of the pit by any means necessary. It was a language he spoke fluently.
"They framed your family?" Alistar asked, not out of compassion, but a need to complete the data set. To understand the shape of the illusion.
Cassian's head lolled back against the stone. "The rising houses… they feared our knowledge. Our methods were… untamed. Unapproved. They called it dark. Heretical. They came in the night. My father… my mother… my sisters…" He closed his eyes, a single tear tracing a clean path through the grime on his cheek. "I was away. Studying. I came home to… ashes. I have been alone ever since. No friends. No family. Just a name to avenge. A legacy to rebuild." He opened his eyes and looked at Alistar, a strange clarity in his dying gaze. "You… you know what it is to be alone, don't you? To have nothing. To be nothing. To have to carve your place in the world with your own two hands, because no one will give it to you."
Alistar was silent. He saw the police station vault. The sterile cold. The bench in the pristine square. The empty cube in Sector Seven. He saw a lifetime of being a smudge on a clean landscape.
"Yes," he said, the word simple and true.
A strange understanding passed between them, there on the mountain of the dead. Not forgiveness. Not camaraderie. But a recognition. Two different kinds of monsters, forged in different crucibles, but born of the same fundamental desolation.
Cassian's breathing grew shallower. The light was fading from his eyes. "It seems… my legacy… ends here. On this… godsforsaken rock." He looked up at Alistar, a final, flicker of his old arrogance returning. "Don't… don't suppose you'd let me live? We could… rule this new world… together."
Alistar looked down at him, his pale face impassive. "No."
Cassian managed another weak, bloody smile. "No. I didn't think so." He sighed, a long, rattling exhalation. "A pity. It would have been… glorious."
Alistar tightened his grip on the spear. It was the only mercy he had to give, and the only justice. He raised the cracked shaft.
"Goodbye, Cassian," he said.
With the last of his strength, he drove the spear down. It was not a violent thrust, but a precise, final one. The point entered Cassian's heart cleanly. The scion of House Vor jolted once, his body arching off the stone. Then, he went still. The last vestige of tension left his face, leaving behind only the peaceful emptiness of death.
Alistar stood over the body for a long moment, the wind tugging at his torn clothes. The grinding stone had finally stopped. All the variables had been resolved.
He looked down at the dead noble, the architect of this nightmare, his final and most formidable opponent.
"Goodbye, my friend," he whispered to the empty air. The word felt strange on his tongue, but in that moment, it was the only one that fit.
A chime, cold and resonant as a bell from another dimension, sounded in the depths of his consciousness, devoid of all emotion.
[You have slain an Ascended human.]
The world around him—the blood, the sand, the colossal corpse of the worm, the body of Cassian—began to waver, to lose its substance, like a dream dissolving at the edge of wakefulness.
[Wake up, Alistar. Your nightmare is over.]
The ruins of the Altar of the Fallen Sun faded into a blinding, featureless white.
[Prepare for appraisal…]