Chapter 439:Authorities.

Chapter 439: 439:Authorities.

The arrow didn’t kill the Sovereign of Fire.

Atheline hadn’t expected it to.

Seven powers crossed the broken sky, six belonging to him and one belonging to Lilith, and for one impossible moment the battlefield became silent.

Wind carried the arrow. Lightning gave it release. Earth prevented its structure from collapsing. Water allowed the conflicting Aether to adapt around one another.

Ice preserved the unstable balance. Fire transformed everything continuously so that the arrow didn’t destroy itself from within.

And darkness covered it; Lilith’s Darkness swallowed its presence until even the divine consciousness forcing itself through the fracture seemed to lose sight of it.

The arrow disappeared.

Then struck the enormous burning hand gripping the edge of the world, it jerked backward.

A sound came from beyond the fracture filled with surprise.

Atheline’s eyes widened.

The arrow had penetrated one of Fire’s fingers, barely.

A wound smaller than a coin appeared within something large enough to crush a mountain... but it had wounded him. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

He stared up at the giant.

"So you can bleed."

The wound closed and with it, his optimism disappeared.

"Of course."

Lilith appeared beside him.

"Did you expect one arrow to finish this?"

"I was hoping he’d be considerate."

"He caused the Cataclysm... Consideration probably isn’t one of his better qualities."

The Fire Sovereign moved again.

His fingers tightened around the edge and the fracture widened.

Atheline’s smile disappeared as another chain snapped. The fairy sanctuary shook violently.

Lyria screamed orders.

Fairies flew between failing formations while ancient roots beneath them began burning.

Atheline felt something change inside the seal. The fragment behind his core suddenly pulled.

Atheline staggered.

Lilith grabbed him.

"What?"

"I don’t know."

That was becoming an increasingly dangerous sentence.

Atheline closed his eyes.

The mysterious fragment was no longer dormant. For months, it had waited behind his core, now it opened.

Atheline disappeared.

Lilith caught his body before it reached the ground.

"Atheline!"

He couldn’t hear her when he found himself standing somewhere else. There was no ground, no sky and no stars, only darkness.

Before he could even question anything, lights appeared.

One... Two...Ten... Hundreds.

Atheline stared in amazement.

They weren’t stars as he had thought at first. Roots stretched between the lights.

The original World Tree.

What remained of its spiritual structure and the network of the seal.

Atheline slowly turned.

He could see everything.

The current World Tree burned brilliantly in the distance. The fairy sanctuary was another point. The Blood Ocean. Dragonic Island. Ancient ruins. Demonic lands. Human territories. Beastkin mountains. Dwarven tunnels. Places he’d never visited. Places no modern map remembered.

Thousands of years ago, all of them had been connected, they still were technically.

Something moved behind him.

He turned to find the Supreme Sovereign standing there.

Atheline immediately knew that this was the final message of someone who had expected this moment thousands of years before it arrived.

He looked at him.

"You could have explained everything the first time."

The memory smiled.

"Would you have understood?"

Atheline considered it.

"No."

"Then I explained enough."

"I still find you annoying."

"So I’ve been told."

Atheline’s expression changed.

That response felt almost too natural for a memory but he decided not to think about it.

"What’s happening?"

The Supreme Sovereign looked toward the lights.

"The seal is dying."

"I noticed."

"Not only the seal."

Several lights flickered.

Atheline looked toward them.

Something existed inside each one; ancient power.

He recognized some immediately.

Fire.

Water.

Earth.

Wind.

Ice.

Lightning.

But others...

Light.

Darkness.

Life.

Death.

Space.

Nature.

More.

Some were barely fragments while others were enormous.

Atheline stared in disbelief.

"What are those?"

"The dead."

His expression hardened.

"Sovereigns?"

"What remained of them."

Atheline remembered Fire’s ritual.

"He collected their Divine Authorities."

"Yes."

"Then why are they here?"

The Supreme Sovereign raised his hand and the memory changed.

Atheline saw the ancient battlefield, fire’s ascension, the original World Tree, authorities gathered around it and the Supreme Sovereign firing his final arrows into the ritual.

He had assumed he’d simply disrupted it.

He hadn’t.

The arrow struck the network connecting Fire to the stolen Authorities.

They scattered and Fire screamed. Some Authorities escaped entirely, others shattered and some remained trapped within the World Tree.

The Supreme Sovereign used them.

Atheline’s eyes widened.

"The seal."

The Supreme Sovereign nodded.

"I couldn’t destroy him."

"So you used what he’d stolen to imprison him."

"I returned his theft to the world."

The scene expanded.

Fragments of Authority traveled through the World Tree roots, across the ancient continent, into seas, mountains, forests, ruins and places where the Laws naturally resonated.

Water sank into ancient oceans. Earth disappeared beneath mountains. Wind entered places where the world’s Aether currents converged. Life returned to forests. Light entered sacred regions. Space disappeared into fractures created by the Cataclysm.

Death...

Atheline followed that one.

Death scattered differently; part of it sank into regions filled with the dead while other fragments became cores, artifacts and corrupted locations.

Atheline thought of Cassian without knowing what had just happened to him.

The Supreme Sovereign continued.

"The Authorities couldn’t be restored to those who had already died."

Atheline understood.

"So you anchored them into the worl until they could return naturally through new Sovereigns."

"That was the hope."

Atheline looked toward the countless lights.

"But they didn’t."

"Some did."

Ice pulsed.

Atheline immediately thought of Draco.

Darkness responded.

Lilith.

Other points remained incomplete.

"Most never found successors capable of completing them."

The Supreme Sovereign looked toward the broken network.

"And now there is no longer time."

Atheline’s stomach tightened.

The seal was collapsing and the Authorities supporting it were being released. If nobody claimed them... Fire would.

He looked toward the fracture.

He could feel him waiting and hungry. Exactly as he’d done during the Sovereign War.

Atheline laughed bitterly.

"We’re doing it again."

"Yes."

"The entire ancient war."

"Yes."

"He’s waiting for the Authorities to become available."

"Yes."

Atheline rubbed his face.

"I really hate this man."

The Supreme Sovereign almost smiled, then the lights moved toward Atheline.

He stopped.

"What are they doing?"

"Recognizing you."

"No."

He frantically backed away.

The fragment inside him opened further. The Supreme Sovereign’s final inheritance wasn’t another core, it was a command embedded within the seal.

A final instruction.

When the seal could no longer survive, the unclaimed Authorities were to seek the one who existed outside the world’s closed destiny.

The outsider.

Atheline.

Wind reached him first which Atheline didn’t resist. It entered his core and pain exploded through him. His body outside the vision convulsed.

Lilith grabbed him.

"Atheline!"

Wind became more than he’d ever understood; movement, freedom, direction, distance, breath and currents moving through the world. His surface understanding suddenly felt like a child touching an ocean with one finger.

Water came next.

It represented flow, adaptation, continuity and change without loss of self.

Atheline screamed.

Back in the sanctuary, Water erupted around his unconscious body.

Lilith’s expression changed.

Lyria turned.

"What’s happening?"

"I don’t know."

Earth entered.

It came with foundation, weight, endurance and structure. Atheline’s bones cracked from the weight of it.

Ice followed.

It represented stillness, preservation, suspension and the refusal of change.

Fire appeared.

Atheline recoiled ftom it.

It was not Fire’s Authority or the Sovereign of Fire beyond the seal but an older fragment. The natural Law itself, separated from the man who had claimed it.

It showed him transformation, consumption, heat, and creation through destruction

Lightning.

It showed him potential, release, instant and a way of connection between two points.

Atheline’s six elements, the ones he’d already built his core around.

They stabilized first.

For one heartbeat, he thought that was the inheritance.

Then Light moved into his body.

His eyes widened.

"No."