Chapter 183: Journey! II
How could he do what he did?
It was a simple question, and yet Damian didn’t really have an answer he could give honestly. The Primordial Tongue wasn’t something he had earned through cultivation or inherited through bloodline or discovered through scholarly pursuit. It had found him. He had screamed it until it had eventually carved itself onto his heart, and everything since then had been him learning how to carry what it gave him.
He thought about it for a moment.
"I can’t say for sure where it comes from," he said, keeping his eyes on the horizon ahead. "I’ve connected myself to a power that I can’t say whether it stems from any Ancestor or what. But it feels grander than even that. I’m not any Ancestor, or the reemergence of one. I just happened to connect to that power."
He paused.
"I persevered. And the rest is history."
...!
His words were calm, and yet when he looked at Serala, she seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. She nodded with a smile that softened the primal edges of her transformed face, and he realized it sat better with her knowing who he was.
Not a returned spirit wearing flesh. Not an Ancestor playing at being mortal. Just Damian, connected to something he couldn’t explain.
"The son of the great Emperor Vakochev," she said quietly. "Whose spirit we just saw above the Cradle. Your father and your Ama were great rulers, Tokoloshe. Great rulers who deserved better than what was done to them." Her wing-shaped pupils held his. "I am sorry for everything that happened."
...!
Such words were rare for Damian to hear. People did not know him the last eight summers, and genuine condolence spoken with the simplicity of someone who meant it and nothing more was not something his life had provided in abundance. He breathed out calmly and continued forward.
"It is what it is," he said. "Life is hard in the Lands of Stone. Life is unfair. Dross can die, but so can Anointed Ones and Emperors. The strongest can fall as easily as the weakest if the right blade finds the right moment." He glanced at her.
"Look at you. The hunted Holy Daughter of the Covenant of the First Stone. Though you look nothing like the arrogant girl who fell from the skies days ago."
...!
His words caused Serala to blink and look at herself.
What she found looking back at her was not what she had left the Covenant with. Her frame had doubled, arms and legs longer and denser, wrapped in verdant tattoos that pulsed alongside the white-gold radiance her Wings of the Radiant Dawn had always provided. Her hands were larger. Her skin carried the faint crystalline quality of a Primeval Viridis Lifeform, catching light in ways human skin simply didn’t.
Her dross garments were torn in places that would have horrified the other Holy Women, and the power rolling off her in passive waves was enough to make the air around her body shimmer.
She could feel it! The Mana cycling through her wasn’t the careful, measured flow a Sixth Circle cultivator was supposed to manage. It was denser, richer, threaded with the verdant brightness of her evolution, and when she let herself sense the full extent of it, she realized the waves she emanated were more powerful than what the late Sir Alex had carried into battle.
She was stronger than a Half-Step Eighth Circle Royal Captain of the Dominion....so she was Eighth Circle right now? Almost the same as her teacher? As The Saint of Stone?
"..."
She was nineteen summers old!
The thought settled through her as she remembered her role, the Holy Daughter of the Covenant, the bearer of the Wings of the Radiant Dawn. She couldn’t help but think of something.
"After all this," she said, "what do you think we’ll ultimately end up at? Will you get rid of the Murderous Saint and take back the Vakochev Empire? Becomr its ruler? Will I become The Hallowed Voice of The Covenant..."
She trailed off.
...!
What would they be months or years from now?
Damian looked at Serala as she asked the question, and he noticed something he didn’t expect. She actually seemed sad.
It was not even that she was afraid of the future, not apprehensive about what challenges it held, but sad, as if the destination they were heading toward was something she didn’t want to arrive at. As if whatever they would become when the fighting was done meant something ending that she wasn’t ready to let end.
He studied her for a moment. He was not a fool as he could see what she didn’t want to say!
"We don’t have to worry about that now," he said. "Come on. Let’s see how fast you can go. Tell me about the Covenant and your life there as we go."
Then the air around him squeezed.
It happened in an instant. The Mana threading through his existence compressed against his body, his wings of verdant-blue flame folded back into a tight configuration behind him, and the atmosphere itself gave way before the force of what his Primeval body could demand of it. A crack split the sky behind him as his speed exceeded what sound could follow, and in the space between one heartbeat and the next, he was gone, a streak of verdant-blue fire tearing across the horizon ahead.
BOOM!
The sonic boom rolled across the Threshold Lands beneath them.
Serala’s expression shifted. The sadness folded away behind something fiercer, something competitive and alive, and her white-gold wings spread wide as she poured Mana into her flight. The air around her compressed in the same way, her verdant-threaded radiance blazing brighter, and a second crack split the sky as she launched forward after him.
BOOM!
Two streaks of fire crossed the Threshold Lands at speeds the Land below had never felt. One burned verdant-blue, the other burned white-gold and green, and they chased each other across a landscape of dry stone and old hills and stubborn grasses that bent flat in their passing. Above them both, stretching five miles across the sky, the cloud followed without effort, blue-threaded and patient, an extension of Damian’s body keeping pace with the body it belonged to.
The Covenant of the First Stone waited somewhere beyond the horizon.
They raced toward it!