<On The Way of All Things: A Fragment Found in the Ruins of an Unnamed Tribe>

Every existence that walks the Lands of Stone follows a Way, whether it knows this or not. The warrior who dedicates his life to battle follows a Way as surely as the healer who refuses to let a single patient die in her care. The ruler who builds empires follows a Way as surely as the hermit who builds nothing and tends only to himself. The demon beyond the River follows a Way as surely as the Ancestor who watches from beyond the veil.

What separates those who live gloriously from those who live as footnotes is not which Way they chose. Peace and war are both legitimate Ways. Building and destroying are both legitimate Ways. The scales do not favor one Way over another by virtue of its nature alone.

What matters is conviction.

To follow a Way with half a heart is to follow no Way at all. To choose a path and then hesitate at every stone is to confess that the path was never truly chosen. Only those who follow their chosen Way to its extreme, who press forward when the Lands of Stone push back, who refuse to let the turning of seasons or the weight of opposition bend their conviction into compromise, only those can attain the glorious enlightenment that waits at the end of a Way truly walked.

The Lands of Stone do not reward the hesitant. They never have. They never will.

Choose your Way. Then follow it until it is finished with you or you are finished with it. There is no third option worth taking.

— Author unknown, found carved into the walls of ruins predating any known empire

---

Damian landed on the Cradle of First Flames with the slow deliberateness of something too large and too heavy to arrive any other way, his massive beast body settling onto the grass with a weight that pressed deep prints into the earth. The World Trees rose around him, their canopies burning with a richer light at this elevation, and he took a moment to simply look.

Dozens of miles of transformed paradise, his in every sense that mattered, floating in the open sky above the cloud layer while the scintillating blue-Mana serpents roiled along the underside in ancient coiling patterns. The periphery of the landmass ended in clean edges where earth gave way to open air, and beyond those edges, the sky extended in every direction without obstruction. The Lands of Stone spread below the cloud layer, visible in fragments through gaps in the vapor, distant and small and unaware.

He let the moment breathe as he took everything in.

Uncle Adam came to him across the grass.

The old warrior moved with a body that had been transformed twice over now, his frame fuller and stronger than it had any right to be for his years, the verdant tattoos on his arms pulsing steadily in the Mana-rich air. His weathered face carried an amazement that he hadn’t fully learned to conceal yet, and when he reached Damian’s beast form and looked up at those enormous verdant-blue eyes, his knees began to bend.

Damian sent a tendril of Mana out before the kneel could complete itself, gentle but firm, and it stopped Uncle Adam mid-descent and held him standing.

"You never have to kneel to me," Damian said.

Uncle Adam straightened. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of eight summers compressed into a handful of words.

"I never once stopped believing the lineage of Vakochev would rise again." His jaw worked for a moment. "But I will not pretend I always believed I would live to see it. I am proud, Young Lugal. Proud of everything you have become and more. You have my loyalty, you have my service."

He stood straight, the old salute of the Vakochev Empire forming in his posture without him seeming to consciously decide to put it there. "I will follow you till the day I die."

...!

Damian was quiet for a moment, and something in his expression softened.

"None of that," he said finally, his voice carrying the same quietness it had when he had told Uncle Adam he would come back. "You were by my side during the hard times. Now you will enjoy the good ones alongside them." His wing-shaped pupils burned steadily.

"We have much to do. The next part is to strip the Murderous Saint of his power. I will seek answers at the Dominion of Crimson Stone before making my way to the River of the World to scorch demons from existence."

BOOM!

The words fell across the floating Cradle with the gravity of a declaration that had been forming since the night of Ancestral Communion. Uncle Adam absorbed them with a single heavy nod.

Then a bouncing shape approached from the direction of the Beast Delegation.

Masamuk moved across the grass with the distinctive energy of someone who had been sent ahead by a larger group that lacked the courage to approach itself. His obsidian body pulsed vibrantly, the stellar blue points across his form blazing with the accumulated strength he had been gaining every time Damian spoke Persevere, and his crimson eyes held the particular expression of a being delivering news he wasn’t entirely sure how to frame.

"So...." he said, "the Beast Delegation is perhaps a little too frightened to ask directly, but the other Royal Beast Lineages that were sent messages are converging at the original location below." He gestured downward through the clouds with a small tendril of Mana.

"How exactly will they be able to reach us up here?"

Damian looked down.

The clouds below the Cradle obscured the ground, and beyond those clouds, somewhere in the distant Threshold Lands, delegations of Noble Beasts from lineages across the Sacred Mountains were arriving at a location that no longer had a landmass sitting on it.

Beside him, Uncle Adam frowned with the focused expression of a practical man working through a practical problem.

"If only there were a set of stairs," he mumbled.

...!

A set of stairs.

From the floating Cradle of First Flames to the ground below.

Damian’s eyes shone.

The idea arrived fully formed, carrying a logic so clean he was surprised it had taken this long to present itself. He had raised a mountain with his blood. He had raised an entire landmass with his Mana and his will. He had his consciousness threaded through clouds, through earth, through the entire domain of the Cradle itself.

Stairs were, by comparison, embarrassingly straightforward!