The dragon mage frowned suddenly. There was another variation in the spell matrix of the chrysalun chamber. It had not been forged by the same hand that had created all else. However, It made no sense... unless it had been caused by the nether dragon.

Krasus inspected it further.

His prison suddenly shifted, throwing him about. The darkness turned to gray, then black again. Krasus was sent spinning—

He reacted instinctively, his body contorting and his arms and legs stretching and bending at angles not conforming to his elven shape. Claws burst from his fingers. Scales covered his skin as his nose and mouth stretched forward into a long, sharp muzzle. Wings sprouted from his back as his robes faded to nothing.

Beating his massive wings. Korialstrasz slowed, then halted his flight. The red leviathan roared from the painful effort.

As he regained his equilibrium, Korialstrasz tried to make sense of what had happened. His simple probing of the area in question had turned his entire prison on its head.

Clearly, the nether dragon had come much closer to freedom than he had imagined. Unfortunately for the creature, he had nothad the cunning or knowledge to benefit from his very uniqueness.

But now Korialstrasz's hopes heightened. There was great risk, but risk was better than either eternity or awaiting his captor's summons. Sinestra would surely be well prepared for him when she opened the chamber again. It behooved the red to make his escape, if he could.

With much more delicacy, Korialstrasz surveyed the weakened area again, observing carefully how it weakened the overall matrix. It did not surprise him to quickly discover that the odd energies of a nether dragon could affect the matrix almost like a virus in a mortal body. The two forces were enough alike that now the essence of the former captive had restructured the original spellwork into a pattern never conceived by the chrysalun chamber's creator.

And where the spell matrix had been most affected, there the red dragon found what he felt was the weak link, the point where he needed to concentrate his efforts.

With the eye of one who had studied the workings of magic perhaps second only to the greatest of the blue dragons, Korialstrasz slowly picked his way through the aberration. He finally found the thread that he felt would, if removed carefully, cause the rest to become undone and, theoretically, open the way for him.

Already feeling claustrophobic, Korialstrasz began gingerly severing the link. Immediately he felt the entire chamber quiver. The darkness became slightly grayer again. The red dragon grew more bold in his work. Freedom was close—

The aberration completely disintegrated, not at all what he had wanted. The matrix became frayed, with the frayed area spreading. Korialstrasz quickly sought to rebuld it, but the damage was already more than he could overcome. The strain on the rest of the spellwork keeping the chamber intact increased a thousandfold.

The chamber collapsed, the grayness pressing in on the red dragon from all sides. Korialstrasz screamed, his prison's abrupt destruction unleashing new and terrible forces that threatened to rip him apart. Korialstrasz was caught in a maelstrom that grew to horrendous proportions. Try as he might, the dragon could donothing to keep from spinning toward it.

That this was all taking place in a container not even large enough on the outside to seemingly hold much more than an apple did in no manner assuage Korialstrasz. For him, it was as if Azeroth had been destroyed and the universe were about to join it. He had wanted to be free of the chrysalun chamber and he had gotten his wish...perhaps much to his eternal regret.

The great wings beat again and again, the strain of fighting against such powerful primal forces quickly bringing Korialstrasz to the point of exhausted panting. The eye of the maelstrom loomed before him, a swirling mass of gray, black, and crimson.

As he neared the eye, invisible forces pressed down ever harder on the dragon. His bones felt as if ready to crush to powder, his flesh as if about to be squeezed to pulp. In all his long existence, he had never known such unendurable agony.

At that point, the dragon decided that there was but one thing he could do. It offered the potential for even greater suffering and a much worse death, but also the slightest of hopes.

Concentrating as best he could, Korialstrasz focused all his magic on protecting himself. The effort strained him more, and he nearly blacked out. Yet, in the end his spells held.

The red leviathan studied the maelstrom, seeking the exact center. It had to be exact. Anything else was certain suicide.

Beating his wings as hard as he could, Korialstrasz no longer fought against the maelstrom's pull, but rather embraced it. He soared forth, speeding into its maw and praying that whatever happened, it would happen swiftly.

And as he entered it, Korialstrasz screamed again...and again... and again—

Sinestra slept.

That she might do so even when her senses warned her that there were other intruders about spoke not of her exhaustion, but of her confidence. She was certain of her impending triumph, certain that any of the vermin seeking to prevent it would soon be either eradicated or serve her in some manner or another.

She slept, as she always did, for but only a few minutes at a time. There had been periods when she had gone more than a century without slumber. This was not normal for most of her kind, but Sinestra had only contempt for the others, even those of the black flight. In her mind, the only dragons worth existing in her imagined world were herself and her new children.

Still in her mortal form and lying atop a bed of stone, she slept alone in a vast chamber deeper than any other she currently used for her experiments. Down here, there was nothing to disturb her.

Down here, she could listen to the voice in her head far more clearly.

All goes as planned, it said over and over. All goes as planned and Dargonax grows larger.... The next generation will dwarf even him...and be a thousand times more powerful...

"A thousand more times..." Sinestra murmured in her sleep. "A thousand more times..."

A thousand more times powerful...and they will crush the other dragons... crush them all... the day of the dragon is at an end...now comes the twilight... the night...

"The night..."

But the night shall be followed by a new day... the first day of the children's rule... the first day of a new golden age of dragons... "A new... golden age—"

Sinestra started. Her eyes flashed open and a look of intense anger spread over her face.

"Korialstrasz!" the black dragon roared. She leapt to her feet. "But how could he—how could he—?"

And then, oddly, Lady Sinestra's expression transformed. Instead of shock, anger, and outrage... satisfaction spread across her maimed features.

"Yes... of course... how delicious... how perfectly timed! Thank you. Korialstrasz... thank you..."

With a smile, she hurried out to find Zendarin....

Another dragon stirred at that same moment, a dragon who was certain that he was dead. It was not Korialstrasz, though, but rather the blue, Kalec.

His first discovery was that he was not, after all, dead. That, though, did not explain the darkness that surrounded him, a darkness that felt... in some obscene way... almost alive.

And then Kalec recalled what had happened to him before he had blacked out. He remembered the pit where they had dumped the huge corpses and the discovery that the pit was not empty.

Not empty...

Kalec summoned his blade. The blue-tinted weapon materialized, but only as a dull shadow of what it should have been. The next moment, it simply faded away.