The sound of artillery detonations rattled the ground. Single Horn galloped forward over the pits, following the explosions as the cerorians cleared a path for her. An aura of magic surrounded her, defending her from the silver shrapnel that the artillery rounds brought down on the Choggoth tissue surrounding her.

A pale green-pink arm reared up beside her and sprung in her direction. She twisted in midair as another explosion erupted and unleashed a blast of white magic that vaporized the appendage.

The Choggoth gurgled and screamed- -a sound that Single Horn had come to accept as laughter more of than pain. She continued to dash forward toward the structure at the edge of the massive pink sea below her.

The war had already been lost. Draconia had fallen two weeks earlier, and Cerorius had followed despite the valiant and suicidal defense of its final soldiers. Now barely fifty cerorians remained, and half the population of Draconian dragons had been extinguished. Only the Trihorn Empire and the United Citadel still stood.

Still the fighting carried on. Both Single Horn and Crimsonflame had vowed to continue fighting until their dying breaths, even if the fight was futile, to defend what remained of the dying world.

Single Horn slid down an embankment, summoning a surge of magic that fired in numerous directions, driving back the oncoming surge of Choggoth. Before her, it looked massive and infinite, stretching in a distorted, squirming sea all the way to the horizon, and that terrified her. Despite that, she continued forward.

She reached the stone outpost and tore the door to splinters. Inside, the eyes of several terrified monohorns looked up at her. With a single burst of magic, Single Horn shattered the chains that were binding them to the abandoned slave shack.

“Come with me!” she yelled. They were used to obeying orders, and they followed her.

Single Horn looked carefully across her field of vision, using her magic to accelerate her vision. The situation was not good- -the Choggoth was attempting to flank her.

“This way!” she called.

She led them backward, through the area where the Choggoth was already overgrowing and neutralizing the silver pellets that had been rained upon it. There was not much time, but the other monohorns were smaller than her and weak from starvation and sickness. They could not run fast enough.

One of them suddenly cried out. Single Horn turned around and fired a twisting beam of white light that severed the tendril that had taken hold of his leg. It dissolved, leaving a horrible ulceration where it had started to absorb his leg.

Single Horn lifted the stallion in her magic, and tried to move forward, only to find that the Choggoth had surrounded them. Single Horn fired her magic at it, a rapid-fire surge of magical projectiles to drive it back, but it was already too thick. There was too much; whatever she destroyed simply regenerated.

“Single Horn!” cried a Crimsonflame’s voice through their telepathic connection. “You’re surrounded! Teleport out, now!”

“I’m not leaving them!” replied Single Horn out loud, casting her magic into a white sphere to surround herself and the other monohorns. Her teleportation spell could only move her; she could not take passengers.

The Choggoth pounded against the shield, and Single Horn roared as she expanded the perimeter of her spell, igniting the sphere against the mass of mouths and eyes and claws that were mindlessly attempting to consume it. The expanding sphere and extreme heat burned away the Choggoth, forcing it back at least forty feet, but doing so drained most of Single Horn’s power. She nearly collapsed, but managed to initiate a second spell, draining her own life force to increase her magic.

As she did, she suddenly felt something strange. The others seemed to feel it too, and huddled in terror. Even the Choggoth slowed and quivered for a moment, and then throughout its entire form released a scream of laughter that echoed for tens of miles, a horrible sound like thousands of deranged voices crying out in perverse joy.

From one horizon, Single Horn suddenly saw the light change. The yellow sky was replaced with a brilliant red and pink surge through the clouds, brighter than any nuclear blast- -and from the horizon rose a red, flaming sphere. From the other horizon came a cold, white sphere, seemingly of ice, that carried with it darkness despite its light, pulling away the light of the other object.

Both the spheres crossed the sky, and took their places opposite of each other, hovering, as if waiting. When Single Horn saw those two terrible spheres, she knew that the world was truly ending.

Suddenly, she felt a second wave of energy pass through her horn, this one much closer, like a great explosion that could only be perceived mentally and not felt.

“Portal opening detected,” said one of the young Draconian mages assisting Crimsonflame.

“A portal?” said Crimsonflame. “Confirm location! What do you mean ‘portal’?!”

Single Horn could already see it, though. It was only a few hundred feet from her, a massive triangular hole in the fabric of space itself, taller than even the grandest buildings that Draconia had once held. She could not see what was truly on the other side, because as soon as it stabilized, tentacles poured out, merging and resting themselves until they formed an enormous quadrupedal creature. Single Horn did not know why it had come, but she knew what she was seeing- -it was almost surely another Choggoth.

The beast approached her, and she fell into its shadow. Concentrating, she generated another sphere, tightening it as much as possible around herself and those she had sworn to protect to increase its density.

The top of the creature shifted, generating an appendage that Single Horn had never before witnessed. It arranged itself, and then sparked with blue energy. A fifteen foot wide surge of concentrated sparks suddenly burst forth from the device, tearing through the air like a swarm of electric hornets. Single Horn braced for her demise, but the beam was not targeted toward her.

Instead, it impacted the green-pink Choggoth behind her. The flesh was twisted from the dead soil beneath, drawing into the singularity of the beam, where it was condensed into a single crystalline point that shattered in a shower of blue energy with the force of large bomb.

The blue Choggoth lumbered forward, seeming to move in slow-motion even as its preposterous size allowed it to progress forward far faster than any pony could gallop. As it passed over Single Horn, she looked up at its underbelly, which was marked with a pair of massive equilateral triangles.

The green-pink Choggoth reacted with what could only be described as primal rage, and surged forward. The blue one responded by separating its upper body, liquefying itself, and pouring down in wide arcs toward the other. They met in the middle, merging violently, each trying to tear the other apart and absorb it. Surges of blue and pink sparks erupted all around, and Single Horn suddenly felt as though she were in the center of a great tempest, a disaster of proportions far beyond her control.

Single Horn’s field started to fade, holes forming in her shield as bits of the pink Choggoth approached below the blue one’s legs. She focused, and closed most of them- -only to see others plugged with multiple colors projected from elsewhere. All around her, she saw more monohorns- -but ones that she knew had long since died. Their flesh had been stripped, replaced with gaunt blue material, much of their skeletons still visible. Each one had a single eye, which was demarcated with two triangles. They poured out of the portal; some of them joined Single Horn, supporting her shield, while the others attacked the encroaching pink Choggoth directly.

“Don’t hesitate,” one of them gurgled toward the terrified monohorns cowering beneith Single Horn’s shield. “She is protecting you. Protect her.”

One of the monohorns frowned, and then stood. She raised her own horn to the shield, and added a piece to the shield. The others saw what she was doing, and they stood too, each of them added their own magic to the spell, freeing up enough for Single Horn to whip arms of her magic at the pink material approaching her, assisting the resurrected army below the body of the blue Choggoth.

Crimsonflame took a breath, and released a cloud of red fire. With her words, she warped it, compressing the heat and forging it into a different element, creating red lightning that pounded into the pink flesh below. The Choggoth reacted by convulsing as holes were burned into it. Even after such an injury, Crimsonflame knew that the effect was on temporary- -the Choggoths had learned how to adapt to virtually any element she could generate, even the more exotic ones of her own design.

She turned her head and looked toward Single Horn’s position. She flapped her great wings, and lifted herself higher to get a better look at the creature that had just entered the battle.

“Confirm,” she demanded into her mutual telaptathic connection with her soldiers. They were some of the last that the Draconian Federation had; they were young and poorly trained, and barely managing to slow the progress of the Choggoth long enough for the trihorn villages in its path to evacuate. They were losing the battle in a lost war, and her troops were losing hope. “Confirm! Is that a Choggoth?”

“Confirmed,” said a young voice in her mind. “New combatant is a Choggoth, holding on Silver Horn’s position. But…”

“But what?”

“It’s attacking the other Choggoth!”

A voice hissed painfully through her mind. Not a Draconian voice, and not Single Horn’s. Crimsonflame put her claw to her head.

“I can not defeat Void,” it whispered and screamed simultaneously in a language that could be understood mentally but could never be formed into words. “Not here. I can cover…your retreat.”

“Grand Magus?” said one of the lesser mages. He sounded nervous. They all sounded nervous, because they were all nervous. They were waiting on her position.

“Grand Magus,” said a more distant and far stronger voice, this one female but much deeper. “A new combatant has been detected. Should we direct artillery fire at it?”

Crimsonflame paused, struggling to make the rapid decision needed. Nothing made sense: she had seen the spheres rise in the sky, now casting light down on them all, and then witnessed a Choggoth emerge from a portal- -to turn on its kin. Such had never before been witnessed, and it could be a trap.

Crimsonflame cried out in rage and confusion, producing a massive sphere of swirling fire that she plunged into the pink Choggoth below, using her fury and confusion to tear a massive crater in its body.

“All units,” she said, “converge on the blue Choggoth! Artillery, focus on clearing a path. Blue Choggoth, you had better keep your word!”

“It will…be done,” it whispered.