The fight ground on, relentless and merciless, until the very concept of a garden had been erased from existence. What had once been a sanctuary of manicured beauty was now a wasteland of apocalyptic proportions.
The lawn had been plowed into a hellish field of craters, scorched furrows, and deep trenches carved by magical discharge. The remaining trees stood as blackened, twisted stumps, their leaves incinerated mid-fall.
The decorative pond was gone, evaporated or drained away, leaving behind nothing but a desiccated pit lined with cracked, blood-stained clay.
Acrid smoke rose from a hundred small fires that fed on the scattered debris, creating a choking haze that blurred the line between earth and sky.
In the center of this devastation, the two men stood face to face, two dying stars refusing to collapse. They were drenched, not in water, but in a thick, copper-smelling slurry of their own blood.
