The capital of the Dominion of Crimson Stone spread beneath them, and it felt like nothing Damian remembered.

He had known this place. He had been carried through its streets as a child and had later walked them himself, had learned the names of its towers and its districts and its gates the way a prince was taught the names of things that would one day belong to him. The Citadel of the Eternal Crimson at its center had been a place he passed through with his father, whose hand had been large and warm and present in a way that the city below him now was not. He had known this place.

It was foreign to him now.

The crimson light that pulsed from every surface had always been there, but he hadn’t understood what it meant when he was young. He understood it now. It was a city that had remade itself around a different kind of power in eight years, and the remaking had been thorough enough that the thing standing below him bore only the architectural bones of the place he had known and nothing else.

He made himself stop thinking about what it used to be.

On the walls, hundreds of warriors had their Land and Sky Physiques activated, their forms shifted and blazing in the dark as they searched the night sky with the apprehension of people who had been watching towers fall and had correctly concluded that whatever was falling them was approaching. They were varied and considerable.

One warrior on the eastern wall had taken a form that was half-human and half something with scales that shimmered like black oil, her body radiating cold Mana that turned the air around her to frost. Another burned with volcanic light, his frame wrapped in slowly moving rock that glowed molten at the joints. A third had no visible transformation at all but produced a distortion in the space around him that bent the light nearby in ways that told Damian the Physique was working inward rather than outward.

There were more. Many more.

And threaded through all of them, between and beneath the cultivated auras of the Dominion warriors standing on those walls, Damian could sense the Demons.

They weren’t visible. They had chosen concealment, tucked into shadows and pressed against stone, their auras muted by whatever technique demons used when they didn’t want to announce themselves. But his Primeval senses registered the vileness of them anyway, that specific wrongness that pressed against clean Mana the way rot pressed against healthy wood, and he found them distributed across the walls and the towers and the structures near the Citadel’s heart with the practiced thoroughness of beings that had been integrating themselves into a human military for a long time.

His home.

Demons in his home.

He stopped that line of thinking before it produced heat he didn’t want to spend yet. There would be time for heat. The night was not yet done providing opportunities for it!

Beside him, Serala floated in the dark with her wings spread and her eyes moving across the walls below them, cataloging what she found there with the systematic focus the Covenant had spent years developing in her.

"How," she said, her voice quiet enough to stay between them, "will we go about it?"

Damian looked at the walls. He looked at the hundreds of Physique-activated warriors, at the Demons hiding between them, at the Citadel of the Eternal Crimson with its cyclopean obsidian walls and the crimson light pulsing from its highest tower.

"Straight on," he said.

...!

Straight on.

Serala’s eyes shone, because she had spent enough time beside him to understand that his most straightforward statements were always his most serious ones.

Damian stepped forward in the sky.

He reached inward and pulled on all three Land and Sky Physiques simultaneously. The Noble Simba Lineage answered first, sovereign and golden and immediate. The Wings of the Radiant Dawn followed, white-gold light blazing through the tattoos on his arms and spreading upward through the wings of verdant-blue flame that had been dormant since the flight here. The Primordial Beast Sovereignty added its own ancient weight beneath both. And above all of it, answering the pull of his intent, the Solar Sovereignty capability of the Wings of the Radiant Dawn ignited, and the sun, which had set hours ago and had no business participating in the events of this particular night, participated anyway. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

Rivers of solar light formed around his body.

They poured, flowing outward from his body in streams that found each other and merged and built a shape around him that was recognizably humanoid and completely impossible, a figure made of living daylight hanging in the sky above a city built on darkness, the brilliance of it so complete that every shadow within the capital’s walls was erased simultaneously.

The walls themselves, the towers, the streets, the Citadel of the Eternal Crimson, all of it was illuminated with the flat total clarity of high noon while the sky above remained dark, the darkness above and the impossible daylight below creating a division that made the source of the light unmistakable to everyone looking up.

HUUM!

On the walls, the concealed Demons moved.

They pulled back from the light the way things pulled back from fire when fire had opinions about them, their muted auras flickering with something that was not strategy but reflex, the involuntary recoil of corruption encountering purification at an intensity it hadn’t anticipated. Several of them abandoned their positions entirely, retreating inward toward the Citadel.

The warriors on the walls stared upward, and their Physique-activated forms held position with the discipline of people who were afraid and had decided to be afraid while standing rather than afraid while running, because running from something that bright and that large was simply not a calculation that ended well.

Damian looked ahead.

He looked at the Citadel of the Eternal Crimson at the center of his father’s stolen capital, and his voice carried outward on Mana that didn’t ask permission to reach every ear within the walls.

"Oh, Murderous Saint." His voice was even. Calm!

The calm of deep water with a current at its bottom that moved very fast and very deliberately. "Oh, Uncle."

The capital listened.

"I, Damian Vakochev, have returned to seek vengeance and retribution for the murder of my father. I have come to bring back honor to someone who has none."

He let that settle across the walls and streets and plazas and into the Citadel itself for exactly one breath.

"Come out, you fucking rat."

...!

BOOM!

The rivers of solar light around him held steady, and the capital of the Dominion of Crimson Stone stood illuminated beneath the dark sky while every being within its walls understood, that the night had stopped being something it had been and become something else entirely!