The Primeval Era

The Citadel was unfathomably quiet.

Quiet in the way that places became quiet after violence had finished speaking and left nothing behind but the memory of what it had said. Ash still drifted across the white stone of the Covenant in grey flakes that caught the light Damian’s solar form continued to cast, and the kneeling thousands of Dominion warriors pressed their knees into that ash without complaint because the alternative to kneeling had been demonstrated with a thoroughness that left no room for misunderstanding!

Damian floated grandly above it all and looked at the scene below him, and it didn’t make him feel good.

It didn’t make him feel empowered, and it didn’t soothe his rage the way he had thought it might. Thousands had just died. Their screams still echoed somewhere in the corners of his Primeval mind, stored with the perfect memory his transformation had granted him, and they would stay there alongside every other scream he had caused since the day he stopped being a farmer and started being whatever he was now.

He simply felt like it was a shame, all of it, the betrayal and the collusion and the fact that warriors who could have been protecting Dross tribes and defending the helpless had instead chosen to serve a man who shook hands with demons.

He shook his head.

Then he spoke.

"All forces of the Dominion of Crimson Stone will exit this Citadel and wait outside its walls."

His voice carried across every corner of the Covenant with the same Mana-enhanced reach it had carried since his descent, calm now rather than furious, which somehow made it heavier.

"You will walk in order. You will leave your mounts. You will go quietly. Anyone who does not comply has seen what happens to those who do not comply."

The kneeling thousands began to rise.

They rose slowly, one by one and then in clusters, crimson-armored warriors getting to their feet with the careful movements of people who understood that the being above them was watching and that speed might be mistaken for aggression.

Their faces carried a mixture of fear and awe that sat uncomfortably together, and their eyes stayed fixed on the ground as they began to walk. Single files formed across the plazas and streets, thousands of warriors who had arrived at the Covenant as conquerors now shuffling toward the gates in the mile-high walls with the silence of the thoroughly defeated.

Pterosaurs and subjugated dinosaurs remained where they had landed, their riders abandoning them without protest, and the sound of armored feet on white stone became the only noise in the Citadel as the evacuation began.

Damian watched them go for a moment, then looked up.

Above the cathedral, the five Dukes still burned in their solar chains. Barbatos had stopped screaming and was now making a continuous low sound that might have been cursing or might have been something more primal.

Beleth’s massive form had gone rigid, his cracked bone armor smoking where the chains touched it. Sitri, Leraje, and Eligos hung in their bindings with the varied expressions of beings experiencing prolonged agony they couldn’t escape from.

Let them burn a bit longer.

These were demons, creatures whose entire existence was built on the consumption of souls that hadn’t consented to being consumed, and somewhere beyond the River of the World, their kind held his mother in a place where her screams were measured and recorded and discussed. A few more minutes of solar fire was the least of what they deserved!

He turned and floated down toward the cathedral.

Serala stood near the entrance beside the Hallowed Voice, her white-gold and verdant wings still spread behind her, her transformed frame towering over the Paladins and Holy Women who flanked the old man.

The Hallowed Voice himself stood in his plain white robes with his hands clasped before him, his white hair catching the blue-gold light from above, his kind eyes watching Damian’s approach with the sharp attention of someone who was absorbing information at a rate that belied his gentle appearance.

Damian came to float naturally beside Serala, his solar radiance dimming further as he allowed his form to become more visible, more human, though the verdant tattoos still pulsed and the wing-shaped pupils still burned. He looked at the Hallowed Voice, and the Hallowed Voice looked at him

"Apologies for the forces of the Dominion of Crimson Stone intruding on your domain," Damian said.

The Hallowed Voice studied him for a breath longer, then shifted his gaze to Serala, then back to Damian, and when he spoke, his voice carried the warmth and authority of a man who had been navigating conversations with dangerous beings for longer than most beings had existed.

"There is no need for apologies for things not within your control," the Hallowed Voice said. "Instead, we owe you thanks for the dominating show of force. It seems the situation would have ended quite differently without your arrival."

His kind eyes moved to Serala with an expression that mixed calmness and curiosity in equal measure.

"Little Serala."

The words were gentle, but the gaze that accompanied them was expectant, and it waited with the patience of someone who had spent time teaching this particular girl that when she had something to say, she should say it clearly.

Serala cleared her throat.

"I introduce the son of Emperor Zuku Vakochev," she said.

"The...Tokoloshe. Damian Vakochev. He was the one who saved me from the ambush of Dominion and Covenant forces working together. He is the reason why we are here."

...!

She didn’t see it herself, but when she spoke about Damian, her gaze turned toward him was...a bit intense. Her wing-shaped pupils found his face and stayed there, and whatever lived in her expression was visible to everyone standing near enough to observe it. The Hallowed Voice noticed. Wise Woman Kethiwe noticed!

The High Paladins flanking the cathedral entrance exchanged glances with Holy Women who returned those glances with raised eyebrows!

The Hallowed Voice nodded, filing the observation away. His expression shifted then, the warmth receding behind something harder as his gaze left Damian and Serala and swept across the Citadel surrounding them.

His eyes found Saint Obara.

She stood among a cluster of Covenant warriors who had sided with her accusation, her white hair disheveled, her face carrying the particular pallor of someone watching everything they had orchestrated collapse in real time.

The Saints and Anointed Ones who had stood beside her during the siege were clustered nearby, some of them trying to edge toward the departing Dominion forces as if they could simply blend in and walk out, others frozen in place with the resignation of people who understood that running would only make things worse.

The Hallowed Voice looked at them all, and his kind eyes went somewhere very far from kindness.

"Many within this Covenant acted with corruption and collusion today," he said, and his voice was no longer the gentle instrument of a healer tending to the wounded. It was deeper now, carrying the resonance of a ruler who had been patient for too long and had reached the end of that patience.

"The Dominion was not alone in this treachery. They were invited. They were welcomed through gates that should have held against them, by hands that had sworn oaths to protect what those gates guarded."

His gaze moved across every face that had supported the siege, and each face it touched seemed to shrink beneath its weight.

"All those from the Covenant who broke their vows and played a part in this betrayal will have their power stripped. They shall serve the Covenant in whatever capacity I so choose, for as long as I choose, until the debt they owe to every faithful soul they endangered has been repaid in full."

He paused, and the rivers of white and gold Mana surging around the cathedral seemed to pause with him, as if the sacred structure itself was holding its breath.

"Shame."

The word fell across the Citadel.

"Shame."

It fell again, heavier.

"SHAME!"

BOOM!

The rivers moved.

Not in the gentle, rhythmic pulsation they had maintained since the cathedral’s founding countless generations ago, but with sudden violent purpose, surging out of their carved channels and rising into the air like serpents that had been sleeping and were now very much awake.

⁴White and gold Mana coiled and twisted and shot outward from the cathedral in dozens of streams, each one seeking a specific target with precision that could only have come from a mind that had spent decades weaving itself into the very fabric of the sacred structure.

The rivers found Obara first.

They wrapped around her before she could react, white and gold coils pressing against her cultivation with force that made her Seventh Circle defenses look like paper walls in a storm. She screamed!

She scream in the shock of feeling something she had never imagined possible, the rivers splitting her skin in hairline fractures through which her Mana began to pour out of her like water from a cracked vessel. Her power left her in visible streams of light that were reabsorbed by the rivers as quickly as they emerged, decades of cultivation draining away in seconds as her body shrank and weakened and her eyes lost the Mana-bright shine they had carried for most of her adult life!

Oh!

Across the Citadel, the same thing happened to every Covenant member who had participated in the betrayal.

Saints who had stood beside Obara felt the rivers find them and strip them without ceremony. Anointed Ones who had broken their vows felt their cultivation pulled from their bodies the way roots were pulled from earth, painfully and completely and without any prospect of growing back. Warriors who had opened gates and provided intelligence and stood in formation beside Dominion Imperators felt their Mana leaving them in torrents that left them gasping on their knees, their status as Warriors evaporating along with the power that had defined them.

HUUM!

Thousands of traitors were reduced to Dross in the time it took for the Hallowed Voice’s final word to finish echoing across the white walls.

Their screams filled the Citadel, but the screams were brief, because the stripping was efficient, and what remained when it was done was not warriors or Saints or Anointed Ones but ordinary people who would spend the rest of their lives serving a Covenant they had tried to destroy.

Damian watched the Hallowed Voice with surprise he didn’t bother to conceal.

In a single move, without lifting a hand, without raising his voice beyond what conversation required, this old man in plain white robes had demonstrated a level of ruthlessness and power that Damian had not expected!