The sky split, not with thunder, but with fire.
A shriek ripped through the clouds like a hot blade tearing silk. It was not the cry of an eagle. It was sharper. Wilder. Older. A falcon's scream, seething with heat and wrath. A shape dropped from the atmosphere flames trailing behind its wings, so large it eclipsed the sun.
Not a bird of prey.
But a hunter of Gods.
The falcon dove.
Wreathed in fire, the creature plummeted like a falling star, the light of its descent igniting the clouds. Its eyes were twin embers, and its wings beat like the breath of a furnace. Wind screamed beneath it. The battlefield froze not out of awe, but survival instinct.
FWOOOOOOM.
The falcon struck.
Thor's hammer halted mid-swing. A wave of heat and pressure erupted outward from the point of impact, a column of flame so violent it threw sand and shattered bone into the sky. Thor went flying, crashing through the ranks of his own army, Valkyrie wings shattered. Bodies spiraled. Screams filled the air. More were knocked from the air by the heat. Creatures ignited mid-flight, screaming as they fell in streaks of fire.
The falcon flared its wings, standing taller than siege towers, eyes locked on the thunder god.
Anubis blinked through blood and ash, lips curled into a grin.
"You took your damn time."
The falcon's scream answered, "I was in slumber."
Ra had arrived.
Across the battlefield, Thor dragged himself from the rubble, beard scorched, eyes wild with fury. Lightning streamed off him like rivers of light, crackling along his arms, snapping through the air. The ground around him blackened as he rose.
"You think the two of you can stand against me?"
He slammed his hammer into the dirt.
The lightning answered.
It tore across the battlefield in blinding arcs. It vaporized a front line of goblins. It split a stone barricade in half. It surged through the legs of a human spearman who didn't even have time to scream before his body crumpled into steaming flesh.
Anubis growled and charged, claws gouging the earth beneath him. Ra's falcon form beat its wings once just once and took to the air, circling above them like a god of flame and fury. The battlefield bent around the clash, as if the very war knew to shift away.
Anubis launched into Thor.
They collided and magic sprang to life like a hurricane.
Anubis's claws raked across Thor's side, tearing furrows in his armor. Thor grunted, caught the jackal mid-strike, and hurled him aside with a roar. Anubis skidded through a mound of corpses, rose spitting blood, and charged again.
Above them, Ra dove.
His talons opened and caught Thor's shoulders as the falcon smashed into him from the sky. Fire and lightning collided in a thunderous burst. Thor shouted and struck upward with his hammer—catching Ra's wing. A trail of scorched feathers and golden light arced into the air, raining across the battlefield like flaming shrapnel.
A human soldier caught one in the chest and went up in flames. Another was flung backward from the shockwave, his spine snapped mid-air.
The battle was bending around them.
Valkyries wheeled higher, abandoning tight dive formations. Even their pride bent to survival. Mortal troops scattered wide, giving the gods space not out of reverence, but fear. Every blow these beings exchanged carved craters into the earth. Every counterattack was a weapon of mass destruction.
Thor lunged.
His hammer arced toward Anubis, lightning blazing along its edge. Anubis ducked under it, slashing with one claw and biting deep into Thor's side. Blood spilled.
Ra dove again—wings aflame, talons catching Thor's leg and yanking him sideways. The thunder god roared and threw a bolt of lightning that tore the falcon's feathers into a spiral of gold and fire.
Still, Ra did not fall.
He flared his wings and banked upward, circling above like a divine hawk, then turned in a tight loop and came down again, faster, hotter, his whole body glowing with sunfire. This time, he slammed into Thor's back just as Anubis pounced from the front.
The thunder god was crushed between them slammed down into the sand hard enough to leave a crater ten feet deep.
A shockwave followed.
Sand turned to glass. A line of charging foot soldiers on both sides was swallowed in the blast. Half were shredded by debris. The others were hurled away like dolls, landing limp and broken.
Thor didn't stay down.
He pushed up through the rubble, screaming, and his lightning turned solid—columns of it rising from his shoulders, cascading from his skin like wings of energy. He turned and roared, the sound shaking the stormclouds above.
Then he launched upward, hammer raised, meeting Ra in mid-air.
They collided again, fire and thunder locked in a cataclysm of screaming wind and elemental fury. The force knocked Anubis back, his claws digging furrows into the glassed sand.
The battlefield could barely keep pace.
Entire formations were turned to ash by misfired lightning. A squad of Valkyries collided mid-flight avoiding Ra's descent. Men screamed beneath falling rock. Creatures on both sides, unworthy to be in the gods' presence, were crushed underfoot or incinerated outright.
War, now, was the wreckage left behind.
And still the three creatures of destruction and magic fought.
***
The battlefield heaved like a dying beast.
Chunks of sandstone flew as Ra, still in falcon form, slammed into Thor with a burning screech that split the clouds. Thunder cracked in response. Below, mortals and immortals scrambled, caught between titans.
Morpheus ignored it all—until a blast of electricity tore the ridge beside him, forcing both him and Helga to leap away mid-strike.
He hit the ground in a roll and came up with a spear of obsidian glass drawn from the sand, flinging it in a single motion. Helga turned her shoulder, letting it graze her pauldron, and answered by flicking a glowing hand toward him. The ground beneath Morpheus erupted—he vaulted back just as thick vines, grown from magic-infused seeds that sap the energy from a being, reached for his legs.
"Still twisting healing into a weapon," Morpheus said, breath shallow as he skidded along the sand. "Only you could take a gift for mending and turn it into a scalpel for war."
Helga's silver mask glinted, cracked now along the cheek. Beneath it, her voice was calm. "And only you could take empathy and carve it out of yourself like it never existed."
Lightning struck a shattered obelisk behind her Ra and Thor collided again above, their power sending down another shockwave. The sand lifted in a cyclone, blinding for a moment. Both Helga and Morpheus braced, shielding themselves with hastily cast shield charms.
"Do you regret it yet?" Morpheus asked through the haze, his voice low, cutting. "Do you regret joining my enemies?"
Helga stepped forward. Her next spell bloomed like petals razor-sharp lotus tendrils shaped from hardened light and plant. They whipped out and he dodged, leaping to higher ground as she followed.
"I never joined your enemies," she said, her tone unreadable.
Morpheus narrowed his eyes. "Cryptic to the end."
Another crash. A boulder, thrown by Anubis, arced through the sky and slammed into the steps they had just crossed. It shattered the stone bridge between them. Morpheus reached out, transfiguring a patch of sand mid-air into spiraling steps. He dashed up as Helga sprinted below, matching his angle fighting across uneven terrain, between blasts of godlike fury.
She struck upward. Healing magic laced with decay. A wound-and-seal technique, meant to overload his system with contradictory signals. Morpheus grunted as it clipped his ribs. His flesh tried to close and rot at once.
He bit through the pain and sent a jagged knife of wind down at her in response. It cracked her armor across the chest.
"You cared about this world once," Helga muttered, casting a wall of hardened blood cells that shattered the wind blade. "You cared about people."
"I cared about victory!"
"No," she said, leaping toward him again. "You cared about me!"
They clashed mid-air sandstone steps dissolving beneath them. Their spells illuminated the chaos around them: Thor grappling with Ra now, fire on thunder. Anubis tore through a formation of winged infantry, the ground splitting behind him.
A Valkyrie's body slammed into the ground nearby, fried by stray lightning.
Morpheus's foot connected with Helga's shoulder—she twisted from the impact and used the momentum to plant a spell beneath him. The ground exploded, sending him careening.
Still, he landed like a shadow. And when he rose, the look in his eyes was final.
"You could've left," he said. "You should have."
She stared at him across the crater. "I couldn't. I made a promise."
"To who?" he asked.
But she didn't answer. Her next spell lit the sky.