For a moment, the world seemed to suspend its breath.
Lying side by side in the battered earth of Vollua, Foster and his dragon closed their eyes. Their bodies bled, their magic was almost entirely exhausted, and yet... in this shared agony, a last fire glowed.
A fire older than their pain.
A fire that came from before the world.
Their breaths, synchronized, were drawn out.
And in the deafening silence that preceded the end, their spirits rose together.
-
They floated.
No more pain.
No more flesh.
Just the two of them.
Two orbs of consciousness, two incandescent souls, drifting through the white void of their mental space.
Foster as himself. Proud, broken, resolute.
The dragon, vast, ancient, incandescent.
They drifted slowly, towards each other.
But the moment they touched... everything flickered.
A mental detonation.
Rejected from each other.
Their consciences imploded with contradictions.
Foster shouted into the void:
- I am me! I'm not you!
