The Hallowed Voice had seen many things in his long years walking the Lands of Stone, but he had not seen anything like this fucking monster of a being.

Damian Vakochev. The son of Zuku Vakochev. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

He sat across the Sacred Hall of Truth watching the young man work through the first stack of grimoires with the focused intensity of someone who had decided the texts were going to give up their secrets whether they wanted to or not, and he took a quiet moment to observe him the way he observed all things that concerned him, which was to say thoroughly and without the filter of politeness.

Nearly three times the size of a normal man. Dense Mana curling over his body in slow continuous waves that had nothing to do with intentional projection and everything to do with what his existence simply was at rest, the way a furnace radiated heat without being asked to.

The pressure alone that this young man radiated at baseline exceeded most Eighth Circle existences the Hallowed Voice had encountered across his considerable years, and he had encountered a great many. It was monstrous in the most literal application of the word.

The frame on this creature was titanic, muscles stacked on muscles that had been refined by whatever evolutionary process had turned a Lost Prince into what currently sat in his Sacred Hall reading about demons with the calm of a man reviewing crop reports.

He looked like a tool of pure destruction wearing the face of someone who had not yet fully decided what to destroy.

And back then, when he had actually watched him smite demons and subsequently kill thousands of human Dominion soldiers with solar flames, the Hallowed Voice had experienced a genuine few seconds where he had wondered whether Serala had brought back a demon that would eventually kill them all.

Oh, and that wasn’t even accounting for Serala herself, who had returned in a form that made the Holy Women of the Covenant go pale in the best possible way, similar to this monster in her own terrifying evolution. But back to Damian Vakochev specifically.

The Hallowed Voice had thought to show off a little when the Eye of the Demon Emperor appeared in the sky. A reasonable decision in the moment. He had the Sacred Ancestral Bone. He had been waiting for a situation worthy of it. And he had looked down at the crater where the Eye’s first attack had driven this Damian Vakochev and watched the young man stand up from direct contact with a Ninth Circle projection and begin cycling Mana again like the inconvenience had already been categorized and filed away, and the Hallowed Voice had thought, well, if this monster can survive that, surely I can push back against it a little.

Nearly died.

He had nearly fucking died.

He had been lying in the cushion of solar light that this young man had thoughtfully provided, feeling his bones settling into angles that bones were not supposed to settle into, thinking genuinely warm thoughts about the Amadlozi he was about to go join, when Serala had looked at Damian and asked her quiet question, and this titanic monster of a young man had knelt beside him and touched his leg and said one word, and the Hallowed Voice’s entire existence had been reconstructed from the inside out like a dwelling whose foundations had been replaced without demolishing the structure above.

He was a better healer.

This young man, who had presumably not spent the last eight summers studying the sacred arts of restoration in a Cathedral built upon generations of accumulated Shaman knowledge, was a better healer than the Hallowed Voice. The best healer in the Lands of Stone. A title he had held for longer than most civilizations had lasted.

How fucking unfair was that?

He had communicated this sentiment silently toward the Amadlozi he believed were observing this situation, and he had received no response, which was also not particularly fair.

But here they were. The Hallowed Voice had just finished telling this titanic young man everything he knew about the forces that existed above the Nine Circles, about the Ancestral Celestials on their Sacred Floating Islands who looked down at empires falling with the indifferent patience of beings who had stopped counting the years, and he had delivered this information with the measured gravity it deserved, fully expecting the weight of it to land the way such weight always landed when delivered to even the most powerful Warriors of the Eighth Circle.

He watched Damian’s face.

The young man frowned.

Then his eyes burned with rage and conviction, the wing-shaped pupils blazing with verdant-blue fire that made the air around him shimmer, and his expression communicated with absolute clarity that this information about beings who exceeded the Nine Circles entirely and could end his existence with their casual attention was registering not as the terrifying obstacle it was but as another thing to overcome on the way to where he was going.

Holy shit.

The Hallowed Voice sat with that for a moment.

What power did this young man carry inside him that made him not cower when hearing such things? What had happened to the Lost Prince of the Vakochev Empire across eight summers of hiding that had produced something capable of looking at the concept of Ancestral Celestials and meeting it with fury rather than the entirely reasonable and sensible response of existential dread?

He didn’t know, and he found that he was genuinely unsettled by not knowing.

After that, there was nothing to do but usher this titanic being into the Sacred Hall and watch him begin working through the demon texts one by one, which the Hallowed Voice did with the careful positioning of someone trying to appear calm and wise rather than deeply uncomfortable. He answered questions when they came, and they came with the precision of a mind that consumed information quickly and immediately identified the gaps, and he did his best to seem like a man dispensing knowledge from a position of relaxed authority rather than a man acutely aware that he had to look upward at an angle to meet his companion’s eyes.

The Holy Women had approached him earlier.

Three of the senior Holy Women of the Covenant, each of them with enough cultivation and enough years of service to feel entitled to raise concerns they believed warranted raising. They had stood before him in the corridor outside the Sacred Hall with the particular expression that indicated a delicate subject was incoming, and they had told him it wasn’t appropriate for the Holy Daughter and this young man to be left alone together given how close they appeared to have become, and had he considered perhaps establishing some parameters around their proximity.

The Hallowed Voice had looked at these three women.

He had looked back at the entrance to the Sacred Hall, behind which sat a being who had survived a direct hit from the Eye of the Demon Emperor, healed him from the brink of death in one word, and driven five Demon Dukes into chains of solidified sunlight.

He had looked at the three Holy Women again.

"If you feel strongly enough about it," he had said, with all the gentleness he could assemble, "you are welcome to raise the matter with them directly."

They had not raised the matter directly.

He returned to the Sacred Hall and to the suffocating density of existing near this young man, who radiated an aura that pressed against the Hallowed Voice’s cultivation the way a millstone pressed against grain, constant and comprehensive and not remotely intentional, which somehow made it worse.

He found himself sitting slightly further from Damian than was necessary for easy conversation and telling himself this was a comfortable personal preference rather than the simple truth, which was that proximity to whatever Damian Vakochev had become was an experience that even an Eighth Circle existence processed as physically demanding.

He had watched Serala when she moved through the Hall.

He had known this girl since she arrived at the Covenant as a child, had watched her grow into the Holy Daughter that the Covenant had needed her to be, had seen her carry the weight of that role with the conviction he had taught her was paramount.

He knew her expressions the way a man knew the expressions of someone he had watched across years of close observation. And what he saw in her eyes when they moved to Damian Vakochev was not the expression of a young woman looking at a powerful ally.

The Holy Women might not recognize it yet, with their focus on propriety and protocol. But the Hallowed Voice was old enough to know the look, and what he saw there was clear.

The Holy Daughter was already lost to this monster, in the sense that mattered. She had stood beside him when she could have stood apart. She had turned down the Hallowed Voice’s own words about succession to say she wasn’t ready, which meant she intended to remain exactly where she was, which was beside someone who was heading toward the Lands of Demons to retrieve his mother’s soul from the hand of the Demon Emperor.

She was going to follow him.

The Hallowed Voice shook his head slowly in the privacy of his own thoughts.

They truly did not know what was coming. The Covenant didn’t know, the Dominion didn’t know, the Obsidian Throne didn’t know, and the demons beyond the River of the World who had sent five Dukes as reconnaissance and lost all five to a young man definitely didn’t know.

The Lands of Stone were about to receive an education in what the last heir of the Vakochev bloodline had become while everyone was busy deciding he was safely dead.

He looked at the titanic young man working through his seventh grimoire and exhaled very quietly.

What a thing to still be alive to witness.