I lay in the silt, staring up at a circle of distant, violent sky framed by walls of rushing water.
Tenebria hadn't left.
She had parted the Great Ocean like a curtain, creating a dry cylinder of air that reached all the way down to the seabed where I lay broken. The sheer water pressure of the depths should have collapsed in on us, crushing everything instantly. But her Will—amplified by the Authority of Pride—simply refused to let the water touch her.
She descended slowly, floating down the shaft of air until her boots touched the muddy floor of the crater.
She didn't look like a monster. She looked like a conqueror inspecting a collapsed bridge.
She walked over to me. Her coat was shredded. The wound on her neck—the one Valeria had died to inflict—was still weeping black blood, refusing to heal fully against the lingering resonance of my Sovereign intent.
