This is a short chapter, so I won't get in the way.
Just understand: it's been leading to this.
.
Time slowed to a still and brought silence with it like a dance partner; echoing and cacophonous, yet so thunderously absent that it was colder than the ice frozen on their faces. Even the shadows, at least for the moment—that one moment before the end—were quiet.
The twins stole one last look at each other as the living shadows grew solid enough for light to bounce off of them, as armor like chitin started flaking and layering onto the shadows' bodies; prepared for their joint suicide pact, in a final act of sacrifice at the altar of a goddess they'd never have the chance to behold, they had just pushed against the snow in their final charge when there came a sound that none of them had ever heard before.
Yugi was the first to recognize it.
Sotaro was next.
But recognition did not replace experience, and they would reflect on this later, how the sounds they had heard before this moment were little more than a pale mimicry, like they'd been listening to a warped record all their lives and were just now sitting before an instrument.
The dragon's roar was like thunder given voice; it was the drumbeat of Heaven; it was the heartbeat of God. It split the air into shards. Sieglinde and Anri, hunched forward so low that they were nearly touching the snow, pitched backward and landed flat on their backs, followed shortly by each and every one of the others. The shadows—huge, mutated, real—whirled around to look upon the summit, furious at the interruption of their imminent feasting.
She was too bright.
She took in all heat, all brightness, from the sky above and the snow below, from the day itself, and wore it as her royal regalia. She was the searing heat of high noon. She was every constellation. She was lightning. The holograms from the living world, lovingly crafted as they were, only presented the image of a large beast, something that might feasibly exist in corporeal reality; this was unconceived. This was an untouchable majesty, beholden to nothing so mundane as what was possible.
The queen took wing, and it was less that she leaped into the air and more that reality folded itself downward at her command. She moved with a speed and grace that could scarce be comprehended, even as more eyes beheld her in this moment than had in the past millennia.
The Great White Wyrm, the Last Sovereign of Lights, the Mother of Lightning; the last Blue-Eyes White Dragon was awake.
And she was angry.