"Spyro," Flame said, his throat hoarse. "That's him?"
Spyro nodded, ordered himself not to avert his eyes from The Black Star. "It's him."
The deity directed a hand towards Flame and Ember. "Two fires you have brought." Languidly, he craned his head to them. "None of which carry the yoke of perdition. Tell me, then..." He turned his head to Spyro, Cynder, and Malefor. "Will you devour them as well? As you did the heroes before you?"
Spyro glowered at the deity. "You mean the ones you broke? Who weren't meant to carry the loss of their entire world?"
The Black Star bared his stained teeth in a grin. "This isn't a question of morals. The shades are my tokens. Innumerable potentials, drawn and quartered spirits." He tilted his head at the dragons' gauntlets. "No other world has resisted me in this manner. Curious."
Spyro restrained his urge to lash out. Malefor's prior words still drifted in his head. "What will it take to keep Avalar alive?"
The stars faded from the deity's eyes, became as pitch within his cowl. "I've already bargained with you."
"Then let's bargain again."
The Black Star stood before Spyro. "Perdition's shades were my keepsakes, but not irreplaceable. Offer more."
Spyro's paw curled into the infirm ground. He forced the question from himself. "What else do you want?"
Imperceptibly, The Black Star's vision meandered about the dragons. Aching moments passed as the deity thought. "The two fires may leave. I have no use for them."
Flame swept the notion aside. "I'm not leaving them to you." Ember sided closer to her mate, shared his resolution.
Spyro, downcast, said wearily, "Flame. Ember. Please go."
The stricken tone in Spyro's voice disturbed the fire dragons. Flame said, "We couldn't live with ourselves if we left you."
"But you'll live." Spyro's face hardened, eyes glassy as he stared downwards.
Flame's throat tightened, his head in a slow shake. "I don't want to leave."
Cynder said to them, "How do you think we'll feel if we lose you?"
Flame's mouth opened only to be silenced by Ember's paw upon his shoulder. She held her forehead to it, frowned wanly. She whispered, "I don't want this to hurt anymore than it has to." Her mate grimaced, the etches of his face as gashed shadows before the pale fire of The Black Star, the couple barely alight amongst the waiting gloom.
Malefor made a step towards them, smiled, softened his sharp, somber features. "Be well."
The two fire dragons raised their heads up at Malefor, quietly returned his blessing. The couple parted from them, their steps heavy. They kept their sight on the three dragons until the pale fire of the deity became as a weak star. Only then did they turn their vision to the darkness before them. A rose-fire serpent flourished to life, lit the way for the couple as they distanced themselves, the fire but a small beacon in a sea of black.
Spyro tensed his jaws, eyes lucid as he locked sight with the deity. "What do you want?"
"Spirits twice damned, the ones that overcame the nadir of many only to fall again."
"What do you mean?"
The deity outstretched his hand to the dragons. "You three."
The weight of the behest didn't initially draw Spyro. He resisted the implications, his imagination an evil he didn't want to contend with. He couldn't keep his voice steady. "You want...you want us to be a part of perdition?"
"Yes." He gave them the smile of a sadist, barely visible beneath the cowl. "The peak that you three have reached intrigues me. The fall would be nothing short of singular."
Spyro's strength waned, dripped slowly from his spirit, waxy as it hardened into something cold and shapeless. "For Avalar?"
The deity nodded. "For Avalar."
Spyro turned to Cynder, the dragoness wracked by The Black Star's offer. She brought herself closer to her mate's warmth, clung to it. She leaned her muzzle towards his, stricken words stinging. "I don't want to go there."
He put his muzzle atop hers, cherished her slow breaths against his scales. "Avalar will live on this way."
"I know..." She nestled her head deeper, gave a shuddering breath. "I don't want to be with them."
"It won't be the same," he tried to console, his own words a feign for his doubt. "We'll know that we saved ours. We'll always have that."
The Black Star grew tired of the exchange. "Make your decision."
Barbs hooked the dragons' acquiescence, pained them each time they tried to answer, threatened to rend their spirits if they complied. Cynder held Spyro tighter, the purple dragon's jaw locked as he sought the strength for the final push.
Something fell loose within him. "I–"
"No."
Spyro, Cynder, and The Black Star turned to Malefor, the dragon firm in his stance, head lowered at the deity. "I will not go."
Disgust spread across Spyro's face. "Damn it, Malefor! Wasn't it you who said to find another way to end this? Why are you recanting now?"
"Because Flame was right," Malefor said, his tone sharp with rebuke. "We might help this bastard if we concede." He acridly chuckled at the deity's deception. "Oh yes. You'd save Avalar. But what about the worlds after? I know, you both know that's not a burden a soul can bear."
Spyro and Cynder turned their heads to the deity, incised their suspicion upon him. Spyro said to The Black Star, "You want perdition's power back and ours in turn."
The Black Star stilled with the exception of his slowly curling and splaying hands, the gesture one of dwindling patience. "Do not speak to me as if you hold an advantage."
"And who else has crossed you this way?"
"The severed." The white flames burst from his body, and when they receded a sinuous cheetahman stood in his place, the eyes still black and starry, swathed robes dank. He made slow steps around them, glared at them. "The ones whom I extracted my knowledge, my fleshes."
His body burst to flames again, receded to reveal a wiry, slick, blue-skinned creature with a thin muzzle and long, membranous hair. The eyes and garb stayed the same. "Many bloods, all to flow the same path by changing hands."
Another plume of fire. In his place slithered a serpent with four bulky arms. The Black Star's rags draped loosely around the muscles of its neck, the inside of the cowl illuminated by glowing, slitted irises, his hissing speech deepened by growling vowels. "I bore them all, discarded them except for the ones in my vision. They are all within me."
Another flash of fire before he reverted to his human form, a smirk on his face. "Your lives, your blood and flesh have been conjured by the minds of many, as have the avatars you have just seen. I am disappointed that you have chosen to fight. Perdition, at least, shared my experiences despite their despair. I shared with them many marvels, if at a cost."
Cynder scoffed at that. "They never asked to take that journey with you. I doubt they could have appreciated it with the hell you put them through."
"Yet they did, if not bitterly so." He raised his palm up, and from the darkness came a virescent light that illuminated sprouting, serrated greenery from shadowed soil: twisted trees with sharp, irregularly shaped boughs that gave life to black leaves with silver eye-like shapes upon the cuticles. The trees' boughs continued to stretch, intertwined with their kin, formed a ghostly green canopy over the dragons and deity.
"Perdition falls, their memories the precipice."
Abhorrence. It seethed through the dragons' being, manifested as curled lips and taut arms eager to rend. Spyro growled, "Bastard! All this power, all this potential for good and you use it for suffering."
"Good?" The deity's grin broadened as he roamed about the malformed verdure. "Your frayed seams, your trampled paths of thought..." He stopped. His hand reached through a tree, almost spectral in substance. "Discarded as your own seams give way." Its stump slowly seeped with black sap as the infection traveled to its boughs, to the cuticles of the leaves. The eyes wept with the pattering liquid light before they shriveled
The Black Star turned to them, the tendrils of his infection like a canker as it spread throughout the ground, infected the greenery around it. The light above them reddened, glared. The diseased life shone bloodily beneath, began to pulse, rhythmically breathe and sway as its sanguine vascularity expanded and contracted.
He opened his arms, invited their defiance. "Come to me, little spirits. Be lost in all."
Spyro raked his arm upward, sent a wave of white fire towards the deity. The Black Star took the element with a gyration of his arm and slung it black, shaped it into a blazing maw. Malefor extended his arm, summoned bruised energy that entangled the blaze's mandible, and with a roaring crackle the binds ripped the jaw from the elemental, faded it.
The dark dragon blurred towards the deity, wings of light from his back as he slashed. The deity appeared at Malefor's side, and with clasped fists he struck the dragon against the bloodied soil, cratered it.
Cynder appeared behind him, clamped her claws into the deity's face and tore. The deity spun from the tear and raised his head, his face gashed and bleeding before the wounds sealed anew. With a wave of his arm he created a line of floating, runic symbols. Two hazy, red-cloaked figures appeared behind them, heads bowed. The evanescent pair raised their heads, one that smiled, one that frowned before they emitted undulating howls, mouths stretched as they bellowed black fire.
The flames wound through the air, hunted the three dragons. Spyro sprinted towards the deity, drew the flames towards him as he shrouded his body in a heavy suit of earthly crags and barbs.
The deity manifested beside him. Spyro had anticipated this.
Threads of false light shone like geodes through the earthly armor as the spikes protracted, impaled the deity before the dragon rammed him to his knees. He opened his gauntlet, intended to absorb the black fire. He gasped when it wildly resisted, tried to free itself from the gauntlet's draw.
He cast the element back at The Black Star, and the impact flung the deity through the trees, burst them into shards of sanguine bark, wood, and meat. Cynder pursued, nimbly navigated the mangled terrain before she leaped and sent down a windy rain of brilliant white needle points, perforated the downed deity. She landed a few paces from him, stared at the unmoving body. Spyro and Malefor joined her.
Cynder, unsure of The Black Star's demise, strayed her vision across the surroundings. "Could it be?"
Spyro shook his head. "I'm not sure."
The vegetation stilled its swaying, the sudden sound of tinnitus all around them. A croaking groan entered the sonance as the life around them convulsed and sunk into the ground, left them in a pool of bloodied sap. They took to the air through the skeletal canopy as the pool flooded further out into the great void, The Black Star immersed within its shallow depths.
A voice sheared through them. "Not. Your. Seams."
They spun around. The Black Star walked on air towards them, held aloft by spectral, cadaverous hands that caught his footfalls as his rags swung from side to side. The dragons flew to him, elements ablaze from their maws as the breaths conjoined into a boiling mass of ever-shifting color. The deity splayed his hand, took a grip on the stream of power and swung it around at them, concentrated it and shaped it into a massive scythe.
The dragons dropped height as the scythe crackled above them. The deity reversed the direction, aimed to cleave them in half. Spyro and Malefor summoned their elemental cleavers, met the scythe in an eruption of fire-wisped sparks. They parried the scythe downward, rose up and passed it as they veered towards the deity.
Cynder became as a dark streak as she shot towards The Black Star. She manifested at his side, put up a shield of false light before she reached through it with her gauntleted arm and sank the talons into his neck, channeled her fear, venom, and darkness into him.
The Black Star seized up for a moment, a flash of white from his cowl. Spyro and Malefor closed in, the cleavers aimed at his belly. The weapons sank in with a steaming hiss and squelch, smoked as the deity's white blood evaporated upon the bladed, amethyst fires.
Spyro and Malefor wrenched the cleavers out, and a spray of false light erupted from the deity's innards. Cynder sent another surge of ravaging power into him, darkened the bleeding hole in his gut with coalescing reds, greens, and blacks.
The Black Star tilted his head down at the wound, wordless. Cynder released him, kept her shield up, eyed him from the hole within it.
The Black Star's hand snaked through and seized her throat. Cynder opened her mouth, mutely screamed as she tried to pry off the deity's hand. Spyro cried out to her as he and Malefor rushed forward.
Red. Shrill. Grating. Deafening. It poured from the The Black Star's gaping wound, pierced and burrowed into Spyro and Malefor, and from the crimson came thrashing, glowing phantasms that blocked the two dragons.
The illusory figures appeared as lithe, female dragons that writhed and pried at their necks. Spyro reached for them only to be obstructed by an unseen enclosure. He howled and slammed against the barrier as the figures' legs kicked and bodies tossed. Furious sobs came from him as he beat the barrier with everything he had, with fire, with earth, with lightning, with cold, with his own false light, bore into it with a feral abandon, his own screams distant to him as his sanity drifted, became a distant and unreachable thing.
The little figures slowed their movements and slackened. They vanished, as did the enclosure.
Cynder hung lifelessly in The Black Star's grasp. He dropped her, and her body bowed as the air rushed against her corpse, down into the bloody pool below.
Numbness. Spyro's wings stopped moving. Malefor flew to him and caught him, his own mind lost in a brume of disbelief, of horror. "Spyro..." His voice shook. "Spyro, please! I need you! Come on!"
A presence emanated from Spyro, something that radiated through Malefor and forced him to release the purple dragon. He distanced himself just as blotched essence flared from Spyro's wings.
The bereaved dragon rose, body slack with the exception of his widening, blurring wings that left wretched phantasms in their sweeps: visual echoes of the dragon's misery and ire. Life left his eyes, became as hollows as a violet light bled from between his scales, flowed around him in rivulets. Black and white tears issued from his empty eyes, merged and swirled with the violet.
His head trembled, fangs clenched to the point of breaking. Languidly, he brought up his gauntlet and pointed it at the deity.
The Black Star took one step towards him until a mass of flickering oculi opened their smoldering lids from behind the deity, shifted their voided pupils towards him.
A rasping chorus of screeches ensued, followed by a thrashing of invisible slashes and blows as the dragon's specters lacerated the deity, shredded the rags from him and eviscerated his genderless body, sent spatters of false light and red from his dark flesh.
Malefor could only gape at the power Spyro wielded, the notion of victory far from him as he witnessed the uttermost hatred and despair that lied within the purple dragon. He covered his ears and turned his head away, and even then the shrieks and vibrations of violence haunted him.
The attack ceased. Malefor took his trembling paws from his ears. He shuddered as he beheld the floating remains of the deity. White-lit tendons and entrails dangled from his maimed body, his cowl ripped from his half-torn face, his left arm missing, legs in slivers.
Yet he still levitated, stared at Spyro with one starry eye, his exposed teeth and gums clenched. He opened his mouth, and from his throat came a rattling, disembodied voice. "This deception ends."
Within the span of a blink The Black Star speared his hand through Spyro's heart. The dragon's body arched, mouth agape, hollowed eyes wider as the black and white tears ran thickly down.
The deity leaned towards Spyro's ear. "No heart to lament." He pulled his hand from his chest with a squelching crack. The dragon's wings beat for a moment, shivered, and stilled before he plummeted to the bloodied ground below.
Malefor didn't act on rationale. It escaped him as raw emotion lashed against the confines of his mind. He flew after Spyro's falling body, caught him and flew him down to where Cynder lay. He spread him out next to her, the purple dragon's wheezing breaths broken.
Malefor put his paw above Spyro's destroyed heart, intended to mend the wound as a small orb of false light emerged from his palm. He reeled his arm back when Spyro cried out, aghast when the wound gushed more blood and light. "This..." Malefor's shivering intensified. "This worked for Ember, why isn't..." The dark dragon squeezed his eyes shut, unwilling to believe this shift of fate.
Spyro's head rolled towards Malefor's gaze. His deep blue irises overtook the black, the heaving of his chest spasmodic. Weakly, he lifted his gauntlet to Malefor, splayed his paw. Malefor didn't understand the gesture. "What...what are you..."
"Malefor..." His breathing dwindled, became strangled. "Take our light."
Malefor's vision shifted between Spyro's and Cynder's gauntlets. He understood the implication, yet couldn't accept the inevitable. "No...don't...don't die. Not like this."
With a final push of strength Spyro reached up and clenched Malefor's gauntlet. He pulled him close, his hot breaths thick and saline, eyelids strained as he fought to keep his fading life. "Be our Savior. Become The Destroyer." With those words his eyes glassed over, breath cut short. He lied his head down and turned it to Cynder, let his darkening vision linger upon her as his other paw reached out and brushed against hers. He closed his eyes, and a cold calm flowed over him before his final rest.
Malefor held tight to Spyro's gauntlet, shook him as if to wake him. The Black Star's presence creeped up from behind him. Still, he shook the purple dragon, didn't want to accept their death.
His body remembered the warm touches. It clashed with the lifeless grasp of metal upon metal, the contrast a jagged ache within his body and soul. Rocking sobs took him as he gripped the gauntlet tighter, held onto Spyro's last words, chanted them. "Be our Savior. Become The Destroyer." He put himself between Spyro and Cynder, took their gauntlets into his paws. He hardened his resolve. "Be our Savior. Become The Destroyer."
The Black Star's presence drew closer, the air heavy with ozone. Malefor reached deeper for Spyro's voice, for Cynder's.
Cynder spoke in his mind. 'Friends, Malefor. Hard of hearing?'
The deity's gurgled breaths became audible. Malefor reached for another voice.
Spyro's: 'You're cared for, Malefor, even if said care is new.'
Flame's: 'Never thought it would happen, but I was wrong about you. Can't say I regret it.'
A burning, freezing hand reached for him.
Ember's: 'I told you: a grudge is a heavy thing to bear.'
Terrador's: 'You've changed much, Malefor. I am happy to have known this side of you.'
His own voice echoed through him, cast out his misery, left only will.
'I'm not used to smiling like this.' He opened his eyes, beheld the corpses of his lost friends.
'All I can offer you is my power, my loyalty.'
He raised his head, opened himself to their lifetime of experience, of power, of love shared and lost. "Until nothing left." The hand grabbed his shoulder just as a shimmer of force propelled The Black Star back, tumbled the deity in splashes across the drenched ground.
Motes of false light transferred from the fallen dragons' gauntlets to Malefor's. The dark dragon leaned his head back, braced himself. The motes converged into a stream, the flood gates of power opened. His arms shook as he grasped tighter, took in the ever-rising flow.
It intensified again, rippled the red liquid around him, bent and stretched the air. A strangled moan came from him as other elements intertwined with the light: twined bands of fire and ice, earth and lighting, fear and darkness, wind and venom.
Another stage of imbuement initiated. He nearly released their gauntlets as the power manifested itself physically, and for a brief moment the pain of his resurrection resurfaced. Smooth muscle grew against an expanding skeleton. The sinew lengthened, broadened, gave him a rediscovered sense of strength and vitality at odds with the agony of his empowerment. The gnarling material of the gauntlet grew with him, creeped up his arm before it finally conformed.
The last wave of power came as a gift he had bestowed: their darkness, the abandon to give an edge, to draw from the deeper recesses of emotion.
The abandon he needed when his friends lie dead and battered before him.
The connection between him and the flow of power snapped shut. A brief vertigo took him and staggered him before he righted himself. He peered down as his body.
Every iota of his being exuded strength that dwarfed his previous faculty as The Dark Master. He understood Spyro's words then. His ability to ravage, to scour entire lands and lives now had a purpose.
He needed to end The Black Star.
His amber eyes left a light trail as he canted his behind at the deity. He turned to him, made ponderous steps towards the floating, mangled figure, so diminutive before the towering dragon. "You've taken too much."
The Black Star didn't move, his one eye up at the behemoth. Malefor stopped before him, bore his hatred into the deity. "Once again, I can only look up." Bruised essence flared from his massive form as he lowered his head. "And you're in the way."
His gauntlet arched downward, aimed to flatten the deity. The Black Star held his hand up, met the strike. Even in his crippled state he matched Malefor, force for force. From the tips of the dragon's gauntlet came threaded, dark blue energy that twisted around the deity, ensnared him, buckled him before the immense pressure.
The deity lay supine, wrenched his hand through the net of Malefor's binding power, his trembling arm a brace between him and the crushing will of the dragon. With a desperate thrust he deflected the gauntlet aside and levitated away.
Malefor pursued only for the red liquid around him to converge around his fours into adhesive, gurgling masses as the deity blended with the dimness of the ethereal chamber. The dragon growled a curse and dissipated the trap with a downward rush of white fire. Freed from the entrapment, he peered around at the void.
His aggression turned to caution as the very air became as water in its tangibility, flowed around him as unseen tributaries, gathered and streamed towards an amassing source. He couldn't identify the flow to cull it, couldn't detect the deity anywhere.
The rush of the flow strengthened, and he dug his talons into the ground, pressed and adjusted against the jostling force around him. He summoned a temporary orb of light to give illumination to the surroundings, but the darkness did not accept it.
The flow ceased, and in the distance's obscurity came a voice wholly unlike anything he had experienced. It spoke to him physically and audibly, its pitch incapable of consistency as it alternated between subterranean rumbles and grating highs, yet The Black Star's unmistakable intonation remained: savored speech with lingering vowels and cutting consonants.
"You have entrenched yourself deeper than you can imagine."
Malefor paced, waited for the deity to emerge as prints of glacial fire burned in his wake. "I know I have, deity. Fear for your own perdition, as I will ensure that you never climb back out."
The Black Star did something then that made Malefor's core clench. The deity chuckled, the sound akin to grinding stone. "You have grown much, little spirit. I am inspired."
Malefor backpedaled as a looming shape ambled towards him, bore a chilled luminescence, its paws veined and corded with tendons, plate-less chest and belly knotted with sinew. As it became visible so did the crawling of its albicant flesh: feebly reaching hands an imprints of faces that squirmed and drowned beneath.
Its massive head emerged, the stars within the ebony of its new eyes, its jaw heavily muscled, muzzle broad, its crown of horns molten with swirling reds. From its back came swaying, ragged strips of flesh like bastardized mimicries of wings. His tail whipped left and right, its tip a mass of hooking serrations.
The draconic form of The Black Star stood twice as tall as Malefor, twice the breadth. The deistic dragon craned his head down, lips spread to reveal rows of stained, bifurcated fangs. His mouth did not move as he spoke. "For once in a millennium I have taken up a new mantle. Consider it an honor before I end you. Devour you."
Malefor stretched his neck up at the deity. Slow white flames curled up his body as his ethereal wings protracted from his back. He lunged and struck. The deity's great paw caught the strike and pressed him down. Malefor braced against it, muscles corded as he resisted, growled through clenched teeth. "Arrogance, Godeater." He slipped out from under the paw, raked the deity across its face and buried his claws in its muzzle. From his gauntlet came a curved blade of crimson lightning that sliced the great dragon's arm, leveled it, brought the deity lower before he wrenched his face to the ground.
He held the The Black Star's head down as the blade became a spear of churning, bruised fire that extended from his clenched paw. He drove it through the deity's muzzle, pinned it with a dull snap and crunch. "It blinds." He sank his armored paw into The Black Star's left eye, spilled bright viscous humor from it as he yanked. The deity howled as Malefor ripped the eye from his socket, took in its energy with the gauntlet.
Bright, webbing essence spread from the deity's paw, seized Malefor and sank into him with a frigid pain. The Black Star extricated the spear from his muzzle, tossed the elemental weapon aside. His paw bashed the dark dragon, tumbled him across the wet, squalid ground.
The chamber shook as The Black Star pounded towards him. Malefor rolled onto his back just as the deity's jaws closed in around him. He grabbed hold of the massive fangs, fought as the deistic dragon thrashed its head around his resistance, desperate to devour him.
Malefor exhaled fear-laced venom: a coiling gout of crimson and jade that traveled down the deity's gullet. The Black Star reeled and hacked, trembled as the venom coursed through him, intensified his shaking as he experienced something he had long forgotten.
"What..." The Black Star hacked, single eye narrowed. "What have you done to me?"
Malefor chuckled and rose to his fours, relished the tremor of his enemy's voice. "Taste that, Godeater?"
The Black Star retaliated with a great breath of white fire. Malefor shifted from its path, continued his predatory pace. "Death, deity: it claims us all."
A throaty laugh came from The Black Star as he shook off the fear. "Fool. I slew death itself." From the red mist above came a rain of shimmering ember-shards that hissed through the air towards Malefor. The dark dragon inhaled sharply as the perforating myriad closed in. He cast a translucent dome up, cringed as the storm of knifing fire bombarded his shield, ate into his reservoir of energy, the assault a strategic drain on his power.
He summoned a great gale, pushed the storm of fire aside and brought the shield down. The Black Star reinforced the assault, the deity frustrated at the counter, the drain of powers turned. Malefor manipulated the gale into a vortex, let it absorb the element into its circling hunger, formed it into a cyclone of whirling flames before he cast it at the deity.
The Black Star inhaled and took in the burning winds, the hollow of his eye and maw alight with churning fire. He vaulted upwards, his ragged wings as creepers upon the air. Malefor soared after him just as The Black Star concentrated the element into incandescent threads that hunted down its quarry.
Malefor rolled through the air, evaded the initial barrage. He hissed as several threads cauterized his arm and thigh, created smoking perforations. He dropped height and hastened as more threads pursued, the biting heat eager for his flesh.
He aimed his gauntlet back, sent streamers of ice as the heat threads chased him. Gradually the threads' intensity lessened, left a trail of vapor as he flew towards The Black Star.
They locked fours, snarled and clashed within a flurry of slashes. Malefor gripped the great dragon's throat and clawed downwards, bit into the deity's ribcage as his legs scrabbled against his belly, gouged into it, spilled more blood and light. The deity dazed him with a blow to his side, the dark dragon slack against the shock.
The Black Star opened his maw, and from it stretched a swarm of specters, their protean bodies a coagulate of black ichor and light-laced fire. They reached for Malefor, subdued him and dragged him towards the great dragon's gullet. Malefor fought through his daze, let his body became as a shadow as the brief, sinking stupor of darkness pervaded him. The specters groped for his intangible body, couldn't hold onto it. He blurred behind The Black Star, who reared his extended arm towards the dark dragon.
Malefor caught it, clenched the forearm and underarm. He pulled and rammed his horns into the elbow, used it as a fulcrum and dislocated the bone with a dull crunch. The Black Star shrieked only for Malefor to snag his broken arm and plunge them both to the ground. Malefor kicked the deity's back as they neared impact, knocked his head to the floor.
The Black Star staggered to his fours, jaw loose as his head swayed. Blindly, he fended off Malefor with a series of electric spheres that manifested erratically, forced the dark dragon to dart in and out of the spheres' paths, his wings unfaltering as he closed the gap.
He faced the deity, whispered, "Your seam is frayed, Godeater." A pillar of surging coruscation erupted from his gauntlet as he swiped upward, connected with the deity's jaw with a clack of metal on bone. He followed up with another swipe, tossed the deity's head to the side before he leaped atop his back, formed threads of garroting, bruised essence between his paws before he wrapped them around his neck. "Feel it tear."
He yanked, body taut as the power sank into the deity's neck. The Black Star tried buck him off as he took in wet, strangled breaths. Malefor held fast, sank the claws of his feet into the flesh, adjusted as the garrote cut deeper.
Buckled, The Black Star touched the garrotes, sent motes of false light up the cutting threads. It sank into Malefor's gauntlet, coursed through him, initially manifested as a prickling cold before his vision flashed white.
Cynder's agonized visage came into view, eyes wide as she clawed at his forearm. Guilt briefly paralyzed Malefor, the idea of killing her a freezing grip on his heart.
The Black Star pivoted, nearly threw Malefor off. The jarring brought him back to the fight. He pulled harder, stood higher on his hind legs.
Another vision came to him: Spyro's hollowed eyes that wept with shadow and light, the dark dragon's bloodied arm within his chest. Malefor expected to see pained askance across his friend's face, as if to wonder why he had ever bothered to live.
Yet the grace bestowed by Spyro altered the vision's intent. Spyro's blue eyes washed over the hollows as he gently took Malefor's hand from his chest, the wound sealed. He smiled, his mien forgiving, accepting.
'You're amongst friends now.'
In that moment Malefor came to terms with now, his past evils distant and small. In the loss of his friends he found both sadness and content.
Even in their death they embodied his will to live.
His back arched as he pulled. The garrote radiated as it slid and burned deeper into the deity's throat, his passion neither fueled by bloodlust or loss.
'None of us are entitled to anything.'
The tension in the garrotes loosened.
'We do this because it needs to be done.'
The garrotes gave.
'Because we're Avalar's protection.'
The Black Star's draconic head fell from his bleeding neck and rolled. Malefor leaped off the headless body as it collapsed on its side. He breathed heavily, approached the head. The deity did not die easily.
The severed head's mouth opened wider. "You cannot truly kill me. I am within you all."
Malefor ignored him and splayed his gauntlet, prepared to absorb the deity's remaining essence. "Maybe so. But some shackles are stronger than others."
The deity said tremulously, "What do you mean?"
Drops of the deity's false light began to drift into Malefor's gauntlet. "I have a place for you, as do we all. A place of many shackles, prisons within prisons." The drops coalesced into rivulets. "You will be in a desolate place, far but not forgotten."
The Black Star, in all his eons of existence, became terrified. "No...No! I had the stars, the heavens before me." His reckoning reduced him to bitter mourning. "Don't take the stars from me, please!"
Malefor took no pleasure in ending the deity. He could only begin to imagine the loss of such wonders.
But he could not let the agony of perdition reach any further. "Your seam is cut, Godeater. No one else will suffer by your hands." The gauntlet jerked as the surge of The Black Star's power flowed into it, seemingly unending as the deity's cries warbled and faded, left only susurrations as the dark dragon drank from the flow.
He clenched his teeth, winced against the increasing force. He trembled, the sheer magnitude painful for his body to bear. He screamed as the false light whirled around him, formed a blinding, roaring maelstrom as it funneled into him.
It brought him to his belly, his gauntlet still splayed as the power permeated his being, kindled him with a current of energy that had manipulated and destroyed entire worlds. He cried out, begged to nothing for the flow to stop.
And at that cry it stopped, left him in bleak silence. His vision still carried the after image of the light, his eyes scalding and moist. He lay his cheek on the ground, indifferent as the deity's draconic body blackened to ash, and with a moaning draft it floated away into the darkness.
He shut his eyes, his mind and body overwhelmed, heart heavy as a baking heat smothered him.