The shedding of the cyst’s hardened husk sounded like the collapse of a stone cathedral.
The fifty-meter dome of rotting purple flesh didn’t merely crack. It turned inside out. Sheets of dead, stone-hard dragon scales and stringy scar tissue peeled away in violent spasms, sloughing off onto the dark rock skull plate in smoking heaps of blackened melted rock waste. From within the decaying debris, an entity of pure, packed void energy emerged into the zero-gravity expanse of the Crystal Genesis Throne.
It was no longer a passive, sessile tumor.
Deprived of its vegetative roots and cut from the dragon’s blood-flow drain tubes, the parasite’s genetic fail-safe had activated. It packed its vast biomass into an autonomous combat form.
The creature was twelve meters tall, hovering three feet above the ground in a cradle of warped, gravity violet light. Its body was a linked armature of hyper-dense, non-Euclidean hard shell, black as the outer void and etched with pulsing violet living-glow runes that twisted space around its limbs. Four segmented, scythe-like appendages—each ending in a razor-thin spatial edge that hummed with faster-than-sound shaking—unfolded from its thorax. And at the center of its featureless, three-sided head, a single, faceted eye burned with cold, ancient, extraterrestrial malice.
