With a superhuman muscular exertion that surpassed every boundary of ordinary human capacity, driven by the blazing Phoenix Mana surging through his veins, Dex forced the heavy amber sarcophagus out of its boiling environment. He released a suppressed roar as he heaved the edge of the massive cocoon upward and cast it onto the solid stone shore that had recently formed from the cooling magma. The sarcophagus skidded across the black obsidian surface with a rough, grating sound before finally coming to rest well back from the edge of the volcanic lake.
Dex hauled his magma-drenched body out of the viscous liquid. He stood there for long moments, breathing slowly, while the residual magma clinging to his skin dripped like tears of liquid fire, touching the cold rock below and evaporating at once into small wisps of grey smoke. He did not spare a glance for his own condition. His gaze-still blazing with its gold and blue luminescence-remained fixed and riveted on the transparent sarcophagus. On the sleeping girl within it.
Now that the sarcophagus had emerged from the sunken darkness and stood beneath the faint, intermittent illumination of the enormous blue crystals adorning what remained of the cavern ceiling, the features of the imprisoned entity were far clearer. Nothing but a layer of Stellar Amber-clear as the glass of gods-stood between Dex and her. Every detail of her face, every curve of her form, every strand of her hair was visible with terrifying sharpness.
"Pure silver hair as though woven from frozen moonlight... pallid skin that glows with a strange self-radiance even under this immense pressure... and an aura-cold, so profoundly cold that it insulates the heat of an active volcano and imposes a spiritual frost across a ten-metre radius..."
Dex began murmuring to himself, his voice reverberating through the emptied cavern. His mind-the Reader's mind that had consumed every word and every background manuscript in The Legend of the Silver Dragon-was working at a speed that outstripped lightning. He was searching the archive of his memory for any hint, any description, any legend that matched what lay before him. He began connecting the scattered threads: those marginal allusions that the original novel's hero had never focused upon, which readers had dismissed as mere world-building filler.
Then, without warning, his eyes widened-and the blood that had been boiling moments ago froze in his veins for a suspended instant. He remembered. He had retrieved a forgotten, obscure chapter from the ancient history of Ekarthas: a blood-soaked epoch inscribed in forbidden manuscripts under the name of the War of the Great Fall.
A thousand years ago, in the epoch known as the Age of Ash, it was not the higher-ranking demons nor the ancient dragons that represented the sole or greatest threat to life on the continent. In that deep and sunken time, the sky split open without warning, and from it descended invaders the world had never known. They were referred to in the old texts as the Celestials.
Their designation as Celestials did not derive from any goodness or angelic nature. It derived from their arrogance and their absolute self-elevation. These beings considered themselves incarnate deities, and they drew no distinction whatsoever in their dealings between a great human sorcerer, a terrifying demonic beast, or a domestic animal. To them, every creature that walked the soil of Ekarthas was merely a low-frequency insect-a primitive life form to be exterminated and its planet purified, reshaped according to their strict cosmic architecture.
The Celestials were distinguished in legend above all by a beauty that robbed the mind: their luminous silver features that made them appear as angels of mercy, while their actions were the embodiment of absolute catastrophe. They did not employ the conventional elemental magic of fire, water, or wind. Their sorcery operated by direct manipulation of matter and time. They were capable of reducing mountains to dust with a touch, halting the flow of time across entire cities, and ageing armies to dust within seconds. They had nearly erased all life entirely, were it not for a legendary and impossible alliance between dragons, demons, and humans that brought them down in a battle that cost the world half its continents.
"This girl... she is not human, and she belongs to no race of this age," Dex whispered, his tone carrying a complex weave of absolute awe and instinctive hostility.
His right hand retreated instinctively and ignited at once in defensive blue and white flame-ready to launch another Sun of Hell in any fraction of a second.
"She is of the bloodline of the first invaders. A living embodiment of the Celestials. A sleeping calamity-a weapon of mass annihilation placed at the floor of hell to be forgotten forever."
In that charged moment, a violent and wrenching internal war erupted in Dex's depths. His practical mind-the mind of Dex the Prisoner, who had endured the worst in torture cells and left no room for chance or blind mercy-was screaming at him with bloody force: destroy this sarcophagus now. Use every ounce of Phoenix power you possess. Melt this amber and kill her while she sleeps. If this calamity wakes and reclaims her Celestial power, she will not only destroy you-she will annihilate the entire continent. Do not be the fool from a naive story who shows mercy to his enemy only to die at that enemy's hand later. You are the Burning King now. Extinguish the threat in its cradle.
That killing impulse drove Dex to raise his blazing hand and gather his Mana for a finishing blow. He was ready to reduce the sarcophagus and everything within it to absolute nothingness.
But... his blazing hand stopped in mid-air, as though an invisible force had seized him by the wrist.
His hesitation did not spring from emotional weakness, nor from any fascination with her divine beauty. Dex had long since moved past the stage of being deceived by appearances. The cause of his stopping was something far deeper. There was a strange, overpowering, unfamiliar magical attraction flowing between the Phoenix Core planted in his heart and the cold silver aura emanating from the sarcophagus.
While Dex's mind saw in her an existential enemy, the Phoenix within him was reading the situation in an entirely different way. This ancient mythical fire entity, representing the apex of chaos, destruction, and rebirth, felt not a single particle of fear or threat toward the girl's energy. On the contrary-the Core was pulsing in a harmonious rhythm, sensing Integration.
It was as though a hidden cosmic law were at work: as though the absolute and primordial fire Dex carried in his chest had finally found, after aeons of searching, the eternal ice and temporal stillness that balanced it and prevented it from consuming its bearer. Their energies were not repelling like enemies-they were attracting like two fundamental poles in the structure of the cosmos: movement and rest, chaos and order, thermal detonation and temporal freezing.
Dex lowered his hand with agonising slowness. The blue flames in his palm extinguished, dissolving into threads of warm smoke. He drew a deep breath, his eyes never leaving her still face.
"Who are you-truly?" Dex asked in a low voice, carrying a strange ache that ill-suited someone who had just erased a demon from existence. "Are you an enemy sent to exterminate what remains of this world? Or are you... exactly like me? Nothing more than a victim of a time you do not belong to-a playing piece that was discarded and thrown into the floor of hell?"
He stepped one pace closer, watching with intense focus as a cold silver light began-for the very first time-to seep slowly from several microscopic cracks that had started to form on the surface of the Stellar Amber. He knew that whatever decision he made in these next few seconds would not merely change his own fate. It would rewrite the entire history of Ekarthas.