Thor moved, and the plain stopped being a plain.
He crossed the crater in a single stride, and the ground behind him fused into black glass where his lightning hand touched it. The first bolt fell from the open sky and struck the earth where Ottar had been standing. Ottar was already gone, but the blast threw him anyway, tumbling him across the broken field in a spray of molten dirt. A second bolt landed beside it, then a third. Thunder rolled so close together it stopped being a sound and became a pressure, flattening grass, rattling teeth, pushing the rain sideways.
Diana met him first.
She came out of the smoke low and fast, the great scimitar sweeping up in both hands, black fire streaming off the curve of the steel like a banner. Her mastery of the blade was terrifying to watch. She did not swing it so much as pour it, every cut flowing into the next, a dozen strikes in the space of one breath. Thor weaved through them with his hammer held loose and his lightning hand trailing sparks. The black fire kissed his beard and he pulled back from it with a hiss. It cut a stripe across his ribs and he grunted, the first sound he had made in a long while.
He answered with the hammer. It caught Diana in the side and folded her like paper, hurling her across the field. She hit the ground and burst into shadow, a cloud of black smoke that drifted and reformed twenty paces away. She came back swinging without a word.
Baal stood behind her and opened his eyes.
The beam that left them was thick as a tower, white at the core and black at the edges, laced with the same fire that had unmade Poseidon's sea. It crossed the field in a heartbeat and struck Thor in the chest. The god planted his feet and braced, lightning roaring up his arms, and the beam drove him backward fifty paces with his boots tearing furrows in the earth. He roared and swung the hammer across his body, and the beam split in two and splashed across the sky.
Baal lumbered forward, shaking the ground with every step. He swung one huge arm and Thor caught it on the haft of his hammer. The impact cracked the air. Thor slid back another ten paces, then threw the hammer.
It went through Baal's chest.
The beast looked down at the hole in him. Then he dissolved into black mist and rose from the earth a moment later, whole, eyes already glowing. The hammer wheeled back to Thor's hand. He had barely closed his fingers around it when Ottar hit him from behind.
The beast surged in Ottar's veins like fire in dry grass. His body had swollen to nearly twice its size, fur and scale rippling across his shoulders, grey eyes gone feral and bright. The greatsword in his hands burned black and white from hilt to tip. He brought it down in a stroke that would have split a castle gate, and Thor turned his shoulder into it. Black fire bit through skin and muscle and into something deeper, and the god screamed. It was a raw, ragged sound, the sound of a thing that had never been hurt like this.
His answer was lightning.
It came out of his body in every direction at once, a white dome of destruction that swallowed Ottar and Diana and Baal in a single flash. Ottar felt his bones sing. He felt his teeth rattle in his jaw. He felt the ground leave his feet, and then he felt the ground come back, hard, and the world turned over and over.
Above the field, the sky had become a roaring furnace. Bolts fell by the hundred, and every one of them struck. A column of lightning nearly a kilometer wide drove down across the plain and carved a canyon through it. Rocks exploded into gravel. The air screamed. Thor strode through the ruin with his arms spread, a storm in the shape of a man, and everything he touched turned to glass and ash.
Not one of them gave him a moment's rest.
Diana died the first time with her blade buried in his thigh. A single bolt took her through the heart, and she scattered into smoke. She rose from her own shadow and cut at his knee. He crushed her skull with the hammer, and she rose again and cut at his wrist. She died eleven times in the space of a minute. Each time she came back a little slower, her form a little thinner, her blade always leading, her silence never breaking. The scimitar left a bright black line on his body every time it landed.
Baal died more. His eyes fired beam after beam, each one pushing Thor back a few steps, each one drawing a harder bolt from the sky in answer. A bolt split him down the middle and the halves wobbled and fell and rose as one. A strike of the hammer drove him into the earth, and he climbed out of it. He charged on four legs, and Thor met him with his bare lightning hand and shoved his entire head into the dirt. Baal burst into mist. Baal rose. Baal charged again.
Ottar fought through all of it with something past rage. He cut and cut and cut. The black fire on his blade carved scars across Thor's chest and back, and every scar made the god's lightning flare brighter. Ottar was bleeding from a dozen wounds. One arm hung wrong. He swung anyway, and he swung with a fury that had stopped asking whether it would be enough.
It was not enough.
Thor took the greatsword on his lightning forearm and let it bite, shoved through it, and struck Ottar in the chest with the hammer. It was not a swing. It was a single point of force, all the thunder in the world gathered into a fist, and when it landed the sound was the sound of a mountain breaking. Ottar left the ground. He crossed the field in a streak, and struck the lip of a crater so hard that stone collapsed around him. He slid down the slope and lay at the bottom with his greatsword still clenched in one hand, the beast bleeding out of him in thin streams of steam.
He was breathing. Barely.
Diana came next. Thor looked at her, and she looked back, bruised and dim and nearly transparent, her scimitar raised. He lifted the hammer with a quiet kind of respect, and brought it down. She dissolved into shadow. This time, the shadow did not rise.
Baal fell last. A final column of lightning tore through him from skull to tail, and the vast shape of him came apart like torn smoke, black fire scattering into the rain. The silence that followed felt enormous.
Thor stood alone in the ruin with his hammer on his shoulder and his lightning crawling up and down his arms. Three of his opponents had been burned out of the world, and the fourth lay broken in a hole. He was bleeding from a dozen cuts that would not close, and the black fire still gnawed at the edges of every one, but he had won.
He turned his head, slowly.
Vritra stood at the far edge of the field, where she had been since the lightning began. She had not moved. She had not fought. Her eyes were closed. Black flame gathered around her in a slow, rising spiral, pulled from the burning wreckage of the field, from Diana's blade, from Ottar's, from the dying embers of Baal, drawn into her one thread at a time until she glowed like a coal.
Thor studied her for a long moment.
"You remind me of a serpent," he said. His voice was low, the first thing he had said since the sky opened. "I killed it once."
Vritra opened her eyes. They were gold, and calm, and tired.
"I am no serpent," she said.
The fire reached her. Thor lifted the hammer and set his stance, lightning gathering in his fist, waiting for the attack he knew was coming, the bolt of black flame that would try to burn out his divinity. He had seen what it did to Poseidon. He would meet it with everything he had.
It did not come.
Vritra opened her mouth, and the black fire poured into it.
She drank every ember, every spark, every thread of the flame that had burned across the field. She ate it. Her throat moved. The fire sank into her chest and spread outward through her veins, and her skin began to crack. Bright lines ran across her face and arms and down her legs, and light spilled out of the seams. Her avatar was breaking. It had never been built to hold this much.
It shattered.
The pieces fell away like shards of glass, and what stood in their place was not a woman. A shadow fell across the field, vast and cold. The rain parted. A shape descended out of the clouds, slow and enormous and terrible, and the air bent around it as though the sky itself were afraid.
This was not the dragon who had fought beside Ottar. This was not an avatar wearing scales. It was Vritra, in the full flesh of her true form, a creature as old as the oath that had bound her kind. Ten heads rose against the storm, each as large as a castle. Her scales were the black of a starless night, and the flames that licked between them were the same flames that had unmade a god. She was the World Devouring Dragon, the Demon Dragon, one of the greatest beasts to ever draw breath, and she looked down on Thor the way a hawk looks down on a field mouse.
Thor raised the hammer.
He threw everything he had left. Lightning fell from every corner of the sky in a column so bright it turned the world to white. It struck her full on the central head. It rolled across her scales and crawled down her wings. It did nothing at all. The bolt splintered and died against her hide, and she did not so much as blink.
She struck, and it was over very fast.
A head came down and closed around his hammer arm. Another took his leg. A third seized his lightning hand and bit through it, and the white light of it went out like a candle. Thor roared and drove his knee into the nearest jaw and felt a tooth crack, and then the rest of her heads descended. Ten mouths closed on his body from ten directions. He did not scream. He met her eyes in the last moment and something close to joy crossed his face, a warrior's grin at the end of the best fight of his life.
Then she tore him apart.
The flesh came away in pieces. The lightning inside him flared once and was gone. She swallowed what was left, and the sky pulsed with white and gold as his divinity burst across the clouds, the death of the God of Thunder announced to every living soul on the plain.
When the light faded, the field lay silent. The rain fell on glass and ash and a vast, still shape crouched in the center of it all.
Vritra lowered her heads. Her eyes found the crater where Ottar lay, still breathing, and for a long moment she did not move.
The cost came for her then. Cracks spread across her scales, running from the horns down to the tail, and light spilled out of every seam. The avatar that had held her to this world had broken beyond repair. There was no body left for her to return to. She did not cry out. She only closed her eyes, one head after another, and let the light take her.
She came apart like dawn mist and drifted up into the clouds, gone as the other dragons had gone before her, until the oath that bound her kind was broken and the sky was open again.
On the northern wall, no one cheered. They only looked at the place where she had been, and the silence ran from one end of Orario to the other.
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