Smoke curled from the broken hills as if the world itself was exhaling after holding its breath too long. The field was scorched, pockmarked with the collapsed trenches of our labyrinth and the glassy, molten scars of the Phoenix's wrath. Here and there, flickers of unstable, residual magic danced across the debris like dying stars, their light casting an eerie, spectral glow on the fallen.
But the war wasn't over. Far from it.
The survivors of both Crimson Dawn and Galat's Vanguard stood on opposite ends of the valley, bloodied but unyielding. The aftermath of the Phoenix's havoc weighed on every soul, a shared trauma that had burned away all pretense, leaving only the raw, desperate will to survive. The ground trembled, not with flame this time, but with a palpable, humming anticipation.
