Single Horn released her shield bubble. The monohorns at the ends of it dropped to the ground. So did Crimsonflame, falling limply onto the dust below. Single Horn raced to her side.

Crimsonflame’s condition was poor. One of her arms had been completely converted into charred bone, and her entire body was smoking; the silver armor she wore was melted and glowing in several places.

Single Horn immediately quenched any remaining flames and began casting spells. There was still some indication that, miraculousy, Crimsonflame had survived, but her body was in ruins. Most of her internal organs were damaged, and her bones had been shattered by the force of the magic she had absorbed.

“We’re…we’re alive,” said one of the other monohorns, staring at his hooves, as if he were unsure.

“Then help me,” said Single Horn, trying to mask the tension and fear in her voice. “She’s dying. Please, help me.”

At her request, they joined her. Even though they were mostly drained, they directed their horns toward Crimsonflame, providing power for Single Horn to do what she could. Crimsonflame seemed to stir slightly, and coughed weakly.

“What happened to her?” asked one of the monohorns, in awe at the fact that Crimsonflame was still alive.

“She absorbed the feedback that was meant for us,” said Single Horn. “All of us.”

“She withstood enough power to destroy the entire monohorn race?”

“I don’t know,” said Single Horn. She looked toward one of the monohorns whose magic was so low that it was not actually helping. “Forest Rune,” she said, “get in contact with the others. We need medical assistance.”

“Right,” said the green mare. She stood back and directed her horn skyward. It glowed with a weak green color, but then she appeared confused. “I…I cannot hear anything. I am not detecting any Draconians, or trihorns.”

Single Horn looked up at the sky. It was dark, and the air filled with dust and angry, diseased-looking clouds. Blue lightning was periodically flashing through it, providing some of the only light to the land below.

“There is too much residual Order,” said Single Horn. “Use Silent Voice’s radio. Contact the cerorians.”

Forest Rune nodded, and took the radio from the bags of one of the other monohorns who was, at this point, only helping to slow Crimsonflame’s death.

“Forest Rune to Rnon,” said Forest Rune into the radio. Her lack of a cerorian accent made pronouncing “Rnon” difficult, but she came reasonably close. “Please respond.”

Only static came from the radio, at first, but then a heavily distorted cerorian voice came through.

“Repeat,” it said. “Confirm your identity.”

“Forest Rune, of mage squad sixty five, headed by Single Horn.”

“By the Madgod,” said the voice on the other side. “You…you survived?”

“Yes,” said Single Horn, taking the radio in the tiny part of her magic that was not being poured into Crimsonflame. “We are all safe, but we need medical evac immediately. Crimsonflame is badly wounded.”

“The Grand Magus is…alive?”

“Not for much longer if you don’t hurry!”

“Right…I am dispatching a hovership. Try to keep her stable.”

Something in the sound of the cerorian’s voice was profoundly concerning. The way he had reacted to the news of Crimsonflame’s survival- -the level of disbelief, or relief, was far greater than it should have been for somepony who never knew her.

Far away, in the depths of an ancient fortress, a circle of drying blood sat surrounded by twenty five piles of steaming ashes. In the center of the circle, lying in a pool of far fresher blood, was what remained of Arcane Domination.

If an observer were to have found him, they would almost surely have deemed him a corpse. His body had been torn apart, and precious little of it remained. That which did would have barely been recognizable. Unlike Crimsonflame, however, there was no one around to help him, no one to protect him. The only ones who surrounded him were those who had become ash and dust, and the pile of limp and exsanguinated monohorn corpses lying in the corner.

Then, in the darkness, his horns began to flicker. All around him, the shattered remnants of the ancient laboratory began to move. Stone, metal and glass were picked up by his magic and contorted and changed. He drew them into himself, using the inorganic materials to form the machines necessary for his continued survival.

So much of him was gone. His bones had been shattered and most of his limbs destroyed, and his organs were mostly dried to the floor. They were of no use to him; he expelled them and constructed new ones. He pulled them into his body, interfacing them to what was left of himself.

When he had finally produced something reminiscent of lungs and connected the tubes of them to his mouth, he gasped for breath- -and immediately began to scream. Not in pain, or fear, but in absolute, mad rage.

The crystal-powered engines of the hovership whirred as it descended. Before its metal landing struts had even extended, the doors on the sides slid open and a team of cerorian medics jumped to the ground.

“Over here,” cried Single Horn. The cerorians motioned to each other and immediately moved to Crimsonflame. Single Horn was surprised that no Draconians were accompanying them, or even trihorn medics. Something about it struck her as profoundly ominous.

The cerorians descended on Crimsonflame, immediately shifting her onto a fold-out stretcher and attaching various types of machines to her body.

“We will take her now,” said the lead cerorian, the abstract marking on his shell indicating that he was a doctor.

“I’m coming with you,” said Single Horn, moving alongside the stretcher as the cerorians used their horns to pick it up and carry it to the waiting hovership, its four engines revving and ready for takeoff.

“You can’t,” said the doctor. “Her condition is grave. I need to operate immediately. The hovership is prepared. I cannot have you moving around while I am working, especially not in an in-flight procedure.”

“She’s my friend,” said Single Horn. “I will not leave her!”

“I know,” said the cerorian, taking a moment to pause and put his oversized hoof on Single Horn’s shoulder. “I know. And by my honor as a cerorian, I pledge to do everything in my power to keep her alive. But this is our task now. Not yours.”

Single Horn hesitated for a moment, and then nodded. The doctor released her and bounded to the hovership, where Crimsonflame was already being loaded.

“A second ship will be sent for the rest of you!” he called back over the sound of the engines. He then jumped on board his craft, and the door sealed behind him. The vehicle rapidly released the ground and took a course back toward the Rnon.

Single Horn watched it leave. For over eight hundred years she had stood at Crimsonflame’s side, fighting the seemingly endless war. She had always assumed that it would he her, not Crimsonflame, who would be the first to fall. When suddenly faced with the converse, she found that she had never even considered the pain of being the one to survive.

“She will be okay,” said one of the monhorns, putting his hoof on Single Horn’s shoulder.

Single Horn turned her head slightly and smiled toward him. She then turned toward the battlefield that stretched into the distance.

In the distance, beneith the blackened sky, she saw the Finallity Core still hovering over the land. While she had been trying to protect Single Horn, it had retracted from its fractal disk-shape back into some semblance of a sphere. It appeared badly damaged, though, and it no longer contained the pink-red flesh of the Choggoth Nil.

As she watched, its revolution started to slow, and it began to sink. It fell through the sky, slowly at first, and but faster as it went. Even though it was miles away, the impact against the earth below was still deafening. Single Horn was forced to remember the sound that was produced by the fall of Olympus. This time, though, she wondered if, for the first time in so many centuries of conflict, they had actually been met with a victory.

Her eyes shifted to the remnants of Oblivion. Nearly half a mile away, atop a hill, stood the fragments of the blue Choggoth. They were clearly dead, and rapidly dissipating. The creature that they were had surely died, and yet Single Horn did not know why it had chosen to.

Suddenly, something caught her eye. A glint of light from the top of that hill, a tiny reflection. Something about it was strange, as if it were calling to her.

“Stay here,” she ordered here squad. “Wait for the hovership.”

“Where are you going?” asked Forest Rune.

“I want to see what has been wrought,” said Single Horn, simply.

All around her, the remains of the Choggoth were collapsing. Parts of it stood before her, the fragments of its skeleton, their forms slowly liquefying and rapidly evaporating into smoke. Parts of the massive pieces still sparked with bolts of Order, and some parts even maintained the remnants of motion.

Single Horn slogged through the foul smelling, dark-colored liquid that she could only assume was its equivalent of blood. All around her, pieces were falling or dissipating. The feeling was something like being in an abandoned city, except one where the rate of decay had been accelerated vastly.

In addition, the rain was starting to fall from the sky above. Most of it was dirty, darkened water, but Single Horn was also aware of the occasional gemstone or mineral produced from the Order-charged atmosphere.

She came to the top of the hill and saw what Oblivion must have seen. The view was impressive, even though it overlooked land that was not perfectly sterile. The Choggoth Nil had been completely destroyed, its body vaporized in the blast, leaving behind nothing but a desert. In the far distance, the remains of the unnamed cerorian city were still visible, although only the most durable outermost redoubt towers still stood. In the center, the edge of the Finallity Core was still visible; most of it had sunk into a massive crater torn into the earth by the blast. No trace of the horrid crystalline creature that Single Horn had only distantly seen remained.

That such a force could be released was almost inconceivable. The force of all magic in Panbios, of the unity of three nations, fired in a single destructive beam. Togather, they had done what they had never been able to achieve before. Not only had they stopped the Lord of Order, but they had defeated one of the two Choggoths that threatened Panbios.

Another glint of light appeared in Single Horn’s peripheral vision. She turned and followed it. It was unclear to her what sort of light was being reflected, if it was the dying sparks of Oblivion’s Order or if it was something reflected from the Spheres above, if they even still remained, waiting behind the bank of gem-filled clouds.

Something seemed to be calling to her, and she followed her instinct toward the center of Oblivion’s corpse, until she reached the region that contained the largest and most durable of the wreckage.

She approached the spot where she was being led, and looked down into the liquefying soup of dying Choggoth flesh. There, before her, was a tiny fragment of crystal. Single Horn nearly dismissed it as one of the falling gemstones from above, but this one was different. Something was strange and different about it. Crystals normally were appealing strictly because they were singular, durable points of color and beauty. This one, however, was not beautiful in its permanence, but rather, in a bizarre way, because it seemed to be alive.

Single Horn’s mind immediately linked what she was seeing to one of her most recent memories. She had seen that manner of crystal once before: in the distance, descending from the portal built by the Finality Core.

She jumped back and charged her horn, pointing it at the tiny organism. Something stopped her from firing, though. Something about doing so felt wrong. Instead, she lowered her magic and stepped forward gingerly. She once again looked down at the crystal, this time more closely.

It resembled, oddly, a tiny tree, like the smallest of saplings. Its body had a tiny trunk, and a center shaped like a five-pointed star in which was inlaid a violet, star-shaped insignia.

“H…hello,” said Single Horn. The tiny tree did not respond, but somehow, she felt it smile. She herself smiled, and then reached down, pulling it from the destroyed body of Obivion. It was barely the size of her hoof, and seemed almost to tremble as it stabilized itself in her grip with a set of root-like tentacles.

“Do not worry, little one,” said Single Horn, holding the tree to her chest against the growing rain. “You are safe now. Do not be afraid.”

She took off her helmet and overturned it, gently placing the sapling into it. She took the helm in her magic and felt the cold rain run through her gray mane. In the distance, she saw a cerorian hovership approaching her position. She signaled her position to it with a spell.

This battle had been one, but the war had not. There was still much to do, and still much pain ahead. In his death, however, Oblivion had given the residents of Panbios something it had not had in centuries. He had given them hope.

As the cerorian hovership took off from the remnants of Oblivion, the rain was already too thick for anypony on board to see the sudden surge of a long-range teleportation spell in the distance.

Panting heavily through his artificial lungs, Arcane Domination materialized on the plane. The radiation around him was fierce, both from the spell that had just been unleashed and the ancient cerorian neutron bombs that had long ago been detonated in the region. He did not care; there was nothing left in his body that was truly sensitive to radiation anyway.

He roared with fury one last time, and then collapsed to the ground in manic laughter. He had failed. Despite all his power, and all his might and brilliance, he had failed. The spell he had sought to perform had encountered something he had not anticipated in Oblivion’s spell, and it had backfired.

It had not just been the nobles, either. Arcane Domination had searched out the land for any sign of trihorn magic. Even through the storms of Order that were raging high in the atmosphere, he had been able to get adequate sensory coverage to know that the unthinkable had occurred.

He was alone. There were no other trihorns. There was no signal. The blast that had maimed Arcane Domination had killed them all. In one brilliant flash, the greatest race to ever walk Panbios had been erased completely. Arcane Domination, being at the center of the spell, had somehow survived, at least partially. He was now the last living trihorn.

That spell had not been meant for them. It had been intended for the monohorns. They were the weaklings, the genetic filth that he had been so foolish to produce. They had no right to live; all Arcane Domination had been trying to do was to purge them from existence, to return them to the nothingness that he had been the first to pull them out of. Instead it had been the creators rather than the creations who had been taken.

It was not fair. The strong were supposed to survive, and the weak were meant to be punished. In this case, though, the strong had been killed and the weak survived. The perverse inversion of the natural order was almost too much for Arcane Domination to withstand.

“No,” he said, his voice distorted by the machines within him. He stood on his three robotic legs and stared toward the destroyed cerorian city, where he knew that the remains of the Finality Core waited. He alone was the one who had seen its schematic, and understood what he saw.

An image of geometric shapes flooded into his mind, and he stepped forward.

“Not over,” he said. “Not…over not over not over NOT OVER…” he burst into laughter, and then into tears. “I will bring them back…”

He knew it was impossible for one trihorn to do so, even one as powerful as him- -but power alone was not what made him great. It was intelligence. He knew how to do it, he had ideas. He as a king without a nation, without a people, but not for long.

“I will not be the last,” he said, both to himself and to the distant Black Sphere. “Yes…because I am that powerful, because I understand. If it takes me the rest of eternity, I swear on the name of my people- -I will bring them back!”

So he stumbled forward into the dead, radioactive city toward where the Finality Core, and his destiny, awaited him.