Vaelrix didn't rise.
He erupted.
The ground split in a jagged line from the dragon crypts to the courtyard, stone and earth heaving upward like the spine of something ancient shrugging off centuries of sleep. Cobblestones cracked. Walls shuddered. A section of the eastern battlement simply collapsed, folding inward like wet parchment, and through the dust and the debris and the screaming—
Black.
So black it ate the light around it. So black the smoke pouring from its jaws looked white by comparison. Vaelrix pulled himself from the earth the way a corpse pulls itself from a grave—slow, deliberate, terrible. His jagged horns crowned his skull like broken swords. His opal eyes—white, pupilless, ancient beyond reckoning—swept the battlefield once.
And then the Night Dragon of Judgment opened his mouth.
No fire.
Smoke.
