Somewhere in the distance, a figure overlooked the soft luminous glow of the Arena.
Chion Nyxvalis.
His cloak was black. His armour, black. His expression unreadable beneath the fall of his hood. One gloved hand rested against the trunk of a single blackened tree at the cliffside's edge—dead long before he'd been born, bleached by centuries of wind and soil that had long since chosen to fall over the edge.
Getting out of the Vale after it had been sealed had not been as simple as he had anticipated. Mostly because he hadn't. The Acting Patriarch's decree wasn't in his agenda. Nor would he even bother incorporating it now. His faith, as of late, rested in Violet's capacity to adapt.
Beyond the calculations running through his mind—
His eyes lifted.
The two moons. The stars. The hordes of wyverns tracing slow, patient circles across the sky. And finally—
The Plains of Barbel.
It was not a plain. More of a wound. An ungodly crater of doom, blown into the heart of the Drake's Teeth. A mountain range that earned its name for the simple fact that the rock's signature jagged formations and its hardness could tank a literal meteor without blinking. That was not hyperbole. Nor was it ever meant to be disproven.
From this distance, it looked like a nightmare carved in stone. The hole that had shattered Nyxvalis pride. The mass grave where the Calamity General had descended and brought flaming ruin. Chion had read the cold accounts masking ruin in pride. This told another story entirely.
Maze-like grooves cracked outward from a central pit, the Arena itself sunk deep into the bedrock like a pupil at the centre of a shattered iris. Three main paths cut through the devastation—massive slithering grooves wide enough for armies. Two curled toward the cliffside where he stood. The third bled away northeast, vanishing into the deeper teeth of the mountains.
Between the paths, the stone had frozen mid-torment. Rock formations rose and fell in petrified waves—high and low, uneven, ripples locked in a violent ocean. The weird topography formed walls and corridors, a labyrinth born not of design but of cataclysm. Nyxvalis had seen siege-shattered cities that looked kinder.
The details grew worse the longer he looked.
Weapons jutted from the stone. Blades, broken hafts, spearheads. And silhouettes—human, half-human, thing—frozen inside the rock like insects in amber. Every few seconds the patrols of wyverns overhead would sweep the crater with light, pale illuminations dragged across the terrain.
And for single heartbeats
the shadows would dance. Faces lunged out of the dark. Hands stretched toward a salvation that never came. Mouths open in eternal agony.
Then—darkness reclaimed them.
Within the seams of that horror, the Council had manifested. Formations of Hands. Silent lurking figures. Specialists all prepared to erase him and any other fool who'd dare interfere with tonight's proceedings.
Too preoccupied to spot him where he stood under the shade.
His chest burned where the stitches held—barely stitched together, a wound that should have killed him. Lingering pain he had decided, quite deliberately, to treat as background noise. The alternative was collapsing. And collapsing here meant dying here.
He took one deep breath. The stitches pulled. He ignored it.
His eyes swept the valley once. Whether he was meant to die within it—that was yet to be determined.
A wyvern passed overhead, its wings stirred the dead leaves around him. Light washed over his form, briefly. Exposed. The creature's head tilted.
It saw him. Or thought it did.
Its gaze dropped, searching for the silhouette it had caught, and found nothing.
A branch shifted with the beat of its wings and broke. Still nothing.
The wyvern let out a low, irritated growl as its rider pulled the reins. They rose again, folding back into the circling mass above.
Leaving only an empty cliff.
**********
Within the Arena, Alison's gaze found the hourglass once more.
Three fingers rose before the next grain fell. Three seconds.
With each curled finger, the executioner's blade drew closer.
The first. Viren finally stirred—head tilting, slow and deliberate, toward the Red Entrance.
The second. The crowd held its breath. Anticipation stretched until it ached.
The third. A silhouette formed in the dark beyond the threshold.
Violet exhaled without sound. The Elders straightened as one. Garrek leaned forward.
All were invested.
Above, the twin moons aligned. An iris and its dying pupil, gazing down upon what gathered below.
Alison's eyes gleamed. His sceptre swept upward, and his voice rolled across the Arena like thunder given ceremony.
"Ladies and Gentlemen— The Man of the Hour. The Eighteenth of the Thirty-Ninth. Chion Nyxvalis. Arriving perfectly at the stroke of midnight."
His head dipped in a theatrical bow toward the silhouette still resolving from shadow.
He stepped into the light.
A black cloak draped his form. In his hand, the Honours Flag—blank, save for a single mark: his Mantle, etched alone upon the white.
Alison saw it first.
Oh my, he murmured—
And then the Arena broke.
Gasps came first. Outrage followed in their wake. And then the current—waves of it, sweeping from the highest stands downward, bloodthirsty and alive, pressing against stone and mortar until the Arena itself trembled beneath the weight of it.
Mirell's expression twisted. Her hand rose—once. Blades drawn in answer. And still they defied her.
Violet sank deeper into her chair, hands folded and washed clean of whatever came next.
Garrek pressed two fingers to his lips, caught somewhere between concern and something darker.
His gaze drifted left. The Moon Heaven held his composure behind carefully cultivated indifference, though only barely. The Blade Heaven was another matter entirely. His fingers had curled into the reinforced armrest, knuckles pale, disgust worn openly and making no apology for it.
"What a show," Kael murmured from Garrek's left.
Garrek turned to meet his gaze. No offence there. No outrage. Only the quiet weight of something worth watching carefully.
"Indeed," he murmured back—and raised his hand.
Across the Arena, the Black Attendants responded as one. Stillness became motion. Suits shifted. Space folded. Black blades emerged from nothing, anchoring the moment before it could spill past the point of return.
The rising violence faltered. The wave receded—slowly, resentfully—behind sharpened gazes that did not look away.
All of them staring at the heresy beneath. Worn openly. Worn boldly.
The Seven Crowned Serpents. Gold-encased. Immaculate. Unmistakable.
The mark of the Usurper. The Patriarch-Killer.
How dare he—
Below, silver met silver. Eyes locked between Viren and Chion, and something passed between them that required no words.
The pity Viren had carried from a distance was gone. The Iron Veil was no longer a veteran extending grace to a child he was about to execute, but a pureblood Nyxvalis bestowed the honour of killing a heretic.
Chion stepped into the array.
His blade came first—tip-down, planted into stone. His flag followed. Then the cloak, folded and set aside. A gesture so small, so unhurried, it bordered on insult.
Alison composed himself. He did not reach for a pun. Some moments weren't worth the risk.
His sceptre moved. The array stirred from dormancy, crimson light bleeding upward through the stone where Chion stood. The mechanisms turned—steady, deliberate—measuring the worth of what had dared arrive.
The sphere emerged as it had for the last, and unfurled in fine Nyxvalis script, line by line into the air above.
Assessment A
Gate Activity: Mid
Current Output: A Below Critical (Stable)
Blood Current Level: 32 / 245 (High)
Heart Rate: 13 bpm (Abnormal)
Blood Circulation: Stable
Overall: PASS
Assessment B
Cognitive Function: Abnormal
Exhaustion Levels: Mid, approaching High
Collapse Threshold: 43.23% until collapse
Foreign Supplements: Five (Standard)
Anomalies:
— Heart rate critically low
— Cognitive activity elevated beyond threshold
— Body temperature below acceptable range
— Current Movement patterns: Irregular
— Gate activity: Unstable
Overall: —
The script faltered.
Flickered once. Then again.
The sphere above the Arena distorted violently—rings of crimson light shuddering outward through the glyphwork in every direction. Along the perimeter, the House Kallistyr specialists straightened from their stations in unison, heads snapping up.
The script corrected itself.
Failed.
Corrected again.
Failed harder.
Lines of Nyxvalis text began overwriting one another faster than the eye could follow, characters consuming characters until nothing legible remained.
/ASSESSMENT ERROR/
/FAILED TO CLASSIFY/
/FAILED TO CLASSIFY/
A pulse of current burst from the sphere. Hairline cracks raced across its surface—then held, barely, at the edge of fracture.
/ASSESSMENT TERMINATED/
/PROCESSING C....
The Arena had gone silent.
Confusion moved through the stands in quiet, directionless ripples. No one spoke. No one seemed to know whether to.
A small crimson-eyed raven alighted beside Mirell without a sound.
"Elder." The voice was barely a breath. "Is that... expected?"
"No," Mirell said. Nothing more.
Across the box, Myra's expression had shifted—unease settling into the lines of her face as her gaze moved, searching. It found what it was looking for.
Elder Nariel. A second raven had already found her.
"Let the rest know," Myra said quietly.
Below, Chion had not moved. Silver eyes forward. One hand resting loose atop the pommel of his blade, as though the sphere above him were someone else's concern entirely.
Alison's smile had finally faltered. His gaze swung between the suspended script and the specialists lining the perimeter—and found no comfort in either. Charts and schematics had appeared in their hands. Heads were bowed over monitors. Fingers moved across the mechanisms of the Primordial stones with the particular urgency of people trying not to look panicked. Others had abandoned their stations entirely, moving fast toward the lower access corridors, coordinating in urgent murmurs with whoever waited below the Arena's engines.
High above, Garrek's fingers curled—slowly, silently.
"What exactly did the boy do to himself?" Kael murmured.
Garrek said nothing. His eyes remained fixed on the script still suspended above the array.
"He should be dead," he said at last.
Every Heaven turned toward him.
A fact stated. A belief withheld.
Below, Violet watched in silence alongside everyone else, and said nothing at all.
And finally—
Assessment C
Mantle Activity: Null
Mantle Blade Activity: Null
Foreign Grafts: One (Standard)
Secondary Augmentations: None
Equipment: Standard
Overall: PASS
Viren watched in silence.
So did his beloved—though her silence was a different thing entirely. It carried weight. An ominous pressure settling against her chest, dense and unmoving, that had no name she could reach for yet.
The Noctis seated beside her extended an arm without a word.
All will be well, the voice said softly.
She did not answer.