The Primeval Era

Did they not recognize who he was?!

Damian asked the question with a voice that shook the white walls of the Covenant, and he asked it freely, without hesitation, without the caution that had governed every moment of his existence for the last eight summers. There was no more hiding!

There was no more sitting still in a Dross tribe pretending to be a farmer while the world burned around him and the people who had destroyed his family walked the Lands of Stone as if they had earned the right to breathe its air.

Demons were rampant. Humans betrayed their own kind and acted like beasts with no honor, colluding with creatures that ate the souls of children for the sake of power they hadn’t earned through anything resembling merit. And all of it infuriated him in a way that went deeper than the rage he had felt when interrogating Sir Alex.

It infuriated him that humans like Draegan Morath could have been living peacefully for the last eight summers, eating their meals and polishing their crimson armor and climbing through the ranks of an empire built on betrayal, while his Ama screamed in a place where no one who loved her could reach her.

While her soul burned in demon hands that measured her agony the way craftsmen measured the quality of their work. While she suffered, Draegan had served the man who had made that suffering possible, and he had done it willingly, and he had prospered from it.

Damian wanted to scorch them all!

It went against his nature, this desire to simply wipe them from the sky with solar light and be done with it, to burn through their ranks the way his judgment had burned through the demons’ defenses and leave nothing behind but ash and the smell of charred ambition.

He was not, at his core, the kind of person who enjoyed killing. He had done it when survival demanded it and he would do it again, but the desire to do it out of pure rage was something new, something his transformation had given him access to by removing the limitations that had once kept his emotions from becoming actions.

But he controlled himself.

He breathed, and the solar brilliance around him dimmed by a fraction, and he let the rage settle into something colder and more useful. He remembered how Anointed Ones treated Dross.

How they looked down upon the powerless as if they were nothing, as if their lives held no more value than the dirt beneath their foot wrappings, as if the gap in power between them was also a gap in the right to exist.

Today, he would give that same treatment to the ones who deserved it.

He descended.

Mana crackled around his frame alongside solar brilliance that threw sharp-edged shadows across every surface in the citadel, and his wing-shaped pupils blazed down at the scattered Dominion forces below with the exact same contemptuous indifference that Anointed Ones wore when they looked at those they considered beneath them.

His voice rolled out across the white walls and plazas and streets of the Covenant, reaching every ear within the citadel with the clarity of something that was not requesting attention but commanding it.

"You stand before the last true heir of the Vakochev Empire. The son of the man the Murderous Saint killed."

He paused, letting the words settle across the thousands of Dominion warriors who stared up at him with expressions ranging from shock to defiance to the beginning stages of genuine terror.

"Your demons meant nothing to me. And you mean even less."

Solar brilliance flared around him in a pulse that pressed downward across the citadel like a physical force, and hundreds of weaker Warriors among the Dominion ranks staggered under the pressure of it.

"In five seconds, if any forces from the Dominion of Crimson Stone are still floating or standing and not kneeling, they will be scorched where they stand."

...!

The silence that followed was so complete that the sound of the Mana rivers around the cathedral became the loudest thing in the citadel.

"Kneel, all ye unworthy! Kneel before the one you betrayed! Kneel, and pay respect to the Ancestors!"

BOOM!

The words struck the air and the stone and the armor of every warrior present with a force that was not merely sound but Mana compressed into command, and the reaction that followed was immediate and overwhelming.

The vast majority of the Dominion army fell.

WAA!

They went down in waves, thousands of warriors in crimson armor dropping to their knees across the plazas and streets and rooftops of the Covenant, the sound of armored knees hitting white stone rolling through the citadel in a cascade that lasted several seconds and seemed to last several minutes.

Fifth Circle warriors knelt first, their bodies responding to the pressure before their minds could form arguments against it. Sixth Circle warriors followed within heartbeats, discipline crumbling under the weight of solar radiance pressing down on them from above.

Seventh Circle Imperators went down harder and slower, some of them fighting the descent for a breath or two before their cultivation acknowledged what their pride refused to, that the being above them operated on a level where resistance was not defiance but stupidity.

Pterosaurs shrieked and banked downward as their riders abandoned their saddles and descended to the ground, crimson-armored Imperators who had been circling the airspace above the cathedral coming down from their flying mounts to kneel on stone they had been prepared to conquer an hour ago!

The dinosaurs themselves landed with heavy impacts that shook the streets, their subjugated instincts recognizing the dominance radiating from above with an animal certainty that didn’t require understanding.

But some did not kneel.

Scattered among the kneeling thousands, a handful of figures remained standing. Eighth Circle Imperators whose cultivation had been refined across decades of dedicated service to the Dominion, whose pride had been forged in the same fires that had melted down the Vakochev Empire and recast its remnants into crimson tools.

A dozen of them stood with muscles trembling and jaws clenched and eyes burning with the stubborn defiance of warriors who had decided that death standing was preferable to life kneeling.

They looked to Draegan.

The former Royal Captain of the Vakochev Empire stood in the plaza below with every muscle in his massive frame bulging against his crimson and gold armor, his scarred jaw locked, his crimson eyes blazing upward at the burning figure with an intensity that bordered on madness.

He had served two empires. He had climbed to heights that most warriors never reached. He had been trusted by the Murderous Saint himself with a mission that was supposed to cement the Dominion’s supremacy across the Lands of Stone.

He would not kneel to a child.

His legs coiled beneath him and he launched himself from the plaza with an explosion of crimson Mana, his Eighth Circle power propelling him upward toward Damian!

"You are only a child!"

HUUM!

Damian brought his hand down.

It was not a strike or a technique or a carefully constructed application of power. It was a gesture, the simple downward motion of an open palm, and the sun answered it.

Beams of solar brilliance fell from the cleared sky and found Draegan Morath in the air and the dozen standing Imperators on the ground and every single warrior across the citadel who had not fallen to their knees when they were told to.

The beams were not the broad waves of purifying light Damian had used against the demons. They were precise, targeted, individual columns of compressed solar radiance that struck each standing figure directly and did not miss because sunlight did not miss when it was given a target.

Draegan’s crimson armor lasted less than a second.

The light hit him mid-ascent and his charge stopped as if he had flown into a wall made of the sun itself. His armor glowed white, then transparent, then ceased to exist, and the body beneath it followed in a sequence that the watching thousands would never be able to forget no matter how desperately they tried. Solar flames consumed him from the outside in, eating through flesh and bone and cultivation with an indifference that reduced decades of Eighth Circle refinement to the same ash that a common stick would have produced!

His scream echoed across the citadel.

Across the plazas and streets, thousands of other screams joined it. Every defiant warrior who had remained standing experienced the same fate simultaneously, solar flames wrapping around their bodies and burning through their existence with a thoroughness that left nothing behind to bury!

The screams lasted for seconds that stretched into what felt like minutes, each voice carrying the particular horror of a Warrior whose Mana was being burned alongside their flesh, their very cultivation serving as fuel for the fire that consumed them.

Then the screams stopped.

Ash fell across the white stone of the Covenant like grey snow. The charred remnant of what had been Draegan Morath tumbled from the sky and struck the plaza below, breaking apart on impact into fragments that scattered across the feet of the kneeling warriors who had been wise enough to submit as these beings trembled fearfully!

Across the citadel, similar remnants drifted downward from rooftops and streets and the air itself, the remains of thousands who had chosen pride over survival and received exactly what they had been promised.

Damian floated alone in the sky above the Covenant of the First Stone.

The five Dukes burned in their solar chains above the cathedral. The kneeling thousands pressed their knees into white stone that was now dusted with the ash of their former comrades!

The defenders around the cathedral stared upward in silence. The faithful of the Covenant remained on their knees with their hands raised and their chanting silenced by the display they had just witnessed.

No one spoke.

No one moved!

Nobody could move!