Chapter 696: Heavens Crashing Down

As they hurriedly approached the Great lodge, feeling relieved, the place they had come many times before, they didn’t know why all of them shuddered and felt a chill running down their bodies, no... it was more like coming from their soul.

The massive, ironwood double doors of the Great Lodge loomed before the trembling delegation like the jaws of a slumbering behemoth.

Carved deeply into the blackened surface were primeval reliefs: great horned serpents coiling around jagged mountain peaks, winged terrors diving through tempestuous skies, and at the very center, the gaping maw of a white tiger whose hollowed eye sockets seemed to follow every shuddering step the emissaries took.

To the shivering foreign envoys, climbing those wide, limestone stairs felt less like an approach to an audience hall and more like a forced march up the steps of an executioner’s block.

Elder Sarn stumbled on the wide stone carved steps, his knees shaking so violently beneath his river-beast hide skirts that his boots caught twice on the stone lips.

His aged throat clicked with every dry swallow while his fingers, slick with cold, clammy sweat, clawed frantically at his carved bone staff just to keep his balance.

Behind him, the feathered scouts of the Wind-Runners moved with their heads bowed low, their proud plumed mantles drooping like wet grass, while the Scaled-Kin envoys kept their taloned claws tightly clamped against their bellies, their blue-frilled neck gills spasming in erratic, desperate gulps of thin mountain air.

The memory of the phantom butcher’s yard... the dark-haired youth leaning against the lumber with blood in his crimson eyes and an empire of corpses behind his lazy smirk... was still burned raw into the meat of their minds.

They had barely pulled themselves out of that psychic slaughterhouse with their sanity intact.

They thought the worst had passed. They genuinely believed that by putting forty paces of distance between themselves and that lazy, dark-haired reaper lounging beside the timber stack, they had survived the jaws of death.

But they don’t why instead of feeling relieved, every step they took toward that elevated timber sanctuary was an ordeal of pure, unadulterated dread.

Just make the formal greetings, Sarn chanted silently to himself, the words a desperate, hollow prayer against the thumping terror behind his ribs. Offer the salt. Offer the spirit-moss. Swear unconditional border neutrality, and crawl back out through the gates.

Somehow they finally reached the gate. Two towering Veynar sentries... warriors whose brawny chests were wrapped in cured hide and hands gripping broad-bladed flint-tipped pikes, didn’t spare them a single word. With a synchronous, grinding heave, they shoved the massive ironwood leaves inward.

The hinges groaned and slowly the doors parted with a low, cavernous groan.

And in an instant, the interior of the Great Lodge opened before them, a vast, dim hall smelling strongly of sun-dried cedar, wild mountain sage, and the pungent musk of predatory furs.

Towering pillars of whole, unbarked pine trunks, each so massive that two men could not encircle them hand-in-hand, rose upward into the gloom to support the high rafters, where thin shafts of midday sun pierced through smoke vents like celestial lances.

At the far end of the long expanse, raised upon a three-tiered platform of carved bedrock, sat the high seat of the Veynar.

It was an imposing throne constructed entirely from the bleached, fossilized bones of predatory beasts, draped in the pristine, snow-white pelt of an unknown beast.

And reclining upon those furs was Warchief Veylara.

She wore a simple, elegant tunic of deep crimson leather, trimmed at the collar with the pale fur.

Her long, ink-black hair spilled over her shoulders in immaculate, liquid waves, framing a face carved from the finest alabaster and absolute coldness.

Resting gracefully beside her right hand was the ancestral spear of the Veynar warchiefs, its razor-sharp flint head gleaming with dull sunlight.

Beside her right shoulder, leaning lightly on her polished white-birch staff, stood High Shaman Zephyra. The blind mystic’s pristine linen robes pooled softly onto the stone, her milky eyes fixed forward with serene, impenetrable calm.

Flanking the raised dais on the lower flagstones stood two lines of Veynar elders and veteran clan leaders... Elder Harkan with his scarred forearms crossed, Elder Bran leaning cautiously against his oak cane, and half a dozen other grey-bearded veterans standing in rigid, breathless silence.

For half a heartbeat, Elder Sarn felt a pathetic, desperate spark of relief.

We made it inside, his mind whispered. The terrifying youth was left behind in the dirt yard. The hall was peaceful. The hearth fire crackled softly in the wide stone pit in the center of the room.

This was a council, a place of tribal law and diplomatic custom. They were envoys; they carried the white boughs of peace. Surely, under the eyes of the ancestors, they were safe—

He lifted his foot to take his first formal pace across the cedar threshold.

The sole of his hide boot tapped against the stone.

In that exact, infinitesimal slice of a heartbeat...

BOOM.

The spark of hope was not extinguished; it was atomized.

Without the slightest warning, without a single movement of Veylara’s fingers, an invisible, titanic gravity... a density so monstrous, so pure, and so unimaginably absolute that it defied the natural order of the mortal world... detonated outward from the high seat like an oceanic tidal wave striking a handful of brittle twigs!

SLAM!

CRACK.

There was no sound, yet the minds of every foreign envoy ruptured with the phantom shriek of a collapsing mountain.

The air inside the hall solidified into solid, suffocating slate.

Before a single envoy could draw a breath, the immense gravitational force crashed down onto the crowns of their heads, instantly snapping their spines downward and violently hammering all twenty foreign emissaries flat against the cold stone floor with sickening, hollow thuds.

Even their staves snapped like dry twigs.

THUD! CRACK-CRACK!

Elder Sarn didn’t even have time to cry out. His chin bounced viciously against the cold stone, biting through his own tongue as the coppery taste of blood flooded his mouth.