The Blasted Lands.
Everyone was looking up.
The orcs stopped swinging their axes. The demons lowered the claws they had been about to bring down. The black dragons spread their wing membranes and hovered motionless in the air.
Turalyon held his sword aloft, Holy Light burning along the blade, but he did not bring it down. Alleria still had her bowstring drawn, her arrow poised at her fingertips, yet she had forgotten to loose it. Danath stood covered in blood, the curse on his lips only halfway spoken. Khadgar had just canceled his Polymorph. Kurdran's gryphon forgot to flap its wings and began falling from the sky, forcing the dwarf to curse and yank the reins back up.
There was a shining white dot in the heavens.
It looked like a person.
Behind him, four meteors were falling.
They were too massive.
Like entire mountains, entire cliffs, entire stretches of land had been torn from the heavens and hurled downward, blotting out the sky above the Blasted Lands.
They burned as they fell, dragging platinum-white tails of flame behind them, burning through the clouds, burning through the air, burning through everything that dared stand in their path.
They were descending.
It looked slow.
Slow enough that it felt as though the entire world had stopped breathing.
Before the Dark Portal stood a gray-white orc, his left arm replaced with a bladed fist.
He stared fixedly at that white dot in the sky, as though trying to carve the figure's appearance into his memory forever.
Then he turned around and walked into the Dark Portal.
The orc army broke.
The green-skinned madmen who moments ago had been trampling over the corpses of their own comrades in their mad charge forward were now throwing away their weapons, turning around, and desperately scrambling back toward the massive green rift of the Dark Portal.
People were shoved to the ground, trampled underfoot, swallowed by the tide of bodies behind them.
Chaos erupted before the Dark Portal. Pushing, trampling, screaming.
The black dragons scattered. They flew in every direction, climbing higher and higher into the sky, fleeing toward anywhere that would take them farther away from the thing descending from above.
Sabellian had vanished long ago. The whelps beat their wings frantically, desperately fleeing from the falling catastrophe overhead.
The demons did not run.
The creatures pouring forth from the Legion portals, beings born of the Twisting Nether, merely stood there and looked up, their eyes blazing with fel fire as they admired the scene.
They had no need to flee.
Death merely meant returning to the Twisting Nether until another master summoned them again.
They only wanted to witness how many living beings this beautiful spectacle would destroy.
Across the mountains and plains, everyone watched helplessly as the meteors crashed down one after another behind the orc formation.
The first meteor fell.
The earth jumped once.
In that instant, the entire crust of the Blasted Lands seemed to be lifted from below by a gigantic hand, then dropped again, every fissure across the land exploding open at the same moment.
White light swallowed everything.
The shockwave burst outward from the impact point in every direction, hurling away the orcs farther from the blast, grinding those directly beneath the meteor into dust, even shaking the massive pillars of the Dark Portal itself.
The second meteor crashed down.
The earth jumped again.
The crater already blasted open by the first impact was smashed deeper and wider still.
The rocks vaporized under the collision. The shockwave caught up to the fleeing orcs, throwing them to the ground, and then the second wave followed behind it, crushing them into the soil.
The third meteor fell.
The edges of the crater began collapsing inward. Broken stone tumbled into the abyss, igniting from the lingering heat before even reaching the bottom, turning into countless tiny shooting stars.
The pillars of the Dark Portal trembled violently. The green rift shrank inward like a burned eye desperately trying to close itself shut.
Those orcs who had not managed to escape through the gate in time were blasted away, overturned, and pulverized into bloody paste by the close-range shockwaves.
The orc army—
That endless green tide which, only an hour ago, had been pouring out of the Dark Portal like an unstoppable flood, a force so vast it inspired despair—
Had now become nothing more than scorched corpses carpeting the ground and scattered remnants fleeing in panic.
At least a third of them were left behind forever on that land that had been smashed into a gigantic crater.
Even the distant Sons of Lothar were knocked to the ground by the sweeping shockwaves.
The fourth time...
The fourth meteor never fell.
Allen lost consciousness in Vereesa Windrunner's arms.
The fourth meteor stopped high in the sky.
It hung there, beneath the clouds, suspended at the very center of the sky it had burned open.
Then it began to crack apart.
Like flower petals withering away.
Fragments peeled off its surface, turning into countless tiny burning streaks of starlight that drifted down little by little across the ruined land below, over the heads of the fleeing orcs, over the remains of the Dark Portal.
Each drop of starlight that touched the ground burst into a tiny flare of fire, a puff of smoke, a little flower blooming upon the scorched earth.
Although Allen had lost consciousness, he still remained suspended in the sky, held aloft by white light as it slowly lowered him to the ground.
Vereesa held him in her arms as she looked at the enormous smoking crater left behind by the three meteors.
The crater was too vast.
Large enough to contain all of Nethergarde Keep.
The edges of the crater had been vitrified into dark-red cliffs glowing with embers, while molten lava still flowed across the bottom, not yet cooled into stone.
Those orcs who had once driven them to despair, who had once surged forward like an endless tide, had been reduced to nothing more than scattered blackened remains around the edge of the crater, so burned that they no longer resembled bodies at all.
The Dark Portal still stood, but its pillars were covered in cracks, and the green gateway itself had vanished.
The Dark Portal had closed.
From the endless ranks of the Alliance army behind them, someone let out the first cheer.
Then came the second.
The third.
The tenth.
The hundredth.
The cries merged into a tidal wave of sound that rolled from one end of the battlefield to the other, erupting from the throats of exhausted soldiers, bursting from the chests of knights kneeling against their swords, spilling from the cracked lips of archers slumped behind their shields.
Some were crying.
Some were laughing.
Some knelt to kiss the scorched earth soaked with blood.
Some tore off their helmets and hurled them into the sky.
They had won.
The orcs had reopened the Dark Portal, and in barely a single day, they had been driven back through it once again.
That green, evil enemy that forever coveted their homeland had once more been sealed away on the other side of the gate.
The white dot in the sky was slowly descending.
Light carried him downward, like a sacred relic being gently lowered, like a weary bird returning to its nest, like a dream that had fallen from the heavens but had not yet fully touched the ground.
People could finally see clearly—
There were two figures.
A man in white robes, cradled in the arms of a silver-haired high elf. His head rested against her shoulder, one arm hanging limply at his side, his eyes closed, traces of fading white light still lingering upon his eyelashes.
Alleria had the sharpest eyes.
Before anyone else could even react, her dragonhawk had already shot into the sky, piercing through the drifting starlight as it sped toward the two descending figures.
She reached out and pulled both her younger sister and the unfamiliar man onto the dragonhawk's back.
By the time the dragonhawk landed, Khadgar was already rushing forward.
He shoved through the crowd, pushing aside the soldiers trying to gather around them, his white hair whipping wildly in the wind.
He rushed to the unconscious man in Vereesa's arms, seized his wrist, and turned it over.
Three wave-like marks.
Silver-white. Faint. Like birthmarks. Like some ancient seal.
They had not been there before.
He remembered clearly.
Back in that tavern in Duskwood, he had grabbed this same hand, turned over this same wrist, and there had been nothing there.
Perfectly clean.
It really... was him.
But the scene I saw of him saving the Sons of Lothar... wasn't this one at all!
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