The royal structures of the Dominion of Crimson Stone had been built on top of the royal structures of the Vakochev Empire, and where the Dominion’s architects had tried to erase what came before, they had instead created a record of erasure that Damian could read as clearly as the Old Tongue.

He walked through the corridors alone.

The solar light he had summoned earlier had faded to something dimmer, present enough that the capital remained illuminated but no longer the aggressive declaration it had been when he first arrived. He moved through the inner halls of the Citadel of the Eternal Crimson with his verdant tattoos pulsing quietly against the stone walls and his obsidian-edged eyes reading every surface he passed.

There were places he recognized.

The archway off the main corridor of the third level had been covered with crimson tile, but the proportions of it were his father’s proportions, designed for a man of Emperor Zuku Vakochev’s particular height and bearing, and no amount of new tile changed the shape underneath. Damian stopped at it and put his hand against the stone for a moment and then kept walking.

The study was harder.

He found it by the orientation of its windows, which faced northeast to catch the morning light, because his father had told him once that he worked better in the hours when the sun was still rising. The Dominion had turned it into an armory, weapons racked on walls that had once held shelves of text and record, but the windows were the same windows and the floor was the same floor and Damian stood in the center of it and felt the room’s original function pressing up through the new one the way old foundations pressed up through newer construction.

He had come here as a child to sit on the floor by his father’s feet while the Emperor worked. Not for any particular reason, not because he had been summoned or because there was something for him to do. He had simply come because his father was there, and being in the same room with his father had been sufficient.

He stood in the armory that used to be the study for a long time.

Then he found the courtyard.

The tree was still there.

It was taller than he remembered, which was the nature of trees and time, and its trunk had thickened across eight years into something that would have resisted the hits of a child’s training considerably more than it had resisted them then. But it was the same tree, standing in the same courtyard in the same position he had stood in front of dozens of times while learning to put force behind a strike and then more force and then precisely the right amount.

He could see where they had sat to watch him.

The bench was gone, replaced by a low stone planter that held nothing, but the position of the bench had been against the eastern wall of the courtyard where the morning shade kept the stone cool, and his parents had sat there together and watched him practice with the patient attention of two people who had nowhere else they preferred to be.

His Ama had laughed when he hit the tree too hard and hurt his hand. His father had not laughed but had smiled with his eyes in the way he had, the full expression confined to that one part of his face while the rest of it maintained the composure expected of an Emperor, even in a private courtyard with no one watching but his family.

That time had been taken from him.

Not interrupted or abbreviated. Taken. Deliberately and by calculation, by a man who had sat in this same citadel and smiled at them while planning its removal.

Damian stood in the courtyard and looked at the tree, and for a moment, he let himself feel the full weight of what had been taken and what could never be recovered and what the mausoleum at the center of the citadel contained that was not the same thing as the man it was built to honor.

He allowed himself the moment.

Then he sensed the Hallowed Voice and the Saint of Stone and the Covenant forces and the hundreds of thousands of warriors waiting in the capital’s sky with the patient energy of people who had been told to hold their position and were holding it.

He did not want to speak to any of them.

He reached for Serala and sent the message directly.

’Let’s go. I don’t feel like talking to anyone else right now.’

...!

Through the link that had existed between them since the Exelissomai evolution, since before that, since the first time he bled his Mana into something that connected him to others, he felt her receive it.

He felt the brief pause where she processed what was behind the words, and then he felt her doing what she said she would do when she stood in the Sacred Hall and held his face in her hands before descending on the Covenant.

He felt her staying.

Serala’s goodbye to the Saint of Stone took some time, which was correct. The embrace he sensed through the distance was the embrace of a student and a teacher who had both understood something irrevocable about the direction their relationship was about to take, and when it ended, Serala appeared near him in the outskirts of the Dominion of Crimson Stone without announcing herself.

He was standing at the edge of the capital’s outer territory looking out across the landscape ahead.

He knew where the River of the World was from this position. He had studied his father’s maps as a child and had updated that knowledge with everything the Hallowed Voice’s archives had provided. It was days in the direction he was facing, past terrain that would change character several times before it arrived at the boundary that was the last line between the Lands of Stone and what lay beyond.

Arms came around him from behind.

Serala pressed close, her transformed body fitting against his with the certainty of someone who had made a decision and was confirming it with her body.

Her arms crossed over his chest, and she held on with the quiet strength of someone who had been wanting to do this since the courtyard he’d told her about on the flight to the Covenant and had waited for him to finish processing alone first.

When she spoke, it was in the Old Tongue, and her voice was low and close.

"Siphilile, siyafa, sisekhona."

We live, we die, we endure.

"Even the Ancestors went through things like this," she continued. "They lost and they grieved and they kept standing because standing was the only direction that led anywhere worth going. We are not the first to carry this. We will not be the last."

Her arms tightened slightly. "So long as we endure. So long as we persevere." She pressed her forehead against the back of his neck. "It will all be okay."

Damian looked at the horizon.

He reached down and held her hands where they crossed his chest, his fingers finding hers, and the obsidian light that had been flickering at the edges of his vision since the Primordial Source had opened settled into something steadier without going away.

"We shall," he said.

"Persevere."

BOOM!

It was the first time he had spoken the Letter since the Primordial Source became accessible to him, and the difference was immediate and total.

The blue flames that Persevere had always produced rose around him and Serala, but they rose through something else now, through the obsidian brilliance of a power that sat beneath and above the Letters simultaneously, and the combination produced something that was neither purely blue nor purely obsidian but a weaving of both that climbed into the night air above them in columns that bent the light for miles in every direction.

The Mana in the surrounding landscape answered.

It surged inward from the terrain in every direction, drawn by the utterance the way smaller tides were drawn by larger forces, and as it arrived, it joined what was already rising and added to it, and the rising turned into something larger.

A hurricane formed around them, walls of Mana and obsidian-blue flame spinning outward from the still point where Damian and Serala stood, the eye of it calm and cold and luminous, the walls of it climbing toward a sky that was still trying to stitch itself back together from earlier in the evening.

Damian’s eyes flashed coldly in the eye of the storm.

The demons first. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

He would scorch them from existence and ruin everything they stood for until nothing remained that could be pointed to as evidence they had ever been.

He would cross the River of the World and find the place where his mother’s soul burned in their hands and take her back. He would burn their Emperor’s throne and the 72 Thrones around it and the civilization built on harvested souls until it was ash that the Lands of Stone could absorb and forget.

And when that was finished, he would institute his Way.

A new system across the Lands of Stone, built on different foundations from anything that had stood before it, organized around the principle that power carried obligation rather than exemption. A Way where the Dross could sleep without fear and the powerful answered for their power instead of hoarding it.

His Way! His Existence!