The Primeval Era

She felt the connection open inside her, the thread that ran from her existence all the way back across the River of the World to the throne that sat at the center of everything demons were and would ever be. The Hand of the Demon Emperor. A fraction of his power, channeled through the five of them, enough to flatten anything standing in this citadel regardless of how many dead Ancestors they called upon.

She began flying toward the cathedral, her aura blazing crimson across the white sky of the Covenant, and her voice echoed outward with gleeful malice.

"Hey, old fucker! Do you remember me from your younger days? I have come to collect the debt!"

...!

The Hallowed Voice turned.

His kind eyes found the demon in the sky, and whatever kindness lived in them went somewhere else entirely. The Paladins and Holy Women surrounding him shifted into combat formations without needing to be told, their cultivation flaring in unison. Serala, still hanging in the air above the army with her wings spread wide, turned her blazing gaze toward Barbatos with revulsion.

The Dominion forces below went rigid. This wasn’t the plan!

The demons weren’t supposed to reveal themselves openly. Draegan Morath’s crimson eyes snapped upward from his commandeered hall, and for the first time since arriving at the Covenant, genuine uncertainty crossed his scarred face.

Saint Obara stood beside him, and her face had gone white.

From the defenders around the cathedral, a powerful Holy Woman’s voice cut through the chaos, ringing across the plazas and streets with Mana-enhanced fury.

"The ones truly colluding with demons and the demons themselves have been revealed! Protect the Covenant!"

HUUM!

The citadel erupted.

Warriors on both sides drew weapons. Pterosaurs screeched and banked. The defenders around the cathedral tightened their formation around the Hallowed Voice. The mourning faithful in the streets screamed and ran. And above it all, Barbatos laughed.

It was a cruel, delighted laugh, and it grew louder as crimson smoke began to billow from her body in thick rivers that climbed toward the sky. The ritual was building. She could feel the other four contributing their own threads, and in four different areas of the citadel, identical pillars of crimson smoke shot upward, five columns of demonic power reaching toward the heavens like fingers of a hand pressing up through the earth.

Barbatos gazed down at the Hallowed Voice, then turned her eyes to Serala, and her smile was the widest it had been all day.

"Today is a day for truth!" she called out, her voice ringing with joy that had no warmth in it. "We had to change timelines, but here we are. There is nobody coming to save you lot. We have the backing of the Demon Emperor himself. You’ll get a glimpse of his brilliance in a short while, and let me tell you, it will be the last thing you ever see." She spread her arms wide, crimson smoke pouring from her in torrents.

"Even if all your dead Ancestors could resurrect, they wouldn’t be able to do a thing! On this day, you have no one! If you had someone decent, if you had allied with someone decent, you might just live through today! But..." She threw her head back and laughed. "Haha! Haha-"

...!

A voice came down from above at this time.

It came from the cloud. The nondescript, unremarkable cloud that had been drifting above the citadel, the one nobody had noticed because clouds didn’t matter when demons were revealing themselves and armies were clashing. The voice rolled down from inside it with a resonance that pressed against every ear in the citadel simultaneously, cutting through Barbatos’s laughter the way a blade cut through cloth.

"I am someone."

BOOM!

A figure descended from the cloud.

He came down slowly, almost casually, wings of verdant-blue flame unfurling behind him as the vapor parted around his expanded frame. Verdant tattoos burned across arms and chest, pulsing with light that had nothing to do with the sun. Wing-shaped pupils blazed in a face that looked primal and ancient and utterly unafraid of anything it was looking at!

He was twice the size of any human below, larger than the Imperators on their dinosaurs, and the Mana rolling off him pressed downward across the citadel in waves that made the five pillars of crimson smoke shudder.

Barbatos’s laughter died in her throat.

She looked up at the descending figure, and something she hadn’t felt in a very long time moved through her chest. It wasn’t fear, but it was the thing that came right before fear, the foreboding sensation of a predator realizing it might not be the most dangerous thing in the sky.

"Who the hell," she said slowly, her cruel smile flickering, "is this now?"

...!

---

<On the 72 Thrones Beyond the River: A Treatise Forbidden by Three Empires>

Before the Sacred Mountains rose, before the first Ancestor carved the first circle into the first stone, before the Old Tongue had a name or a mouth to speak it, there were the 72.

They did not come from the Lands of Stone. They did not come from the sky above it or the earth beneath it. They came from somewhere older, somewhere the Amadlozi themselves refuse to describe, a place that existed before existence had rules to follow. The Shamans who first recorded their presence called it the Lands Beyond the River, and they called it this not because a river separated the two worlds, but because the River of the World was the last thing any living soul would see before crossing into territory where living souls were currency.

The 72 are not beasts. Beasts kill to eat and eat to live, and there is an honesty in that cycle that even the cruelest predator respects. The 72 eat souls. They consume the very essence of what makes a being more than meat and bone, the accumulation of every thought and memory and feeling a life has gathered across its years. They do not do this because they hunger. They do this because consumption is cultivation for them. Every soul swallowed is power refined. Every essence drained is influence sharpened. Where human cultivators temper their flesh through the Nine Circles, the 72 temper their existence through the harvest of others.

They are ranked, because even among horrors there is hierarchy!