Urmryxigorz the Wise was on alert.

It wasn’t that much different a mindset from that of a normal dragon, merely wound up with more paranoia. It made sleeping and even dozing rather impossible, but that was fine, as a dragon could stay awake for weeks and even months if need be.

All five of its mahar Pactbound had been eliminated, smoothly and precisely. There was no sign of what or who had killed them by the other mahar who had hurried to investigate the disappearances of them and their cohorts.

They couldn’t even find intact corpses to examine, which indicated something all by itself.

The dragon elder, a millennium old and having seen and experienced many things in his long life, knew that such a strike was a mere precursor to something more direct, a way of removing pawns and agents in other places.

He expected the children he’d put into place among the mahar to be removed next, and was a bit surprised when they were not. One of the upper-worlders had come here, a demonic female with fantastically improbable strength, and literally slaughtered her way entirely through the Empire that had been founded and grown by foul Grobirundlarsh’s brood, burning them away in white fire and leaving an emptied landscape where tens of thousands of the Demon Dragon Elder’s Bloodline, humanoid and sauroid alike, had once ruled with savage impunity.

He could not Divine any surviving member of the older dragon’s Bloodline still alive in this Hollow World, save the Elder himself.

The demoness had also destroyed the inert Gate back to the Realm of the Cold Blood, which indicated that she might well know its purpose. It would be much more difficult to arrange transport to here or back to his home in the Realm without the Gate’s power there to anchor such magic, and certainly they were lost among the Planes and unable to forge a path back since the other worlds had been cut off.

He had checked all his Wards several times, making sure they were intact, and kept his sons rather more active than they preferred to be, ready against the intrusion of any outsiders into his lair.

He had only worked on this place for a mere handful of decades, but its improvements had been steady and thorough, and if he was distracted sometimes by ensuring that it was a place worthy of being a longer residence of an elder of his status, he had still done the job properly.

When the attack came, it still came without any warning, despite his senses and magic meant to forewarn him of danger.

And it was a Force attack.

His surprise and astonishment at the sheer arrogance of attacking him, of all beings, with a Force attack, gave way to stupefied astonishment, and then, of all things, pain.

Incredible pain, like nothing he had ever experienced!

First was the Dispelling effect, as wild magic crashed into him, and all his Contingencies, his Mantle of Wards, his long-duration Buffs, and even the magical items he was wearing were struck by crazed spiraling arcs of magic and silver shimmers. The spells were ripped apart in explosions of pure arcane energy, searing and battering him simultaneously, while his magic items were overwhelmed with magical static and suppressed instantly, depriving him of their protection and the magical effects stored inside them.

The waves of force came a mere instant later, smashing into him right through his scales, liquifying the cells and shattering the bones beneath, fountains of internal bleeding exploding through his mighty body in eruptions of agony.

He had felt all kinds of Elemental attacks before, experienced ripping psychic damage to mind and soul, and fought with tooth and claw as all dragons must, but never had he felt the vibrating, shaking agony of having parts of his body shattered from within.

It was impossible! Shards, Shards of Force could not harm him! Yet the ringing, bell-like impacts had nearly broken his eardrums and were still echoing in his skull...

He was over a hundred feet long from nose to tail, and the impacts of those Shards and their many flights picked him up and hurled him ten yards back like a doll, slamming him into the fresco of his discovery of this cloud island where he had made himself a temporary lair. He had intended to leave it to some of his children when they finally arrived here, but that didn’t seem like it was going to happen now.

That first volley had blown through all the Health Qi he had managed to accumulate after arriving in this place, and more.

Silver. Those Shards are burning with silver Light...

Divine power!

His violet eyes opened as the second volley manifested, and it was even bigger than the first. Six salvoes of Shards... eighteen Shards in each salvo, so many different energies swirling around their jetsilver display he couldn’t even discern properly how they were arranged, and he knew Force Magic backwards and forwards.

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But he was able to see that Divine power girding them, gathered around every Shard, elevating the Force magic to something empowered by another, even higher energy, and so completely bypassing his immunity to Force and Thunder damage.

They leveled at him, and shot out, one hundred and eight Shards in a swirling geometric wave, singing with precise notes, the whole field of magic resonating with them and a Caster Level he had simply not believed was possible for any mortal, let alone a slip of a half-human hybrid.

Instinct alone made him expend psionic power to offset their impacts, and they slammed into him, bypassing his draconic immunity completely, and the magic meant to defy Elemental energies was turned into wild magic lashing at him instead.

He was smashed back against the stone wall behind him repeatedly, crushing and cracking the stone as waves of force pulped and pounded his insides, a sensation he had never thought he would see or feel in his lifetime.

His psionic Reserves were gone in an instant, of course, totally overwhelmed by the amount of incoming firepower.

The searingly cold pain flaring up from his heart was above and beyond even that, driving arcane wedges into his soul. From where he was sprawled limply against the wall, his spine shattered, he could look down and see a staff wrought from the femur of a Jotun buried deep in his chest.

She was after his Dragonheart...

Her wings were spread wide, demonic in nature, but the silver patterns on them could only be called beautiful and artistic, yet deadly and domineering. Demonic horns radiating edges of that haughty and judgmental Heavenly Light, the same Light clinging to her spells, empowering them with Sacred energies...

He had seen her Shape massive volumes of rock through his human pawn’s eyes, but he had still gravely underestimated her power, so overwhelming that she had killed a dragon with the very energy it was supposedly immune to...

There was no way he could move, and he could only watch as she glided up. He knew his two Drak-spawn sons here were already dead, likely killed so fast they hadn’t even known they were under attack... and so subtly that even his mental ties to them had not been triggered.

Yes, he could see they were dim and dark now...

“It is a shame that you are of the Empire of Cold Blood,” the halvyri called Lady Traveler told him. Elven blood, contaminated with that of humans, so powerful. Unafraid of his size or retaliation, she moved up to lay her hand to the Staff impaling his chest. “We could have learned much from one another, but I know that is not the Empire’s way. You only take. In return, I take from you.”

He could not reply, and only watch as she wrenched with psycho-kinetic strength. Sacred light flared in his mind, and a thousand years of learning and knowledge died as she ripped his Dragonheart from him.

----------------

Rich red dragonblood sprayed over me as I tore Clavus free. The flawless purple corundum Orb I had made specifically for this dragon glowed with an inner light, a constantly evolving standing wave of Force and chiming, crystalline Thunder, reverberating with the captured power of an Amethyst Dragonheart.

The heartblood sank into me like I was a sponge, not leaving the slightest trace on my clothing. It was the conduit for the dragonslayer, the person who could receive the Dragonheart most naturally.

The primary benefit of a Dragonheart was naturally conferring the appropriate Half-Dragon Template upon the receiver.

I had things I wanted to achieve first, so I would not be taking it at this time. At the very least I wanted my Halvyr/4 first. Halvyr/5 getting me the Advanced Template would be nice, but it would overlap, not stack, with being a Half-Dragon.

Indeed, it would not be out of sorts to wait until reaching Twenty and Halvyr/5. It wasn’t like I wasn’t going to have the Karma to do so, it was only time.

Advanced Lesser Exemplar Amethystine Half-Dragon Halvyr. And that didn’t even get into potential Succubi, Nymph, or Sylph Racial Levels and things.

In the meantime, this Dragon was worth a fortune in Goldweight, especially for Force and Thunder Effects.

My Exsanguinating Tube was already plugged in and pumping, clearing out his blood. His children were also pumped dry, although I hadn’t carved them up yet.

Adamantine knives, a full set of unhandled blades only useable via Telekinesis, rose up out of my Masspack and were enspelled with Greater Magic Weapon, Keen, Sundering, and Breaking. Clavus, Einz, and I got to work.

--------

On a world very far away dimensionally from the Shrouded Earth, a pattern of amethyst crystals skillfully wrought into a particular pattern was glowing with an internal light of distant harmony.

Suddenly, that light was snuffed out and faded away. A second later, the amethyst crystals shattered into discolored dust.

Hundreds of other such crystalline formations, in many colors, some bubbling with elemental energies, lit up the faint darkness. To those lights, two more were added as massive eyes opened and regarded the shattered pattern through slitted irises coolly.

The expedition to the new world gained via a bargain with the Aberrant had been promising, but still cautious. Nine elders had been dispatched to that realm to survey it and begin preparations for a migration there.

The explorers had lost contact with the Empire many solar cycles ago, and had been unable to discover why, all forms of contact severed, and the very world no longer at those dimensional coordinates. Above and beyond that, their extradimensional sources of information suddenly and mysteriously had lost all knowledge of the planet ever existing.

Worrisome. But they had waited, watching for the signs or a hint of contact, but even the Aberrant entity that had revealed the world to them originally could no longer be contacted... or was ignoring them.

Now, this had happened...

The great wyrm of the Desolation Dragons considered all the implications, and turned away to another device, a scrying pool of magical sands that would put him in contact with his compatriots on other worlds of the Empire of Cold Blood from whence the elders sent on this mission had come, alerting them of this new development.

His anticipations were proven correct.

Over the next four lunar cycles, the great wyrms watching over the Life Markers of the dragon elders saw the Markers for those nine elders snuffed out, one by one. No, not just snuffed, but shattered and discolored, their Dragonhearts vanishing from the path of reincarnation.

Intercepted by other powers, taken by their slayers, destroyed by overwhelming force or powerful energies... all those things were possible.

They did not know what had been done or what was responsible, but the idea of treachery from the Aberrant meant that information from such things in the future would be suspect, at best...