They should have seen it coming or at least sensed just enough to take measures.
The Crown Prince Evander had recently begun to dabble in politics. No one thought anything of it; in fact, the Emperor had been quietly pleased to see his heir preparing for his future role. Flush with paternal pride, he offered his son full support, even encouragement to push further. So, when Evander declared his intention to curry favor with an Ascended, it seemed a logical, even admirable, next step. The power of an Ascended would be vital if he wished to achieve deeper control of the Order during his coronation, lest he be reduced to a mere figurehead.
That was where the logic had ended, and the madness had begun.
The Emperor, bursting with pride, gathered his innermost circle and a retinue of his most trusted Battlemages in the sanctum at the Onyx Spire's peak, the Chamber of Core, to witness the Commune. The air was thick with incense and anticipation. Evander spoke the Words of Assertion, his voice steady. The ritual flared to life.
Then, his eyes rolled back into his skull. He collapsed, his body seizing upon the cold floor, back arching at an impossible angle while froth, white and bloody, bubbled from his lips. For two seconds, his torso was a strained bow, and then he fell limp. The silence was heavier than any sound.
That was when it came.
The backlash from the violated ritual did not simply explode; it unmade. A visible shockwave of raw, unfiltered power rolled out from the Prince's still form. It hit the Battlemages first. They were lifted a few centimeters into the air and then imploded, their armor, flesh, and bone compressed in a blink into smooth, warm pebbles that rattled as they hit the floor. It then hit the walls of the chamber, and they just ceased to exist.
The Emperor, who had once wrestled a fraction of the Order to his will during his own coronation, fared better. "Better" was a relative term. The force shattered both his shins, driving splinters of bone through his robes, and snapped his left arm, the ulna bursting through the skin. Two of his teeth were launched backward into his throat, and he fell to his knees, choking, coughing them onto the blood-slicked floor amidst the rubble of his most secure chamber. The Onyx Emperor was choking on himself.
Still, he had felt the power, and his eyes flared with anger. Those who managed to impart their will on the Order, even by a fraction, knew the smell of Pseudo-Divinity. Through the pain, his senses, sharpened by his own brush with divinity, caught the scent on the backlash—the cloying, arrogant stench of Pseudo-Divinity. The ritual had not failed. It had been hijacked. His son had tried to commune with an Ascended, but another had hijacked the channel.
Someone had not just killed his boy; they had executed a Crown Prince in the heart of his own power.
For that, there would be no treaties, no negotiations—only rivers of blood.
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Shortly before Quintus pointed his staff down, the Bemoaner unfurled a scroll. His fingers flickered, weaving sigils into the air. A shield of compressed, hazy air, like a heat shimmer, solidified around him. The forest of lightning Quintus had called down connected with the miasma, and the earth groaned under the weight of the transferred power. It also struck the Bemoaner's shield, and where the lightning struck, the shield flashed from hazy to transparent, straining, but it held. For now. The Bemoaner took a deliberate step back, swallowed by the protective darkness.
Inside the miasma, the glowing green eyes had multiplied into a constellation of thousands. Yet Quintus stood unwavering, a silver-eyed pillar in the storm. Soon, one of the owners of those eyes ventured out.
It was a thing of uneasy proportions, caught in the grim space between a tall goblin and a stunted man. At a glance, it was easy to mistake it for a man—a sickly, sharp-featured one, but a man nonetheless. It's only on a second, colder look that the wrongness settles in.
Its skin was the color of a day-old bruise, pulled taut over a frame that was just a little too lean, the joints a fraction too knobby. The face was almost human, but the jaw was a shade too long, the nose a flattened snub with slitted nostrils, and the ears sharply tapered, pressed close to the skull. Its pale green eyes, set too far apart, glowed with a sickly phosphorescence.
It moved with a jarring, stop-start grace, a feral twitchiness restrained by the ghost of human posture. In its hand was a short sword, less a weapon of war and more a butcher's tool, nicked and stained, the hilt fused to the greyish flesh of a palm that could not remember how to let go.
It was not a goblin wearing a man-suit, nor a man infested with goblin-ness. It was a new thing, a failed grave and a desperate spark, given form and purpose. It was a walking blasphemy. And when a rod of lightning found it, it became a charred statue, its brief, unnatural life extinguished in a flash.
Another ventured out. Then another. Each met the same fate, their bodies crisping to ash under the relentless storm.
"The elements thrive in your presence, Archmage," Hamus's voice rustled from the depths of the miasma.
"Your voice burdens my ears," Quintus's voice boomed, eclipsing the thunder.
"It will be a problem no longer after this."
"True. Only screams and pleas will come from that mouth. Tell me, did the Blight-Father shrivel your manhood as he did your stature?"
"Obscene and vulgar as always."
"Tsk. To think you'd accept such a fate while still a virgin."
"Quintus the foul-mouthed!"
"See this, Arnius!" Quintus barked, not taking his eyes from the miasma. "This is the retort of a man severely lacking in conversational creativity."
Arnius, who had been meticulously counting the spent power by the flicker of the lightning, simply nodded and flashed a thin, weary smile. He couldn't fathom how beings of such monstrous power devolved into schoolyard taunts mid-battle, but he had long stopped trying. A win was a win, regardless of the commentary.
The truth was, Quintus's power was not infinite. The energy required to maintain the storm was depleting him at an alarming rate, the elements demanding a steep toll for their service. The constant drain was a tangible burn in his veins, a screaming ache in his temples. Still, he held on.
The imperial scryers had sent two ravens. The first warned of a two-pronged attack: the Iron Valleys and the capital, Solaris. The second identified Hamus as a key attacking figure for the Iron Valleys' assault.
Quintus loathed the man and his art, but he could not help a thread of professional respect for the monstrous effort involved. Hamus was a Biomancer. He hadn't raised an army; he had handcrafted it. Every stitched-together abomination was a product of his personal labor—designed, stitched, grown, armed, and maintained by him alone. The sheer, monotonous effort of creating a force large enough to give the rebellion the numbers required to attack on two fronts was a testament to a terrifying, patient madness.
Hamus' army was the rebellion's backbone. It was the hammer that would shatter the gates of Aethergard, the entry to the Iron Valleys. And it was the army Quintus now sought to pin down with his lightning.
Hamus held the advantage. To win, he merely had to wait, to preserve his forces until Quintus was depleted and then launch it at the valley's entrance, Aethergard.
And that was precisely what Quintus wanted him to do. To wait.