The dragon's harem

The shattered space of the cubic prison, the dreadful space. Arad flew through it; each time his flesh collided with a crack, it was slashed clean. And what more, he could feel it, his body growing weaker and weaker with each passing moment, his eyelids growing heavier.

After absorbing the heart, Arad's soul had grown rapidly, and now his body was on the verge of evolving. He could fall into hibernation at any moment. But he has to resist it, keep himself awake until he finds Zephyr and drags her out. For the first time, he started to hate how small she was.

The space around him rumbled, with each burst powerful enough to kill him. He dodged several blasts, but more than once he found himself losing an arm, a wing, or even massive chunks of his body.

With both time and space shattered, all of his senses ceased to work. All he could rely on was his void, trying to make sense of the ripped threads of time and space to find his way around the chaos.

What was a bigger problem was those threads themselves. Zephyr could be anywhere, in space and time. She might be right in front of him, but only five seconds in the future, which would make him fly right past her. He needed to be at the right place and at the right time to find her.

But as he flew through the void, frustrated that Zephyr's wind magic couldn't survive the obliterated void, he suddenly saw it, a wisp of divine magic, riddled with curses. He frowned, his eyes twitching. What the hell were those things doing here? And since when could divine magic and curses be merged like that?

Doma's voice in his head seemed to disagree with his worries, {Follow it, only you and Zephyr are in this damned void. If anything besides chaos showed up, it's coming from her.} Her words were true, and Arad followed them, quickly chasing after the sparks left by the wisps.

It took him a few seconds to fly through the void without losing his life, but he soon saw her, engulfed in a cocoon of light and darkness. White sparks of divine magic flashed and swirled around her, while dark flames of curses seemed to flicker and dance with the divine magic like its accursed shadow.

As Arad approached, he understood one thing: those were coming from Zephyr herself, and they weren't weak, but extremely powerful. Powerful to the point that swallowing her might lead to his death.

Not having time to think it over, or care, as they would both die anyway if he didn't get her out. And…if he died, Yog would rip his wives open from the arse. He remembers her words and understands well that the annoying halfling jokes a lot, but her words at that time didn't seem like a joke.

Swallowing Zephyr whole, Arad could feel his mouth and throat burn, ripped apart by the violent divine and curses engulfing her body. Those seem to be what protected her from the collapsing chaos.

Now with Zephyr safely protected inside his stomach, Arad was ready to use what little remained of the dead heart's power to survive the prison cube's collapse. And as if she sensed Zephyr's aura disappear from inside the cube, Merlin finally let go of her magic, and the whole thing consumed itself, fading into nothing.

In that split second, Merlin felt a huge relief with the burden of magic leaving her body and mind alone… but Arad wasn't having that much fun. The fabric of space and time collapsed on him like a building, if he were a normal human.

The heart's repulsion magic surged from inside Arad and protected him for that fraction of a second, but that was it. The protection didn't last long enough to withstand the full burn of the collapse, and Arad ended up finding himself between the jaws of the void, crushing his whole body with teeth made of the fabric of space and time.

As the jaws of time crashed onto him, all of Arad's cells suddenly weren't able to stay in the same place, relative to each other. This ripped him apart, but what was worse was when the time surged, and each of those little pieces got lost in the river of time, some flung to the past and others locked in the future.

Luckily, the heart's protection had lasted just enough that Arad would remain alive long enough for the space to shift.

Merlin was sitting on a large stone, snow falling around her in a blinding blizzard as she waited for Arad and Zephyr to show up. It has just been a second since the cube shattered, and they should appear around her at any moment, and soon they did.

Zephyr fell on the snow and sank into it, unconscious. Arad lay beside her in his humanoid form, looking like a shriveled mummy. His once large body was nowhere to be seen; his arms were no wider than his bones, his lustrous skin was now replaced with black, withered flesh, his eye sockets were empty, and all of his hair had been burned to ash.

Merlin's face froze. Arad looked like a corpse, his body had long been killed, but the only thing still pulsing inside him was his soul, and magic still flew through his destroyed body. He won't survive, but thankfully, his body was already on the verge of evolving.

The process was already starting, his life wasn't in danger. Merlin could see his void slowly trying to cover his body. Right now, she should take him and Zephyr down to a safe place.

"Looks like I was right." Suddenly, a strange voice boomed, and when Merlin looked, a horrid abomination was standing just a few meters away from them. She froze in place and summoned her staff. They smelled the heart, and Arad consumed it.

But before either Merlin or the abomination could do anything, the abomination's head fell to the ground, rolled on the snow, and stopped. "Huh?" He gasped, unable to understand what had happened, and before he could think of anything else, a foot crushed his head to the ground.

Betty was standing there, glaring at the blowing storm with a twisted, raging face. "If you bastards don't show up, I'll pull you down myself." As she growled, the clouds were blasted away, revealing hundreds of abominations that gathered around. The ones that still hid in the shadows of the mortal world they've all gathered here.