“It’s time, Princess.”

Lycinia’s voice drew Suraiya from thoughts of the Elyseans’ power and ruminations on their hidden home, and she looked down to where the veiled woman peered up at her with discerning green eyes.

All around them calls for a halt, and shouts for the captured convoy to stop, were passed by cloaked Elyseans; and for a single hysterical moment Suraiya thought she was about to witness a mass execution—until she abruptly shook her head to clear the thought.

There was no reason for their captors to have taken them miles out of their way, at a punishing pace, just to kill them in a flatter stretch of blight.

It was nonsensical.

“What is to happen now?” Suraiya asked carefully, while watching her people being efficiently and, at times, not-so-gently corralled into rows of what looked like four people abreast in a column behind her. The length of the column arced out to the right, as if to give everyone along its length a clear view of Suraiya—or perhaps, of Lycinia.

“Now we begin showing you how woefully deceived you truly were.”

Suraiya looked back to Lycinia when she spoke, but the woman was already turning away to gain some distance. The princess clicked her tongue for Valour to follow, only for a spear to slice the air right in front of her face. She followed it down to a veiled figure, who in turn stared up at her with hard grey eyes. Their hand rested on Valour’s reins, and the warhorse stilled immediately.

It was a clear warning not to move, and Suraiya pursed her lips.

Instead of acknowledging the ease by which the stranger controlled her trained warhorse, she turned her gaze back to the column to assess the mood.

Disquiet and unease rippled through the captive members of her expedition, but even her Knights had long-since learned to hold their tongues and avoid anything that could be perceived as resistance, lest they suffer for the lack of discipline.

She had seen more than one of them, and several adventurers too, suffering the very fate Voranis had threatened her with—men and women alike. At one point she had even seen Dame Taryn, Ser Martyn, Dame Coren, Ser Ilhan, and Dame Lavernia walking with grim features, and pronounced limps that told her even Adept Tier Knights were not exempt from the threat.

It was galling, she had to admit, to think of how readily they’d been bested, captured, and led like lambs to whatever it was that Lycinia was about to show them.

“People of Stormharrow!” Lycinia’s voice thundered with an oratory tone of command that captured Suraiya’s attention—and that of all those present—immediately. “You have lived lives of ignorance, shackled by the lies of false gods, and made meek by the deceptions of those that would see you pinned and helpless under their alabaster boots. You have been downtrodden, brow-beaten, and taught to accept a defeat you never knew you suffered!”

Suraiya listened intently while the other woman spoke, and her armoured hands tightened on Valour’s reins. Lycinia didn’t just have a way with words, but instead spoke with the gravitas and presence one would have expected of any High Noble from the Ascendancy’s subordinate Kingdoms.

Suraiya couldn’t help but admire that about her.

“Your entire existence has been a plaything for fickle lifeforms that name themselves deities, and suck your lives dry of joy for their own demented amusement. Even now, you think my words are madness; for surely no mere blighter could know the true glory of the gods!” Lycinia’s derision was blatant in her tone, and even when she continued some remnant of it coloured her words.

“Yet I stand here before you, unbowed and untainted, and I say to you truly: I am a daughter of Heroes! I am a child of a Royal line more ancient, and more venerated than any of the puppet bloodlines you name Monarchs!”

The woman pulled away her scarf, and let her crimson hair billow in a breeze that Suraiya suspected had been created for effect, and yet was no less impressive for it. Lycinia’s chin was raised, and she stood like a conquering queen, straight out of the stories of Yselda the Red.

When she spoke again, Suraiya found herself listening with rapt attention—and no small amount of curiosity. She was, despite knowing what was happening, as enthralled by the performance as anyone else.

“I am Lycinia Selucia Lirnea Fortuna Tollarius, a Patrician of the Elysean Empire; and I welcome you, lost children of the Mantle, to Sanctuary!”

Suraiya’s eyes widened, and then narrowed at the surname Lycinia offered.

The same name, in fact, which Suraiya bore by right of her mother’s blood.

There was no time to contemplate further on the matter, for the moment she’d finished speaking Lycinia had turned and extended her hand; and now Suraiya saw that she held something within it.

The unknown object shone with blue light, and before there was time to do more than attempt an Analysis; a flash of magic surged outward through the air from Lycinia’s upheld artefact.

Suraiya shielded her eyes instinctively when light blossomed across her vision and, when the sudden brightness dissipated a moment later, she lowered her armoured limb to a scene that set her eyes wide, and dropped her jaw.

Where before there had been endless blight and dead landscape, now instead there were looming mountains. Immense peaks that daggered hundreds of metres up toward the heavens stood sentinel before her, each one positioned in such a way as to create a circular formation that defied her understandings of natural scale.

Their convoy and captures were located before one such giant, and at its base was life.

Grass, trees, and flowers dominated the area around the Mountain with impossible vibrancy.

Suraiya stared with mounting shock, and disbelief, at what appeared to be a whole new world opening up in front of her—one where, before, there had been only death and abandoned Desolation.

Shouts of alarm, cries of shock, and expressions of wonder rippled over the convoy while they beheld the miracle that had come to life before their eyes. Some cried out that they were bewitched, and were quickly silenced by the more aware, the more canny, and the more powerfully Tempered. Those veterans knew enchantment from reality, and they knew better than the Untempered mortals that had accompanied the expedition.

There was no trick, only a miracle that defied rational explanation.

The princess lowered her gaze to Lycinia in shock when the proud redhead returned, and saw that the headscarf had been converted into a loose cover for her flowing locks. Her lips, Suraiya noted distractedly, were as red as her hair—and full in a way that made Suraiya envious.

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“Come cousin,” Lycinia said with a twinkle of amusement in her emerald gaze, “let’s take you inside.”

“I—” Suraiya swallowed back her stunned disbelief, and looked past Lycinia—her cousin?!—toward where the vanguard force of the Elyseans were entering a large cavern-like entrance that had appeared at the foot of the mountain. The portal was easily large enough to fit them ten abreast, and with ample space for even a high wagon to trundle through easily.

She wondered at why their formation was compressed so heavily, before realising that the Elyseans stepping inside were not travelling all the way through; but instead taking up position along the edges of the passage and facing inward.

They were not taking any chances with her people.

Suraiya had only a moment to decide her course of action, and in the end she threw all caution to the wind and heeled Valour forward, with Lycinia joining her moments later to lightly take the horse’s bridle and help guide him forward.

As he had the last time; Valour seemed perfectly content to be handled by Lycinia, and Suraiya was forced to wonder, once more, what manner of strange Skill the Elyseans must have possessed to so easily calm her trained warhorse.

“The tunnel is but the appetiser,” the redhead said conversationally, and unprompted as they entered the shadowed entrance of the yawning cavern, “and little more than an access point. All the lies you have been told, all the falsehoods you have been fed… all of it will be dispelled, just as we dispelled them from the many who now stand among our ranks.”

Suraiya turned at that and looked at the Elyseans that guarded the passage, and for the first time she wondered just who they truly were beneath their veils.

Before she could think to ask, however, Lycinia continued.

“Centuries turned to millennia, and yet the Grand Ascendancy never let go of its fear of this land. We had thought they might launch an attack, but none was ever forthcoming. So, we explored. We dared to venture out of our final haven, and what did we meet, do you think?”

“Skarnids and mutants?” Suraiya asked distractedly.

“Tch. Some.” Lycinia conceded with a chuckle. “But more than that, Suraiya, we found people. Abandoned, cast away, decrepit—but people nonetheless. Here a Knight that had said the wrong thing to a sour Priest, there a weaver whose only crime had been refusing to bed an Anointed soldier, and even children whose singular sin was being born within the wrong place during a staged ‘purification of heresy’.”

Suraiya’s attention turned completely to Lycinia at last, and she listened warily.

The woman’s words were poised and elegant, but Suraiya had grown up around such behaviour. Charismatic subterfuge had been ingrained in her since infancy, and she was very familiar with the so-called ‘charm offensive’ that Lycinia seemed to be employing. Still, information was power—and Suraiya saw no reason to curtail the other woman’s desire to share her perspective.

There might be something within it that could help Suraiya protect her people.

“We gave them succour,” Lycinia continued with a gesture at the guardians lining the tunnel. “We healed them, cured them of the Desolation’s infections, and guided them here. All of them chose to stay, and in so doing dedicated themselves to our ideals, our beliefs, and our pursuit of what was stolen from us. They found a home with us, and in so doing, became part of our sacred charge to uphold the Mantle.”

Suraiya opened her mouth to ask a question about the ‘Mantle’ she’d heard of twice by that point, but a sudden end to the passage killed the words in her throat. Her eyes widened when they passed suddenly out from under a shaded overhang, and onto a large granite shelf overlooking a massive valley basin shielded behind the immense bulk of the colossal mountains ringing its borders.

It was beautiful.

Crystal clear blue-green water ran along streams and rivers, fed from an immense waterfall to the far eastern end of the valley, its flow a roaring deluge whose source Suraiya could not discern. There were no inland rivers or seas in the Desolation, and yet the waterfall poured out pure and clear water unabated, and without relent, with all the force of a wild jungle cascade.

Trees filled an expansive forest beneath the waterfall and across its immediate surrounds, and Suraiya trailed her eyes across their canopies to the centre of the valley, where the true Sanctuary was revealed to her.

It was a sprawling city of white marble and artfully sculpted stone, built in an outward-flowing pattern that aligned each thoroughfare with one of the many rivers sneaking through its design. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of people or more walked its streets, and even at a distance Suraiya could make out that fact that the city was vibrantly alive.

At the northernmost point of the city, and built into the bedrock of the largest mountain, stood a Citadel that looked out over the valley like a guardian construct.

Its massive walls and myriad towers were defended behind sturdy battlements, and flat-top-tower-mounted siege weapons whose design she could scarcely comprehend. Given their apparent size even from a distance, Suraiya reasoned they must have been massive enough to threaten even the Lunar Gate.

The most impressive part of the Fortress, however, was neither its three-row-deep walls, nor the beautiful architecture of steps and marble pathways leading up along its single wide access road toward the hidden wonders of the castle interior.

In fact it had nothing to do with the beatific and mind-bending beauty of the constructed palace, nor the massive city that flowed out from its protective walls.

Instead, what captured Suraiya’s notice were the radiant spires of what looked to be pure metal, rising in a pattern she couldn’t quite discern across various places throughout the city. From a distance they looked miniscule, yet to be visible at all they must have been at least ten metres high or more.

Each one appeared to be topped by platinum or some other precious metal, and upon careful examination she noticed they were in fact built everywhere within the valley. She even spotted several of their dome-like rounded tops peeking out of the forest.

Her eyes drifted southward through the valley across the bountiful farmland while scouting the spires, and then to the cleared fields to the east where she saw what looked like regimented ranks of people—soldiers, perhaps—gathered in large enough numbers to rival an entire Formation of Stormharrow’s own army.

They were not numerous enough to challenge the entire force of Stormharrow, which by her memory—and even when discounting the various Chivalric Orders and Faith Militant Garrisons—numbered close to one hundred thousand standing soldiers, and half again that of ready reserves. A careful estimate, however, put the Sanctuary force’s numbers at somewhere between fifteen and twenty-thousand people—an incredibly impressive number for such a contained civilisation, even by Ascendancy standards.

Suraiya’s eyes then moved southward once more to peer directly down in front of her, toward the distant pathway some sixty metres below their present position.

It nearly gave her vertigo to look at it.

The sheer scale of the valley was beyond her ability to describe.

The main population centre alone must have been at least five kilometres from the citadel’s gates to the city’s own outer layer of protective walls, which themselves looked large enough to brush close to twenty metres high. The population sprawled far beyond those, however, and the valley basin was large enough that Suraiya spotted several small towns dotting the landscape.

At a guess, she estimated that they might have been able to fit the whole population of Stormharrow itself into the city with plenty of room to spare, and there were easily hundreds of thousands of people in the capital city of her homeland.

The valley as a whole must have been close to thirty kilometres in diameter, and judging from how perfectly formed its circular shape was, definitely not naturally occuring.

That thought gave her even more cause for wonder.

Creating something on the scale of the hidden valley was… incomprehensible.

Only Gods could work such wonders, so she’d been made to believe.

“How is this possible?” she asked with a tone of wonder.

“Everything will be revealed soon,” Lycinia promised while smiling at her in a self-satisfied manner. “For now, though, come. The Regent awaits, and I have learned not to stall them from what they want.”

“Who is this Regent you keep speaking of?” Suraiya asked while Lycinia began leading Valour—and her by extension—down the long and winding path toward the valley floor.

“The Regent has many names,” Lycinia said with a mischievous tone that hinted at her knowing exactly how annoying the line was, “but there is one that we reserve for them alone.”

The redhead looked back at her, and this time her smile was, in a word, sly. Suraiya felt her heartbeat accelerate at the knowing twinkle in Lycinia’s jade eyes, and when the other woman delivered the next word, the princess felt some ingrained sense of distant dread grip her soul.

“Calamity.”