Grand Marshal Vildrious had tasked a full company's worth of scouts to monitor developments in Zarmand and ensure that Nethron's loyalists did not march against him from the rear. Regular dispatches from the scouts trickled in every other hour to his command post ten miles east of the Nehal River. Most of the dispatches had little interesting to say besides the typical comings and goings of a bustling city with more than a million residents.

Then came something else. Rather than a single messenger delivering him a dispatch, a squad of some ten of them all arrived at his tent together. They held their helmets under their arms and all of their faces carried grief and shock.

Vildrious knew it had to be dire news and feared asking.

"Well?" he at last inquired.

The tallest of the messengers, a cherubic young lad with a patchy beard, stepped forward. His lips quivered and his hands fidgeted.

"Sir, it's, that is to say, I should... We were riding and... This horrible thing...," the messenger spluttered.

"One thought at a time, boy. Now, now. Start again," Vildrious interjected, though he certainly sympathized with the boy's plight.

With that instruction, the messenger breathed deeply and briefly closed his eyes.

"Zarmand," he squeaked out, almost swallowing the end of the word.

"Yes, yes. What about it?" Vildrious sighed.

"It's gone!" the messenger blurted. He began crying as soon as he said it. "The High Angel destroyed it. All of it."

"What?!" Vildrious gasped as he leapt to his feet. "What do you mean by 'all of it'?"

"There's nothing left! Blasted down its foundations"

"No no no. That's impossible!" the Grand Marshal protested, though he knew in his heart it was true. His mind had been ill at ease since the prior afternoon and he had seen what everyone assumed was the High Angel's glowing approach toward Zarmand high in the sky. "There are over a million people in the city."

"There were over a million people, sir," the messenger meekly replied. "I saw it myself from a distance yesterday. These... flaming orbs. I don't know how to describe them. The just destroyed everything. It's just a bare slate, the whole thing. The castle, the walls, all the buildings, the people. Scarcely anything is left."

"I saw it, too," another of the scouts, a shorter stouter man, added. "I've never even heard of anything like what I saw."

Vildrious paced about, raising a finger as though he were about to have a response to this calamity, but he had none. The scale of the disaster was beyond anything he expected. Picturing all of the great old buildings in Zarmand's central district, each of them hundreds of years old and wreathed in history, blasted into oblivion strained his imagination. And the loss of life. He started thinking of all of the friends, associates, and family that would have died if they were in the city at the time.

"You can return to your duties," Vildrious muttered despondently. "Thank you. Thank you."

"Sir," the first messenger started, "our duties are no longer... Zarmand is no longer there. We have no mission now."

"Quite. Quite," Vildrious barely broke above a whisper. "Um, return to your original units. I'll have orders relayed to you once I... once I figure out what those will be."

Though his candid admission of impotence was unfitting for the army's Grand Marshal, he didn't care. Once the men left, he collapsed into his chair sitting alongside his map table. Where Zarmand had been, he used a simple gray metal cylinder. As he glanced at it, his mind raced imagining the horrors that the city had seen. As the imagined screams reached a crescendo in his mind, he flicked the cylinder over.

He took some minutes to collect his thoughts, but he knew he didn't have long. The entire army would be looking to him for guidance while the Emperor was off campaigning in The Strand to crush Nethron's loyalists there. This was his chance to prove himself worthy of the trust that Emperor Duronaht had placed in him. Other commanders doubted Vildrious was up to his command due to his age, experience, and prior poor performance in the Segrison Marche. Informants within the army told him that he had a reputation as "Myrvaness's puppet."

"So what if she chose me?" he mumbled aloud by himself. "Almost every damn commander in the army has their position due to luck of birth, including me. How is this luck any different?"

In fact, he missed Myrvaness's presence over the prior two days. She had disappeared without a trace and he felt enfeebled as a result. His frustration with the situation growing, he bolted out of his command tent to issue orders for a conference of the top marshals and generals. As he did, he saw Myrvaness floating just before the entrance, her light yellow skin glowing majestically. A very slight grin crossed her face when she locked her eyes upon Vildrious.

"You!" he shouted at her. "You must've known about this yesterday when it happened."

"I did," she replied dryly.

"Why didn't you come to me at once?!" he screeched.

She tilted her head contemptuously at him.

"And what good would have come of me telling you then?" the angel asked in a mocking tone. "I felt it best to let this take its ordinary time. Besides, it was very good news."

"Good news?!" Vildrious spat incredulously, not caring for a moment that passing soldiers and officers could see his unhinged rage. "GOOD NEWS?!"

She lunged forward in a flash and grasped his forearm, letting loose the familiar roiling chill that paralyzed him in terrible pain where he stood. His bones ached as though they were about to shatter.

"Get a hold of yourself," she commanded sternly, her bright green eyes staring directly into his. "A single lost city that already betrayed you is hardly worth crying about when it has caused the High Angel's downfall."

Vildrious, even in his continuing agony stemming from her grip, straightened his face at once, shock and curiosity racing through his mind.

"Her... downfall?"

Myrvaness released her grip on the Grand Marshal and smirked.

"I do not fault you for not sensing this. You are not a child of Ceuna," Myrvaness's prior irritated tone became strangely placid. "She was summoned by the Progenitor. I felt it. As did Parlon. As did Jagreth. Most importantly, so did Elaous. She was punished for what she did. The Golden Aura, that power she could hold over all of us, is not hers any longer."

Vildrious's mind, still rattled by the grief over the news of Zarmand's obliteration, now also grappled with a sense of elation at what Myrvaness told him.

"Indeed. Indeed!" he chirped. "Does that mean what I think it does?"

"Yes," she smiled. "The war can begin in earnest now, with us fighting alongside you. From the ashes of Zarmand will rise your winds of victory."

~~~

Empress Evinda had been unable to console her husband for the prior day after hearing word of the obliteration of Zarmand. She was pleased that he successfully begged the angels to keep their knowledge of the disaster to themselves until it was confirmed by other sources. That delay gave both of them, as well as their close confidantes, time to prepare for the inevitable dire consequences.

Just after dawn, Rohmhelt had left their tent in silence, not answering he questions about where he was going or what he was thinking. She could guess easily enough on the second point. All night as he lay next to her, he muttered time and again, "Why did she do that?" and "She's doomed us."

Evinda knew that she had no words that could reassure Rohmhelt and so she didn't bother trying to justify it. Being from the north as she was, Zarmand was a pure abstraction to her and she had never even seen the city. To her, its destruction meant almost nothing other than what it would do to support in the army for her husband and Forynda.

As to the second of those loyalties, once Rohmhelt left to ruminate and likely meet with Marshal Agrehn, she sought out Matriarch Yldrina for a far different perspective on the event than Rohmhelt's. On her path through the army's tents, accompanied by attendants and two Solnahtern, she noticed the start of rumblings as to what happened. It had only been a matter of time. Destruction of death on that scale, even far away, could not stay secret for long.

On the southwest edge of the camp, she saw Yldrina speaking to the two Etelets as well as a series of her other followers. The short, shrunken, and ancient Matriarch looked and stood no different than she would on any other day. This was even though Evinda noticed the angel Simel also floating near the group.

"Your Imperial Majesty," Cesord Etelet offered with an unsteady bow as she approached. "It's with great reluctance that I tell you that..."

"Yes, I know," Evinda interjected with a shake of her head. "Zarmand."

"Not only that," Simel uttered. His ordinarily sagging face was especially doleful and his metallic eyes locked eerily onto the Empress. "The Progenitor called Forynda to answer for her deeds. The Golden Aura is no longer hers."

Matriarch Yldrina's already deeply wrinkled face seemed to develop added fault lines as she flicked her eyes between Simel and Evinda.

"The Serene Mother knew that she would so suffer and she did this righteous deed anyway," Yldrina boomed in a strong voice that surprised the Empress. "Those adhering to Nethron's wickedness had to be punished."

"I saw such happenings in my own visions," Simel intoned distantly. "The cruel truth of all of this is that so much worse will happen now that Forynda's great power is no longer able to intimidate Omonrel and the others. My brethren's full fury is about to be unleashed and I fear that none are ready for it. Though Forynda is still, even after this, the strongest among us, we face a far different world now."

"What can we do now?" Evinda asked, her fears rising after Simel's brooding warnings. "Are we merely dependent upon you to protect us?"

Simel spread his arms wide and lit up the space between them with various incarnations of the Auras. There were orbs of azure, ivory, crimson, ebony, and many others that dazzled Evinda.

"Forynda never wanted these instruments, and their treacherous powers, to be yours. Nethron's act was irreversible, however," Simel said, his eyes flickering between those mortals gathered around him. "But to fight for your cause to govern yourselves, you must master these alongside what Forynda gave you. There is here the means to at least stand a chance against my kind. You will need it."