The crimson cloud rose from the center of the Citadel and moved toward them across the illuminated sky.

Damian watched it come. He registered its Mana signature, the Imperators on it, the Demons flanking it, the figure of the Murderous Saint standing at its edge with boisterous laughter already building in his chest. He registered all of it in the first half-second of the cloud’s approach, cataloged it, filed it against what he already knew, and then his eyes found what was at the front of the cloud and the cataloging stopped.

The armor he recognized immediately.

He had been six years old the last time he saw it worn correctly, but a child’s memory held certain things with a precision that no amount of years could degrade, and his father’s armor was one of those things. The deep crimson and black of it, the inscriptions along the pauldrons that Empress Vakochev had commissioned for their third anniversary, the way the chest-piece caught light and threw it back in a particular pattern that had been specific to the man who wore it. He knew that armor.

What wore it now was not his father.

The body was old. It should have deteriorated, should have been dust and dried bone with nothing to distinguish it from any other thing the earth had swallowed across eight years. But demonic energy had been poured into it, dense and wrong and visible as a bilious light in the joints between the armor plates, and that energy had given the corpse something that should not have been possible to give. Not life. Not cognizance.

There was nothing in those eyes that recognized anything, nothing that thought or chose or remembered. But there was movement, and there was a terrible semblance of the man who had once filled that armor, a shape that was his father’s shape wearing his father’s armor and howling at the sky with the maddened vacancy of something that had been given energy without being given purpose.

The howl was wrong in every way a sound could be wrong.

Oh.

Oh!

Damian’s existence buzzed.

The rage came up through him from a place he hadn’t known existed until the moment he needed it to, rising fast and without warning, bypassing every layer of calculation and control that his Primeval mind had spent hours developing and refusing to be filtered by any of it. He had been angry before. He had felt cold fury when he killed Sir Alex, and hot fury when he saw the Demons in the Covenant, and the particular fury of a son given purpose by his father’s spirit above the Cradle!

He had thought he understood the range of what his anger could be.

He had not understood.

How could he. How could the Murderous Saint desecrate the dead?! How could he reach into the earth where his father’s body had been placed and pull it back out and fill it with demonic filth and stand behind it laughing while it howled at the sky?!

How could any being that had ever called itself human do this thing and stand on a cloud above a stolen empire and laugh about it?!

The Murderous Saint’s voice reached him across the illuminated sky.

"Is it truly you, Little Vakochev?" The laugh was enormous, unrestrained, a laugh that had no concern for what it was laughing at or who was listening. "If it is, I have brought a grand welcome party. Your father, in the flesh!"

...!

Damian’s entire consciousness narrowed to a single point.

He did not reach for the Noble Simba Lineage. He did not reach for the Wings of the Radiant Dawn, or the Primordial Beast Sovereignty, or the Solar Sovereignty he had used to illuminate this city moments ago. He did not reach for any of the Land and Sky Physiques because what lived in him at this moment was not something that operated on the scale of Physiques, and he knew it without knowing how he knew it.

He reached for the Primordial Tongue.

He had always met the Tongue on its terms. He had heard it when it chose to speak, received the Letters it chose to give, spoken them when the time was right and accepted what they produced. He had never gone to it. He had never demanded from it. The thought of doing so had never occurred to him as a genuine option because the Primordial Tongue had always felt like something that responded to what he was rather than something he could grab by the throat and shake until it gave him what he needed.

He grabbed it by the throat now!

He screamed inward at the space where Persevere and Exelissomai lived, at the space of endless flames where the deeper resonance of his power had always come from, and what he felt was not a polite inquiry or a cultivated request.

’Give me something. Anything to punish this tremendous injustice before me.’

’GIVE ME SOMETHING!’

HUUM!

He squeezed his entire existence around that demand with the force of a son looking at his father’s desecrated corpse and finding nothing left in him that was willing to wait!

BOOM!

His chest split open.

The skin and muscle separated down the center of his torso and what was behind it was not organs and bone but stellar obsidian brilliance, a darkness that was somehow also light, a depth that went further inward than his body had any right to contain, pouring outward from within him in slow silent waves that pressed against the illuminated sky and changed its color wherever they touched.

Above them, the sky split.

Not metaphorically. The actual sky above the capital of the Dominion of Crimson Stone came apart at a seam that had not existed a moment before, and through the gap, something looked down that was not a star and was not the Demon Emperor’s eye and was not anything Damian had a word for yet. The gap was narrow and absolute, the edges of it clean, and the light coming through it was obsidian-bright, which should not have been possible and was.

The Murderous Saint looked up.

The Demons flanking him looked up. The Imperators on the cloud looked up. Every warrior on every wall of the capital looked up, because the sky opening above them was not something any of them had encountered in a context where looking away seemed like an option.

Beside Damian, Serala trembled.

He felt it more than he saw it. She was close enough that the edges of what was pouring out of him reached her, and her reaction was not fear exactly, but the involuntary response of a body encountering something her existence had not been calibrated to remain calm in the presence of. She looked at him.

His eyes had turned entirely obsidian.

No whites. No wing-shaped pupils burning verdant-blue. No iris. Just obsidian, deep and grand and completely without the warmth they had held when they found hers minutes ago. They were not cruel eyes. They were not the eyes of something that had stopped being itself. They were the eyes of something that had become more itself than it had ever been, and the more was the part that made them terrifying.

Words formed in the air before him.

|You have persevered and finally demanded access to what you were born with.|

|THE Primordial Tongue was the door, and it is now open. Past it, THE Primordial Source exists. You have tapped into THE Primordial Source. Your existence is transforming into something else entirely.|

...!

The stellar obsidian brilliance continued to pour from his chest, and the gap in the sky above the capital continued to look down, and the howling of his father’s desecrated corpse on the cloud below was the only sound that cut through the silence that had fallen across the Dominion of Crimson Stone.

Damian heard it.

He heard it clearly!

And he looked down at the Murderous Saint with obsidian eyes that held nothing except the certainty of what came next...which was instant decimation!