The Cradle of First Flames rose.

It happened slowly at first, the way massive things always moved when they began moving for the first time, with the deliberate patience of weight remembering that it had options beyond stillness.

The earth at the edges of the domain separated from the surrounding Threshold Lands in a line that ran clean and precise, dozens of miles of transformed paradise detaching from the world it had been part of since the world began. Where the separation occurred, the underside of the Cradle was exposed to open air for the first time, and what that underside revealed made the sky beneath the rising land look like something from the oldest stories.

Scintillating tendrils of blue Mana roiled across the bottom of the lifted earth, ancient and electric, coiling and uncoiling in patterns that suggested something with intention rather than something merely energetic. They looked like lightning that had decided to become serpentine, blue-white arcs tracing the carved-out bowl of the Cradle’s underside in slow magnificent loops, and the light they cast downward across the Threshold Lands below turned the barren stone a deep oceanic blue that it had never worn before.

The Cradle rose higher.

Damian’s beast form floated in the sky alongside the ascending land, his existence still blazing with green and gold and blue flame, and he watched it climb. The Mana threads connecting him to the Cradle sang with effort, but the strain was not what he had expected.

It was present, a sensation like a muscle being used after a long rest, noticeable without being limiting, and the actual mechanics of it were simpler than the audacity of the act implied.

It felt like wings.

Not the wings of the Radiant Dawn burning behind his human form, not the flaming extensions of his beast body’s power. It felt like the Mana beneath the Cradle had organized itself into a cluster of countless wings, each one contributing a fraction of lift, each one requiring only a portion of his consciousness to keep in motion. He didn’t need to hold the Cradle up. He needed to allow the wings to do it, which was a different thing entirely, and the portion of his mind delegated to the task was closer to the portion required to maintain awareness of the cloud above him than the portion required for anything he would have called effort.

The Noble Simbas of the delegation had ceased being a delegation in any organized sense.

They had become, in the moments since the earth began moving, a collection of extremely powerful beasts discovering that their instincts had not prepared them for standing on land that was departing from the ground.

Mafube had planted all four massive paws as wide as his frame permitted and was staring at the rising horizon with the expression of a Eighth Circle Physique Master encountering a situation that his cultivation had no framework for.

Masamuk, floating independently, had positioned himself above the Cradle and was looking down at it and then at Damian and then back down at it in a cycle!

Grandmother Essun stood in the grass near Uncle Adam with her hands planted on her hips, her eyes blazing, her voice cutting through the rumble of ascending earth.

"We are going up!" she announced to no one in particular, as if reporting something that the surrounding landscape might not have noticed. "We are going UP! Tokoloshe, I can see the ground getting smaller! I CAN SEE THE GROUND GETTING SMALLER!"

Uncle Adam placed a steadying hand on her shoulder and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the evidence wasn’t already saying louder.

The Cradle passed the height of the highest watchtower the Covenant had ever built. It passed the elevation where ordinary birds stopped flying and only beasts with cultivated constitutions continued. It rose toward the clouds themselves, and the clouds parted around the ascending land with the unhurried accommodation of something that had been expecting this eventually.

The delegation passed through the cloud layer.

The Noble Simbas who had been watching the ground shrink below them now found themselves surrounded by white vapor that pressed against golden fur and breathing faces with the soft persistence of clouds doing what clouds did. Mana saturated the air at this elevation with a richness that the lower altitude had not contained, and Damian watched the delegation absorb it unconsciously.

The highest peaks of the Sacred Mountains accumulated the richest Mana in the Lands of Stone for precisely this reason. The air itself was denser with potential the higher one climbed.

The Cradle emerged above the clouds.

Dozens of miles of transformed paradise, crimson Acacia and golden Baobab and blue-stemmed grasslands and seven World Trees rising from transformed earth, now floating in the open sky above the cloud layer with the scintillating blue-Mana underside shining downward through the vapor below it.

The sunlight at this elevation was different, cleaner, unfiltered by anything between it and the land it fell upon, and it touched the Cradle with an intensity that made the colors of everything within it burn brighter than they had on the ground.

Damian observed all of it.

He observed the sensation of it, the portion of his consciousness assigned to maintaining the wings of Mana beneath the Cradle reporting steadily that everything was functioning, nothing was straining beyond the manageable, the landmass was stable and would remain stable for as long as he chose. The slight effort it cost him was genuinely slight!

A flood of something moved through him.

Something larger than pride and less defined. The Hallowed Voice had spoken about the Ancestral Celestials on their floating islands with the careful reverence of someone describing forces so far beyond the human scale that caution was the only appropriate response. And yet here was the Cradle of First Flames, floating in the sky above the Lands of Stone, because Damian had wanted it there and had said Rise.

Was this the action that only so-called Ancestral Celestials could take?

He had done it!

It wasn’t anything crazy. Merely raising a landmass to the skies!

Merely taking rocks and soil and the lives of thousands of people and the entire domain he had built from blood and Mana and carrying all of it upward into the atmosphere because the thought had occurred to him!

So what? 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

He floated alongside the Cradle in the sky, his lineage pulsing through his beast body, and he looked higher. Higher than the Cradle. Higher than the clouds. He looked up at the open sky the way he had looked up at the aurora during the communion, and he felt as though the same presence that had descended to speak with him then was somewhere above him still, watching.

When Damian spoke, his voice carried without effort to every ear on the floating Cradle and into the sky above it.

"I was only raised by you for half my life," he said. "But I remember everything."

The wind at this elevation moved through his flaming mane and said nothing back.

"Today, I have taken this small tribe to the skies. I do this as defiance for beings residing above the clouds who do nothing while the Lands of Stone burn below them." His wing-shaped pupils blazed upward. "To them, I say, what gives them the right? They have power, yet do they not have responsibility? Why must I, barely alive for eighteen summers, have to take up these grand responsibilities while those more powerful than me lounge in their floating domains and do nothing? Why must things be the way they are?"

His Primeval body blazed hotter with each word, all three flames responding to the conviction moving through him.

"I reject the entire way of life of the Lands of Stone! I deny the fact that the poor and weak can never do anything to change their fate. I reject it all, because I want it to change. I want to change the Way of Life of these Lands of Stone. I want to change the way our very existences unfold."

His voice had grown to fill the sky around the Cradle, resonating through the Mana-dense air of the upper atmosphere, pressing outward past the edges of the floating domain and into the open sky beyond.

"I will establish a new way under my doctrine, under my ideals, under what I believe about how we should all exist. A new Way of Life. A new Existence. A Way where the Scales do not tip to favor anyone, except those who can endure adversity."

He paused, and the sky held the silence for him.

"Except those who can Persevere."

...!

BOOM!

The Letters on his heart blazed in answer! THE Primordial Tongue blazed!