Desreal: THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS --

He watches the Diadem’s dissolution, observes the liquid fall through the Desert sands and pass into nothing.

For a moment he studies that patch of land, suspended in some absent limbo with his wings held askew and his neck forming a thin and graceful arch toward the earth.

And then, it hits him. The claw that had been slinking around his mind since that fateful attack on Saphira suddenly clenches, and it shows – it flashes in his white eyes and the skies overhead rumble, darken further, crackle with distant lightning. The Nightmare is not himself; gone is the cruel rationality and sadistic nihilism. Now, he is all jagged madness and sick purpose. It rages within him. They rage. They are unstoppable. They are inexorable.

They are him, and it is time.
0A

His wings spread and he launches himself viciously skyward on leathery wings, sailing through the storm toward Desreal.

He lands in the familiar forest which has sunken into a rare silence. The shadows are longer. Darker. Maybe it’s a slip in his failing perception. Maybe it’s a portent. He knows these paths; he’s reigned over them for years. Each step is slow, guided by something aside from himself. The Others are here, and They want to meet them.

They find each other in a small glade, the very heart of the Element in that central forest.

The Shards throb in his shoulder as the rest of them come into sight. For a moment, there is silence. Silence and all of them, pieces of the puzzle called Apocalypse.

For millennia, he’s searched for this – the source of all that is madness and corrupt.

“I understand,” he sneers, those white eyes flashing with haunted electricity.

And then, They explode out of him. The Shards cut through flesh, rip through bone and shatter scales, muscle – blood pours out over the metal scales, running from his severed arteries.

His Shards collide with the others with a tremendous explosion of light that blinds him.

The Nightmare falls to his knees in time to see a cataclysmic eruption of white heat that engulfs him and them and everything else.

The 100-story pillar of fire billows through the stratosphere, a mushroom-shaped pillar of annihilation. The resulting shockwave rips through everything; cloud, smoke, noxious fumes spilled with that horrendous wave into the realms, sublimating, destroying.

It is an instant, and there is nothing left.