The information the Hallowed Voice had provided was comprehensive and far too much, and most of it was scattered across records written from different perspectives across different years, some in the Hallowed Voice’s own precise hand, others in the more urgent script of Holy Women recording events as they unfolded, others still in the clipped notations of Paladins who had witnessed things they weren’t entirely sure how to describe.

It made sense. The records had to be made by someone.

Damian spent several hours working through them methodically, building understanding the way he built everything, from the foundation outward, stopping whenever a gap appeared and turning to the Hallowed Voice to fill it. The shrewd old man proved genuinely useful in these moments, setting aside whatever discomfort Damian’s proximity seemed to produce in him and answering each question with the precision of someone who had been holding this knowledge for decades and was relieved to finally hand some of it to a person capable of doing something with it.

What emerged from those hours was a picture larger than anything Damian had been carrying.

The regions they occupied, the Covenant and the Dominion and the Obsidian Throne and the territories between them, were tiny fractions of a landscape so vast that the word vast didn’t adequately contain it. The empires nearby were what they knew because they were what they had explored, and the demons beyond the River of the World were what they feared because they were what had come to find them.

But there were almost certainly other empires out there in directions no expedition from the Three Pillars had ever ventured, other powers that had been building themselves across the same ages without ever encountering the people who were currently treating their small corner of the Lands of Stone as the entire world.

And above all of it, not anchored to the ground at all, the Ancestral Celestials sat on Sacred Floating Islands that drifted through the distant sky like continents that had decided the earth was beneath them.

Not their Sacred Mountains. Not elevated ground. Islands that floated, masses of land suspended in the sky through mechanisms that the records described only as beyond current understanding, which the Hallowed Voice had quietly clarified meant beyond anyone below the Ninth Circle’s understanding.

Damian thought about this.

He thought about it for a moment, and then he had a thought that he was reasonably certain the Hallowed Voice would not appreciate if he voiced it aloud. He was already thinking about it, though, so he let it run its course through his Primeval mind and examined it without the filter of caution.

He had the Cradle of First Flames. Dozens of miles now of transformed paradise, World Trees rising a mile or more into the sky, rivers running clean through earth that had been dead stone a handful of days ago. He had already raised a mountain within it with his blood and Mana. He had his consciousness woven through miles long cloud that drifted above him wherever he went. He already existed partly in the sky.

What if he simply raised the Cradle itself?

Not a mountain within it. The Cradle. The whole thing, the Purple Stone Tribe and the World Trees and the Spring of First Waters and and all the people currently living within it, lifted from the ground and elevated into the sky the way the Ancestral Celestials had elevated their domains.

Would that make him one of them?

He turned the question over and found, somewhat alarmingly, that he didn’t think it would be all that difficult. His Second Doctrine extended his blood-connection to his entire environment, and he could already feel the Cradle as an extension of his body across the distance separating them. His consciousness permeated the cloud above him with minimal effort. The mechanics of what he was imagining were different in scale from what he had already done but not categorically different in kind.

He was still examining this thought when the Hallowed Voice sighed.

"The Lands of Stone are vast," the old man said, setting aside the text he had been referencing and folding his hands in his lap, "and every single creature within them is simply looking for a way to live and be happy. And yet we build designations around each other, we go to war with one another, we create enemies on all sides, and still we fight amongst ourselves." He looked at Damian with the kind eyes that held sharp things behind them.

"Which makes me want to ask you something. The empire that was taken from your father. There are likely demons holding the hands of the Murderous Saint in the capital that you used to call home."

The Hallowed Voice let the statement settle for a breath.

"What will you do about the man directly responsible for the death of your father and for your Ama being taken to the Lands of Demons?"

Damian’s eyes went cold.

"Stone returns to stone," he said, and his voice was quiet and deliberate.

"Dust returns to dust. Earth takes back what it made, and the grave holds no rank. That is what awaits him."

He paused, and when he continued, the quietness left his voice was dangerous.

"I used to sit on that man’s lap as he smiled and played with me while he was in a meeting with my father." The words came out flat, each one placed with care.

"He bounced me on his knee. He called me by name. He looked my father in the eyes across the table while knowing what he had already planned." His hands rested on the text before him, still. "For him to do what he did, I want to break his knees. I want to shatter his limbs and open up his belly to see just what gave him the guts to betray and do what he did."

His wing-shaped pupils burned.

"I want to see. I want to see."

BOOM!

The Mana in the Sacred Hall moved.

It didn’t explode outward the way Mana moved during a combat technique or a deliberate cultivation exercise. It radiated, slowly, continuously, pressing outward from Damian’s body in waves that he wasn’t consciously producing, the way heat radiated from stone that had been sitting in direct sunlight for hours. The air around him thickened with it, and the temperature in the room climbed by a degree that had nothing to do with warmth.

Damian didn’t notice.

He was looking at the text in front of him and not seeing it, his mind occupied with a face he hadn’t let himself think about directly for eight summers, a man with a politician’s smile who had bounced a prince on his knee while planning that prince’s extinction. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

The Hallowed Voice noticed.

The old man’s sharp eyes tracked the radiating aura, and what he measured made him swallow once, carefully, without drawing attention to it. Then he took a step back.

Then, with the unhurried dignity of a man who was definitely not being cautious, he took another step back, and one more after that, until a distance existed between himself and Damian that the Sacred Hall’s dimensions technically permitted but that no conversational logic had required.

The old man’s bright eyes stayed fixed on the young titan sitting at the table, who was still looking at a text he wasn’t reading, still radiating something that pressed against the walls of the Cathedral itself and made the rivers of Mana flowing through the carved channels outside pulse in nervous response!