Hours had passed since the Covenant of the First Stone shook under the weight of what had occurred within its white walls.

Night had settled over the Citadel, and in that darkness, two figures floated in the sky above the Cathedral of the First Dawn and lit the dark better than the stars behind them. Damian’s beast body remained above the floating Cradle far away, but his human form burned here, verdant tattoos pulsing against the night air, wing-shaped pupils blazing with blue-gold and green light that threw the white towers of the Covenant into sharp relief below.

Beside him, Serala’s white-gold and verdant wings held their full span, the threads of evolved radiance woven through each feather glowing in the darkness with the steady warmth of something that had decided it was permanent.

They looked like something carved into the sky.

Below them, the Covenant had stopped mourning and started moving.

Hundreds of thousands of people filled the Citadel’s plazas and streets in formations that were still being organized but were undeniably real. Paladins stood in ranked columns with Mana blazing from their frames, their white and gold armaments catching the light that descended from the two figures above.

Holy Women moved among them as leaders, directing traffic with the focused efficiency of people who had been training for a war they hoped would never come and were now running the opening drills. Behind the warriors stood everyone else, men and women and those whose Mana hadn’t yet been cultivated into anything deployable, holding stone-tipped spears and sinew-strung bows with the expressions of people who understood they might die and had decided to come anyway.

A vessel moved through the night air toward Damian and Serala.

It was built from stone and cloud, the two materials bonded together in a way that should have been structurally absurd but held with the solidity of a Sacred Mountain, its surface carved with Covenant inscriptions that glowed faintly in the dark. The reigns connecting the vessel to its escorts were thick braided sinew, and the creatures pulling them were enormous, their bodies shimmering with Mana, their single horns catching starlight while their vast feathered wings beat in slow powerful strokes that moved the vessel forward with the smooth inevitability of something not used to being stopped.

The Hallowed Voice stood at the front of the vessel.

The ring of Ninth Circle Mana above his head turned steadily in the night air. He looked vigorous in a way he hadn’t looked in decades, and the Saint of Stone stood at his shoulder, her own transformation evident in the broader frame and the verdant tattoos now running down her arms, though she hadn’t reached the Ninth Circle the way the Hallowed Voice had.

Around them, powerful Holy Women and Paladins and Imperators of the Covenant filled the vessel’s deck with the organized energy of people waiting on a word.

The Hallowed Voice leaned toward Damian with the urgency of a man who had something important to communicate before time ran out.

"Will you really not wait for all of us?" he said, and his tone had the particular quality of someone who understood the answer but wasn’t ready to accept it yet. "We have to lead this army. We can’t simply leave them behind."

Damian shook his head.

"It would take too long." His wing-shaped pupils found the Hallowed Voice’s bright eyes directly. "We go ahead in the night so the Murderous Saint doesn’t have much time to prepare. The goal is to take him down and any demons within the Dominion of Crimson Stone. After that, your forces arrive to stabilize. Then we head to the River of the World."

...!

His mind was made up. The tone communicated it clearly, not as a negotiating position but as a thing already decided, the conversation happening out of courtesy.

The Hallowed Voice held his gaze for a moment, then exhaled and nodded. The ring above his head pulsed once.

"I will have everyone set off right away. I wish you glory, Young Vakochev."

Damian looked at him for a breath.

Then he turned to Serala.

She was already looking toward the vessel, and she raised her hand toward the Saint of Stone, a clean unhurried wave that carried everything a student communicated to a teacher she was leaving behind. The Saint of Stone caught the wave and held it in her expression for a moment before nodding once.

Damian reached out and pulled Serala away from the vessel.

Their bodies compressed the air, Mana concentrating inward in the fraction of a heartbeat before the threshold, and then they crossed it. Sound cracked outward from where they had been standing, a shockwave rolling across the Covenant’s rooftops and pressing against the assembled armies below and rattling the windows of the Cathedral of the First Dawn, light and heat blooming in the shape of two figures that were already gone before the blast reached the outer wall.

The night sky above the Covenant held only the fading impression of where they had been.

The Hallowed Voice looked at the empty sky. The ring above his head turned.

"Right then," he said.

Below him, the armies of the Covenant began to move.

---

<On the Necessity of Blood: A Fragment Without Attribution>

There are those who say war is the failure of peace, that every blade drawn represents a choice that wiser minds would not have made, that the lands painted red are proof of what we could not build rather than what we chose to destroy. They have warm fires and call themselves righteous, and they are wholly wrong.

Some wrongs do not yield to conversation. Some corruptions have grown too deep for the light of reason to reach. Some powers will not release what they have taken because it is in their nature to hold, and the only language that reaches nature is force.

War is not the failure of peace.

War is the price of change.

The Lands of Stone have never been remade by those who waited patiently for the powerful to become generous. They have been remade by those who understood that the calculus of history runs on a single currency, that blood spilled in the cause of what must be is not waste but investment. Peace built on the bones of an unchanged order is not peace. It is stillness wearing peace’s name, and stillness serves only those who benefit from nothing moving.

When blood paints the Lands of Stone red, the world has the opportunity to be rebuilt differently than it was before. The old structures collapse. The old hierarchies lose the terror that sustained them. The old arrangements between power and powerlessness are renegotiated in the only forum they were ever going to be renegotiated in.

War is not good.

But sometimes war is necessary, and the distinction between those two things is the difference between wisdom and sentiment.

Some wars must occur. Some blood must fall. Some fires must burn everything down before what should have been there all along can be built in its place.

The peacemakers who refuse to understand this have simply decided that the suffering of those ground beneath the current order is a price worth paying for their own comfort.

War was not evil.

War was a vessel for change.

— Author unknown