Chapter 67: The Covenant of Flame and Frost
A thunderclap split the heavens, not from nature—but from unity.
The skies above the battlefield no longer belonged to dragons.
They belonged to Emissaries.
Light blazed from Jean Luther's sword as she ascended like a star reborn. Behind her, the world's final hope surged—a coalition not born of trust, but of necessity.
Beside her flew Karen, the Emissary of Thunder, her stormhawk Raigen shrieking defiance into the storm. But even they were not alone in the sky now.
From the blazing frontlines of the Iron Empire, wreathed in crimson flame, soared Seraphine Durnstahl, daughter of the Iron Empress and bearer of the Flame. Her aura roared like a furnace unbound, and in her wake, wings of fire carved paths through dragonspawn.
> "The fire of my house does not yield," Seraphine declared, flames wreathing her twin sabers.
From the opposite edge of the world came a colder power—glimmering, graceful, and merciless. A surge of frost blanketed the battlefield as Ilyana Veyr, the Emissary of Ice, descended on a glacier-forged beast of ancient origin. With every breath, winter itself answered her call.
Where Seraphine burned through the tide, Ilyana froze entire legions in place—together shaping the battlefield like sculptors of nature's extremes.
Then came the unnatural.
From the veiled shadows between life and death stepped Vaelros the Hollow, not an emissary of the gods—but something else. He held in his skeletal hand a broken black egg, pulsing with abyssal energy, a relic no mortal was ever meant to wield. Tendrils of living shadow spilled from the cracks like whispers of the void.
And when he raised it to the sky, the battlefield darkened for a heartbeat.
A massive, spectral dragon of shadow and silence coiled above him—born of the egg's corruption.
> "You wanted a war of gods and monsters," Vaelros murmured, half-mad, half-ecstatic. "Then watch what the Hollow brings."
No one trusted him. Not even his own. But on this day, even the Hollow fought against Antares—for if the world ended, there would be no one left to fear him.
Emissaries gathered—those known and unknown.
The Emissary of Blight, mounted on a withered griffin whose talons decayed the air.
The Emissary of Tides, her trident trailing moonlit water even across the sky.
The Emissary of Beasts, riding a chimera of claw and fang that howled like all wild things at once.
And still others, emerging from every continent and god-forged shrine, drawn by Jean's light.
This was no alliance.
This was a covenant.
One forged in silence, blood, and desperation—bound by fate and the will to fight against the end.
And above them all—on wings of molten gold—Antares rose, his ancient eye narrowed not with rage… but with interest.
> "So the light finally calls its children," he thundered. "Then come, Emissaries… and perish."
The war to decide the fate of the world had begun.
And this was only its first dawn.
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