Unsleeping Patron - Fall of the Skinless Priest

A shockwave of crushed jade and bone dust rolled across the shale plain of crushed jade and bone dust rolling across the frozen shale plain. It hit the Fel-Cat infantry lines like a physical wall, knocking three hundred black-armored pikemen flat on their backs.Silas didn’t drop into the dirt with them.He hung fifty feet above the battlefield, suspended by the slow, silent beat of his silver-and-crimson wings. The starlight plating over his chest reflected the amber glare of New Sanctum’s fractured dome, his black pupils tracking the chaos below with a cold, absolute clarity.The High Priest was dead. The tuning fork was vaporized. But the two remaining corrupted siege-towers were still grinding forward on the eastern and western flanks, their dark-robed priests desperately trying to maintain the anti-spatial resonance that was cracking the golden sky.Silas raised his right hand.The Blood-Lantern hung from his fingertips, but he didn’t open the brass cowl. He pointed his index finger toward the eastern tower, focusing the heavy, fifteen-beat pulse of his new core straight down his arm.Crack.The sound wasn’t thunder. It was the sharp, localized snapping of space itself.A second spear of silver-and-crimson Astral Lightning shot from his finger. It crossed two miles of empty air in a fraction of a second, striking the base of the eastern tower directly where the massive iron-bound wheels met the dead meat-mortar.The lightning didn’t explode. It unraveled the spatial bonds holding the structure together. The two-hundred-foot tower of crushed obelisks instantly lost its cohesion, dissolving into a massive avalanche of loose stone that buried the fifty dark-robed priests standing on its lower decks.”The sky-demon!” a Fel-Cat officer screamed from the shale, pointing a trembling claw upward. “Break formation! Break the line!”The conservative elders’ battalion, ten thousand strong, had marched to slaughter terrified human refugees under the cover of the Synod’s dark magic. They were disciplined, steam-powered, and ruthless. But seeing a single human figure float in the sky and vaporize two mountain-sized anomalies with two points of his finger broke something fundamental in their feline minds.The steam-pikes hissed wildly as the formation shattered. Soldiers in heavy iron-mesh armor abandoned their hooked ladders, turning and sprinting back into the grey Miasma, trampling their own officers in the mud.Silas didn’t pursue them. He turned his starlit eyes toward the western flank, preparing to drop the third and final tower.He didn’t need to fire.A sudden, sharp series of brass whistles blew from the rear of the retreating Fel-Cat army. Out of the dense fog, a second legion emerged. They didn’t wear the heavy black iron-mesh of the conservative elders. They wore light leather jerkins and green silk sashes, riding fast, low-slung hunting lizards.At the head of the green-sashed cavalry rode Lady Sharis.Her chestnut fur was matted with wet snow, her velvet-textured deer horns lowered aggressively. She didn’t look up at Silas. She drew a long, curved iron saber, rose in her stirrups, and drove her lizard straight into the disorganized, retreating flank of the conservative battalion.”Cut the steam-lines!” Sharis’s raspy voice carried over the din, commanding her scouts. “No quarter for the Synod priests! Burn the robed ones! Capture the engineers!”It wasn’t a battle; it was a slaughter.The conservative soldiers, already broken by the fall of their siege towers, surrendered by the hundreds, dropping their hissing pikes onto the shale and dropping to their knees before Sharis’s cavalry. The dark-robed priests of the Obsidian Synod were run down in the mud, their ribcage-lanterns smashed by heavy iron hooves.The coup was absolute. With the elders’ primary military force broken on the walls of New Sanctum, the Fel-City belonged to Sharis’s faction.Silas lowered his hand.He didn’t blink down to the shale to accept her surrender. The treaty had already been signed in blood and ash on the floor of a ruined manor. He folded his silver-and-crimson wings tight against his armored back and let gravity pull him down, dropping in a long, silent arc toward the basalt parapet of New Sanctum.He landed lightly beside Gideon, the starlight plating of his boots making a soft clink against the stone.Gideon was leaning heavily against his ash pole, his windbreaker soaked in sweat, his grey eyes wide as he looked at Silas’s new form. The rotting corpse-spots were gone. The canvas tunic was gone. Silas stood tall, encased in living starlight, his dual-core radiating a steady, calming warmth that pushed back the freezing draft of the Miasma.”The towers are down,” Gideon rasped, wiping a thick smear of black blood from his chin. “The dome… it’s holding.”Above them, the jagged black crack in the golden sky was already sealing shut, the amber light of the Sanctuary Aegis flowing back to fill the void.Silas turned his black, starlit pupils toward the northern horizon, where the smoke from the ruined towers was mixing with the grey fog.”The Synod is broken,” Silas said quietly, his voice entirely free of the metallic resonance that had marked his Stage 9 peak, settling into a deep, clear resonance. “Sharis holds the Citadel. The perimeter is secure.”Gideon let out a long, shuddering breath, his shoulders dropping two inches. He looked at Silas, his grip loosening on the iron knife. “You did it. You actually did it, Silas.””No,” Silas corrected him softly, looking past Gideon toward the center of the city.In Pioneer Square, despite the chaos on the walls, thousands of citizens were gathered around the fifty-foot copper monument. They weren’t panicking. They weren’t praying to imaginary goddesses. They had their hands pressed against the cold stone base, their focused, anchored belief flowing straight into the central Relic vault, giving the Slate the power it needed to heal the fractured sky.”They did it,” Silas said. He turned his face back toward the deep Miasma, his eyes locking onto a dark shape barely visible in the upper clouds, nine thousand miles to the north. “I just bought them the time.”