The heavens broke with a salvo of shrieks.
Dihmers ran for cover.
Keepers froze in the midst of their latest charge.
The Ruby Chorus gazed from afar while Endrax and her broodlings took survey of the unsettling situation.
From the Penumbral Edge, a new cloud had formed—one made of velvety bodies and crude machinations and ethereal runic light. A song escorted the new army, a song comprised of ritualistic chants and warrior shrieks. A sea of fangs glinted, accompanied by a forest of slitted eyes. They came by wing, by wagon, and by zeppelin. Wood and metal and torch and moonrock coalesced into a veritable battering ram of zealous wrath.
The Ruby Chorus kept their distance. The Keepers rushed head-on while Endrax and her children steadied themselves in caution.
The new army did not even remotely flinch. With a Lunar Hymn, they met their attackers straightaway. Runic explosions brought a new illumination to the Curve. Despite the blood and ruby clouds of death, they punched their way across the wasteland, laying ruin to all Dihmer settlements that waited in their path and appropriating their resources. When they met Endrax and the Ruby Chorus, they slaughtered just as indescriminately. The perilous procession continued—all slitted eyes locked on the Sarcophagus—until sheer attrition forced their advance into a crawl. Soon, all three armies were locked in the center of the curve, with Endrax and her children stuck helplessly in the middle.
Children of a wayward Benefactor,
Corrupted in spirit, born from nightmares;
They covered the land in a second night.
Carrying with them Penumbral weapons
Of war, they attacked from the land and air,
Exercising their greatest strength: cruelty.
Weaker than the Ruby Chorus, Bloodwings
Excelled through ambition and Loyalty.
Fewer in numbers than the Keepers, they
Surpassed them in the art of genocide.
Their actions strengthened the Chorus but they
Did not care; they only flew and murdered.
None of the forces anticipated
Such a violent advance, and the battle
Changed forevermore, until the War came
To a stop around the Sarcophagus.
Endrax, who was already weakening
From fighting both the Chorus and Keepers,
Could not hope to defeat all three armies.
Her only recourse was to defend the
Hidden gift of the benefactors with
The last litter of her courageous brood.
The sky burned red-against-purple.
Ruby clouds billowed towards the stars like volcanic plumes.
The land around the ziggurat was absolutely covered in a calcified sea of bones and glass and insectoid limbs. Those who were suicidal enough to camp that close to the target over the centuries had burrowed narrow trenches through the necrotic detritus.
Within one such crevice, a spiderweb flounced in the heat of an artificial breeze. High above, flashes of runic light illuminated a squadron of wooden zeppelins. Cannons fired lunar rounds through the sky, impacting translucent monoliths that responded with volleys of finely-harnessed crimson beams. Between the combatting vessels, countless swarms of chitinous drones swept through the air on dragonfly wings. Fanged equines occasionally dove in to do courageous battle with the metamorphs, and the clouds turned a brighter shade of ruby as more and more corpses fell to the wasteland below, adding to the mountainous piles. Just as monoliths and zeppelins came within a scream's distance from one another, black-scaled drakes swept in, breathing plumes of onyx flame.
The silken web shook more and more. It was next to impossible to make out the Song anymore. All was a continuous cacophony of screams and artillery barrages. Thunder rocked the earth beneath the bones and entrails as more vessels fell from the heavens, accompanied by the occasional flailing corpse of an impaled drake or metamorphic creature.
Then—against all odds—a singular squadron of Bloodwings sailed past the aerial gauntlet, descending towards the ziggurat itself. Their wings shook the stationary spiderwebs, and emotionless sets of black eyes reflected velvety bodies doing bloody combat with Keepers and Chorus constructs in the ravines adjacent to the Sarcophagus. In the end, a single soul approached the target where the heart of Endrax's brood had been stationed for a final stand. The mare's neck glinted with a crescent pendant as she fired a concoction into the heart of the draconian defense. There was a runic blast, and it erupted in a plume of dark magic, consuming and melting the whole of Endrax's children.
The battlefield lit up in the resulting conflagration, and the very bones around the Sarcophagus began to melt.
At long last, the Bloodwings' guile proved fruitful.
One singular charge brought an end to the last
Defense of Endrax, bringing an end to
Her litter, her courage, her legacy.
The bloody battle became what it was
Inevitably destined from the start:
A Trinary War between three factions.
And because of Endrax's failure, one of
These corrupted armies would get ahold
Of the Benefactors' treasure and thus
Destroy the last chance to fix the Circles.
This left Endrax with one final option.
As the three armies prepared their advance to fill up the vacuum left by the deceased drakes...
The heavens and earth shook.
Countless faces looked towards the stars—stars that were soon blotted out.
Endrax—on slade black wings—soared straight for the Sarcophagus. She raced past all advancing forces, dodging multiple artillery barrages and simply taking more than a few of the explosive charges. Bleeding black blood and flame, she finally purched atop the ziggurat. A lasting roar escaped her iron-wrought muzzle. Then—with a violent thrust—she impaled herself on the summit of the structure. Her massive corpse bent around the pyramid, tail and wings and limbs covering every possible entrance on all four sides. Thus—with a final act of righteous defiance—Endrax sealed off the interior of the alicorn structure against every member of the three battling armies.
Undaunted, the angry factions fought tighter and bloodier around her, taking their frustration out on the other members of the endless Trinary War. In the end, Endrax's forced stalemate remained just as effective as when she was alive.
Endrax, the Divine of Death, did her part.
If she could not be the Slice's salvation
She could at least be the Curve's final seal.
The very last bastion of harmony
Was not locked behind more than that which the
Benefactors intended making the
Treasure within even harder to get.
This most sacred of gifts awaits the Spark,
But now, because of desperate extremes,
The quest to reunite the circles is
Imperiled by the selfish forces who
Battle at the Sarcophagus' doorstep.
While there may be only one lock, there are
Now three "keys" to enter that bright domain.
The Shards of Endrax; they have been scattered.