Ultramar stood bathed in the Array’s throbbing light, the captive Sword of the First looking like a diseased limb in his grip. His gaze swept over Koronos’s battered company with contempt, lingering on Corvannafax. “You bring the Red devil into the heart of our realm. A fitting final audience for the old fool’s end.”

  Ultramar’s loyal thugs began to fan out in the room, each holding a black crystal blade.

  Koronos said nothing. His eyes assessed the distance, the Array, the dying emperor. He was a calculator of violence, measuring the moment to strike. He tries to call the Sword of Otepi back to his hand, but there is something blocking him; certainly not any power of Ultramar’s, but some type of powerful majik.

  “You think I took power?” Ultramar continued, his voice rising, not with rage, but with a zealous, cold fervor. “I earned it. Decades ago, as a young officer freezing in that pass, I heard it. Not a sound, but a… silence that spoke. A vacuum that hungered. The mountain whispered. I listened. I wasn’t afraid. I was curious.”

  He took a step forward, his eyes blazing with the memory. “I gave it my first offering; a condemned prisoner. And it gave me a vision. Of strength. Of purity. Of an empire not softened by age and diplomacy, but hardened by frost and absolute will. While Xerxes napped on his throne, dreaming of glory from the days of yore, I was building a new world!”

  “You fed a tumorous growth," Koronos said, his voice flat as stone. “And called it growth.”

  Ultramar’s face twisted into a snarl. “I gave it a name! I gave it purpose! I alleviated its hunger! And it made me its king! This ‘tumor,’ as you call it, is the cure for weakness. It will consume the decadent, the frail, the human-loving fools like him,” he spat toward the dying emperor, “and from the ashes, a stronger Bergia will rise. One worthy of the ice. And with the power of this Array, once it’s fully tuned to the Whisper’s frequency, we will reach out and purify the whole world.”

  His plan was even vaster than Koronos had feared. He didn’t just want a throne; he wanted to become a conduit for the Nightlands plague.

  On the floor, Emperor Xerxes stirred. A shudder went through his frail body. His white, pain-clouded eyes opened, fixing on Ultramar with a look of profound, weary disgust. Then they shifted to Koronos. In them, Koronos saw no plea for his empire, no kingly command. Only a sharp, final understanding, and a decision.

  “You are… a rotten branch…” Xerxes wheezed, black blood on his lips. “Plucked from… my own tree.”

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  With a gasp that seemed to tear his soul from his body, the ancient Everliving focused. It wasn’t a blast of power, but a precise, unraveling pull. Koronos felt it; a targeted severing of threads in the air around the Sword. The verdigris of Bergian majik encrusting the blade flared violently, then shattered like rotten glass.

  Ultramar cried out in shock and pain as the hilt in his hand became white-hot agony. The Sword of the First, its true radiant yellow glow erupting like a sun, was ripped from his grasp by Xerxes’s last, focused will.

  It spiraled through the air, end over end, a falling star aimed at the heart of the room.

  Koronos didn’t move to catch it. He simply raised his hand, and the Sword, singing with released power, slammed into his palm as if returning home. The familiar, righteous energy surged up his arm, a warmth that burned away the last of the cavern’s chill and the palace’s oppression. The spear in his other hand hummed in sympathetic resonance.

  Ultramar stared at his empty, smoking hand, then at Koronos, his face a mask of betrayed fury. “You insect! That was mine by right of conquest!”

  “It was never yours,” Koronos said, hefting the Sword. Its light pushed back the shadows Ultramar stood in. “It tolerates you through great effort of majik. It obeys me with ease.”

  He turned from the usurper. The true fight was moments away, but the window was closing. He strode to the Crystal Array. Up close, it was a symphony of impossible majikal engineering and captured lightning. He could feel its purpose, its destination; a coordinate etched in its core that sang of Terra Primius and home.

  He placed the tip of the Sword of the First against the central node, where the energy throbbed the strongest.

  “What are you doing?!” Ultramar shrieked. “That Array is not for your escape! It’s for the ascension!” His men didn’t know what to do, they were awaiting a command.

  Koronos ignored him. He reached into the Array with his will, through the Sword, and found the trigger. He pulled.

  A deep, resonant thrum filled the Sanctum, shaking the very bones of the palace. The concentric giant crystal rings began to rotate in the air overhead, slowly at first, then faster. The crystalline nodes brightened from a glow to a blaze. The air crackled with gathering power. A point of blinding light began to form in the center of the apparatus, a tiny, ripening star. Zeyzey stood in awe, her witch powers sensing it was a majikal energy level on orders of magnitudes that she couldn’t begin to comprehend.

  It wasn’t an instant gate. It was a breach. And breaching the fabric between worlds took time, energy, and produced a beacon that could be felt by beings from realms best left undisturbed. It was a majikal energy from a long forgotten age.

  “Go…” Xerxes whispered, his voice the last sigh of wind from a collapsing peak. His eyes closed. The ancient Everliving was gone.

  The Array built its charge. The star in its heart grew. And from the shadows of the chamber, a new, familiar voice laced with malice cut through the building roar.

  “I think not.” Arch-Sorceress Lazuli steps from behind a shimmering portal of her own making.

  Koronos the Kazarian | Royal Road