When the other gods leapt up to fight the Ko-Ganall, Karmion shook his head. They’d slow the inevitable, yes, but they wouldn’t stop the destruction of the Shattered Moon unless more joined them.
Which he wasn’t going to do, nor would his closest allies—Nilsenir and Kalawen.
But he had to make a show of it. He flew down to his tower and ducked in through the window, then commanded the nearest Admirals, “You three. Defend the crowd, and don’t let any of them get harmed while you can help it.” No sense in degrading his standing in their eyes before they died. Afterward? He’d blame the Ko-Ganall on a secret Velaydian plot to wipe out the pantheon, and the survivors would love him once more.
“Yes, my lord,” they said in unison, then ran to the railing of the viewing platform.
Karmion ran to the stairway, then sprinted down through the tower and interior of the arena. As soon as he made it out to the open woods, he summoned his cloud of mist again and skimmed over the trees, racing toward the port, and toward the Cardinal Arrant.
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Myrrir climbed to the top of Altrous’ tower and slipped in through a window, then sprinted across the floor a few paces to a table, where he ducked down and hid from the Admirals and the single Grand Admiral—an aging man in a white robe, who’d existed for centuries, but hadn’t the fortune of advancing, and was nearing the end of his massive life.
Myrrir still veiled himself, just in case.
The room was like all the gods’ viewing platforms—with an open wall along the arena-facing side. It being made of white marble and drowned in golden ornaments changed nothing.
Altrous stood alone at the edge of the viewing platform, using a rune-scripted device on a tripod to redirect and amplify the sunlight. He drew on the reflected light from the arena floor and, with a Reach technique, condensed it into a beam and fed it into one end of the cylinder, then continued the technique and pushed it out the other end. It passed through a sheet of parchment, then into a different cube, then ran back out into the sky above the arena.
It displayed a three-dimensional golden projection of the two combatants in the air. With the time it took the technique to function, the enlarged replay of events had to be about a minute behind the actual fight.
Myrrir, still veiling himself, sprinted from behind the table to a pillar. When one of the admirals turned away, and when the others were too busy staring out at the events in the arena, Myrrir darted across the room to a different table, then snatched up a spare bottom cylinder device from the table on the other side of the room. Before anyone spotted him, spun behind a pillar.
Light could only travel in a straight line, best Myrrir knew, and that extended to the realm of godly authorities. Altrous and his children could only use Reach techniques in a straight line. To bend the light, like he was doing, he needed runes of a different authority.
But that meant the device controlled what the arena saw, not Altrous. Altrous only moved the light.
If it came from a different source, the crowd would see a different projection, and Altrous would be powerless to prevent it.
Myrrir tucked the cylinder into his pocket and, when he had an opportunity, jumped back out the window.
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Vayra didn’t know how many other God-heirs were aboard the Cardinal Arrant and she didn’t want to find out. She kept herself veiled as she crept across the ship’s gun decks and up the stairways.
In the distance, her senses picked out three powerful presences unveiling themselves. Gods.
‘They’re going to fight the Ko-Ganall,’ Phasoné said.
“They can survive in the void?” she whispered.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
‘For a short time, yes. For a long time? No.’
Vayra chewed the inside of her gums and pressed her back against a wall. She was almost at the main deck, then it was just a short dash to get into the great. But she didn’t sense Karmion nearby.
“So we don’t have long?” she whispered. A troop of bluecoats marched past, taking the stairs up to the main deck two at a time. Their muskets clattered and their haversacks jostled. She sealed her lips shut.
‘They’ll buy us time, but if no one gets off the moon, then it’ll all be for nothing.’
“At this rate, if we don’t break the fully-formed blockade, we won’t get off the moon either. They won’t let the Harmony through again, if they’ve let the ship go at all.”
‘Then be quick, get the weapon, and get out and help.’
When the last of the bluecoats made it to the top of the stairs, Vayra broke cover and chased them up. She emerged from a hole in the deck right only a few paces from the quarterdeck stairs.
Being a first-rate ship, the Cardinal Arrant had a quarterdeck, and behind it, an afterdeck. The great cabin—where Karmion had to be keeping the weapon—was beneath the afterdeck.
She darted up the stairs, then ducked behind the wheel hub. On a ship this large, it needed three or four coxswains to spin it. But, holding formation in a blockade, they could afford to stand around lazily and stare up at the sky.
Massive arcane technique flashed out in the sky, though Vayra couldn’t see who launched them. The gods and Ko-Ganall were still much too far away for that. The Ko-Ganall orbited the Shattered Moon’s parent planet like a wisp of pink silk. Some broke off and smashed through the gas giant’s orange clouds, but they couldn’t do any harm to such a large world.
Eventually, they would break off and attack the Shattered Moon, but the Gods were keeping them in line. A moonlight technique raced off down a beast’s body, severing it in half and spattering asteroid-sized globs of blood into orbit as well.
‘We don’t have much time at this rate. Get inside the great cabin and free Nathariel, then get the weapon.’
When the coxswains turned to face the other direction, Vayra jumped out from behind the wheel hub, then darted over to the great cabin. She pulled one of its doors open a crack, just enough to slip inside.
Two bluecoats stood inside the door, muskets cocked and pointed at Nathariel, but she flung them into the side wall with a single impact-rune enhanced Starlight Palm. They collapsed and didn’t stand up.
The interior of the great cabin was dark. Curtains hung over the windows, and the shadow of a false, twisted Namola tree, forced to grow from the deck of the ship, but leafless and withered, stood along the far end of the cabin. Glass tubes fed elixirs into its trunk, and its branches had been twisted—blood-manipulated—out of shape to hold up a ragged man by his wrists.
Nathariel. He barely gave off any spiritual radiation, and she would’ve mistook him for someone like Glade, with a weak spirit, had she not known better.
“Nathariel,” she whispered, running across the room. “I’ll—”
“Guard,” he groaned. “Ward your head. Now.”
Vayra did as she was told—just in time for a dull impact to strike the back of her head. It didn’t do any damage, but she staggered forward a few paces.
An Admiral-stage god-heir, dressed in Karmion’s children’s usual attire, strode forward, holding a whip of water in his hand. “An intruder,” he said. He emerged from the shadows behind the false Namola, striding slowly but confidently.
Vayra could fight an Admiral, and she could probably win, but she didn’t have time. Better to do it with friends. She snatched up a nearby pail of Stream water and splashed it on Nathariel, then Moulded her scythe and slashed through the branches holding his arms. They resisted her, fighting back harder than anything ever had before, but, with a shout of exertion, she cut through. It wasn’t a real Namola.
Nathariel landed in a crouch, then rose up to his full height, and his spirit exerted a pressure once more.
His arm snapped out, and he caught the Admiral by the throat. The man’s hat tumbled off, and a Ward of water sprang up around his neck. Veins of orange flame lit up beneath Nathariel’s skin, then wisps emerged overtop his hand. Surely, being the same stage, their techniques would cancel out.
But, when she scanned his spirit, she noticed the same shroud around his core, leaking out a greater power from an orb below.
With a deep yell, he tightened his grip, smashing through the Admiral’s Ward and crushing the man’s neck in a single movement. Head completely severed, the Admiral collapsed.
“...Sir?” Vayra asked.
“I don’t have long.” Nathariel shook his head. “I sense them now, the Ko-Ganall.”
“What do you mean, you don’t have long?” She scowled and put her hands on her hips. “I need answers, Nathariel.”
“I figured you might…have found some truths out while I was gone. I see you have advanced to Admiral.”
“I know you’re older than you say, and I can see you’re probably stronger than you say, but…”
“Long ago, I learned to wield flame from the Dragon Gods,” he said. “I am…about twice as old as you think, though perhaps a little older. They taught me everything, and I was one of the first men to control flame with my Arcara.” He shook off his hand, then brushed the tattered remains of his sash off his shoulder. “Naturally, and as ambitious as I was, I developed an authority over it. I became the one and only God of Fire.” He snorted. “My real name is not Nathariel, though it has been so long, I barely remember, and I was never pleased by it.”
The veil on his core trembled. More cracks formed along its every surface, like a marble about to shatter.
Then, in an instant, it dissolved, setting his core free. A blazing orb of orange light burned in his gut, bright as a sun in Vayra’s spiritual vision and painful to sense in the middle of a spiritual scan.
“It seems the galaxy will let me hide no longer. I am Lyze.”