The violet streak in the sky expanded into a colossal wedge of obsidian and light.
Sulfiqar’s presence breached the lunar horizon, its gravity-wells distorting the silver dust into miniature cyclones.
Seconds later, the God-King of Sacra blasted onto the silt ofMortuusvlei, draped in silks that shimmered with the trapped luminosity of a nebula.
Constellations traced his dermis like scars, some fading, some fresh, all ancient.
A crown of thinning comet-fire hair clung stubbornly to his skull, and behind his gaunt, sagging cheeks, his eyes still blazed like collapsing stars.
His lips, dry and cracked, carried the burden of galaxies, each word like gravity made sound.
Yet the immortal fokker he held on to life like the ghost of a sun that refused to go out, Idan thought.
His once-mighty body was smaller, wrinkled, skin dimmed to a burnished, bruised gold, as if the cosmos was giving up on him.
His expression, however, remained a mask of raptorial arrogance.
His eyes blazed with the hubris of a man who believed the universe was a mirror for his own reflection.
‘My sons, prodigals united in the dirt of a backwater moon,’ Sulfiqar’s voice boomed, dripping with a condescending, honeyed venom. ‘I knew the chance to reclaim glory would eventually drive you back to the heat of my shadow.’
Idan forced himself to kneel, descending into a calculated, humiliating kowtow alongside Molan.
‘The throne is yours, Father,’ Idan rasped, the lie burning in his throat. ‘We were fools to think the galaxy held anything but ash for us without your grace.’
‘A predictable epiphany,’ Sulfiqar gloated, his silhouette stretching across them like a stain. ‘Prostrate yourselves to take the Oath of the Hollowed Vessel. Bare your souls to me to join me in the battle of an epoch, for the crown of Sivania.’
As Sulfiqar stepped within the reach of their shadows, his focus occupied by the theater of his own triumph, Idan sensed the microscopic shift in Molan’s posture.
In lethal synchronicity, the brothers surged upward.
Idan’s hand locked onto the hilt of theCaelum-Sunderer, the blade erupting in a roar of white-hot psychic fire.
Molan unleashed the chains, waving them above his head and flinging them in a lasso toward his father.
Sulfiqar at first jolted. ‘Thefokk?’ he growled.
He recovered with a speed that defied physics, his form fracturing into a swirling vortex of pressurized shadow and lightning as he dodged the shackles.
‘Youfokkin’ double crossers!’ the God-King roared, his voice the sound of a mountain collapsing. ‘How dare you betray me!’
The deity transformed, expanding into a storm of obsidian clouds and violet electrical arcs that tore at the lunar crust.
But Sulfiqar made a fatal error in his vanity: he was a creature of command, not combat. He’d spent eons behind the safety of legions and proxies, while his sons’ battle thirst had been forged in the red-hot furnace of a thousand front lines.
Idan brandished theCaelum-Sundererin a brutal, rising arc.
The sentient blade recognized the divine essence of the target. It aimed a bolt of lightning at Sulfiqar with a discharge of kinetic energy that sent a shockwave through the ridge.
Molan sheathed theChains of Saitoniand changed tactics, closing the distance from the flank, theStaff of Mortisigniting in his grip.
He wielded the spear with a grunt of focused rage, the weapon’s head smashing into the core of the storm.
The staff ignored Sulfiqar’s immortality hexes, the blunt force tearing through the shadow-form as if it were parchment.
Sulfiqar shrieked, a sound of grinding tectonic plates.
His spectral configuration part-splintered, and half of his corporeal body reformed, his hand reaching for Idan’s throat, but Molan was already in motion with theIris-Cleaver.
