In the millennia Vorlan had traveled mortal world, he had never once felt anything approaching that disturbance. He did not need to see it. He did not need to be told what happened. There was no doubt as to what happened. Forynda had made good upon her threats. 

He and Simel floated just above the ground on either side of Emperor Rohmhelt, who sat on a barrel looking eastward across the Nehal River at the rolling green hills and beautiful autumn trees. The Emperor’s head drooped, and he ran his fingers through his ample blue green hair. Even though Vorlan was almost certain that Rohmhelt had somehow sensed the same calamity as the Earth Angel, he felt it necessary to say it aloud.

“Zarmand is no more,” Vorlan murmured. “They refused to abandon Nethron and Forynda delivered the swift and terrible judgment she promised.”

Rohmhelt shook his head and lightly groaned. When he looked up at Vorlan, his face looked as though he had aged five years in an instant. Lines of grief and worry spread everywhere.

"All those people," he lamented, his voice weak. "I can't... I can't even begin to tell you how much harder this will make everything."

Simel floated closer to Rohmhelt. Vorlan's fellow angel let off an air of unfathomable grief.

"I know she did what she thought was just," Simel said, his tone listless. "It was not. I sympathize with your plight. I have seen this moment coming myself and I always wondered if there was a path that would stop it. When the moment came, however, I saw no avenue for us."

Rohmhelt rose and looked back upon the sprawling mass of mainly white tents housing his army.

"I'll be lucky if I can keep half of them after what she did," he whimpered. "Every single person within... I don't know, five hundred miles will have lost someone. Vengeance alone will make my life impossible. Not to mention just outrage. I... I can't find the words to describe this. This is a nightmare!"

"If only it were so," Simel replied solemnly. "This is our only reality. No dream, however deranged, could conjure this torment."

Vorlan wanted to offer something other than Simel's crushing gloom, but before he could a horrible sensation hit him. It was a call to Ceuna that he had not felt in thousands of years. Its precise purpose, he knew not. Its outcome, he could not begin to fathom. Its consequences, utterly imponderable. 

"I must leave you for the moment," the Earth Angel tensely uttered. Both Rohmhelt and Simel looked to him with similar levels of bewilderment. "I will return soon."

He arrived in his own sanctum in Ceuna and looked at the tree in the center of his grove. It was surrounded by a strange shimmering distortion. The Progenitor's realm. No other display was anything like it. It was precisely the same as when he had been summoned in prior instances. Yet, this was not for him. He wondered why it would appear in his sanctum if it was not calling to him.

Forynda then arrived and made that question's answer far clearer to Vorlan. She defiantly grasped her rapier and shield, but that demeanor collapsed as soon as she observed the phenomenon in the sanctum's center around the tree. Her rapier and shield disappeared. She folded her hands before her and glanced at Vorlan with one of the few concerned expressions he had ever seen out of the High Angel.

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"I did what was necessary," she declared. "None had learned their lessons. It had to be done."

"Even if that were so, I am not the one you must convince," he rejoined. 

Trepidations emanating from her every movement, Forynda glided toward Vorlan's tree gradually. He recalled the last time he had been summoned to the Progenitor's realm. It was an indescribable expanse of swirling images, sounds, and other sensations Vorlan felt he did not even have the proper means to convey. He always left the Progenitor’s realm confused as it would feel as though he had been in it for hundreds of mortal years when in fact it was no time at all. The Progenitor itself had no form and did not communicate in words or anything else so crude. Just the faintest of phenomena and yet the Progenitor’s will would be clearer than that of even the most eloquent mortals or angels.

When she arrived just before the baffling distortion surrounding the tree, she paused and looked back upon Vorlan.

“I feel I know what awaits me and why,” she muttered distantly. “Even with what I suspect I will have to answer for, I would do it again. And again.”

“We cannot know the Progenitor’s mind, but I suspect deep in my heart that this is why you are called. That you would do it again, regardless,” he replied, his words wreathed in grief. Much as he desired that Forynda alter her course, he knew that what awaited her would be painful. “I am sorry, Forynda.”

She weakly glanced at him again and then stretched out her arm to enter the distortion. As her hand slipped into the peculiar phenomenon it disappeared and instantaneously another hand emerged out of the phenomenon, shaking and drooping. Forynda paused and examined it for a moment. It was her own. Vorlan was certain of that.

Haltingly, she floated further into the phenomenon in full. She was blasted out immediately, her appearance haggard and disheveled, her eyes both wild and broken, and her demeanor weak and frightened.

“Vorlan,” she gasped in a wispy voice. “How long was I there?”

Stunned by her appearance, he took some time to respond.

“No time at all,” he answered. “We just spoke very few moments ago.”

Her eyes scanned Vorlan’s sanctum. There was a distrust to her movements. It was as though she expected something to leap at her or swoop down upon her. The Earth Angel had been with the High Angel since they were both created by the Progenitor and never had he seen such behavior out of Ceuna’s indomitable ruler.

“It seemed longer than the entirety of my existence, multiplied a thousand-fold,” she said, floating closer to Vorlan. “And that was the least of it.”

He need not have asked her the most consequential outcome. Vorlan could already feel it from the greatly diminished power that swelled from Forynda.

“The Golden Aura is no longer mine,” she muttered, awkwardly glancing at Vorlan. “When I was forced to watch the countless other ways that our unhappy course could have unfolded, I saw what a fool I have been. Things we set in motion so long ago have led us here. Decisions, sometimes seeming irrelevant, all did this. No outcome I saw developed as poorly as ours. Thus, I cannot reject this judgment. It was deserved.”

Much as Vorlan concurred, the thought that Forynda was without her defining powers, those that helped her to control everything in Ceuna, was beyond acceptance. He had never considered the possibility that the Progenitor would so intervene. The Progenitor’s mind was, of course, unknowable, but even so there were thought to be limitations.

“Dare I ask about the future?” Vorlan inquired, floating closer still to Forynda to offer some measure of support.

“I saw it and yet I remember nothing,” she muttered, here eyes drifting off. “I saw so many events and peoples and what becomes of them, but the Progenitor cleansed my memories to hide us from that horrible truth. It is meant to protect me, I feel, so that I do not lose heart. I am left with one memory.”

“What was that?”

She looked directly into Vorlan’s eyes, her own swelling with tears.

“I cried. I do not remember what precisely was the cause, but I cried again and again and again,” she dolefully said. “There is such agony before us that it will trivialize everything we have endured until now. I am left not with Simel’s vivid warnings, but merely this dull vague ache of horror as it all approaches now.”