Countless thoughts rotated through his mind, but underneath all of them, one idea had been quietly taking shape since the Hallowed Voice had finished telling him about Ancestral Celestials and the vastness of the Lands of Stone.

He had enemies in every direction and few allies of the kind that would matter when those enemies came calling. Masamuk and The Noble Simba delegation was useful. Uncle Adam and Grandmother Essun were his. But when he thought about what lay ahead, about the Murderous Saint and the Demon Emperor and whatever sat above both of them on scales he was only beginning to understand, he found himself thinking about the one kind of resource that could change the weaving of any conflict.

Power on his side that nobody expected.

He was about to say something to the Hallowed Voice when his eyes moved to the door of the Sacred Hall.

Serala walked in first, her white-gold and verdant wings folded behind her, her expression carrying the particular mixture of exasperation and resignation that belonged to someone who had tried to talk another person out of something and had failed entirely. Behind her came the Saint of Stone.

She was awake and upright and moving with the energy of a woman whose body had been fully restored and whose mind had arrived back from unconsciousness with several grievances already queued up and ready for delivery.

Her eyes found Damian immediately, and she came across the Sacred Hall toward him.

She stopped in front of him and pointed.

"You," she said, and her voice carried the clipped authority of a teacher who had spent years making her displeasure heard clearly. "What did you do to my disciple? I have taught this girl for years. When I look at her now, her body and existence seem primed to achieve hundreds of times more than I could have ever hoped she would achieve under my guidance." She kept the finger pointed at him. "But she no longer wants to continue my lessons. She wants to go along with you. What did you do to my disciple?"

...!

The old woman was half serious and half exasperated, the expression of someone who hadn’t fully committed to outrage but felt the situation warranted at least a formal airing of grievances.

She was still finishing her last sentence when the Hallowed Voice materialized between her and Damian with a speed that his performed injury had absolutely not suggested he was capable of.

He stood in front of the Saint of Stone with an ashen expression, his eyes communicating a single urgent message directly into her face.

Could she not feel it? Could she genuinely not sense the terrifying level of power the young prince had been radiating? Was she prepared to point fingers at that?

The Saint of Stone blinked at him.

Damian looked between the Saint of Stone and Serala, who stood off to the side while looking down shyly. He thought about Serala as he looked at her.

He couldn’t say he was smitten. That wasn’t quite the right word for it. But he could say with certainty that he liked how she moved between gentleness and fury with the ease. He liked that she spoke about the Saint of Stone with the same voice she used when she declared judgment upon corrupt Anointed Ones, warmth and coldness existing in her simultaneously without one diminishing the other.

She was beautiful. He was a man, and men liked beauty, and he saw no reason to be dishonest about that. He also liked...how it felt when he tasted her lips.

So if she wished to continue along with him, this was naturally something he wanted as well.

But the Saint of Stone’s issue was worth taking seriously. She was looking at him with the grievance of someone who had invested years into a student and was watching that investment walk out the door, and the heart of her objection was the possibilities she saw in Serala, all the heights she might reach, the power she might attain, and the fear that following this unknown young man would diminish those possibilities rather than expand them.

It was, Damian reflected, a concern that went in exactly the direction he had already been thinking. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

He had induced evolution in Serala. He had done it for Uncle Adam and Grandmother Essun. He could do the same thing for the Saint of Stone and for the man currently standing between them as if he were acting as a human shield.

He looked at the Saint of Stone, and then at the Hallowed Voice, and he said it simply because simple was the most accurate way to say it.

"The same transformation and power Serala was able to gain, I can induce that for both of you as well." His wing-shaped pupils moved to the Hallowed Voice specifically. "Old man, you may potentially be able to step into the Ninth Circle."

BOOM!

The words landed in the Sacred Hall with the casual weight of something that should not have been said casually, and both the Saint of Stone and the Hallowed Voice turned toward him with the synchronized incredulity of people who had just heard a sentence their minds were refusing to fully process.

Serala walked to Damian’s side without hesitation.

The Saint of Stone began to shake her head, the slow disbelieving motion of a woman who had spent her life understanding what was and wasn’t possible and was preparing to say so clearly.

The Hallowed Voice’s palm appeared over her mouth again.

His bright eyes were fixed on Damian, and they held an expression that had abandoned all pretense of the wise and measured elder he had been performing for the last several hours.

"Young Vakochev," he said, and his voice carried the careful dignity of a man who was actively suppressing enthusiasm that he considered unseemly for his station and wasn’t fully succeeding, "I volunteer as tribute."

He extended his free hand toward Damian, palm up, arm fully outstretched across the distance between them. "Let this old man go first. What do you need me to do? Do you need to touch me again? Here, here is my hand. Take it. Take it!"

...!

He moved the extended hand slightly closer, then slightly closer again, then took a small step toward Damian while keeping his other palm firmly over the Saint of Stone’s mouth!

The Saint of Stone’s eyes above that palm expressed several things simultaneously!

Disbelief. The specific concern of a woman watching someone she respected behave in a way that suggested the years had taken more from him than previously accounted for. And a dawning suspicion that she had woken from her coma into a world that had developed some new form of collective madness while she was unconscious.

Damian stood up from the table.

He crossed the distance between himself and the Hallowed Voice calmly, reached out, and placed his hand on the old man’s shoulder rather than taking the extended hand, which he felt was a more dignified arrangement for all involved. The Hallowed Voice’s bright eyes followed the hand to his shoulder with an expression suggesting he would have accepted any point of contact and was not particular about the specifics.

Damian looked at him for a moment, then looked at the Sacred Hall around them, then spoke.

"Exelissomai."

BOOM!

"Exelissomai."

BOOM!

"Exelissomai."

BOOM!

Verdant-gold flames erupted from Damian’s hand and surged into the Hallowed Voice’s body with a force that turned the air in the Sacred Hall from a normal atmosphere into something actively participating in what was happening.

The flames didn’t merely spread through the old man’s frame the way they had spread through Uncle Adam and Grandmother Essun. They moved with the accumulated force of three consecutive utterances stacked on each other, waves of evolutionary power crashing against the foundations of the Hallowed Voice’s existence in rapid succession before the first had finished doing its work!

The rivers of Mana around the Cathedral surged in response.

They didn’t merely pulse! Oh! They roared, white and gold currents rising from their carved channels and flooding the air above the Cathedral in visible waves that could be seen from the streets below, the sacred energy of the Covenant responding to something happening within it that exceeded every parameter the Cathedral had been designed to contain.

The walls of the Sacred Hall vibrated. The stone tiles of the floor glowed faintly with the overflow of verdant radiance pouring out of the Hallowed Voice’s body as his existence began to change from the inside out.

The Saint of Stone took three rapid steps backward.

The Hallowed Voice made a sound that was not in the vocabulary of Eighth Circle masters and probably shouldn’t have been, his eyes going wide, his body beginning to transform in ways that his plain white robes were clearly not going to survive intact.

A transformation was beginning.

By the time it was done, something terrifying would bloom in its place!