The night sky remained eerily silent.

The silence of every being present having already received more than they could process and standing in the aftermath of that with nothing left to contribute. The stripped warriors on the walls were on their knees. The Demons that had been moving among them were on their knees. The diminished Imperators who had been arrayed behind the Murderous Saint were on the cloud below with the postures of people who had decided stillness was the only available decision.

Damian looked at his father’s corpse.

The demonic energy inside it was still moving. He could feel it, the vile squirming of something that had been given a body to animate and was now becoming aware that the authority sustaining it had been removed and its own circumstances were therefore deteriorating. It was not brave energy.

It wriggled with the desperation of something trying to find a way out of a container that had been closed on all sides, pressing against the inside of the armor and the dead flesh within it and finding no exit that wasn’t going to require passing through what Damian currently was.

He reached out with the Primordial Source and pressed inward on it.

The demonic energy cried out.

He heard it the way he heard things that existed below the range of sound, as a vibration rather than a noise, and the vibration communicated terror clearly enough that no translation was required. He pressed harder, locating the singularity of this borrowed energy that had given the corpse its semblance of life, and he found it and crushed it against the internal walls of what he had become, and the crying stopped.

The armor of Emperor Zuku Vakochev went still.

The corpse inside it lost whatever had been making it move and became what it had always been since the moment the Emperor died.

Eight years and demonic preservation and violent reanimation had reduced it to something that needed to be held together carefully, and without the energy doing that holding, it began to collapse.

Damian raised his hand.

Sand rose from the lands below the capital, drawn up through the night air in a column that moved with purpose. Stone followed it, slabs and chunks and aggregate from the earth beneath the citadel, answering the pull of his Second Doctrine the way everything rooted in soil answered it.

He shaped the rising materials with the focused attention he had been applying to larger things all evening, and the sand and stone found each other and locked together around his father’s falling form, cradling it before it reached the cloud below, arresting the collapse and beginning to build.

He built a mausoleum.

He placed it at the center of the Citadel of the Eternal Crimson. Stone walls formed first, then a roof, then inscriptions he pressed into the exterior with Mana rather than tools because tools would have taken longer than he was willing to wait. The structure was not elaborate. It was correct, which was a different thing. It would stand in the center of this capital.

When it was done, he looked at it for a moment.

Then he looked away.

"My father," he said, and his voice carried across the entire capital with the solar light still illuminating it, "Zuku Vakochev, was a good man. He was unjustly killed." He let that sit.

"Today, that has been rectified. Here he lies for others to remember him."

He turned to the Murderous Saint.

The old man was floating where Damian had left him, held in place by the same Mana keeping him exactly where the last order had placed him. The terror that had been on his face when Damian said I want you to watch had not left it. It had deepened with each subsequent thing he had been forced to watch, and what lived in his eyes now was the terror of a man who had spent decades operating from the certainty of his own superiority and had seen that certainty removed in the span of a single night.

He had no Mana. He had no power. He had the lined and sagging face of genuine old age and the shaking hands of a body that had lost everything supplementing its limits, and he was looking at Damian with the eyes of something that had finally understood its situation with complete clarity.

Damian moved forward and took his head in one hand.

His fingers closed around the skull, and the Murderous Saint made a sound that had no composition to it, no words and no strategy and no performance. Damian looked at him, and the obsidian light in his eyes had not dimmed, and the hand holding the skull had the same force behind it that had built a mausoleum from raw stone thirty seconds ago.

"Look at me while the darkness comes," Damian said. "I will squeeze your head until it bursts now."

...!

He waited for the terror in the eyes to reach its final expression.

It did.

He closed his hand.

The sound was brief, and what remained was not worth describing, and the Murderous Saint was dead.

The silence that followed was heavier than the silence before, which had already been considerable. The stripped warriors on the walls did not move. The diminished Demons did not attempt anything. Serala floated in the illuminated sky with her wings held at a span that had not changed since the chest-splitting moment, and she watched Damian with the eyes of someone bearing witness to something they understood they would never be able to fully articulate to anyone who had not been here.

His voice rang out once more across the capital.

"Stay where you are. Hold your families close. A new system and new rulers shall come soon to ensure that what happened before never happens again." He looked at the walls, at the kneeling warriors, at the things that had been Eighth Circle Demons and were now diminished creatures with no options.

"Those who followed the Murderous Saint and worked with Demons will be stripped of all positions."

...!

The solar brilliance held steady over the capital of the Dominion of Crimson Stone as a new age would be dawning for it!

---

The Hallowed Voice arrived expecting a war.

What he arrived to was the absence of one.

The forces of the Covenant spread across the ground and sky behind him in the formation they had assembled and maintained since setting off from the Citadel, Holy Women and Paladins and Imperators arrayed for a siege that showed no signs of being necessary. The capital’s walls were present.

The crimson light that usually pulsed from every surface of the Dominion had been replaced by something white-gold and solar that covered the city in an illumination belonging to a different power entirely.

The warriors on the walls were kneeling.

Not in organized defensive positions. Not in the arranged formations of a force that had chosen the gesture deliberately. On their knees individually, scattered across the wall’s length in the postures of people whose bodies had made the decision without consulting anyone higher in the chain of command. Not one of them looked upward as the Covenant’s forces arrived in the sky above them.

They were staring at the stone directly in front of their faces with the focus of beings that had concluded looking upward was not a safe activity at this time.

No defenses activated. No signals went out. No response of any kind came from the capital’s military infrastructure.

The Hallowed Voice looked at the Saint of Stone.

They descended toward the figure they could see floating in the sky above the citadel, the white-gold and verdant wings visible from a distance that would have made the identification impossible for anyone without Eighth and Ninth Circle perception.

Serala was still. Her wings held their span. Her eyes were fixed on a structure at the center of the citadel that had not been there when Damian and Serala had arrived.

The Saint of Stone reached her first.

"What happened? Did the Murderous Saint run with his most powerful forces? Why is there no battle?"

Serala looked at her teacher.

Then she looked at the mausoleum at the center of the Citadel of the Eternal Crimson.

"The battle...ended in the first minute," she said. "The Murderous Saint is dead." She returned her gaze to the Saint of Stone. "And Damian asked to be alone. He is touring his old home." She paused.

"He said we will head toward the River of the World after."

...!

The Hallowed Voice’s ring of Ninth Circle Mana stopped turning above his head for a moment.

The Saint of Stone looked at Serala, then at the capital below, then at the kneeling thousands on the walls, then at the mausoleum, then back at Serala.

The Covenant forces arrayed behind the Hallowed Voice did not make a sound!

He had brought an army prepared for the siege of an empire.

The empire had already fallen!

Oh!