The Last Stand

==Loose Ends==
===Severa, Kakariko, Dawn 4===
Severa was carefully keeping herself hidden, firmly entrenched in the idea that this wasn’t her war to fight. Given that she was hundreds of years and thousands of experiences apart from her own birth era, it was an easy argument to win against herself.
(Severa, it’s time.) A tired, strained voice entered Severa’s mind. It was not her own thoughts. She knew the psychic touch of Lia, and felt the distress. Severa was being pulled away, teleported by Lia. It was slow, like watching herself disintegrate into the wind. For a moment she thought of ways to resist, seeing that Lia was not bringing along Davus. The original plan had been to have Davus speak with Lia, but he had found his own path to follow in the endless journey to his redemption.
(My mind has already begun moving on. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen beyond the borders of this universe into others. I can hear Ithan’s voice, all of them.)
Severa was completely teleported to Lia now, finding her hanging out with Hathor by the crater of Death Mountain. There was a shimmering bubble around them guarding against outside elements. It likely wouldn’t last long with the state Lia was in.
“I think you need to know.” Severa began. Lia, previously staring at the ground, looked up with eyes that were completely black. It startled Severa, but she stayed focused on her thoughts. “The place you are going, Sirius finds a way to bridge to it from his library. I don’t know if this will be with your help or not, but your job will be to guide me when I get there.” Lia didn’t need to ask any clarifying questions. She was well enough versed in crossing timelines.
(This isn’t your most important fight. Your most important fight is against the shadow that your ancestry is casting over the great sea. I’ve seen it. It’s where your mother seeks to break out of her cell. It is the one point in history where she could be successful, and you need to help defeat her.) Severa had a sense that Lia would be giving her this kind of advice. Certainly Lia had to have expected Severa to already know these things. Lia preempted Severa’s questioning when she decided to speak aloud instead of telepathically.
“I’m going to wherever my brother went soon. Stay with me until then, and when I go, I’ll send you where you need to be.” Lia smiled, and Severa felt a deep calm wash over her.
“Okay, I’ll wait with you.”
===Ayala, Outside Kakariko, Dawn 4===
Between the long trek to the woods, the need to stop to pick up her men and Kokage and the flight against the strange weather and the beast that came with it, it had taken Ayala and company longer than expected to reach the Ordon Spring. So long that it was little surprised that Lia’s group had gotten there first. That much didn’t bother Ayala though, after all getting the blessing was all that mattered. What did bother her however was showing a just a second to late teleport out with them. With nothing left to do the group turned around and started the trek to Old Kakariko hoping to at least catch up with the others before they missed the finally battle.
Ayala’s attitude was clearly soured most of the way. She tried to hide it but as someone who so clearly wore her heart on her sleeve as she did her frustration was easy to see. The fact of which only proved to frustrate her more. It wasn’t until Crim convinced her they should make camp for the night while in friendly territory did her mood finally improve. Oberon figured it was the food that did the trick.
It was a different story entirely when the company finally rose in the hours before first light. She seemed to become more distant the closer they got the Kakariko as if her mind was somewhere else, but when prodded she could only say that she felt the sage coin in her armor was pulling her.
That suddenly changed when Kakariko finally came into view and the sun first started to reach over the rocky horizon. In the distance they could make out some calamity over the graveyard. Ayala instinctively darted towards the battle at a speed too great for the others to keep up with save Oberon who simply clinged onto her armor.
Arriving at the graveyard offered only further confusion; the Winged Light Medallion was shimmering with an explosive intensity but before was merely a strange ominous angelic and some other Light Warriors fighting what seemed to be a pure storm. It wasn’t until Oberon, who recognized the figure at the center of the torrent, spoke a single word did everything become clear, “...Tempest...”
Ayala reached for her spear but it there was no point. The light of the sage coin’s power erupted consuming her in a dawn-light luminescence. Her mind went blank.
Lia, Dawn 4
Lia never stopped learning the most painful lesson life wanted for her. You plan, you stay dedicated, focused on a singular task. But in the end, the whims of fate could derail any plan. It was a lesson she was tired of learning.
She felt the presence of Severa next to her. She couldn’t see anything of the living world anymore. Her body remained in it but her mind was already crossing the chasm to wherever Ithan waited. Where her whole family waited. The cosmic background of life that they all drew power from, the place Sirius desperately wanted to reach, the place Severa was destined to protect.
“Severa, I wanted to help win this fight, but I don’t think it matters. Grem’s forces are incapable of holding this land even if victorious today. They will just be another blip in history’s tide. I wish the least suffering on the world, but no matter what happens now, you are needed more in the future.” Lia grasped her hands around Severa’s. Their budding friendship was barely hours old, but she felt an eternal bond.
“We’ll meet again.” Severa said, smiling. Lia could see it without seeing it. Returning the smile, she gave in fully to the process her body was undergoing. It wasn’t flashy. There were no explosions, no tears in space and time, bursts of light, or declarations of eternal power. Lia simply faded into the wind, leaving Severa alone on the hillside.
Severa, Dawn 4
Severa felt like her body was crying without her mind. Tears running down each cheek, but mentally she was entirely detached. How could a stranger elicit such a response? A question she would surely have been able to answer after so many glimpses into the what-ifs of the multiverse, and yet the knowledge eluded her.
A strong wind kicked up, carrying the sandy echoes of Lia into the distance. Severa felt as if the gust was piercing through her soul, lifting her out of the world and to some other plane. Something that was uninterested in the present day.
As Lia had said, she was needed elsewhere. She gave in completely, letting the winds of time move her to the future, to an ocean riddled with discord, one where the tides brought the end of the world.
==Desperation==
===The Hand of Order, Kakariko Graveyard, Dawn Four===
The axe's descent barely cleared the Yeti's armored helm before a streak of sizzling light struck its flat, sending the blow askew. The heavy crescent blade sheared through a grasping, cadaverous hand and buried deep into the soil. Snarling, Hothnight turned his simian scowl in the direction of the graveyard's far end to find a familiar figure leaned casually against the rough, scarred bark of a twisted tree.
"Hell may have to wait a spell for Lord Eridanus, Hothnight," Chamdar said as he took a deliberate step out from beneath the gnarled boughs with his staff gripped loosely in his right hand, its runes still faintly aglow. "So I'll have to see if I might populate it with a worthier soul."
He raised the rod of holm oak, scored around its carvings, and the runes flashed bright again. An aura of light emanated from it, washing across the battlefield. Even the Yeti beast that was Tempest reeled from it, but it was the skeletal fingers that released Polaris for an instant as they glowed like red embers, smoke curling between their fingers. Then the light faded once more to the gray black of pre-dawn's gloom, and Chamdar stepped down onto the lower earth, on a level with friend and foe alike.
Above, Death Mountain's titanic slopes trembled as a violent spume of infernal red roared up from the chasm, and lit even the lower battlefield in its glare. And anon, he could sense the fuliginous heart of the Feared. And before him...
"It has been a very long time since the Primordial harbingers all shared the same air," he said as he took several steps toward the beast towering above him. As he strode forward several steps, he had his pocket watch in his free hand with its silver cartouche open. He pressed his thumb into the center of its face and the luminous runes flashing across it until they all blinked, flashing white and gold and white and gold. Then the display went dead. "So Hothnight, for old time's sake?"
Seven Consecrated Clerics - Concealed Grotto
Seven holy men sat with their legs crossed, forming a seven-pointed star atop the low plinth at the heart of their secret sanctum. They were robed in every color of the spectrum, from dark shades to bright ones, gilt and lavender, cinnabar and cerulean, viridian and saffron, and one all in black. They were hunched, all leaned forward with their hoods drawn as unintelligible words tumbled forth from their tongues in perfect unison. The Scion's tome lay open between them. A vile thing, that book. Its pages were sheaves of cured skin. Its words scrawled in blood.
Those words shimmered with light, growing ever brighter as the incantation rolled forth unbroken. Even as the mountain shivered and shook, coating them and the book alike in dust from the cavernous ceiling, they spoke the words that no mortal should have known.
One by one, they raised their right arms, holding them aloft above the pages of the book. One by one, their left arms came up as well, each with a silver blade inscribed with the holy triangles along the cheek, just above the bone hilts.
Their incantation never ceased, even when the blades laid open their wrists and washed the pages of the text in fresh lifeblood to mingle with the old. The dead.
The pages erupted in varicolored light, filling the cavernous sanctum and spilling forth into the night beyond, carrying on its blastwave the sounds of their song even as their physical forms were washed away. The mountain shook again, but this time from within, rather than above. High up its slope, the stony crag exploded outward in a font of polychromatic power. The multi-hued light washed down the slopes like an avalanche, flowing into the graveyard, the force of it slamming full into the wizard and taking him, seemingly, from his feet. Then it reared, as a wave breaking against a levee, and rebounded back upon itself, swirling around the drowning diviner.
Then as though water forced upward by some pressure it rose, swirling madly, killing where it touched and bringing new life whence it passed, it rose into the night.
Wings of white flame punched out through the torrent to either side, spreading so wide as to almost span the graveyard from one end to the other. The whorling spout of light came apart, falling in a torrent like water but burning away on the air like embers. All the while, the voices sang through the gray.
The Arbiter - Kakariko Graveyard
Ten feet at least he loomed from hem to hood. Though the wind roared through the natural alcove in which the Sheikah's ancient graveyard had been placed, the snowy white robes did not so much as flutter. Chest, shoulders, and forearms were swathed in gold armor chased with silver, cuirass, pauldrons, and vambraces that shone with holy light, inscribed with runes. Within the hood, no face could be gleaned, for it was at once too dark and too radiant.
The High Celestial raised his right arm, and in it he bore a titanic hammer, its squarish, silver-gold head also inscribed with runes that gleamed incandescent white.
"Rending your soul was never the solution. No." The words hung on the air like shimmering bells and brazen horns. "No, not for one such as you. A delay only. But now, Tempest Hothnight, I mean to rid Hyrule of you--and the Primordials--forevermore."
He brought the hammer down.
===Tempest, Kakariko Graveyard, Dawn of the Fourth Day===
Tempest cringed as the harsh white light spilled over the horizon, but it stalled. It was not the crimson crescendo of dawn, but a single radiant figure in the cool, metallic light of the immortal.
"No, not for one such as you. A delay only. But now, Tempest Hothnight, I mean to rid Hyrule of you--and the Primordials--forevermore."
“You,” Tempest grimaced, lowering his raised paws to stare up at the avatar. “…It’s always you.”
With primate howl he swung the weight of his Axe up from Polaris’s neck and charged skyward towards Taliesin. But with a wave of his hand, the consecrated cleric knocked Ginnungagap from his clutch. It crashed into the ground below with a clang, and reverted to the crescent longsword Aurgelmir.
Unfazed, Tempest slapped with his other palm into the Scion’s face, and managed to grip Taliesin under his shimmering cowl. A piercing cry erupted, not from the celestial’s mouth, but its core; and like a choir of angels suddenly burst forth in song, Tempest was thrown back through the air to slam into the cliffside surrounding the royal tomb.
Before the dust and smoke cleared from Tempest’s impact, the ground began to shake. The undead writhing from the graves below began to look upward as one and tremble with the quaking earth, their arms pleading upward. They wore the tattered and deteriorating robes, crowns, and jewels of nobility interred. From among them, the black blade Aurgelmir leapt to the air, and soared lightning quick into the crater left by Tempest.
When it stopped in midair, an ashen gray hand snapped through the smoke to seize it, and the black marshal longcoat of the Hated Raiment emerged from behind it. Taden Horwendil, returned to his human form, took his eyes off the specter levitating above to focus on the aristocratic zombi now coalescing below him.
“You can chain me down in this age and the next, O mighty one,” Taden quipped, his undying smirk curling across his lip as he looked out over his minions. “Rend my hide unto this mortal rock forevermore, no doubt as Fate would have it. But will the Goddess forgive so easily the rending of her dynasty’s remains?”
"Riddle me this, O wise one!" He held his longsword out along a diagonal, as if to lead a calvary charge. “Is it still regicide if the royals are already dead?"
Taden could no longer control the skies, but the necrotic blade that had once split his own soul still gave him its power over Hylia's dead and buried. Raising Aurgelmir aloft, the zombi hoard gathered before him raised the numb body of Polaris over their heads, and began ripping at his scaly flesh with their blackened fingers even as they rushed him towards the entrance of the mausoleum at Taden's back.
===Taden Horwendil, Kakariko Graveyard, Dawn 4===
The Tempest’s blade clashed with the Arbiter’s hammer, and the two repelled each other in midair strike to strike, until Taden rounded on his and hammerstrike and held the high ground hovering above him.
“You were born of the Light, old foe, I am prior to it. You, a human who devoted his mortal soul to a goddesshead for an incidental extension of its duration, cannot endure the lich of that empty, unwarming void in the husk of a carcass that came from down from Snowhead’s peak. You can burn against the darkness, for now, but I am this Realm’s future, because I am its past.”
Taden flew in close to slap both his hands together and made to crush Chamdar between his palms, and the old sage dived low through the air to avoid it, but the thunderwave from his calamitous clap smashed him to the ground. The upturned soil of the mausoleum curtilage smeared his pale beard, and he looked up at the towering Yeti with eyes clouded by rainsoaked hair over his eyes.
“For too long, I have abided in this Realm side by side with the mortals who would draw and quarter my power,” Taden grimaced, looking from Chamdar to Polaris’s stunned body. “As well as those who would loot the body and keep its treasures as their own.”
As he spoke, the Yeti form dissipated further, but it seemed incompletely so. Taden’s eyes flared round and bright in the storming dark, but the white face of a Terminian male stared out at them with a wild mane of wolfwan hair twisting in the wind. In one head, he held the curved, slender longsword Aurgelmir, and in the other, he held the Maskmaker’s Knife. So too from his lip two thick fangs curved up towards the eyes, one long, one short.
“So let it be called justice that I would dispel you with the blade with which you sundered me,” he called out in his low, thundering voice. “And let it be called vengeance that I bid you watch me gut a dying fish with the knife in which he made me prisoner.”
Turning swiftly from Chamdar, who still knelt prone amongst the grave plots, Taden flung his hunting knife toward Polaris, held supine against a tombstone by a writhing mass of undead hands, his chest exposed at the center, as lightning crashed overhead and splintered in the wet eyes of his royal zombi horde.
===Mirra Lemeris, Kakariko Village, Dawn 4===
Together, Mirra and Darrel had fought their way to the town square, through an unending onslaught of Lord Grem’s men. The Twili had broken the outer Kakariko gates and trudged up its cliffside stairs, making their way for the inner gate that held off the upper reaches of Death Mountain, and the catacombs of Goron City where the last survivors had fled. Henceforth, Hyrule would be a nation in hiding, under the asylum of the Goron people.
Bringing the Daybreak Sword down in the dirt at her feet, Mirra sent a blinding shockwave of Light out in all directions, throwing the Twili back into the smoldering dust of the collapsing township. Darrel paired up at her back and readied his shield and chain against their return.
“O Knight,” she called to him over her shoulder, “it is not up to me who should emerge victorious in the strife of the Twilight and the Daybreak.”
As though a sudden silence and stillness fell over the battlefield, Mirra spun around to hurl the hilt of the Daybreak Sword towards Darrel, and he caught it in one free hand.
“It’s all up to you now.”
As the sword landed in his hand, a beam of light traced from Mirra’s heart to its crossguard, and seemed to bless Darrel with shining feathers of gold along his forearms and shoulders.
In the distance, closer to the main gates of the town, Grem’s dark form loomed over the advancing troops. Even at this distance, his red eyes glared from under his helmet like oil lamps. Watching the Sunrise Knight before she returned to battle, Mirra could see that his gleaming eyes coolly met none other than the General’s.
Without another word said between them, Mirra turned from him and tore into the scattered Twili soldiers, two wings of molten flame spreading from her back as she charged into them with her own shortsword unsheathed, crying out, “Din damn you all for not knowing how to finish a war you’ve already won!”
===Polaris Eridanus, Kakariko Village, Dawn of the 4th===
The morning sun still struggled to crack the blackened facade of the distant horizon and the General turned Hand was dying. Polaris opened his eyes and saw nothing neither far nor near. A vast expanse spread out before him and yet, it was empty. Wherever he was, whatever the place, he felt that he wasn’t welcome. He was a stranger in an even stranger land. So, he would not die today. Death wasn’t something to be feared for one who’d already met its embrace. No, he had no fear of dying, but somehow after spending some measure of time here, he knew it wouldn’t be allowed. Some cosmic force, be it they of the Triune or She of the Sands, someone, somewhere in the distance nudged him back towards existence. Back towards the battle.
Cold dead fingers scratched and clawed at his armored back, trying to work their way down to the soft flesh underneath. Taden was talking. Again. There was another force present now as well, interesting. Polaris’ eyes shot open and he wrenched his body hard to the side, letting go of magic that held his armor in place at the same time, it fell from him in a roiling wave of red ice that either froze or burned the zombies closest to him. Polaris snatched the silver blade from the air by the hilt milliseconds before it would have struck the tombstone. In the same motion, Polaris brought the blade to his own flesh, dragging it smoothly across his forearm. Bleeding freely, the General raised his arm high with blooding flowing down and dripping off of his elbow he muttered something under his breath.
The blood siphoned from the Generals wound and swirled around him in a cyclone very much like one The Hated himself may have wrought. Standing in the middle of the maelstrom with his eyes gleaming, Eridanus sliced the air in front of him horizontally with his old silver dagger and expelled his crimson whirlwind. His blood shot out in all directions, spattering a large knot of Hyrule long since dead nobles. Rising to his feet, Polaris stared down the horde which now surrounded him. 
”Subdue any undead whom I have not marked. Drag them to their graves if you must, it is time we lay them to rest once more.”
The crowd dispersed and Polaris strode forward. He spun the Maskmakers Knife in his palm, gripping it backwards in his left hand even as Winters Tide took its true hand-and-a-half form in his right. One of Seishi’s spawn was on the outskirts of the battle, she had undergone some sort of transformation, but even so, all of the Ma carried a certain, unmistakeable air of acrimony. Polaris nodded in her direction without breaking stride.
”Ever have you been the loquacious one Taden, but tonight I see you with a horde of undead and a gaggle of assassins and I start to wonder if the great Hothnight is naught but a scared little boy at the core.”
Polaris drove headlong into the lines of Twili assassins who had moved to intercept him, cutting through them with devastating precision. Their odd colored blood caked his blades and flecked his red and silver streaked scales as he dispatched the without further comment.
In what seemed mere moments, Polaris found himself face to face with Taden.
”Shall we?”
The Terminian swung wildly with Aurgelmir, looking to end his foe in one fell swoop. With a cold snap, Polaris brought Winters Tide up, catching the blow on the flat of his blade and sliding in close. Driving his shoulder hard into the sword arm of Horwendil at the joint. With a growl, Taden pushed back, neither giving ground. The temperatures plummeted as the two fought for position and cold rolled out from them in sheets and waves, incapacitating the remaining assassins and causing the joints of the shambling royals to lock up and send their skeletons tumbling to the earth. Pushing off, Taden spun away causing Polaris, who lashed out with the Maskmakers Knife at that same instant, to stumble backwards and just barely slice the hem of that damnable cloak.
Driving forward, Polaris lashed out with blow after blow, sacrificing form for volume. The song of their blades rang out across the graveyard. Blue Fire and Red Ice. Back and forth. It filled the air until that which once was Chamdar rose, and in doing so, he drew Taden’s attention for the briefest of moments. Polaris leapt forward, tackling him to the ground he landed astride his foe, and chest heaving, he raised Winters Tide high above his head, Red Ice exploded along the length of the blade as he moved. His frigid Crimson aura burning bright in his eyes.
===The Sunrise Knight, Kakariko Village, Dawn Four===
“It’s all up to you now.”
Darrel returned Morning's Edge to the sheath at his hip as Mirra placed the Daybreak Sword in his fist and thrust upon him her blessing. Gleaming feathers of golden light sprouted up and down his arms from chain-bound wrists to thick shoulders, and as they flared with the light of a new day, he felt their effect as the passing moments seemed to slow all around him. Shouts of alarm pierced through the pall, but they seemed comically stretched. Twili soldiers jostled and shoved one another to confront him as he stared at the blade he held aloft and marveled in its power, which filled him with a heat and fury orders of magnitude greater than Morning's Edge.
Their attacks felt clumsy. Slow. Whatever Mirra had bestowed upon him made him not only move but perceive the world with greater speed and alacrity. He walked through his assailants, shuffling his step to the side to avoid a spear thrust. He didn't even impale the offender in retribution, but slapped him with the flat of the Daybreak Sword's radiant blade. The burst of white-gold light which erupted on contact sent the soldier sprawling back into a cluster of his compatriots and they all went down in a heap.
Further ahead, just inside the Outer Gate, Lord Grem laid about him with his titanic, two-sided battleaxe. He had no thought for self-preservation as he advanced, for his armor was impervious. Any defender who drew near enough to strike could only dismay as their blades skittered off the dark steel. Grem's reprisal was swift each time, but almost casual as he dispatched his attackers, as though he gave it no more thought than brushing aside some biting fly. Remembering how brief and decisive their confrontation at the lake had been, Darrel suspected that Grem really did give it no more thought than that.
"Sunrise Knight," Grem called out across the dusty, blood-soaked span between them as the fighting seemed to open up to permit them an opening. "You survived at the lake by luck and happenstance only; do you think that sword will change the outcome this time?"
The armored behemoth stalked forward, more lithe in his motions than one so encumbered should have been. He hefted his great axe as he came, and the Twili soldiers who had gathered about him retreated, finding other targets on the field so as not to place themselves within reach of those bloody black crescent-moon blades.
"Probably not," Darrel replied honestly as he took several steps forward and hefted the shield, Morning's Herald, bound to his left forearm. The point of the Daybreak Sword he trailed through the dirt at his side. "But it's what we have."
You will have to find your way without them.
It shouldn't have been him. He was a soldier, not a hero. It should have been Polaris, or Kae, maybe Seishi. Any one of them would have been better suited to the task, each chosen in their own ways, so that destiny seemed to swirl around them. Darrel was just a broken wolf, wounded and feral, who had spent too much of his life holding on to hate.
There is strength in that too, my love. Helen's voice echoed in his mind, resonating from the shield on his arm and the sword resting idle in its scabbard. Strength in the knowledge of who and what you truly are. What you should be.
"Let us have it done, then," Grem declared as he raised the axe high. "I will end this conflict here and now. When it is done and I take what is mine, when I stand elevated above all else in this world, you will know at last the true depths of your folly."
He charged, and Darrel rushed to meet him. The axe came around with devastating speed, making a half-arc aimed at Darrel's neck and upper chest. The blow should have separated his head and shoulders from the rest of his body, but this time he moved with greater speed and he threw his shield up over his head even as crouched and slid, letting his momentum carry him under the blow. The dark steel struck off the face of Morning's Herald with a shower of sparks, but the shield held. Inside Grem's guard for only an instant, Darrel drove the point of the Daybreak Sword up into the rounded swell of the black breastplate.
The burst of opposing energies, the blazing light of dawn and the dark force of thousands of souls held enslaved within the steel, threw them apart. Darrel was sent careening backwards through the air, spiraling until he landed hard on his back, sliding across the dirt and gravel several more paces, kicking up a cloud of dust.
"I grow weary of your ceaseless struggling, Sunrise Knight!" Grem growled as the haze on the air began to settle. "Your new sword will do you no more good than the old one. I am two steps away from godhood!"
"You'll need to make it past me to take those last two steps, Lord Grem," Darrel said as he climbed back to his feet. And when I fall, you will face another. And another. You will face the Daybreak Alliance one and all before you set foot in the Sacred Realm.
"So be it," Grem countered. His axe was raised again and Darrel could feel the perverse power coming off of it in waves. "I once told you the difference between you and I, Sunrise Knight. Sword or no sword, that has not changed. No weapon will save you when you limit yourself. You could be so much more!"
He rushed, and again Darrel raced forward to meet his charge. Again, instead of putting the full force of his strength into an attack, Darrel cut in mid-stride and leaped sideways, barely in time to avoid being cleft in twain by the downward stroke. The crescent-blade buried itself in the dirt and Darrel flicked at Grem with the Daybreak Sword. The blazing steel glanced off the armor and there was another eruption of golden heat and cold black that pushed them apart, though this time Darrel kept his feet. Grem's counterstroke came quickly. Too quickly. The axe caught his shield full in the center and he was thrown from his feet. This time, with the power of Mirra's blessing, he twisted adroitly in the air and landed in a crouch.
"And you should be so much less," Darrel said as he rose again. Grem snarled as he turned toward him and advanced a step, only then recognizing the trailers of dark smoke rising off of his armor where the Daybreak Sword had struck. Back on his feet again, Darrel felt as though he could hear the screams of the damned in those wisps of black.
Seeming to realize the significance in that instant, Grem abandoned words entirely and rushed with all of his ferocity at the Sunrise Knight, loosing a feral howl that rent the air itself.
A wolfish smile came to the Sunrise Knight's lips as he hurled himself forward to meet the Lord General's charge.
===Davus, Morning 4===
Davus heard their voices in his mind. Lia and Severa’s departing words as each one moved on to the next part of their journey. Lia, beyond the borders that only mortals truly know, and Severa to a distant future where the unending battle of light and dark persisted. He felt the magnetic pull of his own fate towards the world Severa had gone to. He knew she would likely live a thousand lives in other worlds before even getting there. Meanwhile he would live just one, waiting out the years until he would be called upon to stand against the dark. The tides of discord were crashing all around him, it was only a matter of time now.
Now Davus watched the legendary Eridanus, and the equally legendary but far more annoying Hothnight. It was clear that he had no role in this showdown, and the greater concern now was Grem. Davus had always found aggressors like Grem to be the most blind of all. They told more lies to themselves than any other, exuded a confidence that had no solid ground beneath it. Grem sought something Davus perceived as a burden with no reward. It was ridiculous, having the power of a god. Davus’ own creator Ratnis believed himself a god. Then he created his own children, as gods do, and they proved to have inherited all of his cunning. Ratnis was now locked away, and Davus had ascended beyond what his creator was capable of. Being a god caged you in, determined you to be the target of those looking for what lies beyond the gods.
Davus knew who and what Grem was. Just another foolish soon to be corpse that was reaching further than its grasp would allow. Having made his way from the polaris and taden deathmatch to the Grem arena, Davus readied himself and directed his amplified voice to Darrel.
“My memory spans too many years to remember what things we have seen of each other, but in this moment you shall have my strength!” Davus shouted to the charging Darrel. He extended out both arms, once again taking on his conductors stance, calling down a single lightning strike. Were Davus in battle against Darrel, and if the man had a weaker constitution, it would have torn him apart. More than just lightning, it contained the fury and chaos that composed Davus himself. Carefully controlled and directed, it would only magnify and enhance Darrel’s natural ability.
===Davus, The Final Fight Super Deluxe Edition, Day Whatever===
Davus was rocking from from calm collected and controlled to rash decision as fast as the lightning he called from the sky. A schizophrenic, erratic, irrational ping ponging of approaches - to anyone else. For Davus it was the epitome of true inner balance. It was a concept he believed lost on many. Yes they outwardly understood that ‘balance’ was to bring one’s extremes into harmony, but often that resulted in a melding of them all into a quiet anger, a facade of balance where one continued to act as they always had, only with a smug soft tone to their words.
Davus thought it much more like two sides that could never become one, instead allowing them equal stage time, fully absorbing himself into the rage until it was time to recede and let the calm take him again. Never both, and never permanently staying with just one.
Then again, maybe he was completely wrong and everything he believed was just errant misguided misinterpretation. At least he had the confidence to avoid overconfidence. Hopefully.
“I guess I’ve been trying to act like something I’m not.” He mused to himself. “Granting my power to others does not have to supplant….what the hell am I doing talking to myself at at time like this?” Davus shook his head and rushed forward to Grem, deciding it was time to get his hands dirty directly. With each step he took, lightning surged down into him, channeled outward into billions of sparks, sparks that defied their composition, shimmering and solidifying into glass. The shards sprayed across Grem, blocking any sights he might have on Davus as the living lightning conduit rushed him. As he closed the final inches between them, the glass fragments turned back into sparks, coalescing around Davus fist as it collided with Grems chest, interrupting the charge between Darrel and Grem. Darrel swiftly moved out of the way as the blow struck, and Grem moved but a few inches backwards. Grem turned his attention slowly to Davus.
“I guess it’s four steps from godhood now?” Davus said, smirking at Grem, who turned his attention to Davus. The would-be god had a pleasing mixture of irritation and amusement on his face.
“I know who you are, Fulmen.” Grem swung his axe, and Davus exploded outward into a thousand shards, reforming after the axe swung through him. “You can’t use your coward tactics forever. You are as foolish as the rest.”
“Maybe you should be watching something else.” Davus said, his smirk growing ever wider. For an instant, Grem’s expression changed to one of shock, barely perceptible. Darrel landed ever more strikes against Grem’s armor, more souls leaking out. “You need to practice the omnipotent part of being a god. Would you like some help?” Davus taunted while continuing to warp around, avoiding strikes from Grem’s axe.
===Mirra Lemeris, Kakariko Village, Dawn 4===
As Darrel and Davus clashed with Lord Grem, a thin line of pink sunlight dotted the horizon over acres of Kakariko’s rubble. The light cast a sharp glow around a crumbled wall, until its light became brighter, red as flame, and roaring into an explosion as Mirra charged through it into battle on the back of her Bulbo mount, Hathor.
As the two warriors held Grem engaged, she crashed down on his exposed flank from the opposite direction and cratered the ground next to him, knocking the brute prone even as Darrel and Davus had time to dodge back.
“If we can only break that armor,” Mirra shouted over the raging winds surrounding Davus’s blasts, “we will tear that false immortality from his flesh.”
Hathor charged ahead and Mirra nocked one Light Arrow in her holy bow, letting it fly before Grem had a chance to stand. He stumbled forward again, and now Davus rained down bolts of lightning from the air over his head, glaring down from the high ground of the lip of the wide crater.
“What do you think we’ve been trying to do?” Davus called down; ever a familiar wit about him, though to Mirra it seemed she had known him only a while.
Mirra somersaulted from Hathor’s saddle at the same moment Darrel sprang down from the wreckage above. They flanked Grem on either side as he slowly rose up, resisting the pillars of lightning pouring down onto his shoulders from Davus with an act of sheer brazen will.
“I fear we will fall short if we do not have Polaris,” Darrel called over the dust and smoke of the burning crater, now positioned at Mirra’s back. Davus’s sustained attack gave out, and they were left with a smoldering Grem training his white hot eyes on them.
“The gods will deliver him in their time,” Mirra resolved. Dropping her bow into the ash, she lowered her helmet, unsheathed her shortsword, and charged toward the Twili General. “We must act now.”
“Mirra, no—!”
Before Darrel could grab her arm, Mirra lunged forward and slashed through the air, sending a blinding flash of light that stunned Grem for the moment she needed to tumble towards his side and slam the edge of her sword directly into the crease of his black gauntlet while he lowered his axehead on her.
With her feint, she caught the face of the axe, not the edge, but was blasted back to the far ridge of the crater by the dark energy it emitted, falling slack against the gray ashes and embers that coated the dirt. She winced and struggled to rise, one eye blotted shut with blood.
But as she looked up through her good eye, she saw the fruits of her strike: the pale, moonwhite hand of a Twili exposed where once the black gauntlet of a thousand souls had shielded it from the coming light. Grem’s left gauntlet lay in pieces on the ash at his feet.
She had cost herself time before she could return to the fight, but hoped she had given enough of it to her Allies to make it count.
==Acceptance==
===Taden Horwendil, Kakariko Graveyard, Dawn 4===
Taden reveled in the symmetry of their red and blue blows, glancing beams of Blue Fire off the General’s arcs of Red Ice. With a flourish, he swung his longsword through the air and it screamed with a whistling wing of Blue Fire down on the upraised gauntlets of Red Ice with which Polaris laid claim to his Knife. In a burst of their intermingled energies, each flew back from the other—Polaris to land deftly on his feet upon a low ridge, Taden knocked prone against an opposite dirt wall.
As he picked himself up, Taden glanced over his shoulder to the east, and saw the Realm’s internal sun beckoning just beneath the horizon, like a whale driving up to its breach. Taden could feel the warm winds of that rising tide on his brow, as it brushed the matted locks from his sunken eyes.
“Even in your new blessed form, you wait for your foe to rise before concluding the duel?” He brandished Aurgelmir again, standing upright to face Polaris, poised at the end of a low row of tombstones. “You above all should know that honor is a folly of the mortals, General…”
Taden charged headlong towards Polaris. “…Or are you mortal still?” He slashed downward.
Polaris merely sunk back into a squared off fighter’s stance, his fists expanded into rocks of Red Ice, his feet held firm to the ground by the same, utterly prepared to absorb the brunt of Taden’s blow.
But the Hated feinted, and from his right side Polaris found his foe striking sideways, even as the last of his Twili retainers lunged up from the shadows where he’d stood.
In a blink, Polaris thrashed one arm upward to blast the assassin back along the tombstone row, and with the other hand slammed the hilt of the Maskmaker’s Knife forward to bash Taden in the jaw, only unfolding his incarnadined hand to catch the Hated’s black blade with his own.
They locked eyes once again, pinned against one another. The Fire gleaming from behind Taden’s eyes was refracted in the icy blade inches from his face.
“You will come to regret the Hand that seized that Knife,” Taden chided, “if you did not already.”
Before either broke their grip on the other, the first full rays of red sun climbed over the billowing clouds of their dispersing storm. Like a flood of water coming over the walls of a dam, the sun’s light cascading from the towering clouds down to the slopes of Death Mountain and the village and its graveyard beyond.
“You think your duty, your divine mandate, was to destroy me?” Taden began to laugh. “To correct the cosmic imbalance that is I? Alas, General, you were supposed to see past me.”
While the Zora stayed cemented to his heavy armor, Taden finally levitated away from their deadlock, and began to ascend higher into the air. Around him, he could see the corpses revived by Aurgelmir’s Hate beginning to stumble and collapse, while those marked with Polaris’s blood magic merely seemed to stand still.
“As the customs of those who built this humble shrine would have it, this graveyard was built on the easternmost edge of Kakariko Village,” he began. “I learned much of this land’s lore inside the mind of your Ally, Lynn Annei.”
The simmering smoke of the battle in the village may still have been shrouded in darkness, but Light had come to Kakariko Graveyard.
“At last, my will to the death and discord of Hyrule has brought me here, to the final hour of this Interloper’s War, and as fate would have it, I find myself a Lieutenant in it,” he intoned. Sunlight finally pierced his hollow eyes, and lit the ends of his wolfwhite hair with gold.
“I realize now, it was not my fate to destroy the mortal Allies of Hylia, but to delay the Goddess’s anointed ones while the Interloper did.”
His fingers began to burn away at the flesh, leaving white bone to grasp the hilt of Aurgelmir, and around his bleak eyes there suddenly grew a blackened pallor. His face grew wan, his hair thinned but lengthened, and as if the sun returned time to Taden’s bones, all the ages of his existence seemed to weigh on him at once under the shining light of dawn.
And it was this weight he channeled into a final torrential strike, bringing his blade up inverted as if to impale his own gut, one last zephyr of subarctic air billowing from the coldest depths of his undying soul.
In a piercing tornado of ice and wind, Taden dropped on Polaris like a drill. But when the wind cleared, Polaris lowered his hands from his face, and saw the limp body of Taden drop to his knees on the far end of their row of graves. Aurgelmir protruded from his chest.
He smiled up at Polaris’s wide glare, black bile dribbling from his lips, then fell back on the earth and gasped once before his breathing stopped. His pale eyes hung wide open but faded into dullness, as the black bile slowly dripped over them. His sword sagged in his gut, but remained upright in the fresh corpse, held in place by the emblazoned Dusk Mail.
===The Arbiter, Kakariko Graveyard, Dawn Four===
He'd stood aside. This fight was not his fight, only what came after. Now the Hated lay supine, Aurgelmir jutting from his breathless middle whence he'd sheathed it. The icy light was fading from his open, sightless eyes and black, frothy spittle coated his lips and streaked each side of his face as it ran down. An end it seemed.
"He speaks some truth among his myriad lies, General," he spoke to the Left Hand, whom he had raised up. His gaze, concealed within the depths of his hood, turned toward the west. Toward the village. "The battle rages yet beyond the seclusion of this necropolis, and your strength must be added to that of your brothers and sisters in arms. Even now the Sunrise Knight and the Sacred Realm's Guardian do battle with the enemy alongside the Feared. This part did Horwendil speak true: you are needed there."
Polaris at last tore his eyes from the dying form of the ice wraith, Taden Hothnight, and peered up at him. No words were spoken, for none were needed. Raising his weapon and steeling himself, the Red Ice General departed that place of the dead to fight for the living.
And then they were alone, and the High Celestial loomed over the creature dying alone in the dirt.
"I'm afraid you will not escape me into another transitory death this time, Horwendil." Reaching down with his left hand even as his right gripped the mighty supernal hammer, he took hold of the hilt of Aurgelmir and, twisting it ungently, wrenched it free. He raised the blade before his face to regard it for a moment, then cast it aside. A tool only, one that had bought him time, sundering the soul of the Hated until he could reconstitute the creature and end him altogether. He no longer had need of it. He gestured with the left hand again, now free, and an amber aura took shape around the dying form as it raised up into the air. Sunlight poured over the hills into the graveyard, but this golden light shined brighter still.
He closed his fist and all of the gleaming golden light began to pour into the gut wound as though it were water sucked down through an open drain, filling it with healing energies. First there was nothing, but over the seconds the limbs began to twitch, then they thrashed. Then the arctic gleam returned to his eyes as the divine light tormented him, and a cry of agony ripped free of the Hated's lips.
"No you are returned to us, for a moment."
Hothnight struggled, but he was held fast. Daylight enveloped them, weakened him, and the Arbiter's strength surged. Wondrous strength, and terrible.
His left fist remained clenched at his side as he turned from his ancient foe to an opening amongst the headstones. He raised the hammer, which caught the slanted rays of dawn on its gleaming surface and seemed to ignite. Raising it, he brought it forward with strength and struck not the earth, not a grave marker, but the very air itself, the very knitted fabric of reality. The air shimmered and wavered but held fast, so he struck it again. This time cracks of black began to form, so he struck it again and they spread. One more blow broke the levy, and the shattered pieces fell away into a void of deepest emptiness. The void. The place between realms.
"No. No simple death for you this time, Horwendil. No subverting death to return and haunt us anew. No, you will float eternally in the abyss, and trouble no realm further."
Hothnight stared at the hole, his contemptuous sneer still painting his lupine visage. He opened his mouth to speak, some clever rebuke to be sure. A band of golden light sprang up around his mouth and wrapped around his head, gagging him before the words could form on his tongue. Still held aloft, floating above the earth in the Arbiter's power, Taden began to float toward the gateway.
No.
What you do here is an abomination.
Even against this creature, it cannot stand.
He turned from the Hated, from the gate. Three headstones, somehow moved as though reality itself had warped, to enclose him in a semi-circle. The markings upon those stones gleamed with varicolored light. Azure to his left. Emerald to his right. And bright Crimson directly before him.
He thought he would have more time.
"This is as it must be," he told his patronesses three, standing to his full height before their manifestations. It was a rare thing for them to show themselves in this way in the mortal realm. Reserved for only the most dire of circumstances.
Of which you are now one. It was the voice of Din, reading the thoughts in his head.
"I mean to put an end to this madness. This endless cycle of devastation and chaos."
You take by force and malefaction that which was not given.
You betray, deceive, and steal not for our ends, but your own vendettas. It cannot stand.
The punishment we visited upon the other will not do. So long as you stand as Scion you will stand as an example.
He meant to speak again, but before the words could leave his tongue the lights around the headstones built to radiance and he understood their intent. He had always known. But if he could do this one thing before the hammerstroke fell...
He turned and thrust his left hand toward the gate, and Taden's floating form shot forward across the intervening space.
Only to pass through regular air, the gate nowhere in sight. Dismayed, the Arbiter watched Hothnight slam into a stone marker and smash through it, tumbling to the earth. The High Celestial rounded back on the headstones only to find himself facing three pillars of light. No more words were spoken; they had made their verdict clear. The Arbiter had been judged and found guilty.
From the faces of the headstones erupted bars of light that struck him in the chest, enveloping him in an aura of many colors all shifting and swirling. He felt the power of the High Celestial draining from him in the fashion in which he'd taken it up. In an instant he was Chamdar Taliesin again, held fast in their grip, but it did not stop there. Power stolen could be regained, and power given could be revoked. He felt those streaks of light boring past the flesh, into the very heart of him. Rooted in place, he shook violently, feeling it all bleeding away.
But the agony of being torn down served only to conceal the pain of the curved silver blade sliding into his back, through the ribs, and punching out into the open air before his chest. He heard that frigid voice whisper in his ear.
"No simple death for you, Taliesin."
Hothnight gripped his left shoulder from behind as he twisted Aurgelmir in his gut with his right hand.
So close, the tricolored aura enveloped Hothnight as well as it built to incandescence around him. That silver blade, those fonts of light, he felt something break inside of him as he lost sight of the world.
When the light faded, the graveyard stood empty, the bare limbs of the trees swaying in a chill wind.
===Mirra Lemeris, Kakariko Village, Dawn 4===
”Get ready!”
Mirra cried out, charging forward as Grem prepared another swing of his broadsword. The wings of fire and light adorning her shoulders swooped down to form a Mirror Shield on her right arm. At the moment she shouted, she skidded down on one knee and slammed the chrome shield down into the sand, sending a shockwave of sound and light upward diagonally into Grem’s wide jaw.
The behemoth was blinded, and in that instant Darrel lunged overhead of Mirra to bash the Daybreak Sword into the side of Grem’s skull right as Davus arced three talons of lightning through the air to stun his limbs.
When Darrel’s strike connected, a great crack thundered from the apex of his black helm, and the titan rocked back—when his electrocuted legs gave out from under him, he crashed into the earth like a brick tower outfitted in full plate. A cloud of dust erupted in his wake, and for a moment Mirra lost sight of her Allies, the steadfast Soul knight and the hermetic Winged Light elemental, behind the veil of falling dirt and debris.
But with the Daybreak Sword in the grasp of the Sunrise Knight at last, she could sense them still. As if bound by invisible threads that connected them all and converged on the hilt of the Daybreak Sword, she felt each of their hearts beating alongside hers. Darrel’s tall stance began to glimmer through the smoke at her in a brilliant orange hue, and near him the hunched scowl of the redeemed thunder mage echoed toward her in deep purple. Like bells in the air, she felt the ringing Aura of the Daybreak Alliance emanating from the Sword, imbuing them all with its godlike gifts.
In the distance, she felt the radiance of yet another Ally, shining through the very hills and wreckage with a chilling crimson light, himself elevated to some new celestial height: the Red Ice General Polaris, now Hand of the Triune. She knew not the bargain he had struck, nor the burdens he’d accepted for his newfound power; but she knew to revere it.
“Even now, the Goddesses weave their threads among our fates, tethering us to the next life, and the next,” she reflected to herself in the moment’s quiet, only barely aware that her thoughts travelled to the minds her Allies three. “The sun sets on one world’s end, and rises on another’s beginning.”
With the Daybreak Aura around her, all the world seemed to slow. She saw the slowly shifting figures of Davus and Darrel raising their weapons and charging forward in the smoke behind her, and she felt the palpable void of fiendish will that was Grem’s husk lumbering upright in the dust beyond. The sky overhead slowly filled with the palest pink ringed with blue, as the night’s stars begin to fade back into the abyss under the rising sun’s reign. Finally, high above her head, she heard a piercing avian cry in the morning sky, and she lowered her white visor.
“Blasphemer! You interlope between the realms of Gods and Men,” Mirra announced, and in a sudden rush of wind a path cleared through the falling dust to reveal her to the Lord General. “So shall it be an army of Gods and Men who brings you down!”
As she leapt through the air, with a shrieking battlecry the arcane warbird Rukh soared underneath her, and swept the Aviatrix into the skies on wings of bronze and steel that carried her beyond the apex of Grem’s arm. Turning round at the far end of the Death Mountain cliffside, Rukh and Mirra returned with her Light Arrows drawn two at a time along a longbow of Ancient Hylian make strapped to the back of Rukh’s saddle.
She fired twice, then loosed a third at the spot where Grem now stood, readying a fourth and fifth to cover whoever moved in first of her three Allies now surrounding the monster.
But even as her arrows tore through the air, the hanging fog of dust suddenly cleared when Grem flung open a pair of long, black wings that had manifested from his back, slashing Mirra’s Light Arrows to the ground in two symmetrical waves of incandescent Dusk.
The blasphemer took to the air with a heavy, rushing torrent of dark wind beneath him, hovering in midair on the strength of his sorcery as much as his wing. He flew slower and lower than Mirra and Rukh, but he was fast enough to deftly roll out of the line of fire from their second volley of arrows.
“We’ve got to restrain him!” Mirra reached out with her thoughts, still acutely aware of the orange, indigo, and red auras beneath her, the colors of the dawn united in the Daybreak Alliance against the coming dark. With her own gold aura joined to theirs, she felt her words enter their minds, as well as a changing mental impression of her bird’s eye view appearing in each of their mind’s eye.
===The Sunrise Knight, Kakariko Village, Dawn Four===
We've got to restrain him!
The words were as the chime of temple bells in Darrel's mind, and full of urgent need as the aspirant ascendant took to the sky on wings of purest Dusk, roiling with black chaos. Darrel understood her fear as he looked on. They'd been giving Grem everything they had, but still he exercised powers that they could not anticipate and which changed everything. Mirra and Ruhk aloft should have been their shaved die, but instead they were forced to wing away as each flap of those mephitic pinions sent waves of Warplight racing toward the enormous rider on her enormous avian mount. The rain of her arrows slowed as they were forced into evasive maneuvers, the ponderous but inexorable Grem giving slow chase.
Lightning lashed from the sky above, slamming into the wings of inky mist only to dissipate into motes that gradually blinked out of existence. Still they struck and struck, hammering into the flying behemoth with enough force to slow his advance.
We will. Fulmen, keep up the barrage. Even if you can't break the wings or get through that armor, keep hammering away anyway. Mirra, keep his eyes drawn toward you.
And so they did. The rain of jagged, sizzling light picked up, slamming into the gliding Grem every couple of seconds with utter nondiscrimination. They pounded the unfurled wings of manifest madness, and coruscated with every bolt that found home upon the Twili's black armor. Bellowing in rage, Grem made to turn toward the sorcerer summoning that rain of crackling fire, only to be drawn around as arrows zipped past his visor or rebounded off of his darksteel.
Darrel had a new sense, a sense of his companions, even Davus though he had played no part in the founding of the Alliance, and he knew that reinforcement was on its way, girded in glistening red ice. They needed only hold out until they could tip the balance. Somehow even faced with the radiance of the Daybreak Sword, they could not bring Grem down.
Bring him down, my love, Helen whispered in his mind, away from the prying awareness of his Allies.
"Don't mind if I do..."
And with that he burst into sudden motion, racing across the riven earth as he let the chains around his left forearm unfurl, the gleaming spirit runes igniting in anticipation. Morning's Edge grew warm in the scabbard hanging off his left hip. But it was not the sword of souls that he bound to the chains, but the hilt of the radiant Daybreak Sword. To his surprise and awe, the Daybreak Sword joined to the spirit links as readily as had his own blade, forming a weapon at once familiar and new. Not the Horizon Lash. Aurora's Scourge.
Radiant with daylight, the blade soared free of his hand as he hurled it into the air trailing lengths of chain. The blade punched through one of the wings even as a bolt of lightning struck down hard on the other. The Dusk wing flickered and seemed to grow insubstantial as the shining point of steel passed through it, then wound itself around the pauldron on the same side. The links grew taut at the end of Darrel's wrist and with every fiber of him, body and soul, he threw his weight behind a pull on that chain and was rewarded as the suddenly careening, airborne Grem came back down to earth with an impact that caused the ground to tremble.
At his bidding, the chains and the blade affixed to their end slackened and unwound from the titan, and he drew the hilt back to his hand with a flourish even as the monster began to rise, his remaining wing detonating in a eruption of chaos that turned the field of battle momentarily black.
Death Mountain's Apex, Dawn Four
Deep down, past the surging spits of lava and pillars of sulfurous smoke, the mountain was awake and writhing. It was in agony. The tremors did not abate, but only surged in intensity, spewing ash and death into the otherwise lightening sky.
Below it was all coming to a head at last. Light and dark, good and evil, gods and men, Dusk and Dawn. But what of fire? What of blood?
The top of the mountain, such as that remained from all of the minor eruptions, cracked and splintered, and in those cracks the fires surged and roared.
Until the mountain's infernal mouth blew apart, sending a gout of molten earth skyward to eclipse all those that had come before. The hellish glare loomed beyond sight, a pillar of red and orange and black that surpassed mortal vision. And from that pillar of molten flame came the wyrm, its reverberant, hungry cry tearing at the burning sky.
===Isaac Abatheras, The Primordial Flame, Kakariko Village, Dawn Four===
The wyrm, titanic from tongue to tail, scales, wings, claws and mane carved from living flame, circled the gouts expelling from the shattered mountain as it tasted the air, then it writhed and descended toward the scents of blood, death, and Dusk. And in its rapid descent, hurtling from on high, it spied a figure on the wing, the bronze gleaming with the wyrm's reflected incandescence. The whore who'd left him to the magma floes. The agent of the Sacred Realm.
Baying harshly, the wyrm plunged toward the back of the great metallic bird and its rider as she fired arrows from on high ineffectually into the armored bulk of Lord Grem.
But the form of the wyrm was nothing to him, so he shed it as the serpent shed its skin, halting in mid-descent to let the suddenly formless flame that had made up the beasts body rush down in a wave. He only followed after, even as the gleam of his fires off of facets of the armored bird drew her eyes up toward him.
Too late. The flames wreathed mount and rider both, and in the conflagration he grasped hold of the edge of her cuirass with one clawed hand and dragged her off of the beasts back so that they could together fall to the earth below.
===The Sunrise Knight, Kakariko Village, Dawn Four===
Dismay filled him as, some distance anon, Mirra and Kinslayer struck the earth in a paroxysm of dark flames. Somehow those flames obscured Darrel's sense of her, his ally. Or else...
No, he refused to believe that. Isaac liked to toy with his enemies and his friends alike when time allowed. When the mood struck though... no, Darrel couldn't allow himself to think such thoughts. Nor could he go to help her. This was a battle that Mirra would need to face alone for now.
You will have to find your way without them. Helen's refrain echoed over and over again in his mind. But he could feel them, all of them, bright points of light in a yawning darkness, close but distant. One and yet many.
Not this time, he mused as he raised the Daybreak Sword before his face and yet felt the warmth of Morning's Edge at his hip. This time they'll need to find their way without me.
"Fulmen!"
The fulgomancer drifted into view through the haze of smoke and dust that lay over the battlefield, which struck Darrel was remarkable. How many times had he and this Primordial done battle? Curious how the end of the world they knew could make for strange bedfellows.
He held out the radiant golden blade hilt first toward his once-enemy.
"Mirra needs this."
Davus gave the blade a critical eye and glanced toward Grem. "So do you."
"We can't let Isaac and Grem pin us between them or we're dead. Isaac is more powerful than he's ever been right now, closer to immortality than he's ever been. Mirra is going to need this; our only option right now is to finish him quickly. Now please, GO!"
Davus regarded the blade for a moment more, then took it up. Before he could make for the spire of smoke rising from Isaac and Mirra's impact crater, though, Darrel snagged him by the shoulder and deposited a small iron orb, carved with the likeness of a serpent coiling about it, into his free hand.
"This will do what that sword can't. All it needs is blood." Give the old man one thing. He'd known his constructed magicks.
And then Fulmen the Feared was gone, and Darrel was left to turn toward the black form of Lord Grem as he loomed to his full height and swung his mighty axe, sweeping jets of black Dusklight in its wake.
And in his mind's eye, Darrel could sense that his final Ally was nearly here. Polaris had taken up one mantle already this day. Why not another?
"You give up your only advantage, Sunrise Knight," the monstrous figure announced as he lumbered forward. "Do you begin to see sense at last?"
"I see what needs to be done, Grem. That's what I've always seen."
Morning's Edge came free in a blink as he raced toward his foe. The axe swept around to meet his charge, so he skidded to a halt and dived to the side, letting it skitter in a flash of sparks off the face of Morning's Herald. Another swing found empty air as Darrel vacated the spot this time just ahead of the blow that would have cleaved him in half. Lightly he danced in a circle around the darksteel monolith, and even though Grem's speed and alacrity were greater than they should have been, so encumbered, Darrel was still faster than he could hope to be.
He kept moving, never allowing Grem to close so that he could deal one blow that he would need to finish their dance. When he was able to get inside Grem's guard he struck with his blade, surging as it was with the spirit of the sunrise, but unlike the Daybreak Sword no wisps of freed soul rose from the armor when Morning's Edge struck.
On his next dodge and quick strike, he saw it. A strap at the top of the breastplate holding the front and back pieces together over the left shoulder. A fraying strap. Even with the Daybreak Sword it was taking too long to penetrate that armor, so impregnated was it with pilfered souls.
From behind he could at last feel his comrade in arms, Polaris Eridanus, the Red Ice General, crest the lip of the crater. He could feel the crimson cold coming off of the Zora in waves.
And he could feel that he was too far away.
Darrel drew a resolute breath and surged again into motion, feeling the end of his spirit chains bind themselves to Morning's edge, forming the Horizon Lash, the first weapon that he had used to any effect whatsoever against Grem. Fitting that it would be the last.
He deflected another errant blow, letting the impact throw him backwards temporarily out of Grem's reach, and in the air he released his grip on his sword and with a flick he let the bladed lash fly. It flew true, shearing through the frayed strap and embedding itself beneath the top of the breastplate where it met the gorget. He wrenched as hard on the links then as he had in pulling Grem from the sky, even as he let the spirit energies in him surge down the lengths of chain and into the blade. Light exploded from the blade caught between darksteel and under-padding. When it cleared Grem was still standing, though he trembled where he stood. His one remaining gauntlet grasped Morning's Edge by the crossguard and his breastplate hung askew, exposing the chest beneath. The padding had been burned away and the pale flesh smoked.
And then the hand grasping his sword--and the chains bound to it--pulled the Sunrise Knight from his feet. He tumbled forward through the dirt and ash and came to rest before the weakened but still standing Lord Grem, and marveled his handiwork up close with a satisfied smile even as the axe blade descended upon him.
I told them, didn't I? This war would be my last. Now it's nearly done.
You did well, my love. Helen's murmur in his mind was still echoing as the darkness flooded in.
===Davus, Kakariko Village, Morning Four===
Davus had once heard, in those times before he even believed it, that life only gave you a few chances to do right. Now he knew such claims were excuses, ways to forgive any behavior until the very last repenting moments. Any individual could make the right choice any time, face the darkness within or the darkness outside and shout it down.
Sword and stone in hand, Davus rushed to the flames obscuring Mirra and Isaac. His prophetic belief that he, Isaac, and Taden would face one another would no longer pass. At least not this day.
But though Taden was gone, Isaac remained. Where Davus now turned his back on the forces within that would have seen him side with Grem, Isaac seemed steadfast in his opposition to light, to the light of the alliance at least. Davus could never know what internal struggles broiled within this terrible foe.
It was somewhat amusing, all this time Davus had the ability to do more than just throw lightning bolts. All the aspects of the storm. The wind. The rain. The things he could do to open a path through to those in need. It had never been necessary until now.
You have to go back for now.
Davus heard the combined voices of Ithan and Lia, at least he thought he did.
Your time alone was never intended to be so long lived, not without someone who can break the spell. You must merge again, take your place in your host.
Davus knew what the cryptic words meant. It wasn’t what he wanted, but it was truth.
He called down lightning with all of his power. The earth exploded outward and torrential rains slammed to the spot where Isaac had dropped with Mirra. The fires separated, forming a doorway that Davus was able to casually walk through.
“Issac.” Davus said the name calmly. “I’ve seen a million possibilities leading to this moment. I had hoped we might stand side by side again.” Davus pulled Isaac up from the ground, eyeing Mirra as he did so. She was thankfully still alive. Isaac looked ready to respond to Davus, but there would be no response, not yet. Davus slammed the snake adorned stone into Isaac’s jaw, smearing it with his blood. It was reflexive, and Davus in fact did not realize he had done anything special at all.
Give Mirra the sword. Your time is up.
Davus sighed as he heard the psychic voice. His body began to dematerialize. As he slipped into the wind, he tossed the sword to Mirra. She had risen to her feet, catching it with ease. Isaac, possibly stunned by more than just his bloodied face, merely stared on as Davus faded away.
Your time is up...as a lone soldier. Now, join!
Davus was coming full circle. Before this allegiance change, this jump into the Interloper Wars, he had resided for two millennia in hell with Polaris, two souls eternally bonded. Eternal was no metaphor. Davus could exist as an individual only briefly now. His essence hitched a ride on the winds to Eridanus, seamlessly merging back with the red Zora.
“I return.” Davus spoke to Polaris telepathically, as the process completed. “My powers are yours.”
===Mirra Lemeris, Kakariko Village, Dawn Four===
Mirra plunged into the ground with an earth-shattering roar of dust and debris billowing around her. The Primordial Serpent had arisen from Death Mountain, but this was not the draconic god who called its fire home; this was the ascendant mortal cum demon she knew as Isaac.
Rukh was nowhere to be seen. As the dust cleared and the shockwave subsided, the rejuvenated pyromancer bounced to his feet and summoned a wall of flame all around them—yet another power-mad sorcerer driven only by his own bloodlust, yet serving Grem’s ends all the same by delaying her, by separating her from Allies. And at that moment, she felt the light of the Sunrise Knight extinguish, as Darrel fell on the field of battle.
While she rose, Mirra uttered a brief prayer under her breath, her heart heavy with the loss but resolved to turn his sacrifice into victory. “Though he be the newest martyr of this Interloper’s War, I swear to the Triune he shall be its last.” With the mountain’s fire all but consumed into Isaac’s burning aura, she could only hope that the survivors of the Kakariko blitz had made it safely to Goron City’s sanctuary.
As if in answer to her plea, a sudden column of rain parted the flames surrounding her like a curtain, and the thunder mage Davus emerged, almost strutting down the length of the crater they were in. She could barely stand after Isaac’s surprise blast, and she took time to catch her breath while the tet a tet between the two unfolded.
More like brothers sparring than enemies at war, Davus teased the fire mage with allusions to a shared past. Despite her travels and her perch in the Sacred Realm, she knew little of the clashes between these elemental titans, or the realms they had crossed one in pursuit of the other. When Davus drew the back of his hand across Isaac’s mouth with a large metal orb in his fist, it was her mouth who dropped.
Who were these lords of flame and storm, to stroll upon the realm utterly detached, yet wielding power enough to destroy it all?
Accentuating his otherworldliness, Davus began to evaporate before her eyes after bashing Isaac’s face, but not before tossing her the Daybreak Sword like it were a baton in a friendly footrace. By the time she caught it, he had gone, the signature of essence fading from her mind, only to renew itself some distance away where she had once sensed only Polaris.
“So it has come to this,” Mirra said, mustering the strength of arm to rise from the dust and brandish Daybreak against her foe.
Before he could right himself from the stun Davus had dealt, she broke into a run and charged directly at him for a frontal assault. But just as she brought the sword up to swing, she pivoted at the sight of the engraved stone at Isaac’s feet suddenly bursting into a white hot light. She rolled out of the way just as a torrent of flame shot up through the red morning sky, and a doorway of flame appeared between them.
And through the flames, she could see Isaac silhouetted as he regained his senses. With a sinister grin, he stepped out from behind the column of flame, and met Mirra’s gaze with the serpentine orbs where human eyes once had been.
“If Fulmaren the Primordial could not overcome me, what makes you think it would be you who brings my destiny to a halt?”
When he spoke, she felt the rush of wind and tremor of the ground that let her knew her more bestial allies were near, and she knew what she had to do.
“Only faith,” she responded, more a whisper to herself than anything. “And the courage of others.” Once more, Mirra lowered her eyeless white visor.
Isaac let loose arcing bolts of flame, but before they connected she somersaulted through the air, and right where she stood the hulking mass of her warthog Hathor blasted through the flames and debris behind her and charged ahead. She plowed through the flames Isaac pelted her with, and before he could react she caught him by the tusks in her onslaught and forced them both through the hellsgate Davus had summoned.
But they were not done yet. Before touching the ground, the Aviatrix was caught by Rukh in his peregrine dive, and without missing a beat they flew through the gate after them, Daybreak begin to vibrant wildly with Light as they crossed into the forsaken realm beyond the gate. While Hathor charged across the black crags of the charred landscape they now inhabited, she closed the distance even as they approached an oncoming cliff. Rukh flew faster through the fiery nethersky than even Hathor’s hooves could race across its terrain, and when they reached the cliff's edge, Mirra had time enough to reach out and clutch Isaac’s finely scaled face in one armored hand, before readying Daybreak at her side just as Hathor’s stampede left the earth beneath it and began soaring on sheer inertia above the darkness below.
“For Darrel,” she snarled, with all the dread rage she had learned was needed to defeat these unholy gods, and brought Daybreak up to slash through Abetheras’s neck. Like a cold wind through wildfire, with the strength only a blade so consecrated as the Daybreak Sword could bring against this murderous snake's hide, Mirra’s blade rended Isaac’s head from his body in one fell swoop. A black plume of ichor spewed through the air from the wound as Hathor began to fall to the infinite void below with her dismembered prey still in tow, and Mirra held the disembodied scalp high, her own eyes wet with grief and heart pounding from the stress as she piloted Rukh back towards the cliffside.
“Quickly, you won’t have much time once we’re out,” she commanded her mount. Rukh redoubled his speed and passed back through the hellsgate like a thunderbolt, emerging from the other side to the dawning rays that fell on Kakariko’s ruins. They flew over it all, the near miles of rubble, the column of fire that had consumed Isaac, now shrinking into its orb once more, and farthest away the battlescape where Grem encroached Polaris.
“There, by the gate,” she ordered the avian, and they touched down on the burnt soil of Kakariko once more, Isaac’s lifeless head still firm in her grip, the expression vacant and slackjawed, but a lethal darkness still in the unclosed eyes, a smoldering heat that lingered in the dead husk with the warmth of a freshly slain god.
“Take this with you when you go,” she said, dismounting Rukh to scoop up the small stone that had banished Isaac's body into oblivion “Rauru will know what to do with it.” Rukh opened his maw, and Mirra pressed the orb down his gullet, until it clicked into place in the interlocking gears within.
She climbed back into the saddle, and for one last raid, the Aviatrix was off. “Now, to end this.”
Rising steadily into the air on a gathering wind, Mirra made her way back to the battlefield where Polaris would face Grem. Already, she felt the power of the Daybreak Aura coursing through her as she drew nearer to the Red General, her final Ally in this accursed war. Just as he crested the ridge that overlooked the Lord General, Mirra flew in from the other side.
A black rain fell on all sides from Polaris’s newly infused stormcraft, interspersed with a bloodred hail that gave her the cover she needed for a surprise attack. She lost sight of Polaris in the sudden haze, but knew him to be close, and kept herself on Grem’s opposite flank using her sense of the Zora’s own Daybreak Aura.
Mirra closed in with meteoric speed. Rukh’s claws outstretched. Their voices cried as one. And with a vicious warcry, Mirra flung the scalp of Isaac Abetheras headlong into Grem’s cracking helm, causing an explosion that erupted in midair point blank in Grem's face, and nearly knocked her from the sky as they flew away from its wake. The final eruption of Isaac's residual power echoed across the canyonlands, and the light from its heat could be mistaken for the fires of Death Mountain itself. The Kinslayer's crown now met his corpse in oblivion, but the fate of Grem was unknown amid the roiling smoke below.
===Polaris Eridanus, Kakariko Village, Morning of the 4th===
The Arbiters words rung in his ears as the Crimson General, Left Hand of Order… perhaps now the only Hand of Order, climbed the mountain to face Lord Grem. Drawing nearer, Mirra’s power washed over him and from his minds eye he witnessed events as they unfolded. The fall of the Sunrise Knight, Mornings Edge still lodged in their foes armor. Davus, taking the very blade for which this alliance was named and then delivering that same weapon to Mirra before disappearing into the aether.
He wasn't gone for long. “I return.” Declared the Fulgomancer as his soul rejoined Polaris. “My powers are yours.”
Mirra, radiant golden blade in hand, chased Isaac into some Goddesses’ forsaken hellscape and Grem, confident, powerful. Waiting.
With the full might of the primordial storm coursing through his being and melding with his own elements all was laid bare before him so that when he finally came into range of the Lord of the Twili army he already bore Winters Tide in hand. Lightning undulated along the length of the rime covered, naked steel of the hand-and-a-half blade.
”Lets see what you’ve given me Fulmen.”
Blood red lightning rent the heavens as a dread black rain came crashing down from the morning sky. Large chunks of Red Ice hail pelted the grounds and the two Generals as the Zora called out.
”Lord Grem! This ends here. Today your souls shall be liberated and you will be brought low.”
Polaris sensed the Aviatrix and her Thunderbird moments before they mounted their attack and any retort Grem may have had was drowned out by Mirra’s ferocious battlecry as she hurled the Kinslayers severed head like a bomb flower. The residual force still left inside it rattled the earth with its explosion.
Polaris lost sight of Mirra and her mount in the explosions aftermath, but he still sensed her. She yet lived. As did Grem. The Lord General stumbled as he made to turn away from the full brunt of the blast. And Polaris attacked.
Red Ice Lightning rained down from above littering the battlefield with frozen and smoking craters wherever it struck. Overwhelmed with energy, Polaris became one with the storm. It was difficult for him to differentiate between himself and the lightning as he rode the strikes across this field of death until he struck the ground in front of Grem and came back to himself.
”Davus, I don’t know what it will mean for you, but this is going to hurt like hell for me.”
Leaping to his feet, the General slashed through the straps and padding that still held Grems breastplate in place. As it clattered to the frozen earth revealing the chest and underbelly of the beast, Polaris caught Mornings Edge in his free hand with a growl of anguish and kicked the haft of the Twili's large battle axe, sending it careening away.
The power of the Sunrise washed over him, its power in nearly every single way contradictory to his own, it scorched the frigid cells of the Undead Zora and Polaris howled in pain again as the normally nimble General stumbled when he landed.
Roaring, Grem lunged forward driving a shoulder into Polaris and sending him tumbling like a ragdoll across the ground. Despite the collision, Polaris maintained his grip on both swords hilts. Heaving with rage Grem didn't bother retrieving his axe and instead stomped heavily forward intent on murdering his enemy with his bare hands. Regaining his feet once more, Polaris leapt forward only to be caught about the throat in midair by a gauntleted hand. The Lord General grinning as he tightened his grip meaning to squeeze all life from the Zora.
Stars exploded before Polaris’ eyes, blurring his vision and clouding his mind. He knew that the storm was there, but he was unable to call to it. Unable to direct the lightning as he had a moment ago when he was thinking clearly. In a last fit of desperation, he kicked hard at Grems exposed ribs and misjudged, instead kicking him in the pit of his arm. Red Ice spidered down the mans arm to the elbow, constricting tight around his upper arm and causing the Dusk Lords grip to falter and drop the Zora.
With the last of his energy fading as he was being burned alive by Mornings Edge, the Crimson General slashed wildly, dragging both blades down Grems front leaving a pair of wicked horizontal gashes in their wake before crashing to the ground with a dull thud.
”So you can bleed.”
And with that, Polaris chuckled as he felt the Three calling him, claiming their hand. After he faded, the only thing that remained was Mornings Edge steaming atop the frozen turf as the storm raged on.
===Mirra Lemeris, Kakarikopocalypse, Triple Over Time: Sudden Death Mountain===
With a shockwave that left jagged pillars of ice rippling out in all directions, the Red Ice General fell on the battlefield of his own making. As if from the hilt of Morning’s Edge, a centrifuge lashed out directly underneath the Twili warlord who towered over the fallen Zora with such force as to rip a hole in the red sky above. The rolling clouds of Polaris’s black torrent parted at its bloody eye, and when the first golden pillars of dawn shone down at last on what was left of Hyrule’s final outpost, Grem grimaced with a new dread, for it was not the dawn that pierced that mirky veil—it was Daybreak.
Mirra hurtled downward in a sheer vertical meteoric drop, the metallic feathers of her mount whistling around her shoulders and hips, refracting the light that emitted from her very being. Rukh had climbed to the greatest altitude either of them could stand, and in that rarefied air, Mirra had made her predestined leap of faith, the Daybreak Sword held above her now for its one ultimate purpose: impaling the Interloper.
“Twilight Lash!” Just before she made contact, Grem desperately flung Morning’s Edge into the air with a chain of glowing black Dusk tethered to its hilt, in a mockery of the Sunrise Knight’s maneuver that knocked Mirra off course. The dark blade itself sailed by, but his Dusk chain sliced underneath the Daybreak Sword and plied her midriff, whipping her to the ground with the force of hammer on anvil, sending tremors through the frozen ground.
After she hit the dirt, Mirra staggered from the pressure of greater earth tremors than that from her impact, and from a source far off from the site of their battle. She felt it before she got up from her hands and knees, but Grem's face didn't seem to show that he had noticed the distant quake.
“Your time has passed, Emissary!” the Lord General called out to her over the howling Red Hail that engulfed them still. “This gateway to your Sacred Realm, this Light World, gives way now to a new era.”
Half his upper body and one arm lay exposed at this point without his necromantic armor, the bare muscle of his pale blue flesh throbbing as he foisted Morning’s Edge into the air, his other arm still covered in his foul black plate from gauntlet to pauldron. From the fiendish gauntlet on his left arm the glowing coil of his Dusk chain extended outward, wrapped around his torso and twisted along his unarmored sword arm, until reaching the right hand that clenched Mytura's legendary dawn bringing blade. As his overwhelming Dusk energy poured into the links of the chain, blackness spread up the length of the once proud sword, until its amber light became infused with darkest night, and it was remade: Twilight's Edge.
“Your Alliance is broken, your souls are lost. The Hour of Dusk is at hand, and with it, my sovereignty!”
Grem slashed forth with his newly forged Twilight’s Edge and the blade hurled towards her like a missile, still bound to its black chain. But in a red flash of light, it all froze.
Suddenly, as though she were a great distance from the plane of battle, Mirra observed herself suspended in a black abyss, a Milky Way of stars powdering the horizons beyond. She was but an infant nestled in the womblike wings of a great metallurgical bird, floating somewhere in space. At the same time, she saw a girl of a young age with long red hair gripping the saddle of her fierce avian mount nervously, hesitant to command the hulking beast as forcefully as she was told to, the sweat of her palms slipping along the fine leather reins while Rauru and her other tutors watched and studied her from the ground far below, chuckling among themselves and exchanging gentle smiles at her fumbles. She then saw herself kneeling before those same elders years later, taller, stronger now, donning the radiant armor and cloak she still wore to this day, bowing low under the great column of light that fell on the dais of Rauru’s council table, taking her oath alongside Rukh: to eternally protect the Sacred Realm, and to do so from beyond its walls. And in a single, continuous thread from that fateful moment to the present, Mirra's destiny led her to her brethren in the Daybreak Alliance, those who would help her uphold her oath--until all at once she returned to the Interloper's battlefield where those same Allies had now fallen, all except for her.
“For all your Power, warmonger, you want for Wisdom. No enemy can stand alone against united allies for long.” Mirra smiled to herself as a current of Red Ice erupted from the expanse between them to seize in midair his abominable Twilight’s Edge, then launched ahead in a frigid red wave that crashed into Grem’s torso and legs, holding him in place. While he was trapped in the ice, she felt yet another distant tremor.
“And so long as but one of us draws breath, the Alliance lives on!”
Glistening with a prismatic aura of gold infused with emerald, sapphire, and ruby, Mirra rose to the apex of the Red Ice wall she had summoned, then charged down its steppe with Daybreak brandished. Calling out triumphant prayers of victory as she dashed, Mirra felt the courage of her fallen comrades coursing through her veins, and the tarnished bronze bracelet on her right arm signifying the Daybreak Alliance began to burn like the sun.
”Sheikah, be my guide!” she chanted, and as if seeing forward through time, black hands and feet began to emerge from Grem’s limbs the moment before he moved them, such that even as he broke free of the Red Ice restraints and redoubled his assault, she saw his movements ahead of time and was able to dodge each one, guided by the small hands and girlish feet of Elly Shea. Before he slammed his blade down on her, Mirra saw the muffled footwraps of Kae Bryseis shift slightly ahead of her own boots, and when the unmistakable shadow of the Scion's Starborn Edge flashed through the air, Mirra had to but trace its path with her own blade to find a weak point at Grem’s left side. Before he could right himself from her sidelong blow, the specter of Jaden Bryseis leapt from behind her, and she followed it backward with a somersault that put her well clear of the wild swings that came from next from her foe. Face to face with the beast at close range, she blinked once, and in that black instant she saw the screaming visage of Lynn Hothlight flying towards her through the air, and as soon as she opened her eyes, she disappeared into thin air. Grem startled at her vanishing for the single instant she needed to get into position behind him.
”O Mytura, thou art my shieldl!” From behind, her prismatic aura coalesced at Grem’s back, and she caught him unawares with a bash of her Mirror Shield, its edge bearing the amber hue of Morning’s Herald. A sudden burst of Spirit energy blasted Grem to the ground as Mirra bashed him with the enhanced shield, the amber light cleansing the bastardized Morning’s Edge in his hand of its Twilight curse and sending it soaring away into the rubble, even as the chains around his arms were converted to Spirit energy that bound him prone.
”Eridanus, my sword; and Horus, my wings forever!” Radiant white light then cascaded from her shoulder blades and propelled her through the air as cold crimson steel coursed through her shoulders, biceps, forearms, and wrists, seeping into the white knuckles of her fingers as they clutched the hilt of Daybreak's Sword in both hands. The curved silhouette of Winter’s Tide flashed briefly across the holy longsword’s blade as she brought it down upon Grem’s lowered back with all her might.
“Gigagoron, give me strength!” With a crack of energy to rival the dawn of Time itself, the Daybreak Sword met its point of contact with the embodied void that was Lord Grem, and a vortex of Light shattered forth from the holy blade like that with which Din burnt the earth.
His black armor burned away entirely now, stripped down to a denuded bloody husk, Grem coughed into the dirt and wheezed with a winded pain as he tried to push himself but faltered and bit the dust once more.
“All this time, Lord General, you failed to see one thing. You had your army, and your black magic, but we held onto that which you had never known, yet will prove to be our salvation.” A chromatic light beamed from Mirra’s eyes, and the aura of the Triune radiated around her shoulders and hair as she floated above the prostrated god.
His mad lust for power at last crestfallen, Grem looked up at her with an anguished pleading in his eyes, and within those bleak pupils she beheld the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that imbued all his evil campaign. Behind his tyranny, there was fear, and it was then Mirra learned that what the Interloper lacked was not Wisdom alone.
As Mirra spoke her last words to Grem, her white visor lowered over her eyes of its own accord, her hands outstretched at either side. The wings of light at her back then grew exponentially, until it seemed they would span the sky itself, and take Polaris’s dark clouds with them. Four black limbs extended from each of her hands and feet, giving her the appearance of eight ghostly arms arranged in prayerful symmetry above her head or folded at her chest, while her original arms pulsated with the deepest fires of a Death Mountain forge, a Megagoron's might embedded in them. In her true left hand, the conjured Mirror Shield beamed with the light of Morning’s Herald, like a small sun unto itself; and in her true right, silhouetted in the bleeding edge of Winter’s Tide, Daybreak.
“What?” he said, quietly at first, and then in a roar that shook the earth and air around them, as she began to ascend above his now upturned, questioning face. ”What?! Tell me!” he cried, mustering the strength to reach out a single hand towards her.
She was well above him now, so high that in his bloodstained sight Grem could see but a broad shape of light hovering in the heavens beyond the pall of ichor that coated his face. He heard his death before he saw it thus. From all around him, there came a rumbling from far below the earth, then all at once, geysers of fire and lava sprang upward like many voices in one great choir, and the land crumbled into blocks of stone tossed to and fro on a river of fire beneath him. He was surrounded in moments. With her Allies’ power fused with her own, Mirra had evoked the wrath of Death Mountain itself in service to their cause, its eruption undeterred since the Kinslayer began it.
Though she spoke in a whisper, the word entered Grem's mind like a chime on the wind.
"Faith.”
Now she had begun her descent from on high, gathering speed until a shield of heat flared around her, and with a cry that seemed to echo in the distance like the howl of Volvagia himself, she unleashed the full might of the Daybreak Sword on her ungodly foe.
The very ground beneath him disintegrated and gave way to the encroaching magma, and like the blast of a newborn star Grem’s mortal body was obliterated as the cosmic blade passed through him, Daybreak destroying his flesh even as it unknit what was left of his soul. Again and again she struck him to the core with the Daybreak Sword, breaking the bonds of every aspect of his soul in every plane on which her blade found purchase, until the tolling of a bell seemed to ring out from each blow, heralding the demise of the forsaken god. The whirlwind of white light that emanated from the swing of her sword and the breach of her wing pushed back the dark red clouds to a rim revolving around them for several miles. The sphere of the sun then rose to the peak of the sky, illuminating the landscape under its restored reign. For the first day in ages, the morning sun of the Light World shone not on the Interloper's War, but on its ruins.
The river of lava receded in a wide radius from the Daybreak nova, and its great walls of fire were held at bay just long enough for Rukh to dive low and retrieve Mirra from her rocky perch, escaping just as the burning tides swept in.
With her visor still set low, she pressed her weight into her warbird’s saddle, Daybreak brandished at her side. She felt the familiar cold sweat of her palms grip the soft leather of her reins, and knew in her heart that the conflict was over. Together, she and Rukh made for the higher reaches of the cliffside entrances to Goron City, her faith unshaken that there they would find survivors.