The transformation of the Empress was grand!
It started at the center of the illusory shape that had been holding her together for eight sumrs, and it moved outward from there. Skin ford first, radiant white-gold rather than the tone she had carried in her old life, spreading across the will and Mana that had been all that remained of her.
Bone followed beneath it, building structure where there had been only effort, giving her soul sothing to rest inside for the first ti since the demons had torn her body away. The obsidian rivers of Pure Primordial Essence poured into her without pause, and where they touched the forming body, the body beca more than a body. It beca the body of sothing that had been elevated rather than restored.
Her stature began to expand.
She rose, slowly, the transformation lifting her from the size she had been into sothing grander, her fra extending the way Serala’s and Damian’s had extended during their own evolutions, until she stood as a being that belonged to the sa category as her son rather than the species she had been born into.
HUUM!
White-gold light settled across her completed form. When it finished, she was grand and graceful, and the pain that had lived in every mont of her existence for eight sumrs was simply gone, replaced by sothing she had not felt in longer than she could clearly rember.
She felt imnsity.
The rivers of obsidian essence kept surging toward Damian, continuing their work on his own existence even as his Ama’s transformation completed, but she paid them no attention. She looked at her son with astonishnt and love, and then she crossed the space between them and embraced him, and this ti the embrace was real in every way an embrace could be real. A physical body holding another!
Arms that had substance. A soul that no longer had to spend every second of its existence holding itself together against the constant pull toward coming apart.
"My Little Prince," she said, against his chest.
He held her, and for a mont, the most powerful being on either side of the River of the World was simply a son who had his mother back.
---
Countless miles away, past the clouds, the sky held sothing that the beings below it rarely looked up far enough to see.
A massive cluster of floating landmasses shimred with white-gold light at an elevation that ordinary flight could never reach, the domains of beings who had left the ground behind permanently and built their existences in the heights where the air itself was too thin and too rich for lesser things to survive.
These were the Sacred Floating Islands the old records had described in whispers, the abodes of the Ancestral Celestials, drifting through the distant heavens above a world that mostly didn’t know they were there.
On one of these landmasses, an Ancestral Land surrounded by a hazy crimson light of destruction held a structure at its center.
A massive temple rose there, its walls shining white and crimson together, the two colors woven through the stone in a pattern that suggested both purity and ruin held in the sa hands.
Massive white-gold trees surrounded the temple, taller than the World Trees of the Cradle, their canopies catching the high light and scattering it.
Within the forest and the temple both, the auras of terrifying beings moved about, presences that carried the weight of existences that had exceeded the Nine Circles and built Lands within themselves and accumulated power across spans of ti that the empires below asured their entire histories against.
On one floor of that temple, a hall opened wide and quiet.
It was filled with ditation mats arranged in ordered rows, and on those mats sat a dozen humanoid entities with the faces of pigs. They were not identical to Zhuque, but they shared his lineage clearly, the sa configuration of snout and small eyes and burly humanoid fras built to scales that spoke of long cultivation. They sat in stillness, and their attention was fixed on a wall at the far end of the hall.
The wall held many jade crystalline rectangular objects, each one shining with a soft internal light, each one representing sothing.
One of them had just shattered.
It had not cracked or dimd or faded the way things faded when they wound down naturally. It had exploded, the jade bursting outward in fragnts that fell to the floor of the hall and lay there catching the white-gold light from the windows, and the dozen pig-faced entities had all turned to look at the place where it had been.
The shattering of that object represented the death of an Ancestral Land.
The death of an Ancestral Celestial.
A massive burly figure rose from the largest mat at the front of the hall. His pig face was similar to Zhuque’s, broader and harder, set above a fra that carried the presence of sothing considerably further along the path of Ancestral Lands than the being who had just died over the River of the World.
He looked at the fragnts of the shattered jade with eyes that held no warmth at all, and when he spoke, his voice filled the hall without effort.
"Zhuque went down to one of the settlents below," he said. "Just for exploration. It is part of our lands. Our territory, granted to us, ours to walk as we please." He looked at the fragnts. "And yet he has died there."
The dozen entities watched him.
"It should not be the people of the High Mountains. They have their own territories and their own grievances, but they would not move against one of us in our own lands without cause and without warning." His small eyes narrowed.
"It may be those self-righteous fuckers from the Skies of White. They have always looked at us with contempt. They have always wanted what we hold. If one of them ca down to a settlent in our territory and killed Zhuque where he stood, it would not be the first ti they reached into what was ours and pretended their hands were clean."
He turned to face the others.
"His death must have answers. An Ancestral Celestial does not simply die in a settlent of lesser beings. Sothing killed him, and sothing will account for it." His voice dropped, and the weight behind it pressed against the hall. "I will appeal to the High Ancestral Celestials. I will ask them to send all of us, and more than us, to investigate what happened in those lands below."
He looked across the dozen seated figures.
"Are you all with ?"
...!
The dozen rose as one.
They ca up off their ditation mats with the unified movent of beings that had cultivated together and fought together and protected what was theirs together across more years than the world below had nas for, and their answer ca fervently, without hesitation, without the calculation that lesser beings applied to questions of risk and reward. One of their own had died in their own territory. That was the only fact that mattered to them, and it demanded the only response their kind understood.
They protected their own.
As they rose, their bodies glinted with terrifying power. Within each of them, an Ancestral Land shone, and the lands were not the feeble cracked Primum that Zhuque had carried. These were developed, vibrant, the internal territories of beings who had spent the centuries Zhuque had spent and then kept going, plains and rivers and forests and mountains shining within their existences with the light of foundations that had been built firm and tended carefully and never once challenged by anything that could threaten them.
The burly figure at the front looked toward the windows of the hall, toward the distant ground far below the floating landmass, toward the settlents and the River and the lands where one of his kind had gone down and not co back up.
"Then we go to the High Ancestral Celestials," he said. "And then we go down."
The white-gold trees outside the temple shifted in a wind that ca from nowhere, and the crimson light of the Ancestral Land pulsed once across the floating landmass, and far below, in a tower at the heart of the demon capital, a mother held her son and did not yet know that the death over the River had already started sothing moving in the heights above the clouds!
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