خاتمه

Epilogue

IT WAS A bright day, and the sun shone down on a small town cradled by mountains. The town had stood for hundreds of years; its walls were washed by rain and snow to a mellow gold. The light was slanting toward afternoon, and the townspeople were starting to trickle out into the streets to do their evening shopping, when the sound of an enormous explosion split the sky.

In the space between two mountains, above a valley of green grass, the sky seemed to have torn in half, revealing a terrible blackness. It was a darkness more than darkness. It was not a lack of light, but a lack of anything at all. It was the void.

The animals in the valley began to scatter as a rumbling noise came from inside the void. There was a ripping sound, and then from the darkness came Alex Strike, riding on the back of a great metal monster that the mages of the Assembly had once named Automotones.

Alex was no longer human. He had become a thing the world had never seen before. He had become a Devoured of chaos. He was chaos, and chaos lived inside him and flickered behind his black eyes. It crackled in his bones and hair and blood. The silver mask was no longer an independent thing. It had replaced his face, mobile and expressive as his own features had once been.

Behind him flowed a river of elementals and animals that had been once consigned to chaos. There were wolves with coruscating eyes, and dead-eyed mages holding weapons, and the serpent elemental Skelmis hovered over them, hissing and whipping its tail made of air.

Alex rode Automotones to the edge of the valley. He looked down into the town below, where the people were already running in the streets like frightened black ants.

He held out a hand, and in his palm, chaos coiled like smoke.

He smiled.