Records and knowledge of demons.

Damian looked at the stacks filling every flat surface of the Sacred Hall of Truth, his eyes moving across bound grimoires and stone plates and pressed bark scrolls with the focused appetite of someone who had been waiting for exactly this and was ready to consume all of it in the half day they had left.

He was already reaching toward the nearest stack when he caught the Hallowed Voice watching him from the side with sharp eyes and a smile that suggested the old man was waiting for something.

The Hallowed Voice turned his head slightly toward Serala.

Serala cleared her throat.

"Before you get started," she said, "is it okay if you heal the Saint of Stone first? My teacher."

...!

Damian looked at her.

"Of course," he said.

---

The room where the Saint of Stone lay was everything the Sacred Hall of Truth was not. Where the Hall was lived-in and warm with accumulated use, this room was minimal and white and so thoroughly purified that breathing inside it felt like drinking clean water. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

The Saint lay on her elevated marble platform exactly as the Hallowed Voice had been tending to her, her features peaceful, her shallow breathing steady in the way that things were steady when they were preserved rather than thriving.

Damian approached and placed his hand on her shoulder.

"Persevere."

BOOM!

Blue flames surged across her body in a wave that moved from the point of contact outward, threading through every channel and pathway her cultivation contained, seeking the damage and the corruption and the Mana of the Dominion that still lingered in the deep places of her existence. Within the blue flames, a crimson light surfaced, the foreign Mana she had been poisoned with rising to meet the purifying force that had been introduced into her body, and the blue flames consumed it with the patient thoroughness that Persevere applied to everything it touched.

The crimson light faded.

The Saint of Stone’s eyes opened.

They buzzed with Mana the moment they did, her cultivation activating before her conscious mind had fully arrived, and she sat up in a single sharp motion with her hands already moving into the defensive formation of a Warrior who had gone to sleep in the middle of a battle and expected to wake into the same.

Her eyes swept the room with the rapid assessment of someone looking for enemies, and what they found instead was Serala.

The Holy Daughter was already moving.

She covered the distance between herself and her teacher in two strides and gathered the Saint of Stone into her arms!

Damian watched this calmly.

The Hallowed Voice appeared at his shoulder, smacked his lips with the sound of a man who had witnessed something affecting and was determined not to be affected by it, and said in a low voice, "I can never get used to that."

He turned and began walking toward the corridor.

"Come on. Let’s give the student and teacher some time to catch up. Walk back with me."

The corridors of the Cathedral of the First Dawn were quieter now, the frantic activity of the siege’s aftermath having settled into the more organized grief of a Citadel counting its losses.

Paladins moved with purpose rather than panic. Holy Women tended to the injured with the focused efficiency of people who had been trained for exactly this kind of aftermath.

The Hallowed Voice walked beside Damian with his hands clasped behind his back, his blood-spattered robes still performing their political function, his eyes moving through the corridors with the awareness of a ruler taking inventory of his domain.

When he spoke, his voice was measured and unhurried, the voice of a man sharing something that needed to be understood properly rather than quickly.

"The path to the Ninth Circle is a jagged ridge where the wind never stops screaming," he said, "and for those born of man or beast, the climb is difficult."

His kind eyes stayed on the corridor ahead. "But the demons have found a shorter way through the dark. They are creatures who would burn the very mountain to keep themselves warm for a single night, forcefully devouring the souls of those who fall in their wake until their own foundations are saturated with essence they did not earn."

Damian walked beside him and listened.

"Beasts have their pride and their rare lineages that grant them the strength of the old blood. Men have their persistence. But a demon is a being who has discarded the weight of a feather for the heaviness of a mountain without a second thought. They will do anything to ascend, because to a demon, there is no honor in the struggle. There is only the hunger that must be fed at any cost."

The corridors opened into a wider hall, and the Hallowed Voice’s pace remained steady.

"The Lands of Stone are vast, and those of us who seek progression find ourselves struggling against the very earth that gave us birth. We look toward the horizons and see only the struggle of the Nine Circles, thinking that the top of the mountain is the end of all things." He paused, and something in his tone shifted into territory that was quieter and heavier.

"Yet there are glorious powers above us that make our wars look like the scuffling of beetles in the dust."

Damian looked at him.

"Above the demons, in the spaces where the air grows too thin for a mortal heart to beat, there are terrors that have long since moved beyond the reach of our classifications entirely." The Hallowed Voice’s voice dropped further. .

"We call them the Ancestral Celestials. Beings who have exceeded the Nine Circles and now look down upon the Lands of Stone from a height that our minds can barely encompass. Only the rulers of the great empires and those who have touched the deeper truths of this world know their names, because they are the silent anchors of a reality that would otherwise have collapsed into madness eons ago."

The Sacred Hall of Truth came into view at the end of the corridor.

"In the legends that the old ones whisper, their domains are Sacred Floating Islands that drift through the distant skies like jewels in a crown of starlight. Places of a purity we cannot conceive, and it is only because of their presence that men and beasts and demons have not yet ground each other into the red dirt of history."

The Hallowed Voice stepped through the entrance of the Sacred Hall and turned to face Damian with eyes that were sharp beneath their kindness.

"They do not care for our squabbles or our small victories. To an Ancestral Celestial, a war that consumes a province is no more than a ripple in a deep pool. They intervene only when the catastrophe grows too large to ignore, descending from the clouds to stop us from doing what we shouldn’t, moving with the same indifferent grace as a man who steps over a line of ants to prevent them from drowning in a puddle."

He let the silence hold for a moment.

"If you wish to truly destroy the Demon Emperor, walk with caution. You must be certain the monster is not being supported by a particularly interested Ancestral Celestial. It is one thing to face the hunger of a demon who has clawed his way to the top of the Nine Circles. It is another thing entirely to face the attention of a Celestial who has decided to take an interest in the outcome of your struggle."

His kind eyes held Damian’s with the gravity of someone who had spent a very long time learning to take such things seriously. "Death is lighter than a feather. But the gaze of an Ancestral Celestial is heavier than the Lands of Stone themselves."

BOOM!

...!

They had arrived back at the Sacred Hall.

Damian stopped walking and turned to look at the old man, feeling the full weight of everything that had just been laid in front of him.

He had known about the Nine Circles. He had known about demons and the 72 Thrones and the Demon Emperor projecting himself through an eye in the broken sky. He had been building a picture of the world above the world he had grown up in, and every piece of new information had expanded that picture further than the one before it.

But Ancestral Celestials? Sacred Floating Islands drifting through distant skies? Beings who looked down at empires falling the way a man looked down at ants?

He stared at the Hallowed Voice, and for a moment, all he could think was one thing.

What the hell?

He didn’t know any of this! There was so much he didn’t know, stacked above the things he had just learned, stacked above those, reaching upward into distances his understanding hadn’t even begun to approach.

He had made promises to his father and his Ama and to Serala and to himself, and he intended to keep every one of them, but the gap between what he currently was and what keeping those promises apparently required him to become had just expanded significantly!