When Azi Dahaka invoked the Simulated Star-Creation Map—Avesta, a strange force briefly laid claim to Orsaga's essence. It attempted to redefine Orsaga's alignment, to recast him from Evil into Good.
The effort was laughably inadequate.
Orsaga could feel it as if ants were trying to move a mountain; the scale difference was obscene. Still, curiosity made him indulge the attempt. After all, for a Chaos God, labels like "good" and "evil" were toys to toggle at will—no more consequential than wearing a different mask.
Amused, Orsaga allowed the intruding power to probe him. Avesta reached out to analyze and copy his might. The attempt was earnest but futile—like trying to breach the central databanks of a Fallen Machine with an archaic XP-era computer. Between them lay the equivalent of hundreds of galaxies' worth of gap.
Orsaga's expectations of spectacle collapsed into disappointment. He muttered idly, "If you want it, then have a little of it…"
And with that casual phrase he fed a measure of his power into Azi Dahaka.
What followed was instantaneous and horrific.
Azi Dahaka's robust form reacted as if plunged into concentrated sulfuric acid. The smooth white surface of his skin blistered and sagged as if under a furnace. Pale flesh and viscous blood slid in globs from his frame. An exquisite, tormenting pain—sharp as barbed needles—pierced his nerves and spirit.
Cracks bridged into fractures. Bones exploded outward into jagged spines that ruptured the skin and erupted with fragments of sinew and warped faces—limbs and features warped and animated, struggling to crawl free from within his body. Even his eyeballs grew irregular mouths lined with serrated teeth, gnawing at his lids with mindless savagery.
The agony was beyond what even an odious god could easily endure. Azi Dahaka trembled under the onslaught as great wells of divine power poured from him in a desperate bid to staunch the transformation. It did little; the corruption only accelerated. Blood burst from him like a fountain, and the spawn of deformities began tearing one another apart in frenzy.
Clearly, Orsaga's gift was not to the visitor's taste. The energy he had transmitted carried the distilled essence of suffering: the concentrated crystallization of wails, torment and degradation. As a deity of pain, mutation, and trial—one who had long practiced biological abominations and held the flame-nature of a Flame-demon—Orsaga's power carried compounding, grotesque pathologies. Absorbing it without permission was a dangerous gamble; most beings could not withstand it. Even soulless machines might delete their own core rather than endure such agony.
After several minutes of writhing torment, Azi Dahaka could no longer tolerate the morphing within him. His three dragon heads opened in unison and vomited searing dragonfire into his own body—an act of auto-immolation. In a roar of scorched flesh and exploding sinew, his malformed teeth and tongues were the first to turn to ash under that inferno. The heat roared through his body; agonized shrieks—tens of thousands—rose as if countless beings were being purified in flame. Twisted limbs continued clawing to escape, but the fire consumed and cauterized, halting the final metamorphoses.
Orsaga watched, noting that the self-immolation had been decisive. Had Azi Dahaka hesitated longer, his frame would have disintegrated into a writhing swarm of aberrations and the godly spark—the very divinity—within him might have been transfigured into some new, monstrous life-form. Azi Dahaka's extreme measure had thus preserved what remained of his being.
After only a few dozen seconds, having wrestled his condition back under control, Azi Dahaka unleashed a retaliatory torrent of dragonfire—not ordinary conflagration, but the famed technique known as "Khvarenah (Halo of The Supreme Ruler)".
In his Box Garden world, that technique was the peak of incendiary arts—capable, at full force, of obliterating a third of a world with a single strike. The beam condensed into auroral shafts of light saturated with temperatures that could incinerate stars; it surged forward at superluminal speed, bearing every ounce of Azi Dahaka's anger. The recoil alone caused the continent beneath him to sag and triggered kilometer-high tidal waves. Surrounding matter vaporized into steam; planetary crusts blistered and flaked away. Unchecked, that single attack could spread across and scorch a galaxy.
Orsaga, who actually valued galaxies for the entertainment they provided, was not about to allow such wholesale destruction.
"Fire-breathing? I can do that too," he said with a lazy smile.
He inhaled subtly, then exhaled. A flash of blood-red flame erupted from his mouth.
Where it met Azi Dahaka's radiant dragonfire, the latter disintegrated like low-grade plastic exposed to superheat. TheKhvarenah was punctured and incinerated in an instant.
Before Azi Dahaka could finish the sweep of his assault, an appendage of crimson flame lanced from Orsaga and struck him squarely in the chest. The strike's momentum rammed through mountain ranges at superluminal speed, then launched the burning god like an unstoppable meteor out past the planet's edge.
Wherever he passed, the trajectory cleaved and punched through matter with impunity; a trailing smear of bloodfire lingered like the afterimage of a scorched comet. From planetary vantage points the path looked like crimson threads stitched between massive stars—some curious civilizations mistook the spectacle for rare astronomical phenomena.
Days later, beyond the Milky Way, in the Andromeda Galaxy, there was a thunderous impact. Azi Dahaka's charred corpse slammed into a white dwarf, gouging a kilometer-deep crater that spewed ash into space.
Shortly thereafter Orsaga tore open a portal and stepped through. He reached into the smoking cavity of the fallen god's chest and extracted a dim, palpitating orb of light.
"A system only three-quarters cooked, paired with a nine-quarters-prepared dragon god—what a decent meal," Orsaga observed, half-satisfied, as he toyed with the glowing sphere.
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