Unsleeping Patron - Wings Across the City

Shattered three days prior, the glass vault above the Slate lay open to the sky., shattered three days prior by the sheer, downward vibration of the Miasma Tide.Silas stood on the lip of the basalt pit in the center of Pioneer Square. The cold, black slush of the cosmic tide dripped through the open ceiling, landing on his bare shoulders and hissing as it evaporated against the starlit silver plating of his Astral Sentinel armor.Below him, the jade tablet floated in its pool of liquid gold, its inscribed names burning with a frantic, white-hot intensity.Above him, the sky was a nightmare.The fifty-kilometer dome of the Sanctuary Aegis was bulging inward, bowed down under millions of tons of pitch-black, writhing Eldritch sludge. Dozens of monstrous, Sequence 6 and Sequence 5 abominations segmented chitinous horrors, floating ribcage-vessels, and endless clusters of pale, weeping eyes were pressed flat against the outer curve of the yellow light, scraping their claws against the barrier in a deafening, continuous roar.The city was buckling under the mental fallout.Silas didn’t need to look past the stone walls of the square. His fused Astral Sentinel core the silver-and-crimson seed of Order and Chaos picked up every scream echoing through the thirty-nine agricultural districts. Three hundred thousand human minds were fracturing at once. The proximity of the cosmic entities was passing through the yellow glass of the Aegis like a cold poison, tearing at the mental stability of farmers, engineers, guards, and children alike.If their sanity broke, the anchor would snap. If the anchor snapped, the Slate would freeze, and the fifty-kilometer dome would collapse into ash in three seconds.”Silas!”Gideon’s voice barely reached him through the roar of the sky. The old soldier was standing near the arched entry of the square, holding his iron knife in a white-knuckled grip, his boots planted in two inches of black mud as he tried to keep fifty screaming, panicked citizens from trampling each other against the basalt monument.Silas didn’t turn his head.He unhooked the Blood-Lantern from his belt, setting it down on the edge of the jade pit. He didn’t open the brass cowl. He took a single, heavy step forward, stepping directly off the basalt ledge into the open air above the floating Slate.He didn’t fall.The starlit silver armor over his chest flared, and behind his shoulder blades, the Astral Wings unfolded.TEAR.They weren’t ten meters across anymore.Driven by the full, unrestricted power of his Sequence 8 breakthrough and the subjugated Codex in his mind, the silver-and-crimson membranes expanded exponentially. They stretched ten yards, a hundred yards, a mile, shooting upward into the black sky like two twin rivers of liquid starlight and spatial blood.Within five seconds, the wings spanned fifty kilometers.A solid, unbroken canopy of silver-and-crimson light vaulted across the underside of the Aegis, shielding the brick houses, the stone storehouses, and the paved avenues of New Sanctum from the sight of the horror outside.The citizens in the streets stopped running. They lifted their tear-stained, mud-caked faces toward the sky. Above their heads, the pitch-black tar and the scraping claws of the cosmic abominations were gone, replaced by a vast, glowing ceiling of starlit silver that hummed with a deep, peaceful resonance.Silas hung at the center of the world, suspended directly above the Slate.He hadn’t just built a physical roof. He opened his mind completely, extending three hundred thousand threads of pure, silver Mind-Light down into the streets below.He plugged the threads directly into the temples of every man, woman, and child in the city.The recoil hit his soul like a falling mountain.Silas’s spine bowed violently, his silver armor groaning under the sudden, crushing influx of three hundred thousand human panics. He absorbed their terror. He drank their despair, their nightmares, their mental agony, and the suffocating dread of the black sky, channeling the raw, toxic mental pressure of an entire civilization straight into his own dual-core.Black blood poured from his eyes, his nostrils, and his ears, running down his silver neck-guard in steady, smoking streams. His starlit irises vibrated so fast they lost their form, turning into two pits of pure, agonizing white heat.HOLD IT.The subjugated Parchment inside his consciousness vibrated, its obsidian quill writing no rules, simply acting as a cold, unfeeling conduit to process the mountain of human suffering passing through his vessel.His golden-crimson heart beat at forty cycles a second, a frantic, thunderous drum that shook the basalt pillars of Pioneer Square. Every time a child in District Thirty-Nine wept in terror, Silas took the strike. Every time a guard on the boundary wall felt his mind slipping into madness, Silas absorbed the fracture, stitching the soldier’s sanity back together with his own silver soul-essence.He stood as a physical wall between three hundred thousand humans and the cosmic void.On the ground, in the brick-lined lanes of the city, the screaming faded.Farmers sitting in the mud stopped clawing at their ears. Guards on the northern parapet lowered their trembling swords, their breathing slowing, their eyes clearing as a deep, unyielding calm settled over their minds a calm bought and paid for by the bleeding, silent figure hanging in the sky above the Relic vault.For thirty days and thirty nights, the Miasma Tide boiled above the sky. For thirty days and thirty nights, the cosmic abominations scraped their claws against the outer barrier.And for thirty days and thirty nights, Silas Blackwood didn’t close his eyes, didn’t move a boot, and didn’t drop a wing, earning his name in the golden script of the jade tablet below as the eternal, Unsleeping Patron of Humanity.