The Primeval Era

Forces of the Dominion surrounding the Covenant’s cathedral as if they owned the place!

Beside him, Serala’s body began to pulse.

It started as a tremor running through her wings, then spread into her frame, and then golden tendrils of lightning crackled from her eyes and arced across the cloud surrounding them. Her face had gone rigid, her jaw locked, her hands curled into fists at her sides. The Holy Daughter of the Covenant of the First Stone was staring down at her home occupied by foreign soldiers, and the rage building inside her was making the air around them taste of ozone.

Damian placed a hand on her arm.

He focused downward, and his perception, far sharper than hers, reached into the citadel below. He listened to the countless discussions and conversations happening across the white streets, filtering through the noise the way his Mana filtered through his cloud, picking out threads that carried meaning from the sea of frightened chatter.

His gaze changed.

"The Covenant has been split," he said, voice low. "Saints and Anointed Ones within the Covenant itself have accused the Hallowed Voice of colluding with demons. They supposedly invited the Dominion in to help remove him. The cathedral is surrounded. The Hallowed Voice and those loyal to him are inside. Everyone else is either supporting the siege or hiding from it."

Serala’s lightning crackled harder, but she didn’t speak.

Damian’s eyes flashed with something colder than anger.

Because beneath the conversations and the posturing and the political maneuvering happening below, his perception had found something else entirely. Five signatures scattered across different areas of the citadel, tucked into corners and rooms where they clearly thought no one would notice them. They weren’t human signatures. They carried a vileness he recognized instantly, a wrongness that pressed against his senses the same way the Kishi Demon’s aura had pressed against him when he’d killed it.

Demons.

There were five of them, and they had been brought into the Covenant of the First Stone alongside the Dominion army, hidden among the forces of humans who had sold their souls for power they didn’t understand.

His eyes burned verdant-blue in the cloud’s darkness.

"There are demons here. Five of them, scattered across the citadel."

The lightning arcing from her eyes turned white!

Damian gazed down at the citadel below.

The scale of what sat beneath the cloud was not small.

The defenders around the cathedral were powerful in their own right, but they were outnumbered and surrounded, and the siege had clearly been designed to end only one way.

Serala clenched her hands beside him, golden lightning still arcing from her eyes.

"I know you’re powerful," she said, voice tight. "I know you’re different from anything walking the Lands of Stone right now. But gazing down at all those below..." She looked at him. "Do you think we have a chance?"

...!

Did the two of them stand a chance?

Damian let the question sit for a moment. There were many powerful warriors down below, and he couldn’t confirm with absolute confidence that the two of them could walk through that army and come out clean on the other side. He wasn’t foolish enough to pretend otherwise.

But the elevation of their very form of life, the Primeval Viridis existence that set them apart from everything beneath them, gave him a form of confidence that had nothing to do with arrogance. It wasn’t that he was immensely powerful, though he suspected he might be. It was that whatever happened down there, whatever they encountered, he only needed to do one thing.

Persevere.

Persevere could pull him back from death itself. It had already done it once. Exelissomai

could induce evolution to propel him to heights others couldn’t even dream of, and he could use it as many times as he needed to. The floor beneath him kept rising, and he hadn’t found the ceiling yet. So he looked at the girl beside him.

"Go down without worry," he said. "Reveal the faces of those who actually colluded with demons, and I will be supporting you the whole time." His verdant-blue eyes held hers. "Go."

...!

Her eyes filled with conviction, as if his words poured something into her that had been waiting to be filled. But conviction apparently wasn’t enough, or maybe it was too much, because in the next moment she did something that truly took him aback.

Her body surged with rivers of Mana, white-gold and verdant radiance blazing through her expanded frame, and she moved forward with the decisiveness of someone who had just resolved an argument she’d been having with herself. Her hands came up and grabbed his head on both sides, fingers pressing into his hair, and she pulled his face to hers and took his lips into her own.

It wasn’t gentle the way the first kiss had been.

This one was fierce and deliberate, and it tasted like Mana and conviction and something she wanted to make absolutely certain he understood. Damian’s eyes went wide. He blinked against the contact, his thoughts scattering in several directions at once, and before he could gather any of them into a coherent response, she pulled back.

Her eyes were serious.

"I’ve come to the decision that whatever happens after this, I don’t want us to go our separate ways." Her voice didn’t waver. Her hands were still on his face!

"So even if it might take a little bit. Don’t...leave me."

...!

She released him.

Her gaze shifted from serious to livid in the span of a single breath, the rage at what had been done to her Covenant flooding back into her expression, and she turned and began to fly downward without another word.

Damian touched his lips.

He watched her go with many thoughts buzzing in his mind.

He could still taste the Mana on his lips!

Below, Serala descended.

She dropped out of the cloud a mile above the citadel, and the moment she cleared the vapor, her restraint ended. Her wings unfurled to their full span, white-gold feathers threaded with verdant spirals blazing outward as Mana surged through them in torrents that turned the air around her into visible light. Her expanded frame burned bright enough to cast shadows across the tops of the citadel’s towers, and the aura she released rolled downward across the white walls and streets with the force of a second sun igniting above the Covenant!

BOOM!

The most powerful felt it first.

In the commandeered halls and fortified plazas, Eighth Circle Imperators paused mid-conversation. Seventh Circle warriors looked up from their formations. Saints and Anointed Ones who had been confident in their numbers felt something bloom above them that made their cultivation stutter in their chests. Heads turned up and eyes widened. Hands reached for weapons that suddenly felt inadequate!

Then the masses saw her.

Hundreds of thousands of mourning faithful who had been huddling in dwellings and praying at sacred stones felt the radiance press through their walls and into their bones. They stepped outside. They looked up. And what they saw was a figure descending from the heavens with wings of white-gold and verdant fire spread wide enough to cover blocks, a figure twice the size of any human they had ever seen, burning with power that made the rivers of Mana around the cathedral pulse in response.

The Holy Daughter!

Serala continued her descent, openly and loudly, making no effort to conceal herself or her power. She stopped above the army surrounding the cathedral and hung there, her wing-shaped pupils blazing down at the forces below, golden lightning crackling across her frame. An illusion of her form bloomed outward for miles, her image projected across the sky above the citadel so that every single person within the white walls could see her face and hear what came next.

When she spoke, her voice was filled with Mana and it reached every corner of the Covenant.

"After being ambushed by an Imperator of the Dominion of Crimson Stone, Crimson Imperator Jack, colluding with our very own Covenant Imperator Luddya of House Valdren, I now come back to find you all accusing the Hallowed Voice of colluding with demons?!"

Her voice cracked across the citadel.

"How low have you all fallen?! True followers of the Covenant, hear me! The Holy Daughter has returned, and today I shall lay down judgment on the wicked that have fallen into pacts with demons!"

Her eyes swept across the army below, and golden lightning arced from her gaze in visible threads. "Any who stand against me shall be purged under my light!"

BOOM!

Her wings flared to their absolute fullest, white-gold and verdant radiance exploding outward as Mana surged across every feather and every thread and every inch of her transformed existence. The illusion above the citadel blazed brighter, her image burning across miles of sky, wings spread impossibly wide, verdant tattoos glowing beneath armor of pure light. She looked nothing like the girl who had left the Covenant weeks ago. She looked like something from the old stories, the ones told before writing existed, when beings of terrible majesty walked the Lands of Stone and judged the living.

Down below, many stared up in utter stupor.

The mourning faithful dropped to their knees. The defenders around the cathedral raised their heads with tears streaming down their faces. The Dominion Imperators on their Pterosaurs pulled back instinctively, their mounts screeching in confusion!

What...the fuck was this?!