“Is that the best you have?” Janel taunted.

“Janel—” But Khored stopped. Perhaps he’d sensed she had a plan. Perhaps he just couldn’t imagine she’d be this stupid otherwise.

Then a look of horror crossed the god’s face. Khored vanished.

Why…?

Morios flew right at her, opened his maw, and swallowed the top of the spire, her along with it.

Janel screamed as the dragon’s dark, suffocating throat constricted around her, an act that would have crushed her without Tyentso’s protections.

And she should have known; he had razors on the inside too.

She unsheathed a dagger and plunged it into one side, jamming the blade between two razor ridges to gain her a handhold. Morios might have even felt the act, the way one feels it when a rice grain lodges in one’s throat the wrong way, because he continued trying to swallow. Janel held on for dear life.

If she was wrong, she was about to find out what the Afterlife was like as a permanent citizen.

She took a deep breath and concentrated. Not on attacking Morios. Not on the dragon at all. She shoved all thoughts of Morios from her mind because she now dwelt in a playground where intentions mattered, where concepts mattered, where purposeful violence and accidental violence were not equivalent. Not so different in some ways from the Afterlife’s metaphors, where the realm of the spiritual and mental triumphed over the physical.

Instead of thinking about Morios, or her odds, Janel did something she’d always done by instinct and always done well.

Janel created fire.

In tremendous quantity.

The survivors were gathered at Lake Jorat’s shoreline, too numb to do much more than see to the injured and watch as one of the wonders of the world disintegrated.

Only a small few understood the philosophical underpinnings of the battle going on above the city. Destruction on this scale fed Khored’s power.

And yet, Khored seemed incapable of defeating the dragon who had destroyed his city, Atrine, quite possibly beyond all rebuilding.

But even as some watched in horror and others observed with massive academic interest, the spectators noticed the dragon pull back from the fighting, looking surprised.

He shook his head, as if trying to clear it. Then Morios began clawing at his neck, tearing giant rents in the metal there. He keened to shake the stones as he dug deeper.

The giant tears in Morios’s neck turned red. The color rapidly brightened to yellow and then to bright white. Metal melted, sizzling down to the lake water.

Abruptly, Morios’s neck and head separated from his body. Both pieces fell, the huge body landing across Atrine, and the head dropping past the city, over the falls. It tumbled all the way down the immense, failing dam’s enormous height.

Only a few noticed the small red dot, person-sized, that also fell into the water.

Those few were enough.

62: END GAMES