"Let's begin."
The ground cracked as they moved.
Death sent a sheet of annihilation rolling across the stone ahead of them, creating a tide that unmade the world from ankle height to waist.
The concentrated energy of death ate through the corpses, erased pebbles from the ground, and gnawed the skirts of buildings, sending them toppling to the ground.
Aurelius stepped into it and shifted the paving stones under his feet to the time they existed before the tide.
He slipped forward as the air froze in a false facsimile of time stop, the tide breaking around him like a river parting around a sealed jar of yesterday.
Death's aura met a bubble of before, the two forces snarling and splashing around each other. Where they touched, the world smoked and reality crinkled.
Luna's beasts came on at the same moment, moving right at home through the aura of death.
The root wolves leapt into the air, with the thorn stags lowering their heads in a charge not far behind.
