Chapter 697: Primordial Goddess

The pressure was absolute, monstrous, and utterly foreign to anything they had ever experience. It pressed against his chest with the weight of twenty charging mammoth-beasts, expelling every scrap of air from his lungs until his ribs bowed inward, groaning under the strain.

He couldn’t move his fingers or lift his head by a single millimeter. Heck, he couldn’t even blink his bulging, bloodshot eyes!

Beside him, the Scaled-Kin envoys let out muted, strangled shrieks that died instantly in their crushed throats.

The blue-tinted frills along their necks flared in wild, biological agony, the moisture violently forced out of their pores, their leathery hides tearing slightly against the rough floor.

Their three-toed limbs splayed outward in wild, involuntary paroxysms, their amphibious chests compressed until their ribs met their spines, their yellow eyes bulging from their sockets as the pressure threatened to liquefy their internal organs.

The feathered Wind-Runners also lay twisted, their limbs pinned as if crushed beneath a stone slab.

Behind them, the two massive Horned-Folk envoys... behemoths who could wrestle bull elks to the dirt with their bare hands... were also flattened like insects beneath a falling boulder, their heavy, ribbed horns gouging frantic white scratches into the stone as their faces were mashed into the floor.

It was not merely physical weight. It was an existential erasure.

Their awakened spirit cores... the beasts that granted them their strength, their speed, and their status in their respective tribes... went into total, paralyzed hibernation. Their internal essence flows slammed shut. The spiritual channels in their arms and legs seized up with agonizing, white-hot cramps.

It was the sky itself collapsing onto the ground. It was an abyss with no bottom, a divine law that demanded their immediate, unconditional non-existence.

They were suffocating, their vision dimming into a terrifying, red-edged blackness.

Their souls were being ground into dust beneath the heel of a being that had long since transcended the mortal realm.

We are dead, Sarn’s mind screamed, his thoughts turning sluggish as the cold void of oblivion closed in around his fading consciousness. The sky is going to crush us into paste—

The darkness surged in from the edges of their vision. Tinnitus roared in their ears like the scream of a million cicadas. The delicate capillaries in Sarn’s eyes ruptured, flooding his sight with crimson haze. Five more heartbeats of this divine suffocation, and their skulls would split like ripe melons.

"Veylara. It is enough."

The voice was not loud, yet it drifted through the suffocating gravity like the gentle, crystal chime of a heavenly oriole.

The words came from the white-robed figure beside the throne. High Shaman Zephyra had lightly tapped the butt of her staff against the dais. She inclined her head half a fraction toward the woman in the furs, her tone laced with mild, exasperated patience.

Immediatly a ripple of cool, emerald mist swept outward from the wood, brushing gently against the edges of the crushing pressure.

"Humph."

A soft, low nasal sound slipped from the high seat. A sound of sheer, unbothered contempt.

WHOOSH.

In the span of half a second, the crushing weight vanished.

The invisible ceiling that was about to pulverize their bones vanished as abruptly as it had descended.

"HAAA-AAAH!"

A chorus of ragged, desperate, animalistic gasps exploded across the floor.

Air rushed back into starved lungs with the speed of a floodgate bursting open.

They surged upward onto their trembling palms like a drowning man breaking through a sheet of river ice, their mouth stretched wide, drawing in huge, frantic lungfuls of air.

Elder Sarn heaved, his chest spasming erratically as he sucked in wild, ragged pulls of oxygen, coughing violently as thick strings of bloody phlegm spattered against the stone.

Beside him, the Scaled-Kin emissaries were writhing on their bellies, their throat-sacs expanding and deflating in mad, hyperventilating bursts, clawing at their own necks as if trying to tear away an invisible noose.

The feathered Wind-Runners lay curled in the fetal position for several seconds, their limbs shivering violently with uncontrollable muscle tremors, tears of sheer biological relief leaking freely from their eyes.

For several long, torturous minutes, the only sound within the Great Lodge was the frantic, rasping wheeze of twenty foreign dignitaries clawing their way back from the threshold of the grave.

The deafening tinnitus slowly began to recede from their ears, replaced by the steady, terrifying crackle of the hearth fire at the center of the hall.

The world slowly brightened.

Their blurred, blood-shot eyes struggled to focus through the tears and sweat stinging their lids.

Slowly, painfully, the envoys dragged themselves up on their hands and knees, trembling like newly dropped fawns in the snow.

None of them even entertained the thought of rising to their feet. They remained huddled on the floor, their hands planted in the dirt, their heads swimming with dizzying nausea.

Trembling like leaves in a gale, they cautiously, hesitantly lifted their gaze toward the three-tiered platform.

And in that moment, the breath was once again stolen from their throats.

Veylara was simply sitting there, leaning her cheek against the knuckles of her left hand, her sapphire eyes looking down upon them with absolute, unreachable ice.

Yet in the eyes of the shattered envoys, reality had warped once more.

Her figure seemed to expand outward, stretching toward the vaulted ceiling until her presence filled the entire hall, blotting out the light of the fire, blotting out the walls, blotting out the world itself.

The crimson leather of her tunic no longer looked like simple hide; it shimmered with the terrifying, untouchable majesty of sovereign fire.

The semi-translucent phantom of the white tiger stood behind her shoulders... a monstrous beast of white-and-crimson light whose fangs were as long as heavens themselves, and its colossal paws rested casually over the armrests of the bone seat.

Her deep sapphire eyes were not looking at them; they were looking down through them, an icy, fathomless gaze that regarded them with the exact same indifferent curiosity a roaming goddess might spare for a swarm of dying gnats beneath her heel.