Radeon felt the thunder lock on. The sound in his ears went thin and high.
The air around him thickened until every breath scraped. The strike had chosen.
'Body alone and I am soot,' he thought.
Radeon wrenched it toward the nearest stand of twisted maple trees at the edge of the field.
Their grey trunks clawed at the sky like they were begging to be hit in his place.
"This place should keep me alive."
Wind tore at his face as he dove. Each flap of the glider chameleon skin snapped with static.
The plan was ugly and simple. The thunder wanted him.
Fine. He would meet it with wood and root and sap under his boots.
Let the trees drink some of the fury. Let the ground carry the rest away.
Radeon kicked free of the glider harness and hit the ground hard enough to rattle his teeth.
The frame skidded across the roots. He grabbed it with his good hand and heaved.
Obsidian wings and cloth tumbled away through the underbrush. Out of the lightning's kill circle.
The blood ruby at his right shoulder stump pulsed once. Hungry.
He dug his fingers under the fused flesh and ripped it free. Fat and skin tore. Blood slid down his ribs.
Radeon hurled the crystal after the glider. If heaven wanted him then it could strike bare meat.
He sucked a breath through his ruined tongue and pulled silk from his belt pouch
He began to weave with one hand. Over, under, around the highest branches and the low hanging leaves.
Each loop tightened into an intricate web meant to blunt the bolt, to choke the current into narrow paths and bleed off a sliver of its fury.
He did not forget the needles. He drove them into the ground in a rough ring, then wrapped himself in silk until there was barely skin left to see.
Forged light shields rose at his call. He did not grip them.
He let them hang in the silk lattice above his head and along the trunk behind his back.
One. Three. Seven. Eleven. They shivered against one another with a thin ringing like nervous teeth.
That was all his one hand and frayed nerves could loot before the sky finished drawing breath.
Radeon looked up through the trembling shields and the clawing branches and hoped the trees were feeling generous today.
Then the heavenly pressure truly descended. It hit like an invisible mountain.
His jaw slammed shut so hard his teeth chimed. His knees buckled.
His face met the cold dirt and ground grit into his empty socket.
"I. Can't. Fucking. Breath."
He forced qi through his chest just to make his lungs contract.
Radeon tried twitching his finger once, then went dead.
His one good arm might as well have been carved from stone.
"Damn. This physique is useless."
A red glow swelled at the edge of his vision. He forced his head a fraction to the side.
The men below the gilded core fared no better than Radeon.
Heaven's might struck like a hammer. Many died where they stood, their skulls caving in with a wet crack.
The sky itself had taken offense and come down to collect its due.
Above the broken peak of Ashlime Crag, the blood core had outgrown its cage.
It loomed now. Vast. Almost the size of a grand cathedral.
Its surface crawled with faces that were not quite faces.
Eyes too wide. Mouths split too far.
They laughed. Not with sound. With scraping.
With a metal rasp that clawed along bone and set muscles locking all across the field.
Men dropped their weapons. Some fell like puppets whose strings had been cut.
Laughter rattled in Radeon's skull until his one good eye wept blood. Crimson leaked from his nose onto the dirt.
The thing that had been a blood core reached higher.
Its glow thickened until the air around it looked like congealed wine.
It had already eaten hundreds of gilded cores and thousands of the weaker ranks beneath them.
Blood. Flesh. Breath. Now it wanted more. Bodies tore free of the ground.
First the dead ones. Their armored visages wrenched up with a sound like roots being ripped from wet soil.
Their limbs sagged as they drifted toward the swollen orb.
Those still fighting tried to brace and only managed to drag furrows as their boots left the earth.
Ships groaned as the pull caught them. Hulls creaked. Runes spat sparks.
One sky barge tilted nose first and began to slide toward the laughing red mass above.
Men clung to railings and rigging. Some let go too late and rose screaming with the rest.
The orb laughed heartily with each murder. Clearly mocking life for birthing such inferior flesh.
Through the ringing in his skull Radeon felt the shift first. The pattern of screams changed. Less hate. More fear.
Gilded cores on both sides flared at once. Righteous auras of pale gold. Cult light dark as clotted wine.
Lines of their power crawled across the ground toward one another.
Old enemies feeding the same circle. It was not the time for war.
Not with a living calamity roaring in their faces.
Sword beams rose from the fused array. Dozens at first. Then hundreds. Each one carried both colors.
The sword light even stung Radeon's good eye. They crossed the sky in a snarling grid before every line bent inward toward the swollen orb.
The combined cut fell. For a heartbeat a single crimson white stroke split even the torrenting wind.
Rain and dust hung in the air like beads on a string. Sound vanished.
The blood core stopped laughing. It hung there. Vast and ugly and silent. Its pull faltered.
Bodies hung mid flight as if the world had forgotten which way was down.
Even heaven seemed to hold its breath. The world rested on the edge of that silence.
Radeon felt the hair on his arms rise again and knew the pause was no mercy.
Only a count before something worse.
It came. High above, the eyes swimming in the swollen blood orb shifted.
They stopped staring at the sky and turned down toward the men below.
Lids began to twitch.
One face. Then ten. Then a hundred. Tiny spasms that looked too close to laughter.
Each warped set of eyes narrowed. Amusement. Bliss.
As if the storm of sword light and sacrifice had been nothing more than a little stage play set up for its pleasure.
An audience of one watching the cast strain and bleed for the privilege of being noticed.