The skies buzzed!

A second later, Serala appeared beside Damian.

She landed in the crater with force that cracked the already broken stone further, her white-gold and verdant wings spread wide, her eyes defiant and livid as she stared up at the monstrous eye above them.

Golden lightning crackled across her frame in arcs of fury rather than fear, and she positioned herself beside Damian.

Across the Citadel, the Hallowed Voice and his Paladins and Holy Women looked up at the broken sky with expressions that had passed beyond shock into the grim territory of recognition.

Their bodies began to burn with sacred Mana, white and gold radiance flaring across hundreds of defenders simultaneously as every warrior sworn to the Covenant activated their cultivation in unison.

They knew what they were looking at! The oldest among them had read the forbidden texts that described this exact manifestation.

The eye was vast. It was so enormous that it looked like the eye of the world itself gazing down upon them, a pupil the size of the Citadel studying the things that lived within it with the detached curiosity of something deciding how much effort they were worth.

The sensation that accompanied its gaze was utterly obscene and suffocating, pressing down upon every living being within the Covenant’s walls with a weight that had nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with the sheer existential pressure of something so far above them that the gap couldn’t be measured in Circles or Physiques or any scale human cultivation had devised.

An instant later, every warrior below the Eighth Circle fell from the sky. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

It happened simultaneously across the entire Citadel. Seventh Circle warriors and below felt their control of Mana simply stop working, their connection to the energy that kept them aloft severed as cleanly as if something had reached into their cultivation and clipped the threads holding them up.

Paladins plummeted. Holy Women dropped. Hundreds of bodies fell from the sky at once, and only the Eighth Circle and above remained airborne, their cultivation straining visibly against the pressure that had grounded everyone else.

Crimson-gold brilliance began to gather above the eye, concentrating into something that pulsed with intent, and the light it cast across the Citadel shifted from the passive glow of observation into the active radiance of something about to be unleashed.

Pandemonium was seconds away. The faithful in the streets screamed and ran for cover. The grounded warriors scrambled!

The Eighth Circle defenders braced themselves for what they knew was coming.

And at such a time, an old man appeared.

The Hallowed Voice materialized in the air between the Citadel and the eye, his plain white robes billowing around a frame that seemed suddenly less old and less plain than it had at any point during the day. His body shone with brilliant light, white and gold Mana surging around him in volumes that dwarfed what the rivers around the cathedral had produced, and the pressure that had been crushing everything below the Eighth Circle seemed to part around him the way water parted around a stone placed in its current.

From within his robes, he drew out what appeared to be a bone!

It was pristine white, longer than his forearm, carved with inscriptions so ancient that the language they were written in predated the Old Tongue by epochs. It simply existed in his hand with a presence so absolute that the moment it appeared, every authority in the sky above the Covenant went quiet!

The crimson-gold brilliance gathering above the eye paused. The suffocating pressure bearing down upon the Citadel eased by a fraction. The eye itself, that vast serpentine pupil that had been studying the world below with detached curiosity, seemed to narrow as if something behind it had just recognized what the old man was holding.

Even the five freed Dukes stopped laughing.

Damian’s eyes were bright as he followed everything from the crater below, his Mana spreading outward in every direction as he commanded it to give him information about what was happening above him. The Mana churned and processed and returned with words that bloomed before his eyes.

|An existence at the Ninth Circle or exceeding it has manifested above the Citadel in the form of a partial projection designated as The Eye of the Demon Emperor.|

|The subject known as the Hallowed Voice has produced a Sacred Ancestral Bone belonging to an existence that once stood at the Ninth Circle.|

|Classification: Sacred Relic. Ancestral origin.|

...!

Damian read the information!

A Ninth Circle existence manifested as an eye in the sky, and a Ninth Circle Sacred Bone held in the hands of an old man who had been playing at being gentle for decades!

He looked up at the Hallowed Voice floating between the Citadel and the eye with a pristine white bone in his hand and the quiet calm of someone who had been preparing for a moment like this for a very long time!

---

<On the Nine Circles: A Treatise on the Limits of Power>

The Lands of Stone measure power in Circles, and the Circles number nine.

The first four are common enough that most tribes have seen them. Flesh Awakening, Bone Tempering, Blood Ignition, Marrow Crystallization. These are the Circles of survival, the rungs a warrior climbs to earn the right to call themselves more than Dross.

Thousands walk these paths in every generation, and thousands more will walk them in the generations that follow, and while the power they grant is real and worthy of respect, it is not the power that shapes the Lands of Stone.

The fifth and sixth are rarer. Organ Sanctification and Vessel Completion produce the warriors that empires are built upon, the Imperators and Saints and commanders whose names fill the records of the Three Pillars. To reach these Circles is to step beyond survival and into influence, to become a force that tribes remember and enemies avoid. Most who reach these heights consider themselves blessed by the Amadlozi, and most are correct.

The seventh and eighth are where the world begins to bend.

Physique Awakening and Physique Mastery grant access to true Land and Sky Physiques that reshape landscapes and command the elements and manifes.

Those who walk at the seventh and eighth are beings whose decisions alter the course of history for millions, the rulers and generals whose names survive the ages because the ages could not ignore them.

But the Ninth Circle is something else entirely.

The old records call them Legends, and the word is not honorary. It is descriptive. To reach the Ninth Circle is to step beyond what most designed to contain, to push the body and spirit and Mana so far past the boundaries of the other eight Circles that the being who emerges on the other side can no longer be measured by the same scale.

Legends exist in a domain where the difference between them and those below is no longer a matter of degree but a matter of kind, the way the difference between a river and the ocean is not that the ocean holds more water but that the ocean obeys different laws.

Only a handful have ever reached it across all the recorded ages of the Lands of Stone.

Their names are not written in archives because archives are too fragile to hold them. Their names are carved into the Sacred Mountains themselves, etched into stone by Mana so dense that the inscriptions have not faded across millennia.

The Lands of Stone remember them the way the earth remembers the footprints of the creatures that shaped it, not as history but as geography, permanent alterations to the fabric of the world that no amount of time can smooth away.

And when such Legends perish, their passing does not end their power.

The bones of a Ninth Circle beings are Sacred Relics, repositories of condensed authority so profound that holding one is said to feel like holding the root of a mountain in the palm of your hand!

A single bone from a Legend can anchor the defenses of a citadel for centuries. A fragment of their skull can amplify a Shaman’s communion with the Amadlozi a thousandfold. Their marrow, if it can be extracted without shattering the bone that contains it, holds properties that the old Sangomas refused to document because the knowledge was too dangerous to commit to any medium that could be stolen.

Their blood, if preserved, becomes Panacea. Panacea, the substance that mends what cannot be mended, that restores what cannot be restored, that reaches into the broken places of a body or a spirit and reminds them of what wholeness felt like before the breaking occurred.

Wars have been fought across generations for a single vial of Legend’s blood, and the wars were considered worth the cost by those who fought them.

It is said that those who wield this power, or hold the Relics of a Legend in their hands, can erupt with a force that will make the masses weep from the sheer overwhelming pressure of witnessing something that the mortal frame was not constructed to endure, something so vast and so ancient and so far beyond the scale of ordinary existence that the only response the body knows how to produce is tears!

The Ninth Circle is a threshold beyond which the being who crosses it stops belonging entirely to the Lands of Stone and begins belonging, in part, to whatever lies beyond them.

Pray you never face one in anger. Pray harder that you never need one in desperation. And if you are fortunate enough to hold a Relic of a Legend in your hands, understand that what you carry is not a weapon.

It is the last echo of something that once made the mountain tremble.

- From the Sealed Vaults of the Covenant of the First Stone, access restricted by order of The Hallowed Voice.