The water of the River of the World was cold.

It was a deep structural cold that existed independently of temperature. Damian crouched at the bank and pressed his fingers into it and heard them immediately.

Voices.

Sounds that had once been voices and had been in the River long enough to forget what words were for, pressing against his Primeval senses with the desperation of things that recognized a living presence and reached toward it.

They came from everywhere in the water simultaneously, layered over each other until they became a texture rather than individual sounds.

He pulled his hand back.

His eyes shone with surprise he hadn’t anticipated feeling.

Beside him, Serala floated over the water rather than touching the bank, her white-gold and verdant wings spread, and she reached down and let her fingers brush the River’s surface with careful attention.

"My teacher told me about the River before we left," she said, her eyes on the black water. "She said the demons emerged from it. That the existences that sank into it and were changed by it eventually gathered enough of themselves to crawl out onto the other side, and they formed their first tribes there on those shores." Her fingers lifted from the water.

"She said those tribes became what they are now across thousands of years of accumulation."

The other side.

Damian’s eyes sharpened.

He straightened his body and looked at the River’s far edge, too distant to see clearly but present in his Primeval perception as a change in the quality of everything on that side of the water. The crimson earth. The absence of the green the Lands of Stone took for granted. The heat that built and kept building.

His mother was on that side.

"Let’s go," he said.

They crossed.

The River was wider than it appeared from the bank, which was something it seemed to do deliberately, expanding under sustained attention until the far side receded rather than approached.

The rushing of the water was louder at the center, the sound of something that had been running this course for eons.

A wide boatlike structure appeared beneath them at the River’s midpoint.

It was wide and flat-bottomed, built from dark timber that had been sealed with something that made it look like hardened skin, and it moved against the current with the efficiency of something that had been making this crossing long enough to understand the River’s patterns.

The figures on it were broad and muscular, their bodies built for the kind of labor that involved lifting and hauling and resisting things that pushed back, and their faces were wrong. Pig-faced. Wide nostrils and small eyes and flat teeth visible in the open mouths that turned upward as the boat’s occupants registered two radiant figures flying directly above them.

One of them shrieked.

The bell was mounted at the ship’s center mast, and the demon that reached it hit it with the full force of a body built for impact, and the sound that went out across the River was a deep booming toll that the water carried in every direction simultaneously, an alarm designed to reach both shores and every vessel between them!

Damian looked down.

He had told his father he would scorch the demons from existence, so...

He reached for solar flames.

What came was not solar.

The flames that formed in his palm were obsidian, shot through with the stellar light of the Primordial Source that had been open in him since the Dominion, and they moved with a hunger that the solar flames he had wielded before had not carried.

Where solar flames burned with the purifying heat of a thing that destroyed corruption on principle, these burned with the particular intensity of something that had identified its target and intended to leave nothing behind worth discussing!

He brought his hand down.

The obsidian flames reached the boat in the space between one breath and the next, and every demon they touched turned to ash with a speed that left no room for anything else. Not screaming, not fighting...nothing!

Contact and then ash, drifting outward over the black water in grey clouds that the River’s current dispersed before they reached the surface.

The ship burned for three seconds and then it was gone.

They flew on.

The second vessel appeared closer to the River’s far edge, larger, carrying more demons and more cargo and a bell that was already being rung by the time Damian and Serala came into its sight, because the first bell had done its job.

The pig-faced demons on this one were organized in a way the first vessel’s occupants hadn’t been, roaring orders at each other and taking positions along the rails with weapons that would have been meaningful against most things they encountered.

Several of them, calculating something their instincts had clearly provided but their discipline had failed to override, threw themselves into the River’s black water rather than wait to discover what was coming for them.

Damian watched them hit the water and did not look away.

The River took them immediately, the current pulling them under. Their voices, which had been panicked and purposeful a moment ago, became part of the texture he had heard when he put his hand in the water at the bank. He understood now why the texture was so dense!

He raised his hand.

The obsidian flames came again, and the second vessel followed the first.

Two more crossings brought two more vessels and two more alarms and two more clouds of ash dispersing over the inky water, and with each one, Damian moved forward without slowing, his obsidian-edged eyes fixed on the far bank that was finally close enough to see clearly.

The crimson earth. The glass-edged mountains. The sky above it that was the color of old blood.

Then he frowned.

From the skies above the area ahead...clouds parted as...a radiant boar descended!

The boat was small and white-gold, which was wrong for everything on this side of the River, and it sat in the air above the water rather than on it, which was also wrong for vessels in general.

Three presences occupied it.

He felt them before he could see the figures themselves.

Two of them exceeded the Nine Circles entirely.

The third.

He knew the third!

He had felt that aura through the crack in the sky above the Covenant of the First Stone when the eye had appeared and stripped the solar chains from his captured Demon Dukes and sent them home!

He had watched the Hallowed Voice spend a Sacred Ancestral Bone holding it back.

The Demon Emperor!

This fucker actually came out to greet him?

On a small white-gold boat with two beings who exceeded the Nine Circles.

The voice came before he could fully process the configuration, dropping down from the boat with heaviness.

"Little Friend."

It was warm. That was the first thing that was wrong about it. It was the voice of someone who had found the whole situation more interesting than threatening.

"The Demons are a protected species by the Ancestral Celestials. You have come far..."

A pause, brief and deliberate.

"...But turn around for now."

...!