Chapter 6 - The Cleansing Flame
Ignis didn't give the mammoth a chance to run. That wasn't how dragons settled debts.
With a flick of her wrist that looked almost bored, she wrenched the bull sideways, breaking its left tusk completely off at the root. The sound of ivory splintering echoed through the dead canyon like lightning. The mammoth collapsed onto its knees, screaming a high, pathetic wail that sounded terrifyingly human.
Zephyr watched, mesmerized and horrified. He had wanted power; this was power. It was indifferent. It was total.
Ignis took a half-step back, her throat expanding. A blinding, violet light traveled up the ridges of her neck, illuminating her black scales from the inside out like stained glass. The air around her mouth began to shimmer with heat haze so severe the rocks behind her warped.
"Mother, wait!" Zephyr cried out mentally, terrified the blast would vaporize him along with the beast.
Ignis fired.
It wasn't a stream of fire. It was a focused beam of superheated plasma.
The violet ray punched through the center of the mammoth, blowing through hide, muscle, and marrow in less than a second, incinerating the ground beneath it into a trench of bubbling glass. The petrified trees behind the beast simply ceased to exist, flash-boiled into microscopic ash that drifted away on the thermal wind.
When she cut the flame, the clearing fell dead silent.
All that remained of the massive bull was a glowing, slag-filled crater and a pair of scorched iron tusk-bands cooling rapidly in the soot.
Ignis exhaled, a cloud of foul black smoke rolling from her nostrils. She finally lowered her massive, terrifying head down to the dirt, her violet eye stopping three inches from Zephyr's face. The eye was cold.
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"Are you done playing?" she asked, her voice flat and deadly calm.
Before Zephyr could answer, his broken shoulder gave a sickening pop, and the shock finally dragged him under into pitch-black unconsciousness.
