More Power

More Power
Her voice was layered and magnified a thousand times over, carrying the weight of an entire coven, coming from the direction of the Grove. Her incantations came out like a song, much deeper and angrier than before. Her voice cracked like thunder as it filled the air. He felt the vibrations of it in his teeth. 
Ruhkaal let out a low, uneasy growl, a plume of white-hot smoke venting from his massive nostrils. A profound, suffocating sense of foreboding tightened in his chest. He scanned the horizon as the ground beneath his feet began to violently shudder.
"Something is breaking, Drae’, any thoughts?” Ruhkaal hissed.
Before Draevir could reply, the earth tore open. Giant pillars of pale, ghoststone erupted from the soil like ribs breaking through skin. Another shot up in the distance and another and another, forming a massive, jagged circle that surrounded what had once been the Southern Council's lands. As the pillars locked into place, the surrounding trees began to light up, their leaves flaring with a desperate, blinding emerald luminescence.
Suddenly, Draevir went perfectly rigid. The glowing green ley-lines of the forest reflected in the deep crystalline veins of his eyes.
"The Great Tree," Draevir ground out, shifting back into his dragon form as if he couldn’t help it. His massive stone limbs trembled. He walked forward, his claws sinking into the ground up to his ankle.  Then, it pulled him under. 
“Drae’!” The earth wiggled. He felt Draevir getting far away. 
He looked at Xaruh. “What was that?”
Xaruh stared into the sky in awe. 
“I believe… your mate needs you both for the ritual.”
“What do—“ 
Something hooked into his chest and pulled violently, yanking him. 
“Don’t fight it. Just go.”
The violent compulsion pulled harder until he was stumbling toward the direction it ordered. A fierce, burning grew in his chest, drawing his gaze toward the jagged peak of the nearest active volcano. The magma within was screaming, calling for him, responding to whatever Isorai was doing in the Grove.
But before he could take flight, the sky split open entirely.
A magnificent, terrifying set of cosmic scales descended from the upper atmosphere, hovering ominously over the entirety of the Southern Council’s lands. The immense basin glittered with starlight and shadow. 
He leaped and shifted flying toward the volcano nearest to him. A screech caught his ear, then a low, rumbling roar from behind. 
From the blighted trenches where the Souther Council had been, a foul, oily substance began to bubble and rise. The vroth’s giant eye rolled and bubbled up into the air. From a distance, Yseira’s voice drifted, singing a steady baseline, but it wasn’t nearly as loud as Isorai’s voice. The corruptive and caustic sludge liquefied the earth, expanding rapidly as plumes of miasma drifted up around it.
With a deafening, wet screech that ripped through the air, a massive head, pointed and angular reared up. Still half formed, it fired a concentrated blast of corrupt, absolute darkness directly at the celestial scales. The beam struck the left pan of the scale, exploding into a dark fire that began to weigh that side down. The ghost white fire banked in another volcano leaped out and devoured the dark fire, burning a blinding white. 
Around the vroth, more of the Choir began to rise from the muck, their discordant, screeching voices joined in a horrific symphony that challenged Isorai and Yseira’s voices.
In response to the corruption, the Great Tree sent up a colossal, blinding tower of pure, golden-green light that pierced the dark clouds, amplifying Isorai’s voice until he could hear the individual words. 
“Isorai-hae, hael som dhoom hae… Isorae-mae, isorae-hae, jilkae-hael-so riya hae…”
He heard those words before from the dancer, but he still didn’t know what they meant.
Watching the chaos unfold, Ruhkaal’s mind flashed back to the attack on the Consortium as the pillar of light spread out in to a large glowing bough of thick limbs shielding the Grove and part of Vuldra. 
Suddenly, a violent, agonizing tug snapped across his soul.
It was the mate bond.
High up in the branches of the Great Tree, Isorai was reaching the climax of her ritual and was pulling power from him. 
Ruhkaal let her have it,  he threw his mind wide open, pushing every ounce of his roaring, primordial flame he could spare to her.
His strength waned under the sudden drain.
But as his vision swam and his flames dimmed, a cold dread settled deep in his chest.
What happened if it wasn’t enough? Where would she pull from then?
He set his eyes on the volcano nearby and shifted to fly to it. The vroth hovering near the Grove, spewing fire at the barrier, didn’t even notice him flying by.
The caldera of Mount Vesuven hissed and boiled, a gaping maw of jagged black rock. The heat it threw off rivaled his at its hottest. Ruhkaal landed heavily on the trembling lip of the volcano, his massive talons crushing the brittle basalt into dust.
He tipped forward into the heat, landing in the pool of magma, letting the power flow into him and out through the bond. The magma cooled around him. He grit his teeth and reached beyond his elemental power, down to where his witch magic lay to offer it. 
She took it. 
How much more?
The volcano pulsed, pushing up through the sluggish, choked magma around him. Isorai’s song thrummed through the quiet scorching heat around him. It was as if the heat of the continent and every volcano reached out to him, from the freshly filled wells beneath Vuldra to the volcanic vents near Nahzkar. He grit his teeth, letting the power flow through him. 
A torrent of blinding, white-hot elemental fire erupted from somewhere north of him, plunging straight into him. The magma churned beneath him. Another volcano exploded upward in violent geysers of liquid rock and heat, but it wasn't enough. Isorai’s voice was growing more strained.
He could feel her starting to falter. Her confusion and frustration, too. 
More. 
She needed more power, but Ruhkaal had no idea how he could get it to her.
Suddenly, the air pressure dropped violently. Two massive shadows broke through the ash clouds billowing up around him.
Xaruh and Kaal dropped down without a word. High Matron Frythgrove was on Kaal’s back. The two dragons landed on the opposite rims of the crater, they opened their massive jaws over him. High Matrong Frythgrove poured in her own fire.  
Three streams of fire converged over him, flowing through him and out to Isorai. The heavy sense of foreboding in Ruhkaal’s chest only grew.
High above them, the celestial scales thrashed against the bruised sky. The raw, unbridled power bled from the ritual clashing with the dark, oily energy of the vroth. The collisions were a deafening, continuous roar that sounded like the sky itself was being torn in half.
The Choir screamed in a long horrific, discordant wall of sound that vibrated through the marrow of the Ruhkaal's bones.
The vroth was fighting back, and for some reason, it was winning.