Deep beneath the sunlit, opulent halls of the Royal Palace of Aethelgard, Commander Seraphen was descending into a nightmare.
The spiraling stone staircase seemed to stretch downward into infinity, leaving the white marble and gold-leaf of the King's domain far behind. The air grew dense, not with the crushing, martial gravity of the North, but with a sickly, sweet stench of ancient decay.
Seraphen was flanked by six Royal Mages. They wore heavy, lead-threaded robes, their faces pale, sweating profusely despite the freezing ambient temperature of the deep vaults.
"Maintain the warding circles," Seraphen ordered, his voice echoing flatly against the damp stone walls.
The Mages didn't reply. They were entirely focused on feeding their mana into the glowing, translucent golden chains of Light magic that connected them to one another.
They reached the bottom of the stairs. Before them stood a massive set of double doors, forged from a pale, bone-like metal that Seraphen could not identify. Carved into the metal were jagged, chaotic runes that hurt the eyes to look at—blood-magic, drawn by the First Kings to keep something terrible asleep.
"The vault of the Abyssal Relic," the Head Royal Mage whispered, his voice trembling. "Commander, the ambient decay is already eating our Light mana. The wards are degrading at a rate of five percent per minute."
"We are not here to study it. We are here to retrieve it," Seraphen stated, though his own grandmaster Aura—a brilliant, sun-forged shield of kinetic energy—felt as though it were rusting at the edges simply by standing near the doors.
Seraphen stepped forward. He drew a heavy, ornate iron key from his breastplate, handed to him directly by King Aethelgard.
He slotted the key into the bone-metal doors.
Clack.
The sound was not metallic. It sounded like a massive spine snapping.
The heavy doors slowly ground open.
There was no physical monster waiting inside. The vault was a perfectly circular, barren stone room. Floating in the dead center, suspended in a flickering, failing stasis field, was a jagged shard of dark, porous stone. It was no larger than a man's forearm, but the aura it projected was apocalyptic.
It was a piece of the primordial Abyssal Peaks.
Seraphen instantly dropped to one knee, coughing violently. The air inside the vault was completely dead. The relic was not emitting poison; it was emitting pure, conceptual entropy.
He watched in horror as the golden plate armor on his right arm began to tarnish, the metal pitting and flaking away into dust in a matter of seconds. The Royal Mages behind him screamed as their golden chains of Light magic snapped, their spell constructs rotting into nothingness.
"The stasis box!" Seraphen roared, forcing himself to his feet, fighting the agonizing decay of his own life force. "Bring the box!"
Two Mages, bleeding from the nose, rushed forward with a heavy chest made of the same bone-like metal as the doors. With frantic, desperate movements, they scooped the floating Abyssal shard into the chest and slammed the lid shut, engaging a dozen heavy locking mechanisms.
The suffocating wave of entropy instantly vanished, contained by the bone-metal.
Seraphen collapsed against the stone wall, gasping for air. He looked at his ruined, rusted armor.
If we unleash this on the Vanguard, the Commander realized, profound dread settling deep into his marrow, we will not just kill Duke Warborn. The rot will spread. It will decay the King's Highway. It will decay the outer walls of the capital. It will decay the very air we breathe.
The King was not authorizing a tactical strike. He was authorizing a localized doomsday out of pure cowardice.
"Carry it to the surface," Seraphen ordered the surviving Mages, his voice hollow. "Secure it in the lead-lined siege carriage. We ride south to meet the Vanguard at the edge of the capital plains."
Five hundred miles north, the Vanguard was entirely unbothered by the concept of decay.
They had made camp for the night on the petrified King's Highway.
The camp was a marvel of hyper-dense engineering. They did not pitch canvas tents. Instead, the infantrymen drove their True-Cold Steel broadswords into the solid granite of the road at perfectly measured intervals. The overlapping, thirty-foot gravity fields generated an invisible, impenetrable dome of heavy atmospheric pressure.
Outside the perimeter, the Church's black ash fell endlessly from the sky. The moment the ash hit the gravity field, it was violently sucked to the ground, forming a thick, blackened ring around the pristine, clear air of the Vanguard's camp.
Princess Lucy walked through the camp.
She did not require the heavy furs the human Mages wore to fight the chill of the ash plains. Her perfectly stabilized Frozen Ice core acted as a flawless internal regulator. She wore her tailored Vanguard riding coat, her silver veil catching the light of the campfires burning cleanly in the pressurized air.
As she walked, the towering, six-hundred-pound giants of the Vanguard infantry paused in their duties. They stopped sharpening their armor or adjusting their yokes, and they bowed their heads respectfully.
They did not bow because she was an Elven Princess. They bowed because she was the armorer. She was the one who kept their hovering wagons afloat. She was the Queen of the Anvil.
Lucy stopped near the center of the camp. Duke Arthur stood by the newly summoned deep-earth geyser, washing the day's grime from his face.
"The men are resting well, Your Grace," Lucy noted, stepping up beside the warlord. "The runic matrices on the wagons are running at ninety-eight percent efficiency. We have experienced zero mechanical degradation."
Arthur wiped his face with a heavy linen towel. He looked at the slender Elven woman.
"The High Priest expected us to be dead a week ago, Princess," Arthur rumbled, a proud smile touching his scarred features. "Instead, we are marching at a sustained pace of twenty miles a day, fully rested, fully watered."
Arthur turned, looking south through the invisible wall of gravity, staring into the falling black snow.
"But the march is the easy part," the Duke added, his voice dropping into a solemn register. "In six weeks, we will reach the capital plains. The Royal Guard will not meet us with swords, Lucy. Seraphen is a grandmaster. He will realize his men cannot breach our gravity fields. They will use magic. They will use the terrain. And if the King is truly panicked, they will use things buried in the dark."
Lucy looked at the petrified granite road beneath her boots. She felt the steady, unfathomable pulse of the deep-earth aquifers.
"The King does not own the dark, Duke Warborn," Lucy stated, her wind-chime voice absolute and unwavering. "His magic is finite. The entity holding this road is not."
Arthur chuckled softly, a deep, resonant sound.
"You have more faith in my son than the Church has in their Goddess," Arthur observed.
"The Goddess did not quench my steel," Lucy replied simply. "And the Goddess did not part the sky for us."
Deep beneath the continent, the Sovereign who had parted the sky was currently engaged in a microscopic war against the planet itself.
In the pitch-black silence of the Leyline Nexus, Kaiser Warborn sat in his lotus position.
His physical body was a statue of flawless, hyper-dense stillness. But his grandmaster mind was stretched across a five-hundred-mile invisible chord of gravity, boring straight through the subterranean mantle of the earth, aimed directly at the bottom of the King's vault.
The trajectory is absolute, Kaiser tracked, his liquid-void blood pulsing lazily.
But drawing a straight line through the earth's mantle came with a severe complication: the geothermal heat of the planet's core.
The microscopic, frictionless tunnel Kaiser had carved was currently passing through a region of highly pressurized subterranean magma. The immense, chaotic heat and tectonic pressure of the magma were actively trying to crush the one-millimeter gravitational barrel he was holding open.
The friction is attempting to warp the y-axis by a fraction of a degree, Kaiser analyzed, feeling the heavy, molten rock pressing against his invisible construct. If the barrel warps, the Void Orbit will miss the King's vault and erupt into the lower wards of the capital, annihilating the civilian population.
He could not let the barrel warp.
Kaiser didn't try to push the magma away with physical force. He used his newly synthesized biology.
He channeled a razor-thin, continuous stream of pure, screaming Void madness down the gravitational tunnel. He didn't fire the weapon; he simply lined the "barrel" with the abyss.
The moment the intense geothermal heat of the magma pressed against the Void, the heat was instantaneously devoured. The purple madness ate the kinetic energy of the molten rock, turning the magma immediately surrounding his tunnel into perfectly cold, dead, petrified obsidian.
He created a permanent, frictionless, temperature-proof barrel of void-lined obsidian running straight through the planet's mantle.
The resistance vanished. The crosshairs locked back onto the dead center of the King's vault.
Six weeks, Kaiser noted, smoothly arresting the flow of the Void, leaving the invisible subterranean sniper rifle perfectly primed and waiting.