The Primeval Era

Her white hair fell past her shoulders in a straight curtain that framed features sharpened by decades of ambition disguised as piety. Her cultivation was considerable, Eighth Circle at its peak, and her eyes shone with a light that mixed greed and caution in equal measure.

She had orchestrated the public accusation, she had coordinated with the Dominion, and she had rallied enough of the Covenant’s internal dissidents to make this siege possible.

Now she stood across from a man whose patience was visibly thinning.

"What are we waiting for?" Draegan said, his crimson eyes fixed on the cathedral’s position markers.

"The Hallowed Voice is a decrepit old man. Based on the intelligence your people provided, he hasn’t exercised his full power in decades. His body is aged, his closest protector lies in a coma, and his precious Holy Daughter is missing." He tapped the table once with a gauntleted finger, cracking the white stone beneath it. "We have more than a dozen Eighth Circle Imperators in the air. We have a hundred at the Seventh. We have thousands more behind them. And if anything goes wrong, we have powerful demons to call on."

...!

He leaned forward.

"The Murderous Saint tasked me to make sure I succeed in this mission. I don’t intend to disappoint him by standing around while an old man sits in a cathedral and waits for us to grow bored."

Saint Obara’s eyes shone brighter, greed and caution warring behind them.

"Even if he is weakened," she said, her voice carrying the careful precision of someone who had survived Covenant politics for longer than Draegan had been alive, "we must still be cautious of the Hallowed Voice. He did not rule this long for nothing, Royal Captain. He did not forge alliances with Noble Beasts by being feeble. He did not walk alone into the Lands of Beasts and return alive by being the decrepit old man your intelligence suggests."

She straightened, and for a moment the greed receded behind something colder.

"If we are not careful, even if we win, the cost could be catastrophic. The Hallowed Voice has had decades to prepare for the possibility of betrayal. Every river of Mana flowing around that cathedral is a weapon he can turn against us. Every inscription carved into those walls is a trap he may have set generations ago. And the loyal who surround him are not ordinary warriors. Some of those High Paladins have served him for centuries."

...!

Draegan’s eyes flashed.

He didn’t like caution. He hadn’t liked it when he served the Vakochev Empire, and he didn’t like it now that he served the one who had torn that empire down. But Saint Obara hadn’t survived this long by being stupid, and the fact that she was afraid of an old man sitting alone in a cathedral...bah, okay!

"Then what do you suggest?" he asked.

Saint Obara looked toward the cathedral through the hall’s opening, her white hair catching the golden light that still emanated from the structure’s spires despite everything happening around it.

"We tighten the noose," she said. "Slowly. Cut their supply. Starve their morale, and then starve the masses. The biggest thing that The Hallowed Voice cares for are the people. Starve the masses, introduce a plague...he will come out himself. Let the loyal watch their numbers dwindle day by day while we grow stronger. When the Hallowed Voice finally emerges, he will emerge into a world that has already decided he is guilty."

Her eyes returned to Draegan, and the greed was back, sitting comfortably beside the caution.

"And then we kill him."

BOOM!

---

Inside the Cathedral of the First Dawn, the air held a different kind of tension.

It wasn’t the aggressive, hungry tension of the forces outside. It was the tension of people who had placed their lives in the hands of one man and were waiting to see whether those hands would move. Holy Women moved through the corridors with purposeful silence, their white robes brushing against stone floors that had been walked across for generations. High Paladins stood at every entrance with cultivation flaring in quiet readiness, their eyes watching not the Hallowed Voice but the doors, because whatever came through those doors would have to pass through them first.

Hundreds of the faithful filled the cathedral’s inner halls. Some cycled Mana through their bodies with the slow discipline of warriors who knew combat was coming and wanted their cultivation at its sharpest when it arrived.

All of them were afraid.

All of them stayed anyway!

Deep within the cathedral, past corridors marked with symbols that only the most trusted could pass, the Hallowed Voice sat in a simple room adjacent to where the Saint of Stone still lay in her coma. He sat on the same stool he had been using for days, his plain white robes unchanged, his white hair resting against shoulders that seemed far too broad for the gentle posture he maintained.

Across from him sat Wise Woman Kethiwe.

She was old herself, though her age meant something different than it did for most. Her cultivation had reached the Eighth Circle decades ago, and the years since had refined her rather than diminished her. Her face carried lines earned through a lifetime of navigating the intersection of healing and power, and her eyes, normally steady enough to anchor an entire room, were filled with worry she wasn’t bothering to hide.

"Hallowed Voice," she said, and her voice was tight. "The Dominion Imperators have tightened their perimeter. Saint Obara’s people have cut the water and will do so for all others." She paused. "Our people are loyal, but loyalty does not fill stomachs forever. What do we do to uproot these traitors?"

The Hallowed Voice didn’t look up immediately.

His hands rested on his knees, still and unhurried, and the Mana around him moved with a quietness that was somehow louder than anything the armies outside were producing. The rivers of white and gold flowing through the channels around the cathedral pulsed gently in time with his breathing, as if the entire structure were an extension of his body.

When he spoke, his voice was soft.

"I detest killing, Kethiwe."

The words were simple!

"I detest blood. I have spent more years than you have been alive mending what violence tears apart, and every body I have healed has reminded me of what the body looked like before someone decided to break it." He looked up, and his kind eyes found hers.

"It is why I have been waiting. I have been giving them a chance to turn back. To look at what they are doing and realize how foolish this is. To remember that the oaths they swore when they entered this Covenant were not decorations to be removed when ambition made them heavy."

Kethiwe opened her mouth, but the Hallowed Voice continued with the same quiet calm.

"Because once I make my move, Kethiwe, this entire place will be filled with rivers of blood. Not theirs alone. Ours as well. Blood does not discriminate between the righteous and the treacherous once it begins to flow. It simply flows, and those caught in its path drown regardless of which side they chose." His hands remained still on his knees. "They have not crossed my bottom line yet. So I wait."

"And if they cross it?" Kethiwe asked.

The Hallowed Voice looked toward the wall beyond which the Saint of Stone lay unconscious, and his kind eyes held something that wasn’t kind at all.

"Then I stop waiting."

HUUM!

The room went quiet. The rivers of Mana around the cathedral pulsed once, harder than before, and somewhere in the corridors beyond, every High Paladin and Holy Woman felt it move through their bones at the same time.

Kethiwe nodded slowly.

She had known this man for a very long time, and she had seen him angry perhaps twice in all those years. Both times, the anger had been quiet. Both times, it had been brief. And both times, the things that had made him angry had ceased to exist shortly afterward.

She didn’t ask what his bottom line was.

She suspected she would know when it was crossed!