Queen Lucia stood upon the deck of the Emperor Corrin, flagship of the fleet. The ship flew the Blue Wolf banner that Sasha preferred. They sailed south across the Ash Sea, and the high cliffs of the Theocracy were slowly getting closer and closer. They had been careful to prevent the enemy from knowing their exact landing point. The cliffs ahead looked heavily defended however. They knew that the army had left the Empire, and they likely set up ethermancers along the edge of the Ash Sea to wait for Sasha's massive aura to pass over them. They could then triangulate her position and predict a landing spot.

"Queen Lucia," Sasha said, approaching from behind. She was wearing her iridescent blue-green scale armor, and was addended by a few female guards. "You may begin, you have my permission to claim ether. Open up a landing spot for us, but don't cause the cliffs to collapse, please."

The deck was built with a large, circular platform jutting out over the front. The platform did not have a rail, and was the perfect spot for long range ethermancy, usually aimed at enemy ships. Lucia walked up onto the platform and claimed all the ether in her aura. This preempted any ether that the enemy ethermancers would have claimed already, locking it to Lucia and preventing a general defensive barrier.

She fed ether into one of the ether family weaves inscribed inside her aura, and began to feed the correct support weaves with perfect timing. Air, ether, and heat began to be sucked upward towards a single point above the cliffs. The air became heavily compressed and heated into a plasma, and yet more and more air and heat was sucked in, repeating the process in waves. Then she created a barrier and collapsed the barrier down to a single point, causing fusion of the smaller atoms in the air. Her family secret, that the other Heritors didn't know about.

She rotated the aura, with the angle of rotation changing chaotically. Then she gave the barrier a slight wobble. Finally, she punctured the bottom of the barrier like a pincushion. Jets of white hot fire exploded down towards the ground, and as the barrier wobbled and span about these streams danced along the cliffs, causing destruction at random.

"I think that your graduate theses at the Monastery was slightly better," Sasha said. "How long will it last this time?"

"It should be gone by the time the ships get close. We should not have any trouble building a net here."

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The first ship to arrive was the net ship. The entire hull was occupied by a cube-shaped net as long as the cliffs were high. There were wooden support structures spaced out on the outside of the net. Sasha used ether to levitate the ethersteel anchors on the top support structure while some engineers rode on top. When they arrived they secured the top of the net into the bedrock using a combination of ethermancy drilling and long ethersteel spikes. They constructed the elevator at the top and attached four cables to a platform. It slowly lowered down the middle between the four walls of the net, while soldiers climbed the net on three sides.

Lucia watched this process through a spyglass with fascination. This approach to scaling a cliff could also be used to quickly ascend the cliffs of the White Chasm. When the elevator platform arrived at the bottom, Sasha and Lucia stepped in and began to ascend.

They could not feel Heritor Maxius the Senior, so they knew he must be far away. That meant that the enemy army would be defenseless against the Empress and her enormous aura. When the platform slowed down to a halt at the top, Lucia and the Empress stepped out onto the prominent peak of the cliffs. The soldiers had set up a perimeter for them, though they were both protected by powerful barriers. The sheer prominence of the location would allow them to ravage anything alive nearby using long range ethermancy. At least until Maxius arrived.

Lucia set up three similar fire streamers in the forests nearby. Sasha had yet to use her ethermancy offensively. Her techniques tended to be highly specialized, and general offensive magic was more of Lucia's expertise. After all, what could beat a spinning fireball of death floating in the sky?

More ships arrived at the cliffs, and more nets were constructed. Over many days the army ascended the cliffs and began their advance into the Theocracy. In spite of the heavy defensive formations in the cliffs, there was little resistance to the march. The enemy must have placed small pockets of forces periodically to try and protect the cliffs. King Sullivan correctly predicted that the entire region was likely mostly undefended.

They began to form into a more standard formation. Knights with their crysien weapons on the front line, as their weapons could penetrate simple barriers and kill ethermancers. They also had auras and could create barriers for themselves. Full combined crysien ethersteel blades were much more rare. Sir Zachary had owned one but he vanished, and not even Sasha knew what happened to him or his weapon.

A mix of defensive and short-range ethermancers, musketeers, crossbowmen and pikemen in specific formations made up the second wave. In the rear was the long-range ethermancers and the critical leadership, including King Sullivan. While on the battlefield, Sullivan essentially dictated where Sasha and Lucia would be deployed, if at all.

As they advanced into the northern Theocracy, they began to get reports from the ethermancer scouts that a large aura had passed over them. An extremely large aura was approaching from the south. Maxius the Senior was near.