The crater lay silent for three heartbeats. Then the scattered meat began to slide together across the scorched stone, chunks rolling, limbs dragging, fluids flowing uphill like rivers defying gravity.
Black veins threaded the pieces, stitching them into one writhing mass. Seals that had burned out reignited in violet fire, branding themselves deeper into the flesh until bone itself glowed.
The mass rose, taller, wider, until it towered sixty feet above the ruined gardens, a mountain of tumorous muscle and bone plates, a thousand stolen faces pushing out from its skin and screaming silently.
Twelve arms unfolded from the torso, each joint reversed, each hand replaced by a cluster of snapping wolf skulls. The central head split into eight separate muzzles that rotated like a grotesque flower, every eye socket burning with stolen Alpha fire. Zhiliary's final form blotted out the dawn.
Sous lay broken at the crater's edge, ribs staved in, one lung collapsed, blood pooling beneath her like spilled ink. She watched the titan rise and laughed once, a wet, toad croak that sprayed crimson across the stone. Her trembling claw found the last seal, the black circle branded over her stomach, untouched until now. She drove every remaining power into it while the water spelled healed her.
The seal exploded inward.
Blue fire poured through her veins. Bones shattered and re-forged taller, thicker, longer. Muscle erupted in cords thick as bridge cables. Her spine arched, vertebrae bursting outward into a crest of blades.
Skin split and hardened into midnight armor veined with living light. The toad face collapsed inward, then surged forward into a massive wolf skull, jaws wide enough to swallow horses whole.
Claws lengthened into scythes the length of ship masts. She rose on digitigrade legs that cracked the earth with every step, fifty feet of black-furred titan, eyes burning cold blue stars.
Two giants faced each other across the ruined palace grounds.
Zhiliary struck first.
Eight muzzles roared as one, the sound flattening trees a mile away. Twelve arms whipped forward, skull-hands opening to reveal lamprey mouths that vomited streams of black acid.
Sous charged straight through the torrent. Acid hissed against her harden fur, eating deep furrows that sealed almost instantly. She leapt, claws carving arcs of blue fire, and slammed into the titan's chest like a meteor. The impact cratered the courtyard a hundred feet wide. Stone turned to glass beneath them.
Shadow, Faye, and Pamoen watched on in a distance not wanting to get in her way.
Sous's jaws closed around one entire shoulder, fangs punching through bone plates, tearing the arm free at the root in a fountain of black marrow.
Zhiliary's remaining arms hammered down, skull-mouths biting, ripping away slabs of Sous's flank the size of wagons. Blood the color of midnight rained. Sous answered by driving both foreclaws through the central torso, meeting inside the rotten core. She pulled. The titan split vertically from collar to groin in a wet explosion of organs and screaming faces.
Zhiliary wrapped six arms around Sous's torso and squeezed.
CRACK!
Ribs broke like gunshots. Sous roared and twisted, jaws snapping shut on three arms at once.
CRUNCH!
Bone breaking in seconds, marrow sprayed, severed limbs fell thrashing. She tore free and leapt to the titan's back, claws sinking deep, climbing the writhing mountain of meat.
Every skull-hand reached for her, biting, tearing fur and armor away in sheets. Sous reached the crown of rotating muzzles and drove her entire arm down one throat. Blue fire poured from her claws, burning from the inside out.
Zhiliary convulsed, slamming backward into the palace wall. The entire west wing collapsed in an avalanche of stone and dust. Sous rode the fall, claws buried to the shoulders, ripping sideways until half the head cluster tore away in burning chunks.
They rolled across the gardens, flattening centuries-old moon-oaks to splinters, carving new canyons through earth and stone.
Zhiliary's remaining arms pounded Sous into the ground again and again, each impact sending shockwaves that shattered windows for miles. Sous answered with claws that carved glowing scars across the titan's hide, wounds that bled molten seals yet refused to close.
Sous pinned the titan beneath her weight, jaws closing around the central rotating head. Fangs met through bone and brain. She wrenched sideways. The entire head cluster came free in a gushing black rivers. Zhiliary's body bucked once, twice, then collapsed, sixty feet of meat and hate finally going still.
Sous stood atop the corpse, chest heaving, blood cascading from a thousand wounds, blue fire guttering across her titan frame. Dawn light broke fully over the horizon, painting the ruin gold and crimson.
She threw her head back and howled, a sound that shook the sky itself, before the seal on her stomach finally shattered and the titan form collapsed inward. She shrank, bones grinding, fur receding, until only a broken woman knelt in the cratered garden, naked, bleeding, alive.
Zhiliary did not rise again. She could not rise again so Sous did what many wolves did to make sure their enemies never rose again. They eat them.
Sous got down her knees and began to devour the monster before her.
Shadow, Faye, and Pamoen ran toward Sous after seeing Zhiliary fall. The young girl didn't know what to think. Her sire was alive but her brother, her brother she didn't even know was her brother was dead. She had spent years with him training and now he was just done.
She stopped running and just stood there. Faye stopped and turned to face the young girl. "Pamoen, is that your name?"
The young girl nodded her head. Faye walked to her slowly and held out her hand to the young blonde.
"Your sire loves you and...I have a friend who is a medium," she explained. "She can help you talk to.. to your brother, Xeno, right?"
Pamoen nodded her head at the voodoo priestess, never having met one before.
"Let's go see your sire, okay?"
Pameon took Faye's hand and continued to head toward her sire.