While his human body stood in the Sacred Hall of Truth with its hand on the shoulder of a transforming old man, Damian’s beast body floated in the skies above the Cradle of First Flames and looked down at the world below.

The Cradle spread beneath him for miles in every direction, crimson Acacia and golden Baobab and blue-stemmed grasslands catching the afternoon light, the Spring of First Waters running clean through channels that hadn’t existed a week ago, the seven World Trees rising like pillars holding the sky up from the earth. The beast delegation was down there somewhere among the transformed paradise, Masamuk and Tiaret and King Mafube and his procession moving through the sacred garden with the reverent careful steps of beings who understood they were in a place that operated by different rules than the world outside its borders.

It was beautiful.

And Damian could not get the Ancestral Celestials out of his mind!

The idea had been rotating since the Hallowed Voice described them, and it hadn’t stopped. Beings who had exceeded the Nine Circles entirely, who had looked at the ground and decided it was beneath them, whose domains floated in the distant sky like continents that had made a decision. He had understood the Hallowed Voice’s point about caution, about being careful not to draw their attention until he was ready for what that attention would mean.

But the other part of the thought, the part he kept returning to, was this: what had prevented them from doing what the Ancestral Celestials had done? What made that elevation exclusive to beings he hadn’t met yet rather than open to a being who already had his consciousness woven through the clouds and his blood in the earth of an entire domain?

He decided to find out.

"Exelissomai."

HUUM!

"Persevere."

HUUM!

He didn’t stop there. He said them again, then again, the Letters of the Primordial Tongue rolling from his massive beast body in a continuous cascade that he kept watching for strain and kept not finding any. The familiar burn of verdant evolution stacked on top of the familiar warmth of blue reinforcement, each utterance adding another layer to what the one before it had already started, and he felt his enormous golden lion form drinking it all in with the hunger of a being that had been built to hold exactly this kind of power.

Green flames erupted across his fur, then gold, then blue, all three blazing simultaneously and weaving through each other in patterns that turned his beast body into something that looked less like a living creature and more like a phenomenon of nature that had chosen a lion-shaped form for convenience. The verdant-blue mane that had already burned with controlled fire became something uncontrolled and magnificent, flames climbing into the sky above his floating form in columns that could be seen from the outer edges of the Cradle.

Below him, the beast delegation looked up.

Every Noble Simba in Mafube’s procession, every member of the delegation that had arrived expecting to meet a beast and found a burning sovereign instead, turned their golden faces toward the sky in unison. Mafube himself went still with his nine tails frozen in their slow arcs, his Crown of Kingship blazing in resonant answer to what it was looking at.

Masamuk floated at the edge of the group with his small obsidian body pulsing so rapidly that the stellar blue points scattered across his form blurred into continuous light.

The voices of many Noble Simba rose together!

"Ancestor!"

Damian continued speaking the Letters.

Clouds gathered.

They came from every direction simultaneously, pulled by the accumulation of Mana his beast body was producing and releasing in waves that the sky above the Cradle didn’t have the capacity to simply absorb. They gathered and thickened and began to glow, catching the colors of the three flames blazing across his form, green and gold and blue light threading through the cloud mass until the sky above the Cradle became something that resembled what the Lands of Stone might look like if someone set the skies on fire thoughtfully.

Then the rain began. Rain that carried the weight of everything he had been cycling through himself, Mana dense enough to feel as it landed, verdant warmth in every droplet, slight infusions of change and evolution threaded through each one the way dye was threaded through water. It fell across the entire Cradle in a curtain that made the Rain of First Flames look like a gentle preview.

The beasts caught it first.

Every Primal Beast within the Cradle’s borders lifted heads and spread wings and pressed paws flat against the grass as the rain washed over them, their bodies absorbing what fell with the trembling eagerness of creatures whose instincts recognized something their minds couldn’t name. The Noble Simbas of the delegation shuddered in unison, their golden fur darkening as the rain saturated it, their cultivations responding to the infusion with breakthroughs that several of them hadn’t been approaching even close to before the first droplet touched their skin.

Down below, Uncle Adam raised his face to the sky.

The old warrior, already transformed by Exelissomai into something that dwarfed what he had been, stood in the rain with his arms slightly away from his sides and felt his body absorbing the droplets with a hunger he hadn’t known he still had. Beside him, Grandmother Essun had gone completely still, her eyes wide, her newly verdant-tattooed arms trembling as the rain moved through her existence and pushed at foundations that had already been expanded and pushed further still.

The surrounding lands began to shine!

Grasses that had been growing brilliantly since the original Rain of First Flames took on an additional luminosity, each blade catching the multicolored rain and redistributing it as light. The World and Land Trees, already massive beyond the scale of ordinary growth, seemed to straighten, their canopies expanding by degrees that were visible in real time. The Spring of First Waters ran faster and cleaner. The Beast Sanctuaries blazed with the auras of creatures ascending toward the next thresholds of their existence.

Damian observed all of this and let it continue, the Letters still falling from his lips in a steady rhythm that had found its own pace.

Then his attention shifted.

His awareness moved through the Cradle the way his consciousness moved through the cloud above, spreading along the threads of blood he had given to this earth, finding the mountain he had raised with his Mana and his will a handful of days ago. He felt the stone and sand of it vibrate with his presence the way a limb vibrated when he clenched it after a long stillness. He felt the channels of Mana running through the entire Cradle, carrying his rain and his blood and his dominion through every inch of transformed Lands.

He felt all of it as part of himself.

He connected to it more deeply, pressing his consciousness into the foundation of the Cradle the way he pressed it into the cloud, finding the edges and the bedrock and the roots of the World Trees extending down into the earth, and he felt the whole thing answer him the way the cloud answered him, the way the stone answered him, the way every element of his domain responded when he made his intention clear.

He said one word.

"Rise."

HUUM!

...!

The Cradle of First Flames shuddered.

Not in the way things shuddered when they were being broken. It shuddered the way something shuddered when a force was introduced at its foundation and that force was asking it to move in a direction it had never moved before, and the ground was calculating whether the force was sufficient.

The force was sufficient.

Yes!

This was what he wanted. The idea that had been rotating since the Hallowed Voice described floating islands in the distant sky had found its answer in the shuddering of twenty-three miles of transformed paradise beginning to detach from the earth beneath it. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

He wanted to raise the entire Cradle into the sky, and why not? Who said he couldn’t? Who had established that rule? Who had decided that only beings who had spent eons exceeding the Nine Circles were permitted to build themselves a sky domain?

The Primordial Tongue was in his chest. The Cradle was in his blood. His consciousness already lived in the cloud above.

The only question had ever been whether he chose to do it.

He had chosen.

Below him, the Noble Simbas who had been absorbing the multicolored rain went suddenly, completely silent as they felt the earth beneath their paws begin to vibrate with something that had nothing to do with ordinary seismic activity.

Mafube’s nine tails spread wide for balance. Masamuk’s stellar blue points blazed to their maximum brightness. Uncle Adam planted his feet and looked down at the grass with the expression of a warrior trying to identify what exactly was happening.

Grandmother Essun looked down at the ground, then up at the blazing beast form in the sky, then back down at the ground.

"Tokoloshe," she said, loudly and clearly into the vibrating air, "what are you doing now?!"

The Cradle of First Flames began to rise!

Oh!