The world was a narrow, wet, and desperate tunnel. Silk's universe had shrunk to the rhythm of her own degradation. Schlup. Glllk. Schlurp. The sounds of her mouth working on him were a lewd, metronomic counterpoint to the thrumming of the Ossuary Blade and the whisper of the wind. Her jaw ached with a deep, bone-grinding pain, her throat was a raw, flayed passage, but the mechanical motion continued. Her tongue, now slick and practiced in its shame, swirled and pressed, her lips created a tight seal, her head bobbed in a rhythm dictated by the subtle pressure of his hand tangled in her hair. She was an automaton of flesh, programmed for this single, degrading purpose, to suck and to clean, to service the monstrous flesh that had already broken her. Tears still leaked from her eyes, but they were empty now, draining from a well of despair that had no bottom.
Schlup. Schlurp.
Doom stood over her, his breathing a steady, deep counterpoint to her ragged, nasal gasps. His obsidian gaze was half-lidded, the pinpricks of violet light watching the top of her bobbing head with possessive satisfaction. The cold of the void was a distant memory, held at bay by the warm, living, wet friction of her mouth. His other hand rested on his hip, fingers twitching minutely with each skilled pass of her tongue over the most sensitive part of his length. He was a monument of scarred muscle and silver tracery, being worshipped by a broken priestess. The night, the ashes, the dead, all were irrelevant. There was only this sensation, this proof of absolute dominion. Ainar's voice was a purr of dark approval in his mind. 'See how well the tool performs once properly broken in? Her despair is a finer lubricant than any oil. She exists only for this now. Do not let her forget.' He pushed deeper, a slow, testing thrust that made her gag weakly before she forced her throat to relax, a learned response etched in agony. Glllk… Schlurp. She redoubled her efforts, her tongue swirling frantically around the sensitive head, a desperate, pathetic attempt to bring him to a swift conclusion and earn a few moments of respite.
Doom's gaze, however, began to drift from the top of Silk's head. The faint, unstable flicker of light from nearby had been a peripheral nuisance, but it was growing brighter, more defined. It was no longer the gentle, desperate glow of Faith's [Gentle Dawn]. This was harsher, sharper, like the first blinding ray of a sun emerging from a storm cloud. The air itself began to change, the scent of ozone and void being challenged by a clean, electric tang of pure, concentrated light. Silk felt the shift in his attention through the slight relaxation of the hand on her head. A fragile, impossible hope sparked in her chest. 'A distraction. Please, by all the gods, let it be a distraction.' She slowed her movements, her ears straining over the wet sounds of her own mouth, listening for anything beyond the pounding of her own heart. It started as a low hum, a vibration that prickled the skin. Then, a gasp from Faith, sharp and pained, yet filled with a strange, resonant power. The flickering light from Faith flared violently, throwing long, stark shadows across the carnage. Silk flinched, her mouth stilling completely. She tried to turn her head, to see what was happening to the last flicker of innocence in this nightmare. Doom's hand tightened instantly, his fingers digging into her scalp, locking her in place. A low growl of warning rumbled in his chest, a vibration she felt through the flesh in her mouth.
The message was clear, her primary function was not yet complete. But then the event surpassed any mere command. A wave of force, silent and pure, erupted. It wasn't destructive, but it was absolute, washing over them like a tide of solidified sunlight. The very air seemed to sanctify, pushing back the oppressive miasma of blood and void. And with it came a scream. It was Faith's voice, but transformed. It was not a scream of terror or pain, but one of agonizing, glorious birth. A sound of something fragile shattering to make way for something terrible and new. The light became blinding. A pillar of incandescent white-gold energy shot skyward from the wagon, piercing the bruised purple twilight, momentarily turning night into day. The shockwave of pure radiance was physical, making Doom's Void Sigil flare in a reactive, defensive violet pulse. The Ossuary Blade hummed in agitation beside them. This time, Silk stopped completely, wrenching her head back with a strength born of sheer, shocked reflex. His flesh slipped from her mouth with a final, wet pop. She stared, wide-eyed and panting, at the blazing spectacle. "F-Faith...?" she whispered, her raw throat making the name a ragged scrape.
Doom's reaction was not one of anger at her disobedience, but of intense, analytical focus. His gaze was locked on the Faith, his body tense, not with threat, but with assessment. As Silk, driven by a compulsion she didn't understand, tried to push herself up from her knees to get a better view, his hand moved from her head to her shoulder. The pressure was immense, inexorable. It was not a violent shove, but a simple, undeniable application of force. He twisted her slightly, so she was no longer fully facing him, her body angled away. She was still trapped, still on her knees, but now she had a horrifyingly clear view of the unfolding metamorphosis. "I did not say you were done," his voice rasped, devoid of anger, full of an absolute, chilling authority. His gaze was not on her. His obsidian eyes, the stellar voids within them, were fixed on the transforming Faith with intense, analytical interest. The distraction was fascinating, but it did not override his immediate needs. The message was clear, the spectacle was not an interruption of her duty, but a new backdrop for it. He didn't guide her head back to him. He simply waited, the thick, glistening length of his erection a blatant, impatient demand in her peripheral vision. Trembling, her heart hammering against her ribs, Silk looked from the terrifying, beautiful light show back to the stark reality of his demand.
A choked sob escaped her, a mix of terror, shame, and a pathetic gratitude for being allowed to see. Mechanically, her body still obeying the deeper programming of fear, she leaned forward and took him back into her mouth. Schlup. The lewd sound started again, a grotesque soundtrack to the apocalypse of light. But now, her eyes were locked on Faith, her sucking becoming a frantic, absent-minded rhythm as she witnessed the birth of something impossible. At the center of the blazing maelstrom, Faith was arched backwards, her back a taut bow. Her simple cleric's robes were burning away to reveal skin that glowed with an internal, furious light. Her Blessing Mark was no longer a simple, gentle sigil. It had shattered and reconstituted itself into a complex, terrifyingly beautiful pattern of power. Her Blessing Mark was evolving and mutating. Where once there had been a single, softly glowing sigil, now a complex, interconnected pattern was branding itself into her flesh. It was a constellation of four suns, each a perfect circle of solidified, blazing light, connected by razor-straight lines of the same brilliant material that pulsed with power.
On the back of her right hand, a sun mark blazed with a harsh, white-hot light. Its rays were not soft, but sharp and jagged, like shards of broken glass. The air around it shimmered with heat haze.This was not a mark of healing, but of pure, focused destruction. On her left hand, another sun mark pulsed with a cold, surgical silver light. Its rays were straight and precise, like a surgeon's scalpel. The light pouring from her left hand into Lyra was no longer a gentle stream. It was a surgical, overwhelming torrent. Where the silver, scalpel-like light from her left hand touched the crystallized, corrupted flesh of Lyra's wound, it didn't mend it severed. The unstable, flaking crystal was cleanly excised from Lyra's body and dissolved into harmless light, the corruption annihilated with terrifying finality. In the center of her forehead, a third, smaller sun mark burned with a deep, amber-gold light. It was perfectly round, its center a pupil of utter blackness that seemed to see not just the physical, but the underlying truth of things. Simultaneously, the amber light from Faith's forehead poured into Lyra's shattered spirit, seeing the broken pathways of her Blessing and the frayed connections of her being. It didn't just re-weave them, it optimized them. It stripped away the volatile instability, the backlash, the crippling drawbacks of the Sun's Tear and the forced transformation, leaving only the pure, refined power behind.
Finally, over her heart and between her breasts, a fourth, larger mark bloomed. It was a nexus, a master control sigil from which the others drew their power. Lines of blazing energy connected it to the marks on her hands and forehead, tracing over her collarbones and the soft curves of her breasts, turning her torso into a living circuit board of terrifying, divine power. Lyra gasped, her back arching as color flooded back into her skin not with weakness, but with vibrant, restored strength. The grey pallor of decay vanished. The cracks in her crystalline form sealed, not as fragile, flaking armor, but as polished, integrated plates of solidified sunlight that seemed to flex and move with her muscles. Her breathing, once shallow and ragged, became deep and powerful. Her Dawnblade, lying discarded nearby, flared to life, flying to her hand as she rose to her feet in a single, fluid motion. She was whole. She was healed. But more than that, she was perfected. The power that had been killing her was now hers to command, without cost, without weakness. Faith, the architect of this miracle, lowered her hands. The blinding pillar of light receded, coalescing around her form in a shimmering, barely-contained corona. Her eyes opened. They were no longer the soft, fearful pools Silk remembered. They were orbs of molten gold, radiating a calm, dispassionate, and utterly alien intensity. Her gaze swept the scene, taking in the churned earth, the ashes, the silent wagons. It moved over Doom, a flicker of that terrifying gold noting his presence, his state of undress, the silver-traced scars. Then, it fell upon Silk.
Silk, on her knees, Doom's flesh buried deep in her mouth, her face a mess of tears and spit, her eyes wide with a horror that was now compounded by this new, divine judgment. For a moment, there was no reaction from Faith. The molten gold eyes simply observed, processed. There was no shock, no disgust, no pity. It was the gaze of a star looking upon an insect. Her full, soft lips, now touched with a faint, golden luminescence, parted as if to speak, to pronounce some cosmic verdict on the degrading tableau. Then her gaze shifted. It scanned the battlefield properly. It saw Bron's empty, discarded scale mail. It saw Thorn's shattered maul lying in the mud. It saw Marik's lightning-scorched gloves. It saw the multiple piles of fine, grey ash and the abandoned, blood-stained armor of the Iron Sentinels. It saw the massive, empty pile of dark, gritty slag that was all that remained of Garret. It saw the small, lonely set of robes that had been Finn.
The dispassionate gold in her eyes shattered.
The divine star was suddenly, violently, human.
"Where..." Faith's voice was a whisper, yet it cut through the air like a crystal bell. "Where is everyone?". Her head turned, faster now, the golden light around her flickering with sudden, violent instability. "Bron? Thorn? ...Garret?" Her voice rose, laced with a dawning, earth-shattering horror. "FINN!?". Her eyes snapped back to Silk, to Doom, and the truth, the awful, final truth, crashed down upon her. It wasn't a conclusion she reasoned, it was a knowledge branded into her soul by the very power that now consumed her. She knew. She knew they were all gone. She knew what the ashes were. She knew who was responsible. The divine corona around her exploded. A sound tore from her throat, a scream that was part grieving girl, part wrathful god. It was a wave of pure, psychic agony that made the air itself vibrate. The golden light around her turned sharp, hostile, the marks on her hands blazing with furious intent.
The divine scream tore through the night, a sonic manifestation of grief and nascent, terrible power. It was the sound of a soul being flayed by a truth too horrific to bear, amplified by energies that were never meant to reside in mortal flesh. Lyra, who had been floating in a void of painless, golden stillness, was violently yanked back to reality. Her eyes, no longer the swirling molten gold of her transformation but her own familiar, if weary, blue, snapped open. The perfect, polished plates of solidified sunlight that now adorned her body felt like a second skin, humming with a stable, potent energy she had never known. The agony, the petrification, the creeping death from the Sun's Tear's backlash, it was all gone. She felt… pristine. Reforged. "Faith?" she murmured, her voice rough from disuse but strong. She pushed herself up, her movements fluid and effortless. The first thing she saw was Faith, amidst fading motes of light, her form crowned in a blazing corona, her eyes pools of molten, divine fury. "What's wrong? What is—?". Her question died as she followed the line of Faith's horrified gaze. Her mind, still clearing from the fog of near-death, struggled to process the scene. The churned, blood-soaked earth. The scattered, empty armor. The distinct piles of ash where her comrades. Where Garret, had fallen. A cold, sickening dread began to pool in her stomach, a stark contrast to the warmth of her newfound power.
Then she saw them.
Doom. Naked, scarred, and silver-traced, standing like a god of carnage. And at his feet, on her knees, was Silk. The sight was so profoundly wrong, so degrading, that Lyra's brain refused to process it for a heartbeat. Silk, the clever, resilient rogue, was hunched forward, her body angled in a posture of utter subjugation. Her face was a mess of tears, spit, and other, more vile fluids. And Doom… he was fully erect, his flesh glistening and slick, a blatant, obscene declaration of what had been happening, of what was still happening, even amidst this cataclysm of light and grief. Silk's eyes, wide and hollow, met Lyra's for a fleeting second. In them, Lyra saw no hope, no plea for rescue. She saw only a bottomless shame and a silent scream that spoke of a violation far deeper than any physical wound. The rogue's body gave a feeble, involuntary twitch, a ghost of the rhythmic motion that had just been forced upon her. The pieces clicked into place with a final, horrifying clarity. The ashes. The empty armor. The monster standing whole and sated. The broken woman at his feet.