People don't gasp in unison when they witness horror.
They stutter.
They forget how to breathe.
Their minds abort halfway through a thought, as if the very act of understanding would snap something vital inside them.
That was the reaction that rippled through the worlds.
Not wonder.
Not awe.
A cold, instinctive, spine-twisting recoil.
The kind of mind-blown where the mind feels like it's being peeled apart.
And for the first time in a long stretch of ages… the great beings watching Ethan felt something they had not tasted in centuries.
Fear.
Raw.
Potent.
Ancestral.
...
The Dragon Empire's world-rift flared open like the slit of a monstrous eye. Fafnir the Tyrant Dragon, whose mere heartbeat shook continents, had been seated as usual, on his great throne, watching Ethan's earlier battles with mild, almost bored curiosity.
His cold pupils constricted.
A dragon's instincts are older than history. Their bodies remember the ancient predators that once hunted the universe.
