Kael stood at the foot of the mountain with Syleena secured to his back, looking out toward Velthoria.
A golden sword comparable in size to a titan tree jutted from the city in the distance, its branches of gold spreading across the sky, reaching almost to where he stood.
"Must be the family heads."
A line of gold appeared, moving toward him at an alarming speed.
Kael twisted and stepped aside.
It passed him with a roar, tearing into the mountain behind him and cutting a clean line through the rock before disappearing beyond.
He adjusted Syleena and kept moving.
There were still things to be done.
—
Taric and Vael stood eye to eye.
Ever since Vael had revealed his soul pathway motes everything had collapsed into chaos.
Not a single building had been spared, neither in the mortal district nor the Luminaire district. Of the hundreds of Luminaires who had fought below, Eireindaile and Valthorne alike, almost all were gone. Reduced to nothing by the pathway.
Taric stood on a blade, face pale from blood loss. A fist-sized hole was visible through his side. He pressed a hand over the wound and looked at Vael with cold eyes.
It had become a war of attrition, and his enemy had an endless supply. Every time Taric landed a blow Vael simply absorbed another Luminaire from the battlefield below and floated on as though nothing had touched him.
"Is it really clever to use soulpathway so openly, Vael?"
Taric willed a blade close and leaned on it.
Vael raised his chin. "You're no better."
Flashes scattered across the sky like fireworks as they clashed again. Golden blades shot outward in every direction like splinters from an explosion, one for every counter Vael produced.
A colossal blade descended from above and shattered against a mass of rock. A thread of blade curled through the air and struck Vael. Clouds of fine yellow drifted out over the city, cutting anything that breathed it in.
A sword pierced straight through him and continued on, digging into something distant.
Taric's hand stilled on a nearby blade, blood running freely from his chin, half torn loose.
'I can't win.'
The sun hung low above the horizon, a golden plate over a city in ruins.
With a sigh a plain, unremarkable blue knife appeared in his hand.
Vael shifted into a more guarded stance.
"You're going that far?"
"What choice do I have." Taric levelled it toward him. "I'll die long before you run out of Luminaires."
The two stood in a standstill with Luminaire bodies floating all around them, neither willing to make the first move.
Vael scoffed, summoned an invisible orb and sent it toward Taric.
An indescribable crunch sounded as the knife cut through it. Taric's gaze snapped to Vael and he activated a mote art combining three rank five motes, appearing directly in front of him and collapsing the gravitational field in the same instant.
Vael lashed out, deliberately missing as Taric raised the knife to block.
Letting the movement carry through, Vael swept his hand and the city responded. The ground split open beneath them like two continental plates grinding apart, then began closing again like the jaws of something that had been waiting a very long time for permission to shut.
Taric opened his mouth and stretched his tongue forward. A yellow symbol glowed across it.
A thin blade flashed out and tore through Vael's throat.
But the plates kept rising.
Taric flipped the knife and raised it high, ready to drive it down.
Then he froze.
A whisper reached his ears.
Vael clenched his fist, causing the plates to stil beneath them.
Another whisper.
Then another, overlapping the last before it had finished.
One after the other they came, from everywhere at once and nowhere at the same time, bleeding into each other until the air itself seemed to carry them. Each one was perfectly clear and somehow still completely incoherent.
The two stood motionless, eyes locked.
The whispers thickened. It didn't take long before they had grown so dense the air around them hummed like some vast and terrible gospel being sung by a choir with no mouths.
The golden sea of blades Taric had summoned dismissed themselves, as though the motes themselves had decided to hide. The plates collapsed back against the earth. The bodies ascending toward Vael stopped entirely, hanging suspended above the city like a snowfall frozen mid-fall, dotting the sky with the shapes of people.
Somewhere below, Kael dropped to one knee, his eyes wide, and pressed his hand over Syleena's mouth.
Somewhere across the city, Mael let a kettle fall and didn't move to catch it, didn't activate a single defensive mote, and stood still as the hot water cooled slowly against her skin.
Every remaining Luminaire in Velthoria stopped where they stood. Knives held a hair's width from throats. Hands locked around wrists that held daggers already buried in them. Everywhere, across the entirety of the city, everything simply stopped.
Insects curled into themselves. Animals scattered for anything that would hide them. Birds stopped flapping their wings entirely and let gravity take them, desperate only to reach the ground, and be away from the open air.
And then a figure appeared in the sky, making the wind itself stop hollering.
A dress fluttered around them, slow and graceful, the way a wedding dress moves when there is no urgency left in the world. Hair so long it swallowed the air beneath it, drifting as though the sky itself was trying to hold it up.
On their back something massive. A Pillar multiple times the size of their figure, but along with its user close to negligible.
They rested above the city with a presence so monolithic that mountains no one had ever climbed would dwarf to forgotten pebbles beneath it.
The Royal Noble Family had finally taken notice.
"No."
The woman said it plainly, without looking away from Vael.
Taric watched as thin streams of blood began running from Vael's eyes. He didn't seem to notice. Cracks spread across his eyes first, then moved outward across his face like fracturing porcelain, branching and spreading with a patience that had no interest in hurrying. Then they crossed onto the blood itself, as though the idea of fluid was nothing more than a suggestion that could be politely ignored.
Taric pulled his hand back when the cracks reached Vael's coat.
In the same way leaves leave a tree when the wind has finally decided it is time. Layer after layer started to separate and drifted away from him.
And a moment later, Where Vael had stood there was nothing. Just empty air, and the faint impression that something had recently occupied it.
Taric's pupils contracted. His entire body stopped responding as the massive silhouette of her dress descended past him, then the pillar, passing close enough that the air moved against his face.
He watched her retreating back disappear through what remained of Vael, drifting apart around her like smoke.
—
Kael held his hand tight over Syleena's mouth, refusing to let go.
He wasn't entirely sure of what had happened yet but something had appeared. Someone had appeared.
Against every instinct he moved his eyes upward. He took three trembling steps and pressed himself behind the remnants of a wall. It might as well not have been there with how little help it was.
The air smelled sweet, almost pleasant, which somehow made the anxiety even worse, his body convinced it was moments away from coming apart entirely.
He turned his head left.
What should have been a road was buried under broken boards, shattered glass, dark patches of dried blood.
He turned his head right.
Golden eyes, wide and completely without shame, staring directly into his from close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from her face.
He wanted to run. He wanted to breathe. But no matter how urgently he commanded his body it refused to respond to either.
She reached out and took his chin gently, drawing him closer.
Her eyes moved across his face. First to his lips, then nose and finally his eyes. Wherever they settled it felt like something was being read that he hadn't known was written there. She blew softly across his eye, tilted her head, and studied what she found.
She leaned back and blinked once.
And then she was gone.
The same presence that had stilled an entire city. The same presence that had made the world hold its breath. The same presence that had erased a rank five with nothing but a single word. Gone. Vanished from in front of him so abruptly that whether it had happened at all felt genuinely uncertain.
The moment she disappeared the Luminaires began to fall from the sky, splattering against rooftops and debris with sounds that had no dignity in them. And almost poetically, as though the world had been waiting for permission, birds began rising toward the sky again.
Kael's hair whipped in the wind as it dared to exist once more.
He released his shaking hand from Syleena's mouth.