Doo sat in absolute, quiet stillness, his vibrant gaze anchored to Isis as she perched on a thick root, happily swinging her bare legs back and forth. In her pale green hands, she carefully held a brilliantly illustrated picture book.
Once upon a time, she had adamantly believed that reading was an entirely unnecessary skill for a creature of the wild. But after Doo had patiently sat beside her for weeks, tracing his fingers over the intricate script and teaching her the hidden weight of words, she had become utterly fascinated by books and the vast, boundless worlds captured within their pages.
"Hey, Isis," Doo called out softly, breaking the comfortable silence of the subterranean chamber.
"Yeah? What is it, oh Lizard King?" she laughed merrily, not even looking up as she delicately turned a crisp page of her storybook.
"It's Dragon King," Doo corrected with a highly amused smile, though his eyes remained deeply focused. "But I'm curious about Malakor. Just what specific blessing did you grant him before he departed for the wider world?"
"To be honest, I don't really know," she said sweetly, her ruby pupils tracking a colorful illustration. "When I give gifts, I don't usually specify a rule or anything."
"But what exactly were you thinking of when you gave him that blessing? Or better yet, what was the true desire in your heart?" Doo asked slowly, leaning forward as his crimson hair shifted like cooling magma over his shoulders.
Isis finally closed the book, her expression softening into a look of distant, centuries-old memory. "When I first found him, he was so badly broken. Nature can be brutal, but those metal shards in his chest were just cruel. So, when he finally decided to go back to that place... I was obviously terrified for him." She offered Doo a pure, completely innocent smile. "I simply wished that he would never be hurt like that again. I wished that everything in life would just go his way, and that anyone who ever tried to harm him would stay far, far clear of him."
Doo's heart completely stopped for a fraction of a second.
In other words, the Dragon King thought, a cold dread twisting violently in his chest, she didn't just bless him. She unknowingly granted him absolute immortality, absolute fortune, and something far more terrifying. A conceptual protection.
He kept his face perfectly composed, but his mind was racing with dark calculations. I already know he is actively plotting to march his iron armies here to kill her. I plan on confronting him in his own domain very soon, so it is best I know exactly what kind of reality-bending parameters he is capable of beforehand. It's the only way to boost my chances of winning against a man who literally cannot be harmed.
"Why are you so suddenly interested in him anyway?" Isis asked, tilting her head as the forest-green vines of her hair swayed curiously toward him. "You don't usually ask a single thing about the humans I've helped over the eras."
"Well..." Doo smiled brightly, his flaming aura pulsing with a warm, deceptive cheerfulness as he reached out to pat her head. "I guess I was just a little curious, is all." Doo stood up, rolling his shoulders and stretching his limbs as his flaming aura flickered lazily in the dim light. He was ready to leave. Isis immediately pushed herself off the mossy root, standing up right after him, her vibrant blue gown rustling against the wood.
"Next week it is, then," he said, a warm, easygoing smile breaking across his sharp features. "I'll be sure to bring you an entire mountain of new storybooks and sweet treats when I return."
"Sure! I'll be looking forward to it!" Isis smiled brightly, her ruby-red pupils sparkling with that pure, boundless innocence he had grown so desperately fond of protecting.
Doo turned, pivoting on his heel to make his way out of the sanctuary. But before he could take a single step forward, the happy atmosphere in the room violently shattered.
VROOM.
With a sudden, desperate ferocity, the forest-green vines of Isis's hair shot forward through the air. They slammed into Doo, wrapping around his torso, his arms, and his legs, binding him tightly in a suffocating, vice-like grip.
"Um... Isis?" Doo asked quietly, his voice perfectly calm as he stopped in his tracks. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know! It wasn't me!" she yelled, her voice instantly cracking as panic seized her chest. She grabbed her own living vines with both hands, frantically trying to wrench them away from him. "Hey! Let him go right now! Come on! Why are you guys being so incredibly stubborn all of a sudden?!"
But for the first time in thousands of years, her hair completely ignored her commands.
Doo didn't fight back. Instead, a deeply knowing, melancholic smile softened his face. He looked down at the dense, emerald vines trembling violently against his chest, feeling the raw, instinctive terror radiating from them.
"You guys are really, truly perceptive, aren't you?" Doo said softly, his voice a cool, reassuring melody as he spoke directly to the hair. "I promise you... I'll be back."
Isis suddenly stumbled backward, a sharp, suffocating weight slamming into her heart. Her breath hitched. She let go of the vines, her small hands flying to her face as her vision blurred. She sniffed, a desperate, confused sob escaping her throat.
"I'm... I'm so sorry, Doo," she muttered, her voice trembling as a constant, unstoppable stream of hot tears poured out of her eyes, tracking down her pale green cheeks. She wiped at them frantically, but they just kept coming. "I don't... I don't know why I'm crying. My chest hurts so much."
Doo watched her, his heart violently twisting in his breast. He looked back down at the vines wrapped around him, which were now shaking so hard they were practically shedding leaves.
These tears... they aren't even hers, Doo thought simply, a profound sadness clouding his vibrant gaze. They're from you, aren't they? You know exactly where I'm going. But I am sure you understand... it must simply be done.
Slowly, agonizingly, the forest-green hair began to unbind itself from his body. The vines retreated inch by inch, slithering back toward Isis while shaking uncontrollably, as if they were mourning a loss that hadn't happened yet. Isis remained rooted to the floor, her small frame convulsing as she wept violently, completely overwhelmed by the crushing, prophetic grief bleeding from her own soul.
Doo took a deep breath, his fiery aura flaring to its absolute apex, illuminating the dark cavern in a brilliant, glorious crimson light. He looked at her one last time, forcing a loud, boisterous laugh to break the suffocating silence.
"Remember, little mistress! In any case that I don't return... do not come looking for me!"
His laughter echoed magnificently off the ancient walls. Then, his eyes dropped to the trembling green vines framing her weeping face, his expression turning deathly serious.
"And please... do well to protect her."
BOOM!
Before Isis could even cry out his name, Doo erupted. A blinding flash of pure, unadulterated kinetic force shattered the air currents inside the tree. He shot upward like a rising star, tearing through the upper canopy and disappearing into the twilight sky in a magnificent flash of fire, leaving the lonely girl of the forest sobbing in the dark.
The great, cataclysmic march of the Iron Empire had begun.
After months of choking the sky with industrial smoke, the armies of The Settlement deployed in full. It was a terrifying, cinematic display of mechanical dominance: thousands upon thousands of brain-altered soldiers marching in a flawless, synchronized cadence that made the bedrock of the earth vibrate. At the vanguard of this dark sea stood Malakor. He moved with a cold, predatory confidence, leading the charge just as he had promised his brainwashed people. They moved like a plague of steel and neon—crossing jagged valleys, carving paths through ancient mountains, and sailing across black oceans on towering iron warships.
They were a mere few weeks away from the sacred borders of the Mother Tree when the sky violently fractured.
A sudden, blinding flash of crimson fire tore through the gray clouds above, and there he was. Doo floated effortlessly in the mid-air currents, his long, lush hair drifting around him like rivers of blood. He looked down at the massive, sprawling sea of iron below him, and he was laughing. It was a loud, boisterous, echoing sound that carried absolutely zero fear.
Malakor raised a single, metal-clad hand, signaling a screeching, grinding halt to the entire imperial march. He stared up at the crimson-haired man with his twin blue star eyes, a dangerous, calculating sneer twisting his features.
"It would seem," Malakor's voice boomed, amplified telepathically so that every single soldier in his endless army could hear him clearly, "that the wicked witch of the forest has sent her desperate minion to halt our glorious march."
A thunderous, volatile uproar erupted from the gathered soldiers. They raised their sleek, ancient weapons in unison, the blue plasma linings of their high-tech rifles illuminating the dark plains in a ghostly, synchronized glow.
"Do not fret, my beloved people," Malakor declared smoothly, his posture dripping with an unnatural, absolute confidence. "For I will personally deal with this lizard."
With a cruel smirk, Malakor stepped forward, leaving the safety of his front lines.
But the exact moment his boot touched the dirt, the trap was sprung.
BOOM!
Before Malakor could even process the movement, a massive, towering conceptual barrier erupted from the fabric of space itself. It shot up from the earth like jagged crystalline pillars, sealing the space around both Doo and Malakor, separating them entirely from the army outside. The barrier pulsed with a violent, roaring crimson embers, humming with a frequency that locked the laws of reality inside its walls.
I must be absolutely crazy, Doo thought to himself, a wry, peaceful smile playing on his lips as he looked down at the barrier he had just sacrificed a massive portion of his lifeforce to create.
Spending so many centuries with that innocent girl in her quiet tree... it truly changed something deep within my soul, he mused blissfully, his vibrant gaze softening for a fleeting second. At the end of the day, I suppose I could have gone to the other ancient dragons and begged for their help. But this is my choice.
He looked at Malakor, who was testing the walls of the barrier, his blue eyes flashing with irritation. Doo's mind drifted back to the weeping girl he had left behind, her vibrant blue gown swirling in his memory.
Of course, I know exactly how I feel about Isis, Doo thought, his chest tightening with a profound, unspoken warmth. I am an ancient, mature being, so trying to deceive myself about my own heart would be utterly stupid. I love her. But she acts with the pure, untouched soul of a precious child. It felt entirely wrong to try and court her... so the very least I can do as a man is act as her ultimate, unbreakable shield.
Doo slowly raised his right hand toward the trapped immortal king, his fiery aura flaring to its absolute, apocalyptic peak. The ambient temperature inside the crimson barrier skyrocketed, melting the metal armor on Malakor's boots.
"Let's have a little date in another world, shall we?" Doo whispered, a small, fiercely triumphant smile playing through his lips.
CRACK!
Instantly, the fabric of the dimension completely tore open. A terrifying, localized gravitational singularity erupted inside the barrier. Before Malakor could even raise his hands to invoke his absolute fortune or conceptual protections, both men were violently, brutally ripped out of the surface of the world. The kinetic force of the dimensional displacement was so immense that it violently scooped up a massive, mile-wide crater of the earth's soil along with them, yanking it into the void.
In a literal blink of an eye, the barrier vanished, the fiery aura dissipated, and the two apex predators were gone—leaving the hundred-thousand-strong army of The Settlement standing in absolute, paralyzed silence before a massive, smoking void in the ground.
But contrary to what Doo had so fiercely expected, taking the supreme leader off the board did absolutely nothing to halt the grinding gears of the Iron Empire.
Down in the physical world, the hundred-thousand-strong vanguard didn't scatter in panic. They didn't retreat. With their neural pathways permanently rewritten by Malakor's cybernetic mind-link, they simply adjusted their ranks over the smoking, mile-wide crater. They kept on moving forward with a terrifying, singular purpose: march to the coordinate, kill the witch, and burn down her tree.
Meanwhile, a dimension away, the vacuum of a dead world bore witness to a clash of titans.
"I guess you must be the man my subordinate warned me about," Malakor smiled, his voice cutting through the eerie stillness as both men circled each other like apex predators locking eyes.
They were trapped in a pocket dimension entirely composed of barren, desolate sand. There were no oceans, no mountains, and no structures—nothing noteworthy as far as the eye could see, just an infinite desert beneath a stark, alien sky.
"Why are you trying to kill Isis?!" Doo growled, his fists clenching so hard that arcs of volatile crimson lightning began to crackle across his knuckles. "You survived your wounds! You could have taken the magnificent power she granted you and simply stayed in your own kingdom in absolute peace!"
"Isis? Oh, I see. So that is her true name, huh?" Malakor's smile widened, his twin blue star eyes flaring with a cold, psychotic ambition. "Well, yes, I suppose I could have stayed in my kingdom. But if I want to truly become the one above all... if I want to become a god, I will have to deal with her sooner or later. There simply cannot be two gods occupying the same universe."
"I'll kill you right here and put a permanent end to this madness," Doo said slowly, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low resonance.
"Well... you can always try," Malakor countered, his smile twisting into a mocking grin as he braced his posture.
BOOM!
The desert world didn't even have time to register the kinetic impact. Like a cosmic bullet fired from a railgun, Malakor was violently flung backward. Doo moved with such catastrophic velocity that the sheer wind pressure of his movement completely vaporized the infinite sand dunes below them. Malakor busted straight through the core of the planet like a needle popping a fragile balloon, the desert world shattering into a billion floating asteroids behind them.
In the dead vacuum of space, Doo caught up to him in a microsecond. He extended a flaming, clawed hand, gripped Malakor ruthlessly by his face, and threw him with all his might directly into the burning sun of that dimension.
The colossal star didn't explode. Instead, the moment Malakor's body breached the solar corona, the brilliant golden light of the sun instantly began to suffocate and dim. Within seconds, the entire star died out, collapsing into a hollow, frozen husk as Malakor completely absorbed its immense, multi-billion-year nuclear energy directly into his own cells.
Floating amidst the stellar ash, a brilliant, blinding blue aura erupted from Malakor's skin. A terrifying, absolute grin split his lips.
"Things always, always go my way," Malakor grinned, his voice echoing through the vacuum of space via pure telepathic dominance. He stretched his arms wide, feeling the conceptual blessing of Isis altering reality to ensure his absolute victory. "How exactly do you reckon you're going to defeat me now... Dragon?"
Doo clicked his tongue with deep annoyance, his long crimson hair drifting lazily in the zero-gravity void. He ignited his own flaming energy to its absolute absolute limits, his eyes locking onto the star-devouring immortal, ready for the next cataclysmic attack.
Isis sat tightly curled on her moss bed, looking completely crestfallen.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying with all her might to visualize the exact moment Doo would walk back through her chamber doors, laughing his loud, boisterous laugh. But a heavy, suffocating dread was beginning to wrap around her heart. It had been two full weeks since he had promised to return. Two weeks of agonizing silence. He hadn't shown up, and he hadn't even sent a single telepathic link to explain his absence.
"Maybe... maybe I should just go out and find him," she muttered into the dark, her voice trembling.
BOOM!
The thought had barely left her lips when a cataclysmic, deafening shockwave slammed directly against the outer bark of the Mother Tree. The entire subterranean chamber groaned, wooden dust raining down from the ceiling.
Again? her mind raced, a cold panic seizing her. The very last time something had struck her home with that kind of violent force was during the great war. But the humans had all abandoned the stone city years ago. What could possibly be out there now?
Her forest-green hair didn't wait for her command. Moving with a sharp, lightning-fast grace, the living vines coiled around a high root and violently catapulted her upward, dragging her through the inner veins of the trunk until she reached the open air at the mouth of the tree.
The acrid, choking scent of burning wood slammed into her nose the microsecond she breached the surface. Isis froze, her ruby pupils dilating in absolute horror as she took in the apocalyptic sight before her.
The Mother Tree was burning.
A distance away, stretching across the desolate plains, stood a colossal, terrifying army of steel and neon. Thousands of human soldiers were completely surrounding her sanctuary, their faces twisted into expressions of pure, unadulterated, brainwashed hatred. They were aiming their sleek, high-tech weapons upward, relentlessly firing a barrage of blue plasma artillery that tore chunk after chunk out of the sacred wood.
Before she could even scream, a stray, high-velocity projectile cut through the air.
CRACK.
A sharp, agonizing pain struck her right in the center of her forehead. Isis stumbled backward, her vision flashing white as a thick, glowing stream of emerald-green blood began to trickle down her face. Panic exploding in her chest, she desperately cupped her small hands over the wound, trying to catch the precious, divine liquid—but she was too late.
A single drop of her green blood spilled through her fingers and splashed onto the trunk of the tree.
Instantly, a horrific reaction occurred. The moment the divine blood touched the wood, the Mother Tree began to violently wither and rot from the inside out, dying at a speed a thousand times faster than any mortal fire could ever achieve. The leaves turned to ash; the ancient, massive branches snapped and collapsed into dust.
"No... No ..No...No...No! Mother Tree, please, don't die!" she whimpered, frantically trying to wipe her own toxic blood off the rapidly decaying bark. But the metaphysical damage was already done.
As the trunk crumbled beneath her fingertips, a fresh, blinding pang of agony struck her skull. She turned her head slowly, looking down at the cheering, triumphant armies below. She heard their monstrous commands, their joyous laughter at her suffering. Inside her mind, the gentle girl who loved picture books and sweet treats vanished. A massive, hollow void erupted at the back of her consciousness, swallowed entirely by a single, pulsing concept:
HATRED.
Her forest-green hair slowly began to expand, mutating in size as the vibrant emerald color bled away, turning into a terrifying, pitch-black abyss. Above them, the sky violently darkened as roiling, suffocating black clouds blocked out the sun. Her eyes violently switched places once more—the emerald centers burning like toxic suns inside twin rings of bleeding ruby.
Her divine shadow expanded outward like a tidal wave, stretching across the valley, over the mountains, until it reached the literal ends of the world. Her face went completely dark, obscured by the sheer magnitude of her aura. The very atmosphere began to crack and splinter under the pressure of her surging energy, the gravity dropping so heavily that the soldiers below were instantly brought to their knees, barely able to hang onto their lives.
"I should just kill them all," she muttered, her voice no longer human.
With one final, tragic snap, the remaining foundation of the Mother Tree completely disintegrated, breaking apart into a towering mountain of gray dust. She was left hovering in the empty air, completely homeless. Completely alone.
"YOU KILLED MOTHER!"
She didn't speak the words. She unleashed them. Her voice didn't travel through the air; it violently detonated inside the brains of every single living creature on the planet, causing their ears to bleed.
"I'LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU! I'LL KILL YOU ALL!" she screamed.
Instantly, an apocalyptic thunderstorm brewed overhead. The sky itself cracked open like cheap glass, the fabric of the dimension peeling away into a dark, empty void as purple lightning struck the earth repeatedly. "YOU EVIL CREATURES—"
"You know, you really shouldn't let your emotions run rampant like that, little mistress," Doo said softly.
"Why?" Isis had asked sweetly, her tiny frame resting comfortably on the Dragon King's broad shoulder as she kicked her legs. It was a memory from a beautiful, sunlit afternoon, long before their current nightmare. "Isn't it okay to get angry sometimes?"
"It's okay to feel it," Doo had replied, a gentle, protective smile warming his sharp features as he looked up at her. "But for uniquely powerful beings like us... our anger isn't a pretty sight for the universe to behold. It's always significantly better to talk things out before you decide to fight. Though a time may come when you absolutely have to trade blows... it's mostly the other way around."
"But they killed Mother..." Isis cried out into the empty void, the raging thunderstorm above suddenly losing its violent edge as the precious memory slammed into her consciousness. She clutched her head, her voice cracking as the sheer weight of her grief overtook her fury. "I can't forgive them, Doo... I just can't. Even if you were here telling me to... I can't."
"At least promise me you'll try to talk things out before you resort to slaughter," Doo's memory smiled, his vibrant eyes anchoring her soul. "Things in this world are rarely what they seem."
Isis floated amidst the falling ash of her home, her pitch-black hair swaying heavily as the roiling storm clouds slowly began to part, the oppressive atmosphere returning to a fragile, trembling normal. She lowered her hands, staring blankly down at the paralyzed, weeping army of The Settlement.
"Just where the hell are you, Doo...?" she whispered softly, her voice completely breaking as a single, glowing green tear fell into the dust.
She aggressively wiped the remaining glowing green tears from her eyes, her resolve hardening. I'll completely revive the Mother Tree right after I talk to them, she thought, forcing herself to stay grounded. Just like Doo said. Talk first.
With a silent ripple in space, she teleported down from the upper atmosphere, materializing just a few yards away from the front lines of the grand mechanical army. As she stepped forward across the ash-covered dirt, the terrifying pitch-black abyss of her hair began to recede, turning back into its vibrant, living forest-green. The soldiers immediately scrambled backward in a state of sheer, unadulterated panic, their weapons shaking in their grips.
Seeing their terror, Isis slowly raised a pale green hand, open-palmed, in a clear and deliberate gesture of peace.
"Why are you all attacking me?" her telepathic voice rolled softly yet firmly into the minds of every single person present. "What did I ever do to any of you?"
"You're a witch!" a high-ranking commander growled from the front lines, though his boots were visibly trembling against the dirt. "An evil, parasitic being bent on entirely wiping us out!"
Isis blinked her massive ruby pupils, tilting her head in genuine confusion. "Though I've become an immense fan of storybooks lately, I don't recall ever poisoning any apples to be considered a witch," she said simply. She let out a long, dramatic sigh, crossing her arms over her vibrant blue gown. "Witches only exist in fictional tales, you silly things."
"But what about the thousands of people you slaughtered?!" another soldier voiced out angrily, emboldened by the crowd. "What about our vanguard armies that agonizingly died from trauma after witnessing your terrible wrath?!"
"I don't think I've ever killed a single human in my entire life," Isis countered, her voice carrying an undeniable, crystalline truth. "No, wait... I guess I technically just killed Mother with my blood. But still! I haven't harmed a single one of you. I mean, look around—you guys are all still standing perfectly fine right now, aren't you? Despite how unbelievably angry I just was."
She took a step closer, gesturing broadly to the massive, smoking crater where her tree used to be. "If your petty attacks made me accidentally destroy my own home, and I *still* chose to let you live... what on earth makes you think I'd just randomly go around attacking people for fun? Come on, be real," she shrugged, tossing her vine-hair over her shoulder.
The vast armies of The Settlement looked at one another, a sudden, heavy wave of confusion washing through the ranks.
What none of them realized was that Malakor's high-frequency cybernetic mind-link was entirely synthetic. In the immediate, crushing presence of Isis's raw, ancient divinity, the artificial commands etched into their neural pathways were violently cracking and breaking down. For the first time in months, they were actually thinking for themselves.
"But... but our King explicitly said—" one soldier stuttered out, his grip loosening on his blue plasma rifle, but his voice broke off as his brain struggled to process the contradiction.
"Well, where exactly is he then? This magnificent King of yours," Isis asked, looking around the desolate battlefield and letting out a bored, exaggerated yawn. "I don't see him standing around anywhere. Seriously, you guys are incredibly annoying. You march all the way here with your loud tools and weapons, make me kill my beautiful tree, and now you're just standing here spitting total nonsense about fairy-tale witches and curses."
She threw her hands up in the air, her green hair rustling with deep irritation. "Are you all completely dumb?"
"But... but..." another frontline commander stuttered, his jaw hanging open as the digital red tint in his eyes completely faded away, leaving him staring at her not as a monster, but as a deeply aggrieved, powerful girl in a blue dress.
"It's been a long while... God."
A voice cut through the quiet atmosphere like a rusted blade scraping across iron.
Isis perked up her ears instantly, every single nerve in her body turning to ice. She recognized that voice. She knew it down to the very fabric of her soul, but it shouldn't have been here. Her forest-green hair violently stood on end, expanding into massive, heavy trunks that slammed into the ground like colossal pillars, cracking the bedrock.
She turned around sharply, her gaze tearing into the gray sky.
Malakor was floating lazily above the battlefield. He was completely covered in dark, thick blood, his pristine imperial clothes torn to shreds, and his body heavily beaten and worn out in multiple fractured places. His twin blue star eyes stared down at her, but they were entirely cold, dead, and utterly devoid of human emotion.
"Ma... Malakor?" she breathed out loud, her voice cracking into a tiny, fragile whisper.
The confusion, the anger, the logic she had just used against the army—all of it vanished in a microsecond. Fresh, hot tears instantly cascaded down her pale green face, tracking through the dirt. "You... you came back? You actually kept your promise after all these centuries?"
But the words stopped dead in her throat, choking her.
Malakor didn't answer. With a dismissive, casual flick of his wrist, he tossed a heavy object down from the sky. It plummeted through the air, hitting the ash-covered earth with a soft, sickening thud, and rolled forward until it stopped directly between her bare feet.
Isis's ruby pupils shifted uneasily downward. Her breath completely left her lungs.
She recognized the long, unruly strands of crimson hair. She recognized those warm, vibrant eyes, even though they were now glassy and still. She recognized the peaceful, easygoing smile that had always anchored her soul, and the small, sharp nose she had playfully booped just weeks ago.
Doo's severed head lay in the dirt between her legs.
That's right... lose absolute control, you monstrous god, Malakor thought, a sharp, psychotic smile finally twisting his bloody lips as his twin blue eyes flared with a manic light. He braced the remnants of his absorbed solar energy, preparing for the apocalypse.
"Oh, and I should probably mention to you," Malakor called out loudly, his voice echoing telepathically through the entire valley, "that the lizard called out your pathetic name with his very last, dying breath."
The words detonated in the valley. Down below, the soldiers of the army looked at the severed head, looked up at Malakor, and then looked at Isis. A primal, instinctual terror overrode their broken mind-links. Without a single command being uttered, the entire hundred-thousand-strong army began to frantically shift away, scrambling and tripping over their own weapons as they desperately tried to flee from the epicenter of what was about to happen.