The Primeval Era

The scene was a surreal one.

Damian hadn’t seen or expected anything like it. Growing up, he’d been told stories about the terrifying Beast Lords and Beast Kings and their Sacred Mountains, and the image was always grand. Beasts whose roars shook valleys. Beasts whose passing through a Land left it changed for centuries. Beasts who descended from Mountains only when the world had done something to deserve their attention.

Even now, as his beast form looked ahead at the kneeling delegation and Mana churned to provide him information, the grandness of those old stories settled into proper perspective.

|Entity Analysis: King Mafube of the Noble Simba Lineage.|

|Title: First Among the Sacred Manes, Crown-Bearer of Vorrath.|

|Cultivation: Eighth Circle, Physique Mastery.|

|Land and Sky Physique: Noble Simba Lineage, Physique of Primal Sovereignty.|

|Notable: Crown of Kingship fully manifested.|

|Entity Analysis: Sehlolo, Second Among the Sacred Manes.|

|Cultivation: Half-Step Eighth Circle.|

|Land and Sky Physique: Noble Simba Lineage, Third Tier.|

|Entity Analysis: Mokwena, Third Among the Sacred Manes.|

|Cultivation: Half-Step Eighth Circle.|

|Land and Sky Physique: Noble Simba Lineage.|

|Remaining delegation: Twenty-three Noble Simbas distributed across the Sixth and Seventh Circles.|

An Eighth Circle Beast King and two at Half-Step, with the rest of the delegation between the Sixth and Seventh Circles. It was a terrifying force, the kind that could level several Dross and Sworn tribes in an afternoon and barely notice the effort!

And every one of them was bowing toward his beast form with shining eyes while the foremost called him Ancestor.

Damian, flying toward the Covenant in his human body dozens of miles away, felt the situation reach him through the link he kept with his beast form, and he genuinely didn’t know what to do with any of it.

The beast form raised its enormous head slightly. Through it, Damian observed the King.

Mafube was magnificent. His golden fur burned with controlled fire, his Crown of Kingship hovering bright and full above his mane, his nine tails resting motionless behind him in a posture of pure deference. He raised his eyes toward the beast form with the careful reverence of a ruler addressing something his rulership had no right to summon.

"Oh, Ancestor," Mafube said again, voice deep and trembling. "I came across your Lands believing I would find a powerful beast who had blessed my daughter with healing. I expected one of the great hidden Lords, perhaps a Mountain King I had never met. I knew the one who saved Tiaret had to carry the blessing of the Ancestors to do what was done." His enormous golden head dipped lower. "I did not expect to find an Ancestor."

Damian, through the beast form, blinked slowly.

He had not corrected him. He should probably correct him.

Should he?

He turned the question over while Mafube continued speaking, and for a moment Damian’s two streams of consciousness, the human one flying toward the Covenant and the beast one receiving worship in the Cradle, both arrived at the same observation. If he corrected this, he was going to have to explain a great many things he didn’t want to explain, including the fact that he was a human, and that humans normally did not possess Land and Sky Physiques that belonged to ancient beast lineages, and that the explanation of how he came to possess one was not a story that would simplify the conversation.

If he didn’t correct it, on the other hand, the most powerful Beast King within several Mountains was about to become his unconditional ally on the assumption that Damian was a returned Ancestral Beast Emperor.

The decision was, when he framed it that way, not particularly difficult.

He let it stand.

His beast form lowered its head with the patient gravity of something ancient acknowledging a descendant, verdant-blue mane curling around an expression that managed to suggest depths the watching Simbas could fill in for themselves. Mafube made a small sound in his throat that might have been a sob!

Damian’s gaze drifted across the prostrate delegation, looking for the two figures he expected to find unmoved.

Masamuk and Tiaret.

They were both standing at the edge of the kneeling crowd, both still on their feet, both staring at the beast form with expressions that didn’t match the rest. Masamuk’s crimson eyes were enormous in his small obsidian face, every stellar blue point on his body pulsing in confused rapid bursts. Tiaret was beside him, golden hair tangled by her descent, blue flames flickering uncertainly across her arms. Her face was caught somewhere between disbelief and an expression that suggested she had questions she didn’t yet know how to ask.

Damian considered them a moment.

It probably was that his Sovereign aura didn’t impose itself on those he had already bathed with blue flames. The Persevere connection ran too deep through both of them, and Masamuk had been declared brother on top of it. Whatever the Primordial Beast Sovereignty did to lesser beasts, it apparently did not do to those already woven into him.

He looked at the two of them, and the beast form’s voice rumbled out across the grass of the Cradle, deep enough to make several of the kneeling Simbas tremble in renewed reverence.

"Masamuk told you of the demons?"

Before Damian could fully finish the question, Mafube was rising.

Not all the way. He came up only enough to lift his head fully, his Crown of Kingship blazing brighter, golden flames surging across his mane in a sudden cascade of joy and conviction. His voice rolled out across the Cradle with the weight of an Eighth Circle ruler making a public proclamation.

"With the Ancestor speaking of demons, it must be true!" Mafube’s eyes burned with fervor. "You are here to lead us! I am already sending word back to Vorrath. We shall let all the Noble Beast Lineages know how the Ancestor of Noble Simbas is walking the Lands of Stone again! Everyone shall know! They all shall know!"

...!

Damian’s beast form held its dignified pose.

His human consciousness, flying toward the Covenant beside Serala, couldn’t believe how all of this was unfolding!