End God

Morning light falls on a hollowed-out Wyndham, and the sole figure in its streets is the Kushan sorcerer Daiba, who has staggered from the temple after witnessing something monstrous inside. Peering back through the half-open doors, he sees a writhing cluster of faces and eyes, every one of them shaped like his emperor. The mass tears itself out into the open, announcing that it has seized the power it hunted for.

Daiba flees as the temple caves in, and the thing revealed within proves large enough to have packed the entire structure. Colossal arms heave up from underground, ripping whole streets apart as the creature keeps expanding. The upheaval reaches the Kushan ranks stationed beyond the walls, where towers topple and the earth shudders.

All at once the tumult ceases. The soldiers strain to see through the debris-choked gap in the wall, their eyes drifting upward as a spreading shadow swallows them whole. From the surrounding hills the Band of the Falcon, Laban and his Arklow Knights, the resistance fighters, and the freed citizens of Wyndham all look on in stunned silence.

Griffith alone stays composed. What towers over the ruined city no longer resembles a man: Ganishka has become a pillar of impossible height fringed with dozens of long, tentacle-like limbs, outlined against the sun and rising above the mountains behind the city, his shadow long enough to fall across Griffith's entire company.

Nearly every leading figure of both armies is present to witness the change, yet Griffith is the only one who watches the emperor's monstrous rebirth without any sign of alarm.