The dirt path Durosh had spent forty-five minutes smoothing with an old pine paddle suddenly fractured under the iron shoes of thirty warhorses. Hooves plated in sun-tempered brass hammered the gravel into dust. Behind them marched two score paladins draped in layered plates of blinding white enamel, their banners snapping like whipcracks in the dry Yalut wind. At their head rode a man with skin the shade of cured parchment, seated atop a six-legged destrier whose nostrils puffed fragrant frankincense. The lead rider raised a gauntleted fist, halting his retinue twelve paces from the door of the mud shack. "Abomination of the Mire!" the commander's voice boomed across the flats, amplified by an oval solar disc pinned to his gorget. "The Sun-Spire Tribunal has measured thy sins! Void Emperor, kneel and offer thine unholy throat to the cleansing shears!" Vankar, who had been on his knees attempting to trim wild clover with a rusty dagger, threw himself flat onto his belly. "Master!" he hissed, his face pressed into the warm loam. "The Hammer of Dawn itself stands before us! He wields the Seventh Brand of Expiation! It can crack tectonic shelves!" Inside, Durosh turned down the heat on his ceramic kettle. He had just sprinkled dried chamomile into the water and was in the middle of stirring it with a rounded ladle carved from scrap pine. The shouting outside was loud enough to rattle the little glass jars of wild pepper he had meticulously organized by shade of red. "I swear," Durosh muttered, wiping a thumb across the counter to check for soot, "nobody out here knows how to knock." Outside, the inquisitor unhooked a great mace shaped like an unfurling sunburst. He did not wait. The bounty had decreed the structure an engine of demonic generation; every second allowed it to breathe was an insult to the noon sky. "Receive the noon's wrath! Solar Genesis: Retribution Lance!" The paladin commander slammed the haft down into his saddle horn. The sky turned an aggressive, eye-searing white. Overhead, the heat coalesced into an inverted spire of pure, crystallized holy flame thirty feet wide at the base, whistling with enough raw, compressed atmospheric pressure to flatten a fortress bastion. The wind scorched the yellow prairie grass black in a fifty-yard ring. The strike plunged directly toward the patch of soft earth Durosh had seeded with pale blue desert gentians just that morning. The plank door swung inward on its leather hinges. Durosh stepped out into the blinding glare, his eyebrows pinched together in deep, profound irritation. In his right hand, dripping a faint drop of chamomile brew, was his soup spoon. He didn't draw a sword. He didn't invoke an ancient crest. He simply saw several hundred tons of descending radiant fire about to turn his flower seeds into molten glass, stepped forward, and swung the spoon upward in an annoyed backhand. The pine ladle met the continental-class divine spear tip. A sound like a dull *thunk* echoed across the flats—not an explosion, but the sound of an empty bucket catching a wet turnip. Durosh gave the spoon an upward flick, scooping the blinding lance of solar plasma off its downward vector, twirling it around the rim of the ladle like a strand of thick honey, and flung it straight up into the empty stratosphere. Three seconds later, the high cloud deck silently dissolved in a circular burst of blue light fifty miles up. The plains fell into a dead, ringing silence. The lead charger took one step backward, its front legs trembling so violently the brass barding rattled. The inquisitor stared at his glowing mace, then at the carved ladle. The edge of the pine implement was not even charred; it merely carried the faint, sweet scent of warm herbs. "You..." the man choked, his voice cracking into a ragged whisper. "You diverted the Brand... with a kitchen utensil?" "The seeds were four silver coins a packet," Durosh said. His voice was level, tired, and entirely devoid of divine majesty. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to get perennials to root in clay? Wipe your feet or turn around." Vankar sobbed into the dirt. "A spoon. The Heavenly King parries the sun itself with the tool of sustenance. My life is meaningless. I am but dust beneath his pine cutlery." From around the back corner of the mud hut, a low, wet rumbling shook the soil. Bumbash, curled into an enormous heap of black scales and jagged obsidian ridges, had been trying to enjoy a mid-morning nap. The sudden blast of heat had irritated his nostrils. The great World-Eater shifted, rolled onto his scaly belly, and drew in a massive, whistling lungful of air. His nose twitched. *"Achoo."* It was not a roar. It was purely an involuntary expulsion of sinus irritation. But the resulting pressure wave erupted from the dragon's snout like an atmospheric shockwave from a falling moon. The gust blasted straight through the Tribunal ranks. It didn't shatter bones or liquefy flesh—Bumbash was too sleepy to muster killing intent—but the kinetic shear stripped everything made of cloth, metal, and leather instantly from their bodies. Enchanted breastplates vanished into the distant horizon. Silk tabards disintegrated into thread. Scabbards, boots, capes, and gauntlets were torn away in a singular, deafening *whoosh* that left the landscape bare. When the wind settled, the high inquisitor and forty battle-hardened paladins were standing stripped in the cool prairie breeze, wearing nothing but linen under-tunics and bruised pride. Several paladins instinctively clamped their hands over their groins, knocking knees together in sheer, unadulterated terror. The inquisitor's teeth chattered violently, the blood fleeing his cheeks as he looked at the beast. The dragon scratched behind its horn with a claw the size of an oak tree, yawned—exposing four rows of jagged teeth dripping with magma—and tucked its snout back under its tail to continue snoring. "Demon..." the stripped priest gasped, stumbling backward on bare, dirt-covered feet. "The beast of the end times... he keeps it as a cur!" "His name is Bumbash, and he's having a rough shed," Durosh said, waving the spoon toward the road. "Now pick up your trash and get out of here. If you track that armor scrap back through my flowerbed, I'm going to make you dig up the weeds with your fingernails." His pride splintered. Humiliation burnt his neck crimson. To be spared was worse than execution; to be stripped naked and told to care for weeds was an insult no servant of the Sun-Spire could survive. "You will burn!" the commander screamed, his voice turning shrill as he reached into his waistline. From a concealed inner pocket of his ragged smallclothes, he yanked out a small, sun-shaped crystal carved from raw astralite. "If we cannot scour this blasphemy, the High Patriarch will cleanse the Shard-Plains to the bedrock! By the Holy Seal, awaken the Grand Engine!" He crushed the crystal in his bare fist. A searing beacon of gold-red light shot straight into the upper atmosphere, piercing the vault of heaven like a spear of molten brass. High above the Yalut wasteland, the sky did not close up. Instead, the clouds tore open in a geometric circle that spanned from horizon to horizon, revealing seven concentric rings of interlocking golden runes slowly grinding against one another. A deep, resonant chime rang out—so profound it made the ground under Durosh’s boots thrum with latent heat. A massive, burning numeral lit up in the center of the celestial mechanism: **[12:00:00]** The runes began to tick backward like an executioner's dropping blade. "The Continental Obliteration!" Vankar wailed, clawing at his own hair. "The Tribunal’s cleansing orbital core has locked onto the province! In half a day, the entire plateau will be reduced to glass! There is nowhere to run! We are doomed!" Durosh stood on his clean front step, looking up at the colossal, clockwork doomsday machine now glaring directly down upon his roof. The ambient heat was already rising. He could feel it drying out the moist soil around his newly planted gentians. In twelve hours, not only would his flowers die, but the baked mud bricks of his hut would crumble under that kind of irradiance. He looked down at his spoon, then back up at the sky.

Catching Doomsday with a Wooden Spoon