Zuzia’s eyes blur with tears as the light leaves the entirety of Amalaskae’s person. The angel is clumsy, foolish, and a bit naive-seeming. But, she has quickly become one of Amalaskae’s closest friends, and even someone whom the brunette could arguably say she loves. It started as a drunken night of mischief, but something about Amalaskae has truly captured Zuzia’s heart.

And now, as Zuzia screams out the divine messenger’s name, Amalaskae’s apparent world-destroying strength fades before the Polish woman’s eyes.

When she tries to stand up, the giant eyeball belonging to the creature seemingly stealing the life from the angel turns its gaze on the spiritually battered and panicking adventurer.

If Amalaskae is a servant of the Holy Lord himself, then this creature is a certain of his treacherous fallen angel Lucifer. Its gaze and presence radiate true and pure evil, and fear grasps tightly to Zuzia’s heart. She tries to step towards it, and sheer, undeniable truth slams into her. The Polish woman is forced back into the wall, and she slumps back down to her knees as the horrors of the last few minutes surround her, accusing her of the unforgivable sins she has committed.

Soldiers were killed trying to capture her, and monster-summoning bandits were slain on the road alongside the beasts they brought forth to ambush merchants. She thoughtlessly attacked the unmoving living beings, some of whom were people, within Serrentuk’s time-frozen void. And in all cases, it was Zuzia’s mere existence that led to their gruesome deaths.

Now, one more life, personally more important to Zuzia and arguably more important than anyone else, has been snuffed out because the Polish woman gave into her hubris and thought she could be a heroine.

The tears streak down her cheeks as the deaths flash through her mind, and she tries to close her eyes as she screams, “I’m sorry! Amala! Please forgive me! I’m so sorry!”

Someone approaches her, but she can’t escape the crushing feeling bearing down on her. She only numbly sees someone else arrive that distracts the eyeball monster, but she doesn’t want anything other than for Amalaskae to be returned. Zuzia’s own arrogance with her plan, and her failure to stay focused, have doomed her guardian angel to being consumed by an actual demon.

“Consider yourself lucky, hapless boy. My Providence is plentiful.” The voice is terrifying and deep, echoing on itself like the legions of the devil, and upon these voices, all of the sound falls silent, other than Yaulander’s voice grunting.

“What?” asks the blond man sharply, but Zuzia can’t bring her hands away from her face. She doesn’t want any of this.

“Ah, I see,” muses Yaulander’s voice behind her. “I can work with this…”

Please… God, please, I… I failed… Please don’t let Amalaskae die in my place…

While she’s sobbing, more distant voices are calling out, but she can barely hear them.

“... Majesty! What’s going on!? How did you get here?”

Yaulander doesn’t reply right away. Instead, something locks around Zuzia’s neck, and she finally sits up, rubbing her eyes. She pivots and swings her arm to push a presence away from her back. Yaulander narrowly jumps back, avoiding her swing.

He speaks in a language that she doesn’t understand, with the exception of her alias ‘Zuzia Spolskia’, speaking commandingly as he aims his hand at her. “{I, Yaulander kos Strylaph hereby command you, Zuzia Spolskia…}”

“Youuuu…” growls Zuzia hatefully. Scorching anger starts to replace the overwhelming guilt. Yaulander, according to Serrentuk, was the one who orchestrated the magical summoning that, in essence, tricked Amalaskae into believing this world needed a heroine, and so she chose Zuzia.

It’s his fault she was brought to this world, and now it’s his fault that Amalaskae is dead. Zuzia is not blameless, but Yaulander is the one who had a direct hand in everything that catalyzed Zuzia’s actions. “If I had known how strong I am when we first met…” snarls the Polish woman as she clenches her fists, stalking towards him. He retreats backwards as he continues speaking, though his tone becomes noticeably more frantic and fearful. It’s just him and her right now, and if he could do anything about her strength, he would have already done it.

“{Succumb to the natural order and surrender your soul! With this artifact, become…}”

He winces as her hand wraps around his neck, lifting him effortlessly off of the ground. It’ll take only a flex of her fingers, but that would be too quick. He deserves far worse than what Serrentuk’s dragon prisoner received. Sayrdarralouche never knew what hit him. His muscles and bones pop and creak under her grip, and he strains just to form syllables in his desperate commands that don’t seem to be working. “Those scars suit you, but when I’m done with you, they will be your most attractive feature…”

“{...a ser…vant…boun…-d…to…my…willll…}”

A feeling like daggers suddenly spearing into Zuzia’s neck tears into her, in spite of her divine gifts, and she screams as she drops Yaulander to stumble back, clawing instinctively at her neck. She doubles over and bucks, trying to alleviate or even distract from the pain, which continues to feel unyielding and sharp beyond some of the worst injuries Zuzia has ever experienced. It’s worse than the many times she has burned herself on hot pots and pans, molten cheese and freshly brewed tea, the aftermath of a spoon entering a microwaved mug of water, which she only ever did once when she was a child.

If she had to compare what she’s feeling now to anything, it would be what she guesses a cattle brand feels like, but all the way around her neck. Her screams scratch at her throat until it fades, becoming pained breaths that she can barely sustain. Touching the collar, which is what she confirms it to be with her fingers, causes the pain to spike even more. She can’t even bring herself to tug on it, let alone rip it off.

She thought nothing of it at first, since a collar and a chain would be nothing to her super-human strength, which shouldn’t be magic specifically. And, she was too distracted with encountering several of the most traumatizing things she could ever be subjected to. Her preparations to take Serrentuk’s life as a mercy to him ended up being no more than walking a mile once a week to ‘prepare’ to win gold at Olympic gymnastics. It was far from enough to give her the resolve to deal with everything after.

Her heart races in terror as she tries to panic, but she can feel her own strength turning against her to resist any movements.

One of the soldiers that came to check on Yaulander cautiously moves to restrain her, and she manages to snatch his arm, flinging him to the ground. He hits hard, but her full strength resisted to Yaulander shouting out, “STOP!”

She is fighting the compulsion, but it’s burning into her.

“I order you to stop!” shouts the Grand Prince. She snaps her eyes to him, glaring. She starts to limp towards him again, but her body shifts and squirms, causing her to stumble. More soldiers throw themselves between her and the blond nobleman, but she’s still strong enough to batter them aside, even if they aren’t exploding or being sent into orbit.

“You cannot resist, Zuzia Spolskia! Obey me! I said, OBEY ME!”

She is less than a meter from killing him, but it feels like the burning is becoming heavy as well. Her body is feeling heavier and heavier, like her veins are flowing with concrete that is slowly hardening. But, she must kill him.

God, please… grant me the strength… Please don’t let me become the weapon of this… monster…

She drops to her knees, trying to climb to her feet, but unable to overcome the burning, the weight, and the newest sensation. A creeping pain slithers down her neck, passing over the notch of the top of her sternum and following the center of her chest down towards her heart. She cries out silently, her voice having slipped away. The pain has ensnared her heart itself, and it forces her down to her hands and knees. She can barely breath, she can barely think. Even with all of the power that God and Amalaskae gave her in order to help this world, she is unable to even lift her head right now. Her breaths become hitched gasps more than actual inhales and exhales, graced to her only by the fact that breathing is an involuntary reflex normally, or else she would be suffocating.

She can feel the burning magic rooting itself in her heart, filling out into her chest as if to definitively remind her that she will never escape this fate.

Something wet lands on her neck, and she immediately knows what it is from its own texture and the watery pop that comes from the human mouth that caused it. Yaulander just spit on her, and she can’t even react. She has exhausted herself fighting against her own strength, but even worse than that, her body is being compelled into inaction. She can only continue to pant as she stares at the ground, disgusted, horrified, and defeated.

“Your Majesty…?” asks one of the soldiers.

He wipes his mouth and growls at Zuzia, though his own voice is strained from her nearly crushing his neck. “If you had cooperated from the beginning, Zuzia Spolskia, you would have been treated like an Imperial Hero.” He coughs once from his rasping voice irritating his throat. “Now, you should consider yourself lucky that I have no interest in preserving the bloodline of savages.”

If only the Zuzia from a few minutes ago had known the cost of her own vengeful delay in finishing him… Her heart tightens as his last sentence truly sinks in. There is always a darker risk to being captured in a combat capacity for a woman, and even men in some cases. With an inability to resist the compulsions from the magic enslavement that Yaulander managed to put her under, and which kept Serrentuk as a tool for generations, she wouldn’t be able to stop one of the most heinous acts.

That said, she might be able to summon enough strength in such a moment, which means she will need to bide her time. She understood Serrentuk’s argument for why he wanted to die, with the hope of being restored to freedom and life on the other side of some magic process. He could not control his body, and so, could not be fully accountable for what occurred under his own immense strength.

And, just in order to take away his power from these wicked people, he was ready to die with the very realistic risk that he would never see the light of day again.

Zuzia now fully comprehends the terror Serrentuk must have felt as it sank in all those centuries ago. His immense power, unable to truly resist, was going to be turned on anyone his master deemed to be enemies, whether they were innocent or otherwise.

With Zuzia defeated, she can only listen when Yaulander finally answers his soldier. “Tell the void artillery to fire on the fortress,” states the Grand Prince. A dragon is very visibly breathing fire while the bursting echoes of gunshots reach Zuzia’s ears on the ground.

Please… God, I know you won’t forsake me, but please… Don’t let me suffer… If I can’t be saved, please… send them to stop me…

“Your Majesty?”

“Did I stutter?” asks the blond man to the officer who just questioned him.

“N-No, but… We still have a significant number of-...”

“Consider them lost already,” retorts Yaulander callously. “If we delay, Hekate and her dragons will escape. She is deep inside the fortress, so she won’t have time to detect it and flee.” He walks towards a nearby encampment, fixing his dirtied nobleman’s jacket collar on the move. “Come Zuzia. No.” He turns and grins wickedly as she starts to her feet under magic compulsion, only to halt at his subsequent ‘no’. “Rather, I have a better one. From now on, you will answer to the name… mmm… ‘Rat’. Yes, ‘Rat’ should be a sufficiently lowly enough creature for you.” He scoffs, adding as he whirls to continue his departure, “Come Rat. We’re leaving. Lieutenant, I don’t hear orders being given to the artillery.”

“Y-Yes,... your Majesty.”

Zuzia feels for the officer somewhat. But, she doesn’t feel that bad for him. He’s serving evil, and from the sounds of it, he has the option to leave, run away, refuse, and even betray the scummy noble lord walking ahead of her as she helplessly follows. She keeps her gaze down, wholly disappointed, afraid, and defeated.

Everything possible seems to have gone wrong today, though she has no idea how much worse it’s about to get.

***

Neith breathes fire on the exterior of the fortress, not putting much power into his flame breath as magic spells lance off of his secondary set of armor and detonate against his own interception magic. In an effort to prepare for the day that he might need to defend against weapons comparable to Daniel’s rifles, the dragon is trying to apply his understanding of everything he has seen or had described to improvise new spells.

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He can’t outright use a spell like the lightning attack that the thorusk hakkadels used, since their lightning defense is rather indiscriminate, meaning it would electrocute his passengers as a passive effect. Both his primary set of armor, which is still on Magnir, and his secondary set, which is made of tempered iron, interfere with the lightning-style projectile interception, and wind magic requires continuous consumption of mana at a higher scale to create a wind barrier like the kamaitaizen benkis.

Thankfully, he mainly only needs his iron armor to protect him from the sharp ends of spears and to take the damage of magic spells, vastly dropping their effect on the dragon underneath, who could survive any one shot with ease, but would take damage over time.

Rikuto, Helbeit, Resken, Horaston, Loxourren, and Chebnom are on the ground, engaging the enemies pouring out of the fortress to engage the dragon or escape, depending on their priorities. Neith is the most mobile because of his size in dragon form, and he can unleash the most indiscriminate destruction as a result. To compensate some amount for this, the currently active members of Grendel Six have tied themselves onto his back, firing submachine guns in small bursts to spray the enemy positions with gunfire while Neith focuses on funneling the enemies and trying to keep the incoming damage to a minimum in order to protect his goblin passengers. Grendel Six has been on several harrowing missions far beyond the normal expectations of goblins, and while not everyone is able to fight from Neith’s back, at least four goblins are able to fire off a few bursts.

Their part of the battle is to try to prevent high-value targets from escaping, which should be made obvious by trying to flee on mounts. This includes the Grand Prince, Commander Nesparu, an unidentified elven sage, and anyone trying to transport an otherworlder woman or a divine being. Due to the alleged ability of this elven sage, it’s possible any or all of them may be transported in secret.

The dragon flinches when a shrill shrieking noise starts and continues endlessly from deep within the castle. Even from outside, the energies coming from within are unnerving, particularly considering the goal was to have Nemaisol negate that magic and rescue Amalaskae and Zuzia.

The shrieking sound seems to penetrate the stone, and it unnerves the Imperial soldiers as well, causing almost everyone to pause. The only ones who have a very minimal reaction are the goblins, who cheer as they continue firing their weapons in spite of Neith coming to a stop briefly to wince. His hearing is good, but not nearly as sensitive as Hekate’s, where the goblins should be closer to the feldrok Empress or gatonines like Sir Chebnom or shenwulves like Sir Resken in terms of sensitivity than the dragon. Yet, the goblins seem gleeful that their enemies have suddenly decided to stop resisting.

The painful moment goes on for a rather long while, and Neith manages to power through to take a breath and continue his search for his targets. He should do another lap around the fortress, but he’ll need to gather the ground team, who are making use of loaned sidearms, in the case of the Mornistae fighters in their colorful outfits, while Resken and Helbeit have permission to ruthlessly defend their rifles if need be.

Because it’s a precarious balance between recently-enemy nations, Neith has no obligation to fully trust Rikuto or his allies. Ryuogriar warned the grey dragon to be highly cautious with Rikuto and his Divine Summon abilities, including a suspicion of some sort of hypnosis.

But, they are allies for the current mission, meaning Neith is responsible for Rikuto’s safety to a degree. He is in the heart of the sword-wielding enemies, fighting with strange acrobatic movements and firing the pistol surprisingly adeptly without aiming properly.

Her Grace was right, but how could he have such skill with firearms when Daniel has a longer history with them?

Before Neith can make sense of his thoughts, including what the shrieking could mean, it has already faded, making him feel a bit more at ease. Most of the Imperials are in cover and hiding, while the ground forces are retreating back into the main entrance of the fortress. There are a lot of surviving Imperial soldiers, wounded by Rikuto’s and his knights, rather than slain. He expressed a desire to capture any possible witnesses to use against Yaulander on the political stage, but something is wrong.

Gold hasn’t relayed anything about what’s going on inside, and Neith begins to worry that something might’ve happened to Daniel and the others. Presumably, Zuzia was brought to this place to restrain her, and a divine being was in danger, prompting Ryukana’s unusual direct intervention.

A shiver rolls up Neith’s spine from the tip of his tail to the base of his skull, and he whirls as a true urgency grips him.

He has felt this specific sensation before, and he’ll never forget it.

The forest areas around the rock fortress provide a great deal of cover for auxiliary fortifications, but more importantly, with the advent of long-range weapons, hiding places for a trap.

Mana is being coalesced into four pitch black points so dark, the darkness of the most starless night could never compare. Even the deepest caverns into the depths of the very world would envy the wholly unnatural lack of color and light as the orbs grow in size.

Neith experienced this phenomenon first hand, and he knows exactly what happens to anyone caught in the radius.

What he doesn’t know is what happens when two void artilleries are fired together.

Each one employs two spheres of concentrated mana, which travel at a moderately lax pace and intersect at range to ignite the mana reaction that instantly obliterates everything in a multi-mile sphere, regardless of its material composition. The spheres are impervious to magic attacks or the anti-magic nullification spell Ryuogriar developed following the wave caused by Daniel’s God-killers.

He knows two separate artilleries are preparing to fire due to the spacing between pairs, which are about a thousand yards separated from each other to the south of the fortress.

If they strike at two different ranges, it will be very difficult for the group to escape.

And, half of Neith’s allies are still in the fortress.

“Gold!” calls out the grey dragon through telepathy. He moves quickly to rush towards Rikuto and the others, shouting audibly during his second attempt. “Gold!”

With no response and seconds to act before the spheres are fired, Neith tries all of them. “Hekate! Doephluev! Gold! One of you answer me!” He even tries Yaulwembor, “Yaulwembor, you need to get everyone out!”

The knights are looking up at Neith by this point, and he looks towards the void artilleries. He can easily see the impending doom due to his height, but they don’t seem to be aware of them, yet.

“We need to go!” snaps the dragon. “Forgive me!” He is as careful as he can, but moves quickly to snatch them up with a wind spell, capturing them in a ‘wind bubble’ that makes them unstable as they float and tumble inside. Rikuto calls out, “Sir Neith! What’s going on!?”

“No time to explain! We have to go!” The dragon cups his huge claws together to sustain the spell, and he stomps into flight towards the conical cavern that penetrates into the fortress, and where Daniel’s group entered to rush to Amalaskae’s and Zuzia’s aid.

Neith has to close his wings in and sustain flight using wind magic, rocketing into the cavern as Klur calls out, “Lord General! Was that…”

“Yes!” barks Neith. “We must move quickly!”

As soon as Neith enters the large inner chamber where Daniel’s group is located, which is the terminus of the tunnel that he can barely fit through at the innermost part, he shoulder-slams into the wall to stop himself, startling everyone inside. He somewhat unceremoniously drops Rikuto and the knights near Daniel, Gold, Doephluev, and a woman’s body, breathing fire at anyone on the upper levels who seem to be trying to maintain some sort of defense. Considering there are monsters as well, he doesn’t feel a need to hold back.

“Neith!?” shouts Gold.

He answers even as flames still sputter out of his mouth. “We must depart! The void artilleries! They’re firing! We have seconds!”

The dragon desperately transforms into his human form above Hekate, landing next to her so that he can scoop her up with a startled, “Hey!” He doesn’t have time to be gentle, though. He tosses her at Daniel, and she cries out, “Whoa! What’s-waaah! Oof!” She is caught by Gold and Doephluev protecting Daniel, which the male dragon has yet to see his current state. Regardless, Neith darts to Yaulwembor and pulls her towards the group, which aggravates her, but he gives her a worried expression as he pulls her to the group. She relaxes a little, but might be ready to pick a fight.

Neith shouts, “Teleport us! Teleport us! Quickly! As far as you can get us quickly! Doesn’t matter where!”

Hekate is startled and confused, which delays them, and Neith can feel a tremble that causes Yaulwembor to twitch in his grip as well. Doephluev, Gold, and Hekate all seem to notice as well, and Doephluev calls out, “I don’t think I can go far enough with so many people!”

“Go as far as you can! North! Go north!” shouts Neith as he shoves everyone together.

“If the void artilleries are here,...!” starts Rikuto urgently.

“They’re about to vaporize us!” shouts the dragon! “Doephluev! Please hurry!”

She scowls at him as she keeps chanting, focusing as much of her mana as she can into the process. It’s a big ask, and Doephluev is more specialized in short range teleportation, but she was quicker to react. Neith will do everything in his power to launch everyone away, but heading south will only endanger them.

There’s a flash of light, and they all appear in the daylight again, but gravity quickly pulls downwards on the group. They’re falling, and the archoneldwyn screams, “Your turn! Do something!”

Neith immediately wraps the group in a wind bubble, slamming it northward with a second powerful wind spell. Everyone tumbles in a mess together, and Daniel seems to be shielding something small with his body and arms.

Neith finally catches a glimpse of it. He has some sort of tiny creature in his arms, and intense mana is coming from it, though it’s a bit more stable than what was coming out of the fortress before.

“We’re not going to make it!” shouts Gold, doing her best to keep her own floating bearings within the messy spell, which gives some of the men an anchor point with her legs and tail. “Teleport us again!” orders the dragon, but she realizes Doephluev isn’t responding.

The archoneldwyn depleted her mana to such a degree, that she fainted.

“Doephluev!?” calls out Hekate.

“Hekate! Teleport!” shouts Gold and Neith together.

“R-Right!” replies the nervous teen.

“We’re out of time!” calls out Chebnom as he points.

Both pairs of the void artillery shots are closing in on the fortress, but more specifically, each other. They are precariously close to each other already, and due to the angle and their featureless black ‘surfaces’, the spheres are impossible to distinguish from each other where the views of them overlap.

A flash of light indicates the moment of tangency between the sphere closest between the two pairs, rather than the pair’s own partner sphere. The non-paired spheres implode briefly before expanding, and Neith can feel his heart stop briefly. He tenses, but they’re maybe half of the distance they needed to cover to escape.

That said, two more flashes occur before the group is annihilated, and rather than instantly being engulfed in a dome of obliteration, a mana wave races outwards in an imperfect sphere. It slams past the group, bursting the wind-magic spells and stunning Neith for a moment as he coughs from the mental surge of having his spells forcibly broken. Everyone starts falling again, and Neith is rattled as he looks up at the sky in a brief daze. Above him, Hekate screams as she begins falling, unable to overcome her greatest fear to finish teleporting everyone, who are also crying out.

I wonder if Roestren’s… our child is confirmed… if she’ll be free and safe from the military… What will she name our child? I hope… he or she is healthy…

“...eith! NEITH!”

Daniel is cradling the infant creature close to his chest, even as it cries, though its crying is more normal for an infant than the shrieking that was able to reach through solid stone. The human’s right hand is gripping the collar of Neith’s armor, calling out to him.

The dragon snaps out of it, quickly casting the transformation spell and catching everyone on his chest before using his magic to levitate himself. He catches a glimpse of a strange new star in the sky

“Brace yourselves!” shouts the dragon, unable to roll over in time. He crashes through a few sparse trees in a field as he does his best to simultaneously block and soften the impacts for his wards, and Daniel does the same for the small being while Gold holds Hekate and Doephluev.

One of the group is not with them; the ancient archfiend known as Yaulwembor. She is hovering in the air in her humanoid form with her wings lazily swirling. Anger is visible on her face as she watches the distance.

Neith focuses on the star for a moment, which seems to be an intensely bright concentration of mana that has inverted from pitch black to a painfully bright white that even a dragon’s self-polarizing eyes can’t look directly at. Even the sun seems rather dull in comparison. It also radiates intense mana that Neith can feel from almost a mile away.

Unlike the sun, however, this strange new star doesn’t descend towards the horizon in order to pass behind it. Rather, from the dragon’s perspective, as well as any of the others watching it from his chest, it descends past the horizon, lazily approaching the terrestrial surface.

Daniel is in the midst of calling out, “Hekate! Hekate, you need to focus! Get us out of here!”

The raven-haired powerhouse is clinging desperately to Gold as she panics, and Daniel can’t pull his eyes away from the falling star either.

Neith hasn’t seen Daniel’s superweapons in action, and in a way, he’s thankful for that. He seems more afraid of the star than the void artillery’s normal behavior, which this is not.

It’s hypnotizing, simply because of how powerful and pure it is. Unlike creatures like the Devourer and even the infant in Daniel’s arms, the mana coming from the star is the epitome of beauty to every sense the dragon can observe it with, other than it is so bright, he can’t look directly at it.

It reaches the ground, and Daniel does the only thing he can think of as a last ditch effort; he curls his body over Gold, Hekate, Doephluev, and the infant, as if it would make any difference.

Neith does somewhat idly raise his massive claw as a shield to everyone as well, including to block his face in some sort of naive hope that they would be able to survive.

The flash that follows the falling star’s contact with the ground is much smaller and less impactful than the dragon would expect. It creates a strange fan of light upwards, which quickly closes into a tight beam into the sky for a brief moment, before dimming to return the sky to its normal daylight shades. Because of the sudden return to normal being noticeably darker than the star, it almost feels for a moment that it suddenly became night time.

Regardless, one last phenomenon comes from the point of touchdown; an apparent fountain of peculiar sparks sprays upwards before they arc back downwards onto the ground, covering an area that might only be a few yards across. Compared to the multi-mile annihilation sphere caused by a normal void artillery shot, this seems more akin to a dud.

But, Neith is desperate to earn the honor and dignity of a titled knight of the Fievegal known as the Einherjars, as well as the Jomsvikings to annotate the male elite warriors in contrast to the Valkyries. He is concerned with what the attack has done, but he is unsure what it could be.

That said, he pays attention, he reads all of the reports about everything the Fievegal is dealing with on a high level. Crime is starting to rear its ugly head amidst the villages around the Citadel, several factions seem to be branched off of the overarching enemy they’re dealing with, including the ones that attacked the Citadel and sent a monster that Sundenelle, of all people, held off long enough for Gold and Ryuogriar to engage it, and for Veiranoei to use one of Daniel’s second-draft railguns to finish it.

Amidst all of that, a humble human Dawnseer desperately brought a foresight to Daniel’s attention because of the implications of the event; an unstoppable fire.

Neith is over seven centuries old, and though the bulk of his endeavors were centered around his revenge, he is likely among the most acquainted with fire of any living being on Zenkon.

And, there is one immutable rule that all dragons know, from the very oldest to absolute youngest.

A powerful fire can start from even the tiniest spark.

***