The Primeval Era

While the five Dukes burned and screamed in their solar chains above the cathedral, a booming voice echoed down from the burning figure in the sky and found the army below.

"Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you."

...!

The words thundered across the citadel and crashed into the Dominion forces that had grown chaotic in the aftermath of everything that had just occurred. Formations that had been organized with military precision an hour ago were now scattered across plazas and streets, Imperators on their Pterosaurs banking in confused patterns, Seventh Circle warriors looking upward with expressions that couldn’t decide between defiance and retreat.

The volleys of purifying light that had fallen among them during the assault on the demons had carved craters into white stone and sent dozens of their number flying, and the ones still standing were doing their best to regroup around officers whose confidence had evaporated along with their demon allies.

The burning gaze from above swept downward and locked onto Draegan Morath.

The former Royal Captain of the Vakochev Empire stood in the commandeered hall near the cathedral plaza, his crimson and gold armor catching the blue-gold light falling from the sky, and his eyes were heavy and somber and deeply, profoundly unwilling!

He had been tasked by the Murderous Saint to bring glory and victory to this battle, to topple the Hallowed Voice and deliver the Covenant into Dominion hands, and he had come with more than enough force to accomplish it. A dozen Eighth Circle Imperators, over a hundred at the Seventh, thousands more below them, and five Demon Dukes whose power was supposed to be the final decisive blow that no combination of Covenant defenders could withstand.

And yet this being had appeared from a cloud and ended everything.

There hadn’t been a grand fight. There hadn’t been an epic clash of armies where Draegan’s forces could demonstrate their strength and training and numerical superiority!

There hadn’t even been a proper battle. It had been a one-sided thrashing, a single figure descending from the sky and dismantling their strongest weapons with an ability that turned the sun itself into a weapon, and now the five Dukes hung in chains of solidified sunlight above the cathedral while this being turned its attention toward the army that had been rendered irrelevant.

Draegan was unwilling to accept it, and yet the reality of what his eyes showed him did not care about his willingness.

He stepped out of the commandeered hall and into the open air of the plaza, his scarred jaw tight, his crimson eyes blazing with the stubborn fury of a warrior who had served two empires and refused to cower before a third power no matter how terrifying it appeared. His voice roared upward toward the burning figure with every ounce of Mana his cultivation could push behind it.

"What are you?!"

The figure above paused.

The solar brilliance surrounding it dimmed by the smallest fraction, not because its power was fading but because whatever consciousness lived within that corona of white-gold light had decided to make itself more visible to those below. The burning silhouette resolved into something closer to a shape that could be studied, a massive frame twice the size of any human, wings of verdant-blue flame spread behind it, verdant tattoos pulsing beneath the radiance, wing-shaped pupils blazing at the center of a face that looked down at the army below with the cold authority of something that had already won and was now deciding what to do with the pieces.

He descended.

It was an imperious descent, slow and deliberate, the descent of a ruler approaching a court that had been misbehaving in his absence!

The solar chains holding the five Dukes remained fixed in the air above the cathedral, the demons continuing to burn and writhe without his direct attention, and his figure dropped through the sky toward the space between the Dominion army and the cathedral defenders with the casual certainty of someone who understood that nothing present could stop him from going wherever he chose.

He came to a halt above the plaza, floating a hundred feet in the air, visible to every soul within the citadel.

His gaze found Draegan first. The former Royal Captain stared up at him with burning crimson eyes and clenched fists and the rigid posture of a man holding himself together through discipline alone. Then his gaze moved to Serala, floating near the cathedral with her white-gold and verdant wings still spread, her face a mixture of pride and apprehension.

Then to the Hallowed Voice, who stood among his Paladins with his kind eyes turned upward and something deeply calculating moving behind them. Then across the thousands of warriors and faithful and traitors and mourners who filled the white city below him, all of them staring up at the being that had just single-handedly stopped the fall of the Covenant of the First Stone.

When he spoke, his voice carried across every street and plaza and dwelling and tower within the white walls, reaching hundreds of thousands of ears simultaneously.

"I am someone who carries glorious purpose."

The words settled across the citadel, and the silence that received them was absolute.

"I am someone who has sworn a promise to the late Emperor Vakochev. I have communed with the very Ancestors of the Lands of Stone and come back to right all the wrongs done against me and so many others!"

HUUM!

Solar brilliance danced across his body as his wing-shaped pupils radiated with an intensity that made the air around him shimmer and bend. The verdant tattoos across his arms and chest pulsed in rhythm with his words, and the illusory wings of blue-gold flame behind him spread wider with each sentence, casting their light across the upturned faces of everyone below.

"Do you not recognize me in my new form? Do you not recognize the Young Lugal who ran away in fear from his home and empire when the Murderous Saint colluded with demons to bring down a legacy of hundreds of years?"

His voice dropped lower, and the weight of it pressed against the stone beneath every person standing in the citadel.

"Do you not recognize I, Damian Vakochev?!"

BOOM!

The name struck the air with force that sent visible ripples of Mana cascading outward from his floating form, and the solar brilliance surrounding him flared in response, his pupils blazing with an immensity and wonder that made those closest to him take involuntary steps backward even though he was a hundred feet above them.

Below, Draegan Morath stumbled.

The former Royal Captain of the Vakochev Empire, a man who had served Emperor Zuku Vakochev before betraying his memory for crimson armor and a new master’s approval, stumbled backward as if the name itself had struck him in the chest!

His scarred face went slack with shock and incredulity, his crimson eyes widening beyond what his discipline should have permitted, and the rigid posture he had been maintaining crumbled as eight years of buried history crashed into the present moment without warning.

Around him, the Dominion Imperators who recognized the name reacted in kind. Officers who had served during the fall of the Vakochev Empire exchanged glances of stunned disbelief. Younger warriors who knew the name only from records and briefings stared upward with the confusion of people encountering a ghost that the official histories had assured them was safely dead.

Near the cathedral, the Hallowed Voice’s calculating eyes sharpened.

His gaze moved from the burning figure above to Serala beside him and then back again, and whatever calculations had been running behind his expression accelerated into something urgent. Wise Woman Kethiwe gripped his arm involuntarily, her Eighth Circle composure failing her for the second time in an hour!

Holy Women across the defensive formation looked up at the being who had just named himself with faces caught between awe and the kind of confusion that came from having too many impossible things happen in too short a span.

Damian Vakochev.

The Young Prince who should have been dead alongside anything that remained of the old Vakochev Empire. The boy who had vanished eight years ago when the Murderous Saint tore down the legacy his father had built, whom every intelligence report from every empire had listed as deceased, whose bloodline had been declared extinct by the very Dominion whose army now stood in the Covenant’s streets.

How was he here?

How was he displaying power that had just driven five Demon Dukes into chains of sunlight and stopped the summoning of the Hand of the Demon Emperor?

How had he returned with the Holy Daughter of the Covenant, both of them transformed beyond recognition, both of them radiating cultivation signatures that didn’t match anything the Lands of Stone had produced in living memory?

These questions moved through the minds of every powerful being present, from Draegan’s shock to the Hallowed Voice’s sharp calculation to Saint Obara’s dawning horror somewhere in the ranks of the traitors, and none of them had answers.

The Young Lugal floated above them all, burning with the light of the sun, and waited for the Lands of Stone to understand what his return meant!