She watched them tumble, watched their bodies spin through air that offered no salvation, watched the ground rushing up to meet them with the patience of something that had claimed countless lives before.
Her gaze became even more somber in the next moment.
She saw the Crimson Imperator laugh with bloodlust, the sound echoing across the sky even as his weapon struck out again. Multiple bloody crimson crescents filled with boiling Mana erupted from his blade, targeting the clusters of injured or dying guards with the casual cruelty of someone swatting insects that had annoyed him.
The crescents smashed into the falling bodies with terrifying force.
Women who had served the Covenant faithfully for years, who had trained since childhood for the honor of protecting the Holy Daughter, were dismembered while they tumbled from the skies. Arms separated from shoulders. Legs spun away from torsos. Heads rolled through air that had become thick with blood.
The expression on the Saint of Stone became heavy as granite, her jaw clenching with emotions she couldn’t afford to express.
She continued giving a secret glance toward one particular guard that she saw was nearly cleaved in half by one of those crimson crescents. The woman’s body had been split from shoulder to hip, her armor torn apart, her flesh opened in a wound that should have killed her instantly.
And yet that body still fell with the others, shot down toward the Lands of Stone like a meteor trailing a comet’s tail of blood.
But the Saint clenched her teeth and turned away.
"On me!"
She called out again, and her figure disappeared toward the horizon on that radiant white-blue cloud with the survivors holding on tightly, their faces masks of grief and determination and the knowledge that they were abandoning their sisters to die alone.
The Crimson Imperator and Imperator Luddya chased close behind, their attention fixed entirely on the fleeing cloud that held what they believed to be their prize. Neither of them gave a second glance to the corpses crashing down toward the Lands of Stone below.
Why would they?
The guards were obstacles, not objectives.
The dead were irrelevant.
Only the Holy Daughter mattered, and she was right there in the Saint’s grasp, fleeing toward a horizon that they would never allow her to reach.
They pursued with the confidence of predators who knew their prey was wounded and weakening with every passing moment.
Nobody realized that the almost half-cleaved corpse of one particular guard, the one the Saint had been secretly watching with such intensity, was not actually dead.
The body that plummeted toward the stones below, trailing blood and viscera and the remnants of armor that had failed to protect her, barely kept her eyes open. Consciousness flickered in and out like a candle in a storm, each moment of awareness bringing fresh agony from wounds that should have been fatal.
But in those eyes, in the brief moments when they focused through the haze of pain and blood loss, there were no ordinary pupils.
There were wings.
Vibrant white wings that pulsed with Mana even now, even as the body that contained them fell toward certain death.
A switch had been made.
Somewhere in the chaos of the initial assault, somewhere in the shuffle of bodies that had briefly hidden the Holy Daughter from view, the Saint of Stone had made a choice that no one else had witnessed.
The woman falling toward the stones was not a guard.
The woman holding the Saint’s hand was not the Holy Daughter.
And nobody knew.
But well, it didn’t seem like it would even matter.
Injuries that very few could come back from had been dealt. The wound that split the falling body from shoulder to hip had severed organs and vessels and structures that were essential for life. Even with the most advanced healing techniques of the Covenant, even with remedies that had been perfected over millennia, such damage was usually fatal.
And there would be no healers waiting at the bottom.
There would only be stone.
The almost-cleaved body continued to fall, spinning through air that grew thicker as the ground approached, consciousness fading in and out as blood loss took its inevitable toll.
When she hit the Lands of Stone, nothing would matter.
The Holy Daughter would die unknown and unmourned, her ending marked only by another red stain on rocks that had seen countless others.
The ground rushed up to meet her.
And far above, two Imperators chased a decoy toward a horizon that meant nothing, their certainty of victory absolute, their awareness of what was actually happening nonexistent.
The Lands of Stone waited below.
Ready to claim another life that had dared to exist within its cruel embrace!
Damian had started to go back toward the tribe.
He had started, really.
His feet had already turned in that direction, his mind already shifting from the violence he had just completed.
Only for his newly expanded senses to buzz with warning!
It was like a pressure against his awareness, a weight that hadn’t been there moments before, and when he focused on it, he sensed the immensity of terrifying concentrations of Mana in a distant area of the skies. The power he felt was beyond anything he had encountered since awakening to the Primordial Tongue, beyond the Butcher or Lukaku or Lady Morgana, beyond anything that should exist in these forgotten territories where the Dross scraped out their meager lives.
He looked in the distance toward the cluster of lightning that he and the other Tribesmen had believed to be a manifestation of a moving Behemoth Primal Beast, that Beast’s Mantle they had dismissed as a passing danger that posed no threat as long as it continued on its way.
But when he focused and truly looked, when he allowed his Mana-enhanced perception to flow outward on the currents of power that connected all things in this region, he began to see that it was not truly a manifestation at all.
There was no Primal Beast beneath those clouds.
There was something else entirely.
His gaze, traveling on Mana like a hawk riding thermals, observed past the crackling lightning and churning clouds to see what they concealed. A floating landmass of stone hung suspended in the sky, held aloft by runic circles that pulsed with ancient power. Atop this impossible platform sat a temple of white stone, its architecture unlike anything the Unbound Tribes could produce, its surfaces gleaming with the unmistakable sheen of structures built by Anointed Ones.
And upon that temple, he saw figures!