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She stood there

the bar maiden with a serpent’s patience,

smiling through fangs I could not yet see.

Her words dripped honey,

but the air was venom.

Deeper still

the hallway of stone warriors,

rows of snarling effigies,

each chiseled from the last breath of a living thing.

Her voice slithered through my skull:

“They are mine… they breathe when I will it.”

The statue with wings was warm to the touch.

Her gaze grew hungrier.

Her offer, power,

armies united beneath a crown of fangs and stone.

I spat back mockery.

Her temple… a tomb.

The ground shook with the march of a thousand petrified souls.

Her tail coiled,

striking, missing, striking again

cheap sorcery snapping like brittle bone.

She could not turn me.

The battle swelled

stone golems breaking beneath the weight of my hammer,

dust clouds rising like burnt offerings.

Yet even my strength began to fade

beneath their endless tide.

I tore her children limb from limb,

beating them with their own bodies,

crushing them into gravel.

She tried one last time,

her gaze useless in the sockets I had already blinded.

Blood poured from where her eyes once ruled,

her crown of snakes hissing their death rattle.

I whispered into her hollow face:

"Even with two eyes, you were blind."

And I cast her into the battlefield

to drown in the dust of her shattered dominion.