Leon Valoris Honorum staggered at the power that washed out of Arcturus Regis, his eyes widening in stunned disbelief as reality and existence seemed to bend and warp around his body. When the power of his ire was turned to Amélie, Leon felt himself chilled to the core. In place of the handsome man he’d shared some level of fraternity with, despite himself, there was a beast. A monster. Hatred and rage twisted Arcturus Regis into something out of the depths of his nightmares. White and black crackles of energy flashed and demented the air around the man like nothing Leon had ever witnessed. The aura that washed out of him, as well, was antithetical: This man, he knew, would lay waste to all of Luxanium in that moment if it stood between him and his prize.

Leon willed himself to move, to move, to resist: Instead, he found only frozen limbs, shackled by a terror so primally deep that his body refused to even register his commands. Self-preservation, he knew, kicked in to a degree he had never before experienced. If he stepped in Arcturus’ line of sight, something deep inside the most aware recesses of his soul told him he would be killed, and dropped to the earth like a puppet with its strings cut free.

His gaze turned to Amélie, and he felt his heart beating in his chest as he watched her, purpling under the force of the Telekinesis that Arcturus was wielding. The world was bending in around her neck, and rippling with pain around her assailant. It was as if reality itself were terrified of Arcturus’ existence, as if it cried out in pain that such a creature should walk Order’s perfect creation. Leon had read the tales about the great heroes, and the great villains, of the world’s history. He had learned of Karias the Conqueror, of Ilymach the Tyrant, Lucius Starsunder, Brunhildr Voidwing, Sera Hopeflayer, and of Joan the Butcher.

He’d read of Tylraes Brightblade, of Perciful Dragoneyes, and of Rodric the Benevolent. Those heroes who had risen to cast down the world’s greatest evils. Saint Amélie of the Unfettered Dawn had been such a hero, and now he looked at her Nephilim namesake beset upon by a creature who, Leon knew to his core, would become a villain more terrible than any force of evil in generations… and he could do nothing. Frustration, self-recrimination, and loathing for his weakness beyond all measurement flooded his body and Leon tasted something bitter in his mouth.

Slowly, slowly, he forced himself to his feet.

With trembling fingers held his Aetherblade, Dawnbringer, aloft.

Leon had always wanted to be a hero of the people, like his uncle had been rumoured to be. He had wanted to achieve something, to be something, that his morose grandfather could be proud of. He didn’t blame Honoris; he had been robbed of his son and heir. The great and beloved Arcturus Titus Valoura. Now, a man claiming to be that paragon’s son stood before Leon: A creature so cunning, so charismatic, that he had convinced even Amélie’s former companions and Elethea herself of the validity of his heritage.

Seeing his power, it was almost believable.

Except he didn’t have a Soul. Alanna had Seen it, or rather, been unable to See him. He was severed from the Great Tapestry and thus his actions could not be foretold, and a creature that had no Fate could not have a Soul. Terrans were given leave to nudge and change their chords by their own actions, for Fate was an active and amorphous thing one could never truly surrender to, lest they be lost… But the being before Leon was no Terran, nor any Nephilim he could conceive of. He was an aberration, a monster.

An existential threat to Valaria and the entire Empire.

Leon’s legs started to move, to firm as he pushed through the fear lancing through his blood like poison. He would fight. He would fight. His eyes turned to Amélie, his protector and friend, and he urged himself onwards.

A curtain of balayage hair stopped him dead, and the pressure assailing him vanished.

The Beast was tackled by Elethea, and something in what she said or did seemed to still his fury, for the cascading pressure bearing down upon Leon’s very soul seemed to abate completely. Freed from the spell, he debated ending things right then: Charging over and putting the creature out of the world’s misery. He thought about it until his knuckles went white, and then he raced over towards Amélie, ignoring the dead woman at her feet and taking a moment to check on Alanna. She was unconscious, but breathing. Her wounds had been crippling, not fatal. Thank the gods for small miracles.

Turning from the Seer, he reached out to assist in bracing the wheezing, disoriented Valkyrie with his own arms.

“Hold on. You’re going to be alright.” He promised, having no healing talents of his own, but aware that those with the Church present did. She would be alright. She was alive, and her will would not allow her to die so ignobly. He felt her gaze shift as his did, and thrashing contention caught both their attentions. The creature claiming to be his cousin stared at them, and in the depths of its crimson eyes, Leon saw what would happen if it ever wrapped its claws around the throne of Valaria.

Death, for him and all those that resisted the creature’s rule.

“Never again.” He promised himself, watching as the Nephilim pulled away their abomination.

Never again would he let that thing threaten those under his protection.

He swore it, and branded it upon his heart.

Tylariel smashed through the wall with a grunt of pain, her elemental armour flickering from the abuse it took as it shielded her from the damage. Either her body had to give or the wall did, given the strength behind the attack that had sent her flying, and with an Archon’s fortitude… she winced. The house had never stood a chance.

Her eyes snapped up reflexively and she rolled to avoid the arcing spear that slammed inches-deep into the floor tiles beneath her, glancing to her left and eyeing the golden implement of death where its metal body sat ominously still. Wasting no more time, Tylariel arced up to her feet and was already moving when the spear’s owner blew in through the wall’s gaping wound, grabbing the shaft and ripping the weapon from the tiles in the same motion as she spun in mid-air to bring it around for a thrust behind her to where Tylariel was moving.

“Too slow!” Tylariel crowed as the spear slammed into a granite slab, and she burst through it a second later; detonating the rocks around her body with an expression of will and then sending them hurtling like a shrapnel bomb at the armoured Highmaiden.

Asteria cursed as the stone shredded her exposed arms and wings, doing notable damage but not enough to truly impede her. Even before the attack was finished, her wounds had started the process of mending: Defying expectation with how mind-bogglingly fast the blessed Valkyrie repaired the remnants of the attack.

A god’s blessing was a powerful thing.

When Tylariel closed in, she dodged under a warding spear slash, letting it cut along the back of her body with a hiss of pain as it passed through her elemental armour like a knife through butter. Valkyries and their enchanted bond-weapons were one of the few things Archons could not adequately ward against with their abilities.

Uncaring about the wound, however, Tylariel performed a spinning roundhouse faster than any non-Archon could witness, her movements enhanced and emboldened by aether to a speed that mundanes and baseborn couldn’t begin to fathom.

When her leg connected with Asteria’s breastplate, the Highmaiden ceased to be where she was: Flying backwards with a bang of popping air and smashing bodily through the dividing wall between two corridors with a manor-shaking boom until she lay sprawled in an abandoned storage room.

Tylariel wasted no time in monologuing or gloating, and gave chase with a crack of the tiles under her feet; launching herself forwards to half fly, half run through the chaotic mess of the Highmaiden’s passage and throw herself back into the melee with Asteria. She had to stop her in then and there, or everything else she planned would be for naught.

Asteria responded to Tylariel’s charge with commendable alacrity, throwing herself aside from the seeking vines and coming up with a slash of her spear that forced Tylariel backwards, her aetherblade — Veritas — sweeping through the air to slap aside the spear as she thrust out with her right hand again, this time pulling stone spikes from the walls towards Asteria, who responded by folding her wings to block them and slamming a foot into Tylariel’s chest, and sending her flying out of the room.

A grunt escaped her lips as she smashed into the wall at the far end of the manor, cracking the masonry and bruising her ribs. Her elemental armour was weakening, she could feel it.

Time to end the fight.

As Asteria charged after her, Tylariel pulled herself to her feet and planted herself. While she tapped into her aether and started manipulating the area immediately surrounding the villa, she focused her eyes and will on keeping the Highmaiden occupied. When Asteria charged in and thrust like lightning with her spear, Tylariel deflected and darted in with a just-slightly overcommitted slash at the Valkyrie's left breast.

Asteria, sensing triumph, swept her spear up for a strike to impale Tylariel. Instead, she met only air as stone wrapped around the Archon’s legs and pulled her out of the way.

Tylariel deflected Asteria’s spear-strike with Veritas and snapped her right hand up as she threw the Highmaiden’s blow wide, pulling deeply on her core and summoning vines she’d prepared moments earlier, pulling them through the walls with such force that they blew them apart in a tumult of power, and then slithered in and wrapped around the Valkyrie’s limbs.

“You think this can hold me?!” Asteria snarled at her, her brilliant wings flexing as she urged her aetherically enhanced muscles to tear apart the vines.

“No.” Tylariel replied honestly, before reaching down to the masonry she knew lurked beneath them, and tearing apart the floor of her home since childhood to impale Asteria on a spear of solid granite.

The Valkyrie’s eyes widened, and she opened her mouth to speak.

Tylariel responded by ramming her sword through her skull via her mouth.

Asteria’s body fell lifeless instantly, and the Archon tore Veritas free, dispersing the compressed vines of its blade into aetherial essence. She had no time to spare, if what her father had told her before he joined the battle had been true.

As she stepped away from Asteria’s corpse, a boom of thunder crackled over the manor — lighting up the sky as the heavens split in half. Distantly, she could hear a keening cry.

The gods, it seemed, had taken notice of the slaying of a Highmaiden of the Church.

Tylariel set her jaw and ignored the dread that stirred in her heart, leaving the brutalised woman she’d known her entire life behind her as she launched herself out of one of the gaping wounds in the side of the villa and slammed into the ground thirty metres below, turning and sprinting back inside and towards the entrance hall.

The two Church lackeys standing guard tried to challenge her, only to die to granite spears that tore through their bodies from the ground and hoisted them dangling like ragdolls into the air. Tylariel didn’t even spare them a glance, cursing as she saw the blasted apart Rubastra crest and racing into the stairwell.

With a fick of her mind, she tapped into the ancient aether matrices beneath the stairs and converted them from steps into a sliding descent of smooth stone — and then she rode it. Arms spread, red hair flying behind her, Tylariel used her elemental spellform to accelerate herself and reduce her friction as she bore down towards the bottom of the passage with prodigious speed.

When she emerged from the once-stairwell into the forbidding corridor of the Unknown Ancients, Tylariel raced past the dark murals and ominous statues to burst into the room beyond the shattered double doors.

Her eyes went first to the sight of Elethea, her blade a coruscating beacon, as the Highblade Heiress — formerly, now, since Beowulf’s death and her lack of husband — dueled a magma-bladed Inquisitor. On the other side, Andy and Adam were embattled with a second Inquisitor wielding a sword of condensed liquid; and her heart wrenched at seeing the sardonic young Nephilim she’d taken as a lover covered in cuts, bruises, and wounds enough that one of his arms hung useless and partially severed at his side.

Above them all sat the blackstone gate, and the swirling white vortex of the portal within it. Arcturus was nowhere to be seen, and judging by the way his friends were defending the gate... Relief suffused her as she realised she hadn’t been too late, and she resolved to rid herself of the immediate problems first.

That meant the Church’s pet pseudo-Archons.

Tylariel reignited Veritas and charged.

Elethea deflected another strike from the magma aetherblade and staggered backwards, gritting her teeth as she felt another surge of revitalizing warmth — courtesy of Danica’s Battle Cleric spells — suffuse her body. The Inquisitor before her was far, far weaker than she’d initially thought. She had charged thinking it would be her death that she greeted, with Arcturus’ eyes in her mind and his taste on her lips, but instead she’d been entered into a melee with an opponent who was, at best, only moderately more advanced than she was.

It seemed strange, somehow, that such would be the case. The power the Inquisitors had demonstrated in detonating the gates offered an insight into their strength that their performance failed to display. She charged back in towards the Inquisitor, whose features showed both frustration and confusion at their fight, but otherwise remained focused. When they clashed, Elethea noticed once again that there almost seemed to be an uncertainty to how the Inquisitor fought.

It was as if he expected more power from each blow he struck, and was denied it.

Think, Elethea! She chided herself, keeping her distance as they dueled back and forth, blades sweeping up and together in flashing crackles of aetheric force. Aetherblade combat was always beautiful; an elegant, flashy showing between individuals of a heightened and superior mein clashing with practiced forms and at-times physics-defying agility. The Inquisitor should have had the advantage decisively — and Elethea should have been dead ten times over. Yet though he was clearly her superior in power, he was only average in blade skill. He relied on his spellforms to carry him through, as many Archons did in modern times.

Why would his magic not work?

The Inquisitors had breached the stairwell, entered the corridor, and broken down the doors. There was no reason—?

Broken down the doors.

To the chamber with the active gateway.

Elethea’s eyes widened, and then her thoughts slammed back into focus as the Inquisitor came at her with a sudden, and before unseen speed. She tried to parry. Her distraction cost her, instead, and the Inquisitor’s blade raked across her chest in a searing blaze of agony.

Danica’s cry of disbelief seemed distant as Elethea hit the floor, her eyes wide at the pain that suffused her chest. A moment’s distraction and now she would die? Because of… what? Her thoughts were foggy as she tried to think against the pain, watching the blurring outline of the Inquisitor advancing towards her. She was going to die, in a basement chamber, surrounded by her future husband’s friends. She’d sworn to him, given herself to him, only to die at the hands of a zealot.

Not just a zealot, a slave. The thought was repulsive. It went against everything she was.

“May the gods grant you Mercy.” The Inquisitor intoned, his solemn words hollowed by the subtle glee in his voice.

Elethea spat blood at him, spraying her vital fluid across the ancient floor. “To hell with your gods.” She said, every fibre of her being truly meaning the words. To hell with the Pantheon, the Church, and all of its lies and deceptions. To hell with the entire Empire. They could all burn.

“Will you not accept the gods’ mercy?” He taunted. “Accept peace beyond death?”

Elethea laughed wetly, blood rolling down her mouth to baptise the floor beneath her. “I would tear down every last trace of your religion, were it within my power.” She seethed at him as she died. “As my beloved swore to do, I would kill your clergies, burn your books, and cast you from this wonderful world like the plague you are. Had I the life in me, I would erase your dogma from Terra. I swear it.”

As her thoughts crystallized, a hum of energy filled the room.

The Inquisitor staggered backwards.

Elethea abruptly screamed as power flooded through her body, arching her back from the floor as her eyes burned with radiance. She was aflame. From near-death to an overpowering surge of life, she felt as though every atom of her existence was being immolated. Her lips parted, her throat torn by the ferocity of her screaming as she felt herself thrown to her feet. Clarity flooded her mind, and wondrous radiance filled her veins. A mellifluous female voice, low and sensuous, whispered in her ears.

“Your vow is witnessed, Bonded of the Reclaimer. Fight on.”

Elethea needed no further motivation. She trusted not a word, but she knew power, and she felt it course in her veins. The Inquisitor stared at her in disbelief as she rose, and then snarled out an “Abominable Heretic!” and charged at her with murderous intent.

Elethea met his vicious oberhau with an horizontal parry and held the Inquisitor’s blade in place, her expression tightening in focus as she focused on the space just behind her opponent. Feinting a failing strength, she let him double down on his assault and then triggered her elemental spellform with a mental switch-flip.

Her body shifted in a way that had first been disorienting, and was now warmly familiar. The world seemed to explode into fragments of light, and for a moment all she saw was prismatic wonder: A kaleidoscope of alternation and various light spectrums that danced and glittered with the ordered chaos of creation. Then as fast as it happened, it was over; and she reappeared in a static discharge of golden lightning and platinum flames behind her opponent.

For her, those movements were both an instant and an eternity, but for her foes they were solely an instant. The Inquisitor stumbled forwards when the resistance against his sword vanished, and Elethea ran forwards and promptly drop-kicked him in the back, sending him careening towards the central dais.

When he turned to face her, Elethea saw him stumble and she knew she was correct.

Elethea didn’t hesitate as she pressed him, slamming into the Inquisitor with a blitzkrieg of rapid slashes and spinning cuts that pushed him back further and further, until his ankles bumped the stairs leading up to the shimmering portal. Her teeth bared at him in a savage smile, Elethea spoke.

“Tell your gods we’re coming for them.”

Adjudication took him through the chest, and was torn up and through his skull in a spray of viscera and grey matter.

Satisfaction rippled through her body.

“So the Vow is sealed.” The female voice whispered again, before the power left her veins and Elethea dropped to the floor like a puppet with her strings cut.

She turned her head to see a sight that very nearly made her laugh. Tylariel, her blade a blur, ripping apart the Inquisitor like he were a prize catch to be distributed. Blood and limbs flew, and the Inquisitor’s head hit the floor with a wet smack not ten seconds later.

“Took you long enough.” Andy muttered as a fresh wave of healing energy rippled across his body. “Bloody slow, if you ask m—!” He was cut off as the Archon pulled him into a kiss, crushing her lips to his and silencing his grousing.

“Battle makes people weird.” Adam grunted as he turned towards Danica. “How does it look?”

“Bad!” Danica cried. “The gateway is losing power!”

“We have to go.” He said, turning to Tylariel, who glanced back at the hallway. Her father, Elethea assumed. She was looking for her father. For several long moments the Archon stood there, and then turned. “Let’s go.”

“Can we catch Arcturus?” Andy asked, looking very much cheered up.

“We won’t know for sure unless we go through.” Adam answered.

Elethea looked up, and found herself unable to move — until suddenly soft, powerful hands were lifting her. Up the stairs she stumbled, half-walking, half-carried by the steady strength of the Rubastra Archon. She tried her level best to hold her own, looking at Tylariel’s battle-mussed features questioningly. “My lady…?”

“I saw your fight with the Inquisitor. That was impressive.”

“Thank you.” She murmured. “Father trained me, and I did a lot of practice with the House Guards.”

“I hear you’ve famously never had a Master.”

“Father never found anyone he thought was worthy.” Elethea confirmed with a mirthless laugh. “And he said taking me on himself was wrong, even though I was learning from him anyway.”

“This may be the worst time to ask, Elethea.” Tylariel said as they reached the apex of the dais, and stopped before the swirling portal. “But how would you feel about becoming my second Apprentice?”

Elethea’s eyes widened. “Is that allowed—?”

“Do you care?” Tylariel asked bluntly, all trace of the previously highstrung woman she’d known gone — erased by the rigours of the tragedy that had befallen her House. Rubastra was finished. Her only sister was essentially a mundane, and there was no recovery for Tylariel to be found in the Empire. For Elethea, House Highblade had allies and subordinates that would come to her aid — but not without issue, and not without political repercussions and internal resistance.

She had better things to do with her life, and a man to whom she had sworn her loyalty. In front of her oath, what did a civil war matter? Her Father had always told her that one’s honour came before all else, even the family’s glory and political prestige. For Elethea, her honour was being Bound to her future husband.

The answer to Tylariel’s question was surprisingly simple after that.

“I would be honoured, Mentor.”

Together, the group leapt into the portal.