Rathgar's headless body was still standing in place, only in the next few seconds when shrills began to resound through the village, and the ground began to shake once more, did the villagers begin to realize what was happening. They were all going to die.
The dead body in front of everyone collapsed to the ground, there wasn't even a noise that could have signified what was going on and what had happened to Rathgar. He had just died in front of everyone.
It was only when someone looked up towards the place he had last looked did someone realize what killed him. As they screamed in terror did it shock everyone back to their senses. Just as they came to their senses, did the surrounding salamandras charge towards the village.
"ITS SALAMANDRAS!!!! RUNNNN!!!!" Someone exclaimed as everyone began to panic for their safety, and as a few people began to prepare themselves to fight against beasts that shared the same ancestral blood as them.
However, salamandras lacked human intelligence that was replaced by terrifying levels of physical strength, agility, and the ability to manipulate fire mana. They were long since feared as elemental creatures akin to dragons themselves.
The most terrifying thing that caused the terror in the people who began fighting for their lives with the swarm of salamandras, was that their patriarch had died without resistance and against a beast they only lamented on having been caught in its sight.
The eldest salamandra was still in the krosis trees that towered over the village patriarch's home, however, its stature seemed to make the already massive trees look like mere saplings. Yet that wasn't the scariest aspect of the massive salamandra that led the others to the village.
The eldest salamandra when it revealed itself to the villagers after killing Rathgar, dark purple flames were being exuded from its body, it was the most dangerous assassin in the woodlands, a dark salamandra. It was a salamandra that was already feared by almost every creature to come across it in normal circumstances, was sprawling across several trees holding itself in the air.
The dark salamandra that was cloaked in an illusion to enter the village undetected was already 40 meters long from snout to tail, yet the most shocking thing about its size was the rippling muscular form that it exuded. The gaps between its scaled hide glowed with burning orange, red, and tinges of dark purple fire.
Its vision was blurred by its mental state that had been caused by Tyros' lingering presence in Alterra. As the other salamandras massacred their way through the outer edges of the village towards the center, the eldest salamandra turned its head towards the thing that seemed to coincide with what it had felt when Tyros' peered into ALterra to commune with Runaan.
The dark salamandra turned towards the sacred ground of the dragon's kin clan that had a shrine in the center of it. It could sense the destructive power of the genesis flame that burned within the shrine's walls.
The dark salamandra dropped from the krosis trees on top of the patriarchs home, and utterly flattened it. Its sheer size and weight were great enough to break the home's reinforced beams that held its roof and walls together. It was heavy enough to even leave sprawling cracks in the ground where the home's foundations ruptured from the dark salamandra falling on it.
It began to rush towards the shrine in an attempt to remove the threat it perceived the genesis flame inside it to be. However, right as it was about to crash through the shrine to destroy whatever was inside it that caused it to be so terrified, it was repelled from the shrine.
The dark salamandra was launched back only to reland back on the ruble of the old patriarch's home. Reducing the already flattened building to even more of a crater. The fact that the salamandra was repelled from the building in front of it, only deepened its fear of whatever was within it.
As it was about to recharge towards the building, it stopped just barely short of where it was repelled from before, it opened its gaping maw that had traces of blood and bone fragments embedded in its teeth.
A torrent of raging fire mana began to gather in its body as well the force of darkness mana begin to fill in its mouth. After a short gathering of mana inside of its body, it shot out a horrifying degree of purple fire that shot towards the doors of the shrine.
The vigorous sheen to its body began to dim slightly as the beam of fire was blasting against the doors of the shrine. The fires spread across the building only to be deflected across the walls as it began to burn away the building.
Standing behind the doors was Aeneas. He had long sense bound his body to the shrine to keep the genesis flame sealed within it. However, when the dark salamandra had attacked the shrine moments ago, it activated the restrictive formations built around the shrine to prevent non-dragon' kin members from entering it.
However, after its initial attack against the shrine, unknown to the dark salamandra, was that the restrictions had been broken by sheer force. Aeneas who couldn't leave the shrine knew that the beginning of the worst possible prophecy that had been shared throughout the generations was about to begin.
As a last-ditch resort, as he felt the torrential mana outside the shrine begin to condense, Aeneas lamented as he grabbed hold of the Genesis Flame of Power that his forefathers had vowed to protect. Aeneas began to forcefully try and integrate his body with the genesis flame to try and prevent the shrine from collapsing, effectively removing the barriers that held the genesis flame on Alterra.
However, as the dark salamandra began to fire his condensed beam of darkness breath at the shrine, Aeneas' body began to disintegrate from the power the Genesis flame contained. No mere mortal of the king rank could have expected the power a genesis flame could contain such terrifying power.
As Aeneas began to be consumed and destroyed by the genesis flame, the shrine was being burned away from the outside, and as the shrine's final restriction was literally burned away, the darkness breath from the dark salamandra burned through the shrine doors and hit Aeneas in the chest.
Aeneas who in normal circumstances had a relatively even power as the dark salamandra, who was also at a similar rank to a king, was being overwhelmed by the two powers that were burning his body away.
In his final moments, Aeneas looked towards the heavens as he uttered his final lamentations, "My dear Saris, I'll be with you soon, I wish I could have seen my grandchild you brought into this world,"
As Aeneas drew his last breath and as he was burned away to ashes from the strength of the genesis flame, the flame then burned itself out of Aeneas' body. After the flame has released itself from Aeneas' body, it reacted with the surrounding area in an unimaginable way.
The release of the genesis flame from Aeneas' body caused a tremendous explosion. The explosion was so devastating that as soon as it was released, it vaporized the dark salamandra that had been trying to destroy the flame out of confused panic.
The force of the explosion generated from the genesis flame was so great it began to burn everything in its path to nothing, not even ashes were left in its wake. The towering krosis trees were vaporized into nothing. As the explosion spread, the entire village and the surrounding areas had been vaporized.
All that was left was a burning pit of fire that was no smaller than 10 kilometers wide and half as deep as it had destroyed everything, it had only stopped spreading when there had been another force, greater than it had been exerted on it from an unknown source.
As the explosion reached its final point that caused the destruction of an area in the forgotten woodlands a mysterious power had surfaced on Alterra. The goddess Tiflos who had been deprived of a portion of her power for millennia, and having banished the dragons for their betrayal of her, reached through the void and reabsorbed her lost genesis flame.
"Oh my precious child, you are home and we can be one again" Tiflos had been lamenting for eons now, always keeping an eye on her genesis flame through the void, unable to reclaim it because it had been bound to the shrine that the dragon's kin had erected.
She only reached through the void to reclaim her lost flame after an adequate portion of the woodlands had been burned away, had she left any more of the woodlands to be burned away by her flame, she would upset her baby brother Duranas who loved his creation to a startling degree.