The Primeval Era

Damian descended through the sky of the Covenant with cold eyes.

The demon ahead of him hung in the air with crimson smoke billowing from her slender frame, two small horns curving back from her temples, her cruel smile flickering as she tried to figure out what she was looking at.

Behind her and across the citadel, four other pillars of crimson smoke climbed toward the heavens from four other demons who had revealed themselves with the confidence of predators who believed they were the most dangerous things present.

He could sense their power as he descended, and it felt particularly heavy. Dense, refined, accumulated across centuries of consuming things that had once been alive and thinking and feeling.

It pressed against his Primeval senses the way Sir Alex’s power had pressed against him in the underground cavern, but deeper, nastier, threaded with something that made the Mana in the air around them curdle.

But so what?

Damian felt rage rising inside him, and he let it rise.

These were demons. Not the abstract concept of demons he had grown up hearing about in cautionary tales, not the distant threat lurking beyond the River of the World that served as a bedtime story for children in tribes.

These were real demons standing in the sky of a human citadel, and they were the same kind of creatures that held his mother’s soul in a place where she screamed and no one who loved her could reach her. Creatures like this one ahead of him, with her cruel smile and her billowing smoke and her casual arrogance, probably sat in chambers somewhere beyond the River and listened to his Ama’s suffering and measured it and discussed what they had learned.

The rage burned hotter than his tattoos!

The nearest demon looked at him with crimson eyes that had gone narrow and calculating, her head tilted to one side as she studied his descent.

"Well," she said, her voice cutting through the chaos below with theatrical amusement. "I am Barbatos. The 8th Duke of the 72 Thrones Beyond the River. I know all those gathered here today, every pathetic little Warriro and every whimpering Holy Woman..."

Her smile returned, sharper than before.

"So who the fuck are you? Don’t just insert yourself into things you don’t belong to. What, the pressure you give off feels Eighth Circle?" She spread her arms wide, crimson smoke curling around her slender frame.

"Let me enlighten you, newcomer. Even if we are all Eighth Circles, the discrepancy in power can be very, very different."

Damian looked at her and said nothing.

He was thinking. Clear thoughts that moved through his Primeval mind with the efficiency his transformation had granted him, thoughts that sorted themselves into categories without him needing to guide them. He had come to the Covenant to find knowledge of demons and how to reach them across the River. He had come to learn what the Covenant’s archives and the Hallowed Voice’s experience could teach him about the creatures holding his mother’s soul.

Since the demons were here, standing in front of him, filling the sky with their filth and their smoke, they could enlighten him directly.

For the first time since his transformation, he wanted to go all out. He wanted to see what this body could do when he stopped being careful, stopped measuring, stopped holding back out of caution or uncertainty!

He wanted to know his limits, and the five demons floating across the Covenant’s sky were going to help him find them whether they intended to or not.

So.

He reached inward.

Past the verdant flames of Exelissomai that danced across his skin, past the blue fire of Persevere that burned on his heart, past the Primordial Mana Core that churned white Mana through his existence, he reached toward the Land and Sky Physique he had replicated from Serala.

The Wings of the Radiant Dawn. He had accessed its basic capabilities before, flight and radiant projection and binding chains, but those were the surface. Those were what the Physique offered when it was housed inside a weaker Common Ash and Stone Lifeform who had only unlocked a fraction of its potential.

He was not a Common Lifeform anymore.

The Primeval Viridis transformation had changed everything, and the capabilities that had been locked behind doors he couldn’t open before now sat within reach, waiting for a hand strong enough to turn the handle. He found the first of them glowing inside him, a capability so heavy with light that touching it made his vision go white for a heartbeat.

Dawn’s Judgment!

He activated it!

The reaction was immediate. His compressed dense Mana surged upward through his body and into the sky above him, white-gold radiance erupting from his frame in quantities that turned the air around him into visible light. The Mana climbed and spread and kept climbing, and Damian opened his mouth and spoke the word that made everything he touched burn brighter.

"Persevere."

BOOM!

Blue flames surged over his body and merged with the white-gold radiance of Dawn’s Judgment, the two powers interweaving into something that was neither purely blue nor purely gold but a fusion that burned with intensity the sky above the Covenant had never contained!

HUUM!

Illusory wings filled the heavens, spreading across the citadel in an image so vast that every person within the white walls could see them, wings of blue-gold fire that seemed to belong to something that had descended from a place higher than the Ancestors.

Then the judgment came down.

Pillars of blue-gold light broke through the cleared sky and thundered toward the earth with the sound of a thousand drums struck simultaneously!

They were enormous, each one wide enough to swallow a dwelling whole, and they fell with precision that had nothing to do with chance. Five of them found the five pillars of crimson smoke and struck them directly, blinding radiance meeting demonic corruption in collisions that sent shockwaves rippling across the citadel’s rooftops. More of them fell among the Dominion Imperators, beams of purifying light slamming into formations of crimson-armored warriors who scattered like insects fleeing a fire.

The citadel shook!

OOOH!

Near the cathedral, the Hallowed Voice turned his gaze upward.

His kind eyes, which had been cold since Barbatos called out to him, went wide. Beside him, Wise Woman Kethiwe gripped the arm of the Paladin nearest to her, her Eighth Circle cultivation trembling in response to what she was feeling from above!

Holy Women across the defensive formation looked up with mouths open and eyes bright with something caught between terror and desperate hope.

"That...!" Kethiwe breathed, her voice barely audible above the thunder of falling light.

"That...is the Holy Daughter’s Lineage Physique! How does this stranger possess it?!"

The Hallowed Voice didn’t answer. His eyes stayed fixed on the burning figure above!

Across the citadel, the demons fought back.

Barbatos moved first. Crimson smoke hardened around her into a shield of compressed demonic Mana that caught the pillar of judgment bearing down on her and held it, her slender frame bracing against purifying light that would have erased a lesser demon from existence!

The light burned through her shield in layers, peeling away defenses one after another, and she screamed as she redirected the pillar’s trajectory with a sweep of her arm, sending it crashing into an empty plaza where it carved a crater deep enough to swallow a dwelling.

Sitri dissolved into shifting forms, her body becoming something between solid and vapor as she slipped between the beams with the fluid grace of a being that had spent centuries learning to be uncatchable!

Beleth took the light head-on, his bone armor absorbing impact after impact while he roared with rage that shook the air around him. Leraje leapt between rooftops, her hunter’s instincts keeping her one breath ahead of the beams that tracked her movements.

Eligos raised his light-drinking lance and carved a path through the radiance falling toward him, his quiet efficiency making him the most successful at avoiding damage.

They were powerful. They were capable! They were Dukes of the 72 Thrones, and they had survived worse than falling light!

But they were injured!

Barbatos’s left arm hung at an angle that hadn’t been there before, the flesh seared where the judgment had burned through her shield. Beleth’s bone armor was cracked across the chest, white-gold light still smoldering in the fissures!

Sitri’s shifting forms had stabilized involuntarily, one of her shapes locked in place by purifying radiance that refused to let her dissolve. Leraje had taken a glancing blow across the ribs that had opened her side to the air. Even Eligos, the quietest and most careful, bore a scorch mark across his shadow-wrapped shoulder where his lance hadn’t been fast enough.

The beams continued to fall.

Barbatos’s cruel smile was gone. In its place sat something uglier and more honest as she dodged another pillar and felt the purifying light singe the tips of her horns.

"Who are you?!" she bellowed upward, her voice cracking with something that sounded uncomfortably close to desperation. "WHO ARE YOU?!"

Damian looked down at her from the sky, his body burning blue-gold, his wing-shaped pupils blazing with cold fury, and he didn’t bother answering.

He activated the second capability.

Solar Sovereignty!