Chapter 1403: A New Battlefield
Consciousness returned in layers: first pain, then the awareness of his own body, then the Red Mist pressing warmly against every surface.
Pain was nothing new. Silent Disaster had lived this cycle for as long as he could call anything living—push to the limit on the battlefield, wake up in the Red Mist Pond, emerge stronger than before. The pain was payment. A small and necessary price. He had made that bargain so many times it no longer required renegotiation.
But something was different this time.
He turned himself over in the mist and waited, trying to isolate what it was. The recovery was normal. His memories of the mountain were intact. The soldier who had smiled—that he remembered clearly. The face. The rope leaving the hand.
Was it an illusion?
And then: a ripple in the Realm of Mind.
He almost missed it. He was half-asleep, his magic power still reconstituting, his senses oriented inward rather than out. Under normal circumstances, in full awareness, it would have been easier to dismiss. But in this between-state—not quite awake, not quite dreaming—the faint fluctuation was impossible to ignore.
He had felt one like it before. Once. When Ursrook had fallen.
That was what a Senior Lord’s death sounded like in the Realm of Mind.
What happened in the north?
Was it an illusion—or a coincidence—or neither?
I need to speak to Nassaupelle. Find out how long I’ve been here, and what has happened on the Western Front.
He endured the pain and pulled himself out of the Red Mist Pond, moving slowly when he passed Valkries.
Her body lay where it always lay, still and composed, as though she had simply chosen not to move and could reverse the decision at any moment. Hackzord believed the Nightmare Lord was equally safe in Sky City. Silent Disaster had disagreed and brought her here regardless, and the reason he gave himself—her security—was only part of the truth. The larger part was simpler: if she was here, he was never without her company, regardless of what the battlefield required of him.
He paused beside her.
“Don’t worry.” His voice came out low, worn by disuse. “I will bring you his head.”
The man’s face was still clear in his memory—the one who had appeared in the God’s Domain, who had done whatever was done to put Valkries where she was now. Silent Disaster had committed every feature to the kind of deep storage he reserved for targets that required patience. Only by ending that man personally, he believed, would the matter close in a way Valkries’ consciousness could rest within.
In the experimental field, Nassaupelle turned when he heard the footsteps.
“Your recovery speed is remarkable.” He clicked his tongue, an expression of genuine curiosity dressed in mild affront. “Even among Senior Lords, I have rarely seen anything like it. I find myself wondering what sort of thing would emerge if your body were merged with a Symbiotic Demon.”
Silent Disaster had no interest in that line of conversation. “How long have I been in the Red Mist Pond?”
“Not even a week.” Nassaupelle shifted his tall frame, gesturing broadly at nothing in particular. “The Deity of Gods entered the Kingdom of Dawn’s territory while you slept. You missed the lowlifes’ panic below—truly a sight worth seeing. I fired a handful of living spears and their cities simply crumbled.” He made a sound that was approximately a cackle. “Flames, trampling, screams—that is how lowlifes ought to behave.”
“Has Hackzord contacted you?”
“He said he was going to inspect the sea of clouds personally and improve transit efficiency at the ridge.” Mask’s tone shifted into something drier. “I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for him to initiate a report. To be honest, the Commander role on the Western Front was never appropriate for him—the King placed him there to keep the main battlefield’s strength intact, not because Hackzord has any gift for it. And who ends up managing the actual work? Me. Nassaupelle. As always.”
Silent Disaster’s attention had stopped at the word week.
He had been in the Red Mist Pond for seven days. Before that, the battle on the mountain. Add travel time between their current position and the continent’s ridge: even generously calculated, it had been more than two weeks since Hackzord had set out. The Sky Lord’s fighting ability was known to be limited in direct engagement. And the demon sentries above the ocean had been reporting increased Sky-sea Realm activity over the past half year—more Demonic Beasts sighted at the link between the two continents, probing the rear.
Two weeks was enough time for something to have happened.
“Come with me to the Birth Tower.” No hesitation in his voice, none visible in his body. “I want to reach the King.”
Without the Deity of Gods’s controller establishing the link, he didn’t have the capacity to connect to the King’s consciousness in his current condition.
Nassaupelle’s expression sharpened—that shift from performance to actual attention. “Did something happen?”
“A ripple in the Realm of Mind.”
“I don’t do well with vague and uncertain—”
“That’s why we contact the King.” Silent Disaster said it the way he said most things: once, level, without softening. “If it wasn’t an illusion, the King will know more than I do.”
At the top of the Birth Tower, Nassaupelle placed his palm against the central hub and gathered magic power.
Every Senior Lord related differently to the Realm of Mind. Valkries could reach its deepest strata at will—that was the origin of her name among humans as well as demons. Nassaupelle required the Birth Tower’s infrastructure to establish any connection at all. Silent Disaster waited while Mask worked, watching the energy gather and flow into the hub.
And waited.
“Is something wrong?” He kept the impatience out of it, but not the question.
Nassaupelle lifted his palm. Set it down again. Removed it.
He turned with an expression that Silent Disaster had never seen on him before—something that was not quite confusion and not quite alarm, because Nassaupelle was too vain for either, but was the shape that preceded both.
“There’s nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“The Presiding Holy Seat.” A pause. “I cannot sense the King.”
The silence that followed had weight.
The King was the race’s spine. The Holy Seat in the Realm of Mind functioned like a lighthouse—constant, fixed, the point everything else could navigate by. For its signal to disappear was not something that happened. The King could not die without producing a ripple that every demon with any sensitivity to the Realm would feel simultaneously, and no such cataclysm had occurred. So the King was alive.
But he had closed himself off. Or something had closed him off. And until the signal returned, the Deity of Gods was navigating without its lighthouse.
The question that remained was what, precisely, could cause the King to shutter his connection to the Realm of Mind.
Neither of them had an answer.
Kingdom of Dawn. City of Glow Castle.
Roland stood on the ramparts and looked northwest.
He had known what the Deity of Gods was in the abstract for some time—had read reports, studied the diagrams, listened to Valkries’ testimony, extrapolated from everything the First Army had managed to observe before the battle went against them. He had thought he was prepared.
He was not.
Not for the reality of it. Not for an actual floating island, wider than a city, blotting the sky the way a second horizon would—except this one moved, and its underside was wrong in a way that mere size did not explain, too dark, too deliberate, like a mountain that had decided to go somewhere and was making progress.
It was not a film. Not a rendering. It existed in the same sky as everything else, obedient to the same physics as clouds except that it wasn’t one, moved with the same steady purpose as a ship except that it wasn’t one. If the black strata had steel frames and steam venting through the cracks, it would have been the finest thing ever built by any hand Roland recognized as human. As it was, it was the finest thing ever built by any hand at all.
No wonder the demons believed in it.
Nightingale had appeared beside him, close enough that her shoulder touched his arm.
“Relax.” He said it before she could speak, which he suspected she had already anticipated. “We’re observing from a distance. We’re not in danger.”
“Unknown territory is danger by definition.” Her tone had that particular flatness that meant she was genuinely annoyed rather than performing it. “In Neverwinter I can check every stranger entering or leaving. Here I cannot verify every noble in the Kingdom of Dawn. Why did you have to come to the front?”
“Because staying in the Western Region was no longer an option.” He turned to face her briefly, then looked back at the shadow on the horizon. The First Army’s first loss. The Deity of Gods’s course change toward Hermes Plateau. The plague spreading panic through the neighboring kingdoms. Each item on its own could be managed at a distance. All three together required a body in the room. “The troops need to see me. The allies need to see me. That’s true in any era—I didn’t invent it.”
He turned to Horford Quinn, who had been waiting at a respectful distance with the particular stillness of a man who has learned to read other people’s need for time.
“Your ministers are all assembled?”
“Waiting in the conference hall.”
“Good.” Roland took one more look at the island on the horizon—at the shadow it cast on land that hadn’t asked for a shadow—then turned away from it. “Let’s talk about what we do next.”
“As you wish, Your Majesty.” Horford placed a hand across his chest and followed.