Desreal: what goes up has got to fall; KALLEIS/ALSHAIN

Alshain stumbles, chokes, falls – the Fire is asphyxiating, holding him and his futile Air powerless – he cannot speak, cannot reason with her, but can only sink lower and lower as the world swirls and preternatural brightness swallows the oblivion of darkness –

An unearthly snarl rips through the night like a tearing tapestry.

Flashes rend the night, blinding and luminous and through them comes an enormous dark creature. He streaks – lightning-quick and preternaturally graceful – from the shadow of the trees, and the clash of Fire with Lightning casts an eerie metallic-blue glow across his scales in that instant of crazed motion. He gathers his haunches beneath him, lands, bounds toward the filly, jagged-sharp ears pressed to his skull.

When he collides with her side, he directs the whole of the electrical current that his body can channel into her while his fangs snap at her crest. He grabs hold onto whatever he can and rips, heedless, snarling –

“Do not deny me my own victory!” he hisses at the fire-mare (he remembers her – how he remembers her, and the feeling of those hot choking cords around his own neck!)

And then, he turns to Alshain, who lies nearly lifeless nearby.

Slowly, Nightmare goes to him – delicately, soundlessly, he drifts like a ghost to the fallen falconblade. “And you…” he murmurs. A diffusive burst of static leaps off of Kurai and strikes Alshain, jerking him back to a sort of senseless, delirious consciousness. He looks up to see the reptilian face leering down at him, pale eyes sneering beneath a veil of black mane. “I want to see how the Falcon fares without his army, his home, his pawns.”

And he turns, back toward the forest, and before he vanishes he laughs to himself, “The bigger they come, the harder they fall…”