Kaz's was focused on his simple rhythm of labor. The thunk of the hatchet biting into dead wood. The crisp, cold air of the Deadzone. The familiar, comforting presence of Miro a hundred yards away, a constant feeling. Kaz, stacked log by log. Just a few more, and the fire would last through the night.
He never heard the sound as there was no warning nor shift in the air.
One moment he was bending to pick up a split log. The next, an unimaginable force erupted from the center of his abdomen. It wasn't pain at first, just a deafening hollow crunch, a sound that came from his own body.
Kaz looked down.
There, right in the center of his torso, was a perfectly clean hole the size of a dinner plate. He could see the splintered wood on the ground behind him through the void where his stomach and spice used to be.
His legs instantly gave out. He collapsed onto the damp earth, the world seemed to tilt on its own axis. The hatchet slipped form his numb fingers.
From the shimmering air beside him, a man materialized. Lean, clad in ghostly mesh with a cold expression. The assassin, Syarhey, didn't even take a glance at his work. He was already scanning the treeline looking for his real target.
A roar tore throught he forest. It was an otherwordly sound, like the shriek of a dying star.
The colossal dragon erupted form the canopy, his star scales blazing with a light they hadn't shown before. His great, luminous eyes fixed on Kaz's broken form, a dark red puddle of blood below him. The sound that escaped him was not a roar, but a shattered wail.
Kaz's vision was tunneling, the gray sky darkening at the edges. He could feel the cold of the earth seeping into his core. He used the last molecule of air in what was left of his lungs, pushing it out in a soft, breathy whisper, meant for his friend and his friend alone.
"I... Love you..."
The light in Miro's eye broke. Shattering into a million fragments of despair.
Miro's world had just ended in front of his eyes. Now it was time to end the world of those who had taken Kaz away from him.
Janos threw [Moon's Aegle], a shimmering dome of defense. Miro's tail, moving faster than light, simply passed right through it. The barrier shattered like glass, and Janos vanished into a fine red mist.
Larysa had calculated a thousand trajectories, her vision locking into a perceived weak spot on Miro's neck. She wasn't even able to move. A single glance from the Dragon was enough to leave her system undone. Her brain was unable to process what she had just witnessed in those slit pupils. Her entire body gave out in seconds.
Syahrey, tried to phase out and become intangible. It didn't matter. Miro's jaws closed around the space he occupied. No blood has splattered, no scream was let out. There was a silent negation of his existence as the jaws closed.
In the span of a single heartbeat, the Drift Police's finest soldiers were gone.
But it didn't matter. It was already too late.
Miro coiled his immense body around the small broken form of the boy. He lowered his head, nuzzling against Kaz's cold cheek, a gesture they had shared a thousand times. A single, shimmering tear, fell from his eye and sizzled on the blood-soaked earth. He had lost his entire world.
He remembered his times as a clumsy hatchling, tripping over his own tail, and the sound of the boy's laughter, a sound that scared away the shadows. He remembered cold nights, curled in a tiny hut, the steady heartbeat of Kaz against his side, the only proof this universe wasn't completely hostile.
He remembered the first time Kaz had called him "Miro," the affection in those two syllables warmer than the summer heat. He remembered shared meals of canned meat and glowing fungi, and long conversations under the twisted auroras, where a human boy had poured his entire heat out to a creature the world called a monster.
Kaz had not been just a caretaker. He had been the anchor. The anchor that held Miro in place, the artist that painted color onto Miro's monochrome existence. The reason a dragon like him had chosen to remain in a single, crumbling clearing for eight long years.
"You were my world," the thought echord in the void of Miro's mind. "This planet, these stars... You were the only thing in it I truly cared about."
"To accept this? To let this be the end? It's a flaw. It's a mistake in the timeline I need to correct. The innate instincts of a Drifter, the imperative to kill, they all mean nothing." A new purpose crystallized withing him.
"No." Miro hummed, the single world vibrating through the air. "I deny this. If the laws of reality say you're gone, then I'll be reality's author."
He wouldn't let their world for two end here. He would create a new one, being the foundation for it.