Such a fool he had been. It had been so obvious. There had only been one end to the chain of events, only one that could possibly be. He had anticipated one outcome, one outcome that should have been clear and definite, even as he watched forces gathered that led to a far more simpler, elegant solution.

Goldmist laughed, at the irony and at his failure and stared up at the slowly sinking, listing mountain above him. Another explosion wracked it, and burning fragments of gold and silver fell around him. Above him, the last of his people continued a hopeless battle that was already lost. It had been lost from the moment that the Choggoths reached Olympus.

They had thought that they were safe, if only because they could fly, but they all had forgotten that above all things, Choggoths were adaptable. They could not think, but their actions made them perfect, the antipodean, organic version of the Adamantasus themselves.

They had come in on a shipment of slaves. No one had noticed that one of them, or perhaps more, had been infected. Everypony thought of Choggoths as contananent-sized masses of indeterminate, writhing protoplasm. No one had ever suspected that it could hide within the organic body of a monohorn, slowly eating its body from the inside until nothing was left but a skeleton. No one had suspected that it would spread so quickly, or that it could, in fact, infect the children of the Adamantusi.

But it had. All because Goldmist had not seen what should have been obvious from the start. That batch of monohorn slaves had been a gift from Arcane Domination himself.

Another explosion raked the mountain above, booming across the Draconian lands below, and more pieces of the ancient and grand machine that kept it aloft fell. Along with them dripped a dark red fluid, as if the mountain itself were bleeding, forming a vast pool beneith it.

One large drip of red landed before Goldmist, hissing as it burned through the shrubs and grass of the scrubland. It writhed and stretched, an a metallic voice screamed within it only to be drowned as the fluid stood on freshly formed legs. It extened a pair of silver wings, and a gaping vertical mouth lined with shining metal teeth ripped open across its form as its eyes formed and reformed, filling the now empty skull of the being it had devoured.

Goldmist laughed. There was nothing left for him to do but laugh, and he did not even mind. It was just so funny, the fact that he had not seen it, that it had all been so clear and he so blind. He had thought that he could manage to save his people by fiddling upon the hill, but the fiddle that had been played was him.

The Choggoth took a step forward, releasing a gurgling sound that was almost like language- -or, more likely, a parody of Goldmist’s own manic laughter. It took another step, almost seeming surprised that Goldmist did not try to escape. It’s form was just so hilarious, though, in its grotesqueness; the symbolism was too much.

The creature shifted, and part of it stretched out, forming a narrow hand, and it reached forward, extending its clawed and dripping fingers toward Goldmist. Still he did nothing but appreciate the justice of the situation.

Then, with a burst of magical vibration, a beam of blinding white light struck the Choggoth. It screamed out as a hole was burned through it, and it collapsed into something more like a spider, abandoning the mostly disassembled Argasus within it, trying to scamper back to the miles-deep pool of Choggoth below the island. It never made it, though, as another beam of magic blew it into flaming liquid that quickly reduced to ash.

A small creature appeared at Goldmist’s side. In body, it closely resembled him, but it was flesh where he was metal, gray where he was gold. She wore dull colored Cerorian armor tailored to her narrow frame, and, though all aspects of her were gray, her horn glowed with the most pure and brilliant white that Goldmist had ever seen.

A wave of Choggoth material swarmed around them, rising up from below them, and the monohorn cast a protection spell just as an immolating blast of impossibly hot red fire poured down from above. The Choggoth screamed as it was burned, and the remainder of it retreated back to the ocean of red that it had come from.

“Single Horn!” ordered Crimsonflame from above, touching down as her mages landed around her, their spells prepared for defense and attack. “Get Goldmist to safety! Emerald-Eye, prepare a squad for direct assault for evacuation. I will take point!”

“Don’t bother,” said Goldmist. “There are no survivors.”

“Of course there are,” said Single Horn, putting her hoof around Goldmist’s shoulder. “Look. It still flies. They are trying. We will save them.”

“They weren’t fast enough,” said Goldmist, his voice flattening as he stared into the distance at nothing in particular. “The engines themselves are all that are keeping it up. No one is in there. At least not anyone who is alive.”

“What do you mean alive?” demanded Crimsonflame.

Almost as soon as she did, the Choggoth itself seemed to answer. Its surface recoiled, pulling back from the attack, and then suddenly bubbling. Bits of it separated from the main mass, spreading pairs of metal wings to the sky. They flapped, and slowly took flight.

“The’re infecting the dead!” cried one of the Draconians, exhailing a cloud of brilliant yellow flame at a tendril that attempted to attack from the ground.

The Choggoth has still not finished, though. Its shape changed once again, the ocean of material shifting and retracting into something that almost looked like a building. Then the ground shook as it stretched upward.

All eyes watched as the red material rose impossibly through the sky, bending as it went, forming reinforcements to its structure to enable upward support. It formed a massive claw, an impossible hand, reaching upward toward Olympus.

“This area is scrubland,” said Crimsonflame, more toward herself than to anyone else. “How is it getting this much organic matter?”

Goldmist chuckled humorlessly, even though it was just another element of the joke that life itself had played on him. “I had Olympus positioned over a massive coal deposit. I was intending to mine it after the dragons were defeated.”

“You what?!”

“But now it’s all over, isn’t it?”

Goldmist watched as the massive blood-red hand reached up, reaching toward the floating mountain. It was his residence, but, for the first time, he realized that it had never just been his. There had been others, and he had largely ignored them. Never once in his life had he had a true friend, and now he never would.

Worse, it was not just Olympus that would fail. He had centered it directly over Draconian territory. The Choggoth that he had inadvertently created, or been forced to create, was in their territory, within a short distance of their critical cities, including the Draconian capital. With their defenses placed on the far reaches of the continent defending the bordres, there was no one left to defend the dragon people.

His eyes narrowed, and a final smile passed to his face. A thought had crossed his mind, something that came from the Other Side, from the voice of the Lord of Madness that spoke through the veil of consciousness. This time, the Madgod spoke in logic, and Goldmist knew what he needed to be done.

He stepped forward, toward Crimsonflame, and brought a hoof to his right eye. He retracted the sensory and neural elements that held the gold component in place, and disconnected it, taking it in his hoof.

“Here,” he said. Crimsonflame took it, although she seemed to not at first understand what it was or why he was giving it to her.

“What is this?” she said.

“I can’t let that old fool Grayrock have all the fun,” he said, smiling.

Then, without warning, he spread his massive golden wings, and sored into the air.

“Coward!” cried one of the Draconian mages. “Come back and help us fight!”

Crimsonflame said nothing, though. She only watched him go.

Goldmist forced himself straight upward through the atmosphere with ease. The winged Choggoths attempted to follow him, at first, but not even if life had there been an Aurasus capable of keeping pace with Goldmist. He passed them easily, leaving them below, and watched as they became tiny specks and vanished entirly.

Even with one eye, he was able to appreciate the view. He saw Olympus from above, a brown and gray stone amongst clouds and the green of the Draconian basin below it. As he forced himself higher still, more of the word came into view; the roughness of the land-planted mountains, and the blue of the seas. Even the swamps of the bug-symbionts were beautiful from such a height, and Goldmist realized that he still did not know how to pronounce their names.

From above, there were also signs of more terrible aspects of the past. Not far from Olympus was the barren, irradiated wastelands of what had once been a great Cerorian city. Similar voids dotted Panbios, and most were visible; those were places that war had rendered uninhabitable for potentially millions of years, the silent graves of countless millions.

And, at the very distant, he could see the other Choggoths. Brightly colored masses, bordering the land, slowly rising from the oceans and over the forests. They were really not as big as Goldmist had suspected; they more or less took the form of a narrow line, leaving behind them swaths of massive, uninhabited desert. That would probably be something Crimsonflame would want to know, but Goldmist assumed she would find it out on her own eventually.

Finally, he stopped at the very edge, the place where the horizon turned from pale blue below to the sickly and infinite yellowness beyond, the uninhabitable void. Goldmist felt the internal respiration systems within himself shift, funneling more air to the small part of him that was still organic. That small part of him, he realized, was afraid. As a whole, though, Goldmist was overjoyed, if only at the chance that he, the last of his kind, would also be the most beautiful.

He laughed as he pulled his wings back toward his body, and began to fall.

Crimsonflame pushed off of the ground with her wings, and leveled a blast at the oncoming force of flying Choggoths. Her fire was hot enough to destroy some of them and melt the wings of those that were bronze, but the Choggoth material on the others simply vaporized, leaving their incomplete metal bodies to fall and rise again, reanimated by the Choggoth material that was seeping ever closer across the ground.

Single Horn fell into formation, using her magic to push back the approaching material. It was a losing battle, though, and both of them knew that. There were not enough mages stationed in the capital to defend against a Choggoth, and Cerorian heavy armored units were still three hours out. Even if, by some miracle, they managed to drive the Choggoth back, it would be lodged deep within the earth in the coal veins below, feeding and growing beneith the earth.

Crimsonflame was about to call for a retreat to enable the evacuation of the nearest cities in preparation for Draconia’s inevitable fall when a sound rang out over the battlefield. She looked up, expecting to see Olympus finally reaching the ground, but it was still barely managing to hover over the ground, if only barely, even as the massive hand of the Choggoth tried to pull it into itself.

The sound had come from much higher, and Crimsonflame looked up and saw, in the high atmosphere, a radiation circle of spectral gold.

“What in Panbios?” she muttered to herself. As she watched, though, what she was seeing became clear: far above her was a streak through the sky, a rainbow of gold, following something moving with tremendous speed.

There was a second blast, and another golden explosion above, followed by a third, and then a forth in rapid succession.

“What is he doing?” said Crimsonflame, but her mind had already made the connection, and the part of her that recognized danger followed.

She took a deep breath, and released it; instead of fire, though, a wave of sound emerged.

“Everyone get down!” she bellowed, “Cover your eyes!”

Crimsonflame herself pressed her wings against her body, and fell to where Single Horn was below. She wrapped her wings around Single Horn, and Single Horn encased both of them in a white protection orb conjured by her magic.

Several more sonic explosions went out as Goldmist continued to accelerate, sounding like one continuous explosion. Then, before many of the mages could understand what was going on, there was a final explosion. The last one was not like the others; it was heard, but also felt, but not just physically, Crimsonflame realized; she felt it pulling at the fabric of space and time, and at her very soul itself.

Beside her, she saw a Draconian mage who was bathed in light. He had not managed to shield his eyes, and looked up at the sight before him. As he gazed upon the sight of a quantum-celestial acceleration, a grin passed over his face, even as his mind shattered. Then, before Crimsonflame’s eyes, his body atrophied and burst into a cloud of golden mist. The fool had stared into a seventh-dimensional rainbow, which, according to some, was the equivalent of staring into the eyes of the Madgod itself.

Goldmist saw the colors fluctuate around him, and saw the beauty of the Impossible Rainbow, the colors that could not exist and that must not exist; shades of gold that were inconceivable but intrinsic to all other colors, and none of them. It as a sight that he alone could produce, and a sight that he alone could survive bearing witness to.

As with the last time, time suddenly distorted and slowed, filling the skies with eerie silence. Before, it was the silence, not the color, that had nearly driven Goldmist fully mad, but now it was a respite from the sounds of battle, a final peace, and he savored the distorted moment for as long as he could.

The Choggoth sat directly below him, in his path of flight. Even if he had made an attempt to slow his dive, the force of the turn alone would have torn him apart. He had no intention of breaking off his course, though.

Through the colors below, he thought he saw the shadow of Crimsonflame, and through her, he saw the monohorn Single Horn, and for just a moment understood the things that Crimsonflame babbled about sometimes. He decided that that if he were to reincarnate, he wanted to return as a monohorn, or something like one, perhaps with wings. Then, maybe, if fate was kinder than it had proven itself so far, he might even be able to make a real rainbow, one that consisted of more colors than just gold.

The world suddenly started moving. Crimsonflame held Single Horn tightly as the white magic bubble surrounding them was picked up off the ground and forced through the air, moving instead of cracking, tumbling across scrubland with incredible speed, propelled by nothing more than the force of the explosion behind it.

It struck the ground several times, and every time, Single Horn shook. The force on her magic was incredible, but her magic was formidable, on par with even Draconian mages. Even with that much magical force, though, it still cracked, and with a yelp of pain from Single Horn, the spell shattered.

Crimsonflame and Single Horn collapsed onto the ground, dust blowing over them. Single Horn had been knocked unconscious, and appeared to have several broken bones, but Crimsonflame was far more durable. She turned her head, slowly, and looked behind her.

In the distance, half of Olympus was surrounded by a brilliant, golden mushroom cloud, grander and more terrible than anything the Cerorian engineers had managed to concoct. When Crimsonflame saw it, she knew what Goldmist had done. The seventh-dimensional rainbow from the quantum-celestial acceleration was not adequate on its own to kill a Choggoth; instead, Goldmist had used his own body as a projectile, ramming himself into the Choggoth at faster than the speed of light. There was no chance that either of them had survived.

Crimsonfame sat down beside Single Horn and watched as the ball of fire slowly collapsed into itself, forming pure white cloud. Olympus seemed to circle that cloud for a moment, a dead city giving one last salute to the final gesture of its fallen leader. Then, finally, the engines beneath it gave out, and with an explosion like deep, distant thunder, it fell to the ground.

After nuclear blasts, the sky normally darkened, but Crimsonflame suddenly realized that it had brightened somehow. Then, instead of droplets of black, toxic rain, it started to snow. The snow was not white, though, but golden.

Crimsonflame reached into her robe, and pulled out the final gift that Goldmist had given her. A single, golden eye, now disconnected from its owner, unseeing and incomplete. It may very well have been the last pieces of the Aurasus species in existence. Crimsonflame clutched it to her chest.

From beside her, she heard stirring. She looked down to see that Single Horn was conscious, and that tears were running from her eyes. They were not for her own pain, though.

“He always had to steal the show,” said Crimsonflame as she sat beneath the slowly falling golden mist. “And I have to admit, that was truly impressive.” To her surprise, her vision blurred, and her own tears dripped to the dusty ground below.