A city, born after the fall, was burning. Flames danced in the night as billowing clouds of smoke drifted into the heavens and men, women, and children alike cried out for a savior, and yet were met with silence.

As the armies of the Lyrhean Imperium washed over the city in a tide of reptilian bodies, soldiers were hunted down and put to the sword, the non-combatants chained and bound forevermore to the will of their new masters. One bastion after another fell before the invaders, whose armies of soul-bound slaves and reptilian elites crushed any who dared to resist with ruthless and utterly merciless force.

As the city burned, the ones who formerly held the reins of this once thriving metropolis of the post-apocalypse wondered how it had all gone so wrong. Below them, beneath the hill that their final citadel was built upon, their lands were reduced in size by the second, and soon their last bastion would be their prison until the time came for the final assault.

People wept as they witnessed the three great cathedrals, the last traces of the Old Gods of Man, be ransacked and set alight, and they cried out as their beloved icons of their faiths and the priests dedicated to them were used as toys and amusement before being left to burn in large bonfires.

But while they knew that they could endure for another decade in this prison of their own making, they likewise knew that the demon that had brought all of this destruction would not grant them such a mercy. In the fires of the night, the sounds of slaughter, torture, and pillage reduced any opposed to it to a broken state, and in the distance, the demon responsible for the barbarity smirked as the most recent annoyance in her way crumbled to dust within her coils.

Her gaze focused on the distant fortress atop the hill, and with but a single thought she was carried atop her sedan chair towards the inferno. As she passed, carried forward by a small army of slaves, all of them former kings, queens, and nobles from over a dozen different races, her soldiers and subjects bowed and scraped in her presence.

“My Goddess, the victory is yours.” Hissed an attendant as she slithered alongside the host holding her mistress.

“No, it is not.” Rebuked the colossal serpentine monster as it rapped its nails against the armrest of its massive sedan chair.

“But, my Goddess, the city and its inhabitants lie broken and beaten! Surely none left living of any note would dare stand in your way!”

“The world is vast, child.” Stated the snake woman who was easily twice or thrice the size of the second largest of her kind. “And the world that exists now after the Fogfall has become even larger. The world has changed, and with it so have all things. The Fog saw to that. Now, bring me to those foolish apes up there; I grow bored, and hungry.”

As the fires burned and the screaming continued, the ruler of the Imperium closed her eyes and thought back to where all of this first began. She never expected that she would become what she was now, nor did she expect that she would even like being what she was, what she is. As she was carried to her target, her memories flooded back, and she let herself remember the line that led to this most recent victory.