The Primeval Era

They flew fast enough that the landscape beneath them blurred into streaks of brown and grey and the occasional stubborn green.

Serala had a faint smile on her face as she spoke, and it was the first time Damian had seen her look genuinely at ease. The wind tore past them at speeds that would have ripped the voice from an ordinary person’s throat, but their Primeval bodies didn’t care about ordinary limitations, and her words reached him clearly through the rushing air.

"The Hallowed Voice taught me something when I was young," she said, her white-gold and verdant wings cutting through the atmosphere beside him. "I was maybe 15 summers. The other Holy Women in training had decided I was wrong about something, I can’t even remember what it was now, and they were loud about it. Dozens of them. I went to him crying and told him everyone said I was wrong."

She glanced at Damian, and the faint smile deepened.

"He sat me down and said that the masses could be wrong. That they were always wrong, more often than not. That if I had examined something with my own mind and my own heart and arrived at a conviction, I needed to hold it even when every voice around me shouted the opposite." Her eyes returned to the horizon. "Conviction was paramount. That was how he said it. Conviction was paramount."

Damian absorbed the words away. They sounded like they belonged to a man worth meeting!

They continued on.

The Threshold Lands gave way beneath them mile after mile, dry stone and sparse scrub and the occasional cluster of huts where Dross tribes clung to survival. The five-mile cloud above tracked their path without effort, blue-threaded and patient. The air was clean, the skies were open, and nothing impeded their passage.

That was the problem.

Nothing impeded their passage.

Damian frowned first. Then Serala frowned beside him. The regions they were crossing now sat between the Threshold Lands and the boundaries of the Covenant’s influence, and these regions should not have been empty. Patrols from the Covenant moved through this airspace regularly. Dominion Imperators should have swept these borders. There should have been someone.

There was no one.

They exchanged a glance but kept flying, and the frown didn’t leave either of their faces.

The landscape began to change. Barren deserts and mountains of dry stone softened into rolling hills, and the hills gave way to lush grasslands fed by rivers that had known Mana for generations. Sparse dwellings appeared, then clusters of them, then proper settlements of Sworn whose cultivation signatures dotted the landscape below in faint organized patterns. The land grew greener and richer and more alive with each mile, and eventually, at the edge of where the grasslands met the horizon, the walls of the Covenant of the First Stone became visible in the distance.

White, pristine, and rising a mile into the sky.

Damian had heard the stories. Seeing it was different.

Both of them stopped.

They hung high in the sky, pulling back their auras simultaneously in a practiced motion that had nothing to do with practice and everything to do with instinct. Damian dampened his Mana signature until it was barely a whisper, and Serala did the same beside him, her white-gold radiance dimming until she was just another shape against the clouds. Then Damian reached upward with his consciousness and pulled them both into the cloud above.

The five-mile mass of blue-threaded vapor swallowed them completely. They hung inside it, invisible, their Primeval senses reaching downward through the cloud cover toward the citadel below.

They passed over the walls unseen.

Damian looked down through the cloud and saw the grand structures of the Covenant spreading beneath him, and his first thought was how familiar it all felt. The fitted white stone, the towers rising in deliberate hierarchy toward the center, the plazas and halls built to project authority and inspire devotion. It reminded him of the Vakochev Empire. The architecture was different in its details but identical in its purpose, because all Anointed Ones built the same way when they wanted the world to remember who ruled it.

The familiarity didn’t comfort him.

Both he and Serala couldn’t help but be somber, because as Primeval Viridis Lifeforms, their perceptions were absurdly grand.

They could feel the signature auras of far too many beings.

Damian’s awareness spread through the cloud and downward into the citadel, and what it found made his frown deepen into something harder. Hundreds of thousands of people moved through the streets below, but they didn’t move the way people in a functioning citadel moved. They moved in clusters, in huddles, pressing close to dwellings and sacred stones with the desperate energy of the frightened. Mourning white robes everywhere. Faces turned upward in prayer. The entire population was either protecting something or grieving something, and from this height, both looked the same.

He and Serala focused their gazes toward where they felt the most power clustered.

A grand cathedral surrounded by an army.

Damian saw it all at once. The Cathedral of the First Dawn at the citadel’s center, golden bands catching light along its white exterior, rivers of white and gold Mana surging through channels around it. A ring of defenders close to the cathedral’s walls, their Mana signatures burning with the desperate brightness of people prepared to die where they stood. And beyond them, surrounding the defenders in organized formations, rows upon rows of warriors whose auras burned a very different color.

Crimson.

Damian’s expression went cold.

He could see the armor. Crimson and gold plates fitted to frames that had been cultivated for war, mounted on subjugated dinosaurs whose own Mana had been bent to serve riders they hadn’t chosen. More than a dozen signatures at the Eighth Circle circled the airspace above the cathedral on Pterosaurs. Over a hundred at the Seventh held formation in the plazas. Thousands more filled the streets behind them.

Imperators of the Dominion of Crimson Stone inside the Covenant’s walls!