"Come!"
Every drop responded to his command.
Dried stains embedded in ancient stones, microscopic traces lingering in the frozen air, the deep, frozen pools where countless warriors had fallen, they all trembled.
Then they turned.
Veins of crimson light erupted from the ground. They sliced through the blackened terrain like exposed arteries. The Devourer’s shadows swarmed to smother them, but the bloodlight burned with a tyrannical will, refusing to be suppressed.
The two domains collided in earnest.
The sky fractured.
Space twisted violently where the devouring abyss met the crushing authority.
Tendrils of pure darkness surged upward in a silent, raging scream, intending to tear apart the enemy.
The crimson pressure descended like a judgment, methodical and absolute.
Yaro remained at the heart of his domain, arms spread, his cloak billowing in a storm of his own making. His eyes glowed a deep, regal red.
"Within my sovereignty," his voice carried, calm and clear across the clashing realities, "all kneels before me."
At his declaration, the Crimson Sovereignty churned.
The blood-light rising from the ground swirled above him, quickly condensed into a cloud of crimson droplets.
He flung his hand down.
"[Crimson Rain]"
The droplets shot forward like crimson hail, screaming toward the dark wall of the dome.
The Night Devourer didn’t just sit there waiting to die either.
At its command, the section of the dome facing the attack moved.
It flowed like living oil, forming a thick, rippling shield.
The blood-needles slammed into it and dissolved, devoured by the darkness. But each one that vanished made the shield flicker, even just for a fraction of a second.
Then the Night Devourer struck back.
[Void Lashings]
Tendrils of pure shadow, thicker than tree trunks, lashed out from its surface. They ignored the air, the light, even the blood-mist, aiming straight for Yaro’s glowing form.
"Hmph." Yaro clenched his fist. "Crimson Spires!"
The blood-soaked ground beneath the dome’s edge erupted.
In an instant, jagged spears of crystallized blood shot up, trying to skewer the attacking tendrils.
The shadows recoiled, twisted, and struck from another angle.
For a while, it was a stalemate.
The darkness devoured, the blood crushed and reformed.
The boundary between them was a storm of annihilation, spears of blood shattered into mist, lashes of void dissolved into sparks of negation.
Neither could push the other back.
But as the exchange stretched on, Yaro’s advantage in focus began to tell.
His attacks were controlled and precise, his smaller domain a perfectly efficient engine of war. The Night Devourer’s vast dome, however, was a liability. Maintaining it drained power, and worse, it had to split its attention.
Because inside its own domain, small points of resistance persisted.
They were mere weak prey.
But the Night Devourer felt a sharp, instinctive warning from two of them.
One had an unsettling control over the darkness within its own domain, bending shadows in ways that should have been impossible for a weak insect. The other carried a cold, searing ember that felt like it could burn something deeper than flesh, something like a soul. Which meant they had the potential to harm it, severely in fact. They were like parasites in its bloodstream, demanding focus it couldn’t afford to give.
The strain became a disadvantage. The vast dome began to waver under the relentless, pinpoint pressure of the Crimson Sovereignty.
Left with no choice, the Night Devourer made a decision. It could not fight a war on two fronts like this.
With a soundless, violent convulsion, its domain contracted.
The perfect black hemisphere shuddered, then violently shrank in on itself. It pulled away from the edges of the pass, condensing into a denser, darker sphere half its original size. The pressure against Yaro’s Crimson Sovereignty lessened as the Devourer gathered its power into a tighter, more defensible form.
The retreat came with a cost.
As the dome shrank, it expelled everything it had not yet fully consumed.
Figures tumbled out of the retreating wall of darkness, dumped onto the bloody, churned snow like discarded refuse.
Barbarians. Hunters from all three tribes. Monsters
They were sprawled across the ground: some unconscious, their minds addled by the void; some dead, bodies pale and hollowed as if frozen from the inside out; others disoriented, stumbling and clutching their heads, blinking in the stark reality outside the dome.
They had been the bait, the distractions inside the beast’s belly. Now, they were just casualties littering the field between the two clashing powers. The Night Devourer had sacrificed its territory and its prey to consolidate its strength.
The real fight, now freed from distractions, was about to intensify.
"Hmm..." Yaro stared at the newly contracted, denser dome. His eyes flicked to the litter of bodies and dazed warriors now sprawled across the snow. A waste of resources, but irrelevant.
He waved a dismissive hand.
The blood mist seeping from his domain surged forward. It swept over the fallen like a crimson tide. Where it touched the unconscious or the disoriented, it seeped into mouths and nostrils, into wounds. It worked fast and mercilessly, draining the remaining life and vitality from everything it touched, fueling Yaro’s power further.
The dead were left as desiccated husks; the living were simply added to the count of the dead.
"That thing is smart indeed," he mused aloud.
It knew why it was losing. But it hadn’t expelled the parasite festering inside it. It probably feared that spitting out that particular thorn might hand an advantage directly to Yaro.
And Yaro knew exactly who that parasite was.
He could feel the faint, familiar pulse through the blood contract that bound him, a subtle signature hidden inside the dome.
’Master...’
Of course, it was him!
Moreover, this entire hunt, this confrontation, was another layer of his master’s brilliant, ruthless design. The tribes as disposable bait, Yaro himself as the blunt instrument to soften the beast, and his master, hidden within the darkness itself, ready to strike at the perfect moment.
A test, a trap, and a harvesting operation all in one.
A perfect plan.