22.0

High in Castle Blackpool's East Tower, a single, stifled scream marked the culmination of five millennia of infernal conspiracy. A trumpet in Hell sounded a solitary, triumphant note to herald the event.

A small earthquake shook Castle Blackpool's ancient walls, startling all its residents but two. At the tremor's magical epicenter, Dirk inhaled Zyrdicia's scream, sucking the breath out of her lungs. Their minds embraced in a single, unified consciousness aware of nothing but a soul-permeating ecstasy. A spiral of pure, diabolic dark magic erupted around them, wrapping their bodies in euphoric power. Delirious bliss exploded in a prolonged moment of agonizing perfection.

They experienced a union born not of mere passion, but of cosmic destiny. Though philosophers and priests might endlessly debate the meaning of life, in a single moment, they both perfectly understood their own purposes in the cosmos. Their psyches were saturated by an awareness that this was the very reason they had been created.

In the darkness, Dirk and Zyrdicia stared into one another's eyes, their moist foreheads pressed together in breathless, quivering aftermath. Raw emotion flowed between them, unformed by conscious thought and unmediated by words. Unwilling to relinquish the moment, they lingered in a state of silent, euphoric connection.