Chapter 945 - 944: Terra

The phoenix broke apart behind Elara.

Its feathers became streams of white light, pouring through her back. The long neck folded inward, and the golden eyes vanished last as the spirit disappeared inside its mistress.

Elara arched.

A thin cry escaped her.

Then winter swept across the clearing.

Snow swallowed the broken pillars. Frost climbed the exposed walls of Frostveil, and the air became thick with glittering fragments sharp enough to strip flesh.

Sonya raised a hand.

Stone curved over Akaza, Virella, and Ammor. Another layer followed beneath the first, leaving narrow gaps through which they could watch.

Around Sonya herself, broad slabs overlapped against the storm.

Their outer surfaces froze immediately.

She discarded them and drew up fresh stone.

When the whiteout thinned, Elara was no longer standing upon the ice.

Four wings spread from her back.

The upper pair carried long crystalline feathers. The lower pair burned with pale, freezing fire, their edges continually dissolving into snow.

A swept-back crest framed her white hair. Ice-feather plates covered her damaged armour, and blue-white veins shone beneath her skin.

However, blood still darkened the corner of her mouth.

The fusion had covered her injuries, but it had not erased their cost.

Behind her, the phoenix reappeared as an enormous translucent outline.

Elara hung within its breast. Its wings moved with hers, and its hooked beak lowered whenever she angled her staff.

The spirit no longer needed to react after her.

They moved together.

"Now," Elara said, lifting her chin, "try striking me again."

Sonya tilted her head.

"Mm. In a moment."

Her attention remained upon the stone moving around her.

Elara’s expression hardened.

A single beat carried her across the clearing.

The phoenix descended with her, its enormous wings sweeping a wall of freezing fire ahead.

Sonya’s defensive slabs shattered.

She twisted aside, but cold scraped across her upper arm. Her skin split before the blood could properly emerge.

The attack struck the ground behind her.

A long white trench opened through the rubble.

Sonya raised two fingers.

Far beyond Frostveil, a mountain shoulder cracked.

Snow slid from it.

Then a broad section of rock tore free, rising above the slope while loose stone poured from its underside.

Her new heart struck harder beneath the effort.

But the mountain yielded along the seams she chose.

Ammor forgot to breathe.

Sonya brought her hand across.

The mountain fragment swept toward Elara like an enormous hammer.

Elara climbed sharply. The phoenix’s talons closed around the approaching rock, freezing deep fissures through it.

But Sonya opened her fingers.

The fragment separated into six long spears.

They thrust from different angles.

Elara broke two with her staff. Her upper wings sheared through another, while the phoenix’s burning outline caught the remaining three.

Explosions of frozen stone filled the air.

Sonya kicked a slab beneath her foot and passed through the debris.

Her fist struck Elara’s crossed staff.

BANG!

The phoenix’s breast rippled around the impact. Elara slid backward, but this time her guard held.

She answered with a sweep of her lower wings.

Sonya dropped beneath the freezing fire.

A ridge rose between them, and the flames stripped its upper edge into brittle fragments.

’The mountain was ground until I lifted it.’

Sonya drifted around the ridge as ice feathers punched through it.

’But it still answered afterward.’

She crushed the broken spears into dust and sent them spiralling around Elara’s wings.

The phoenix flared, scattering the dust.

Sonya felt every grain move.

Ground. Stone. Sand.

Different shapes. Different places.

Yet beneath those differences, her affinity found the same thing.

’What am I actually touching?’

Something stirred within the sensation.

Sonya almost missed it beneath the phoenix’s cry.

A sound.

Faint and distant, as though someone had spoken from the far end of an underground passage.

She turned toward it.

Elara took the opening.

Her staff thrust forward, and the phantom beak snapped down around Sonya.

Stone closed between its jaws.

Sonya shot out beneath the neck while the block exploded, then pulled a shelf from the mountainside and sent it rising toward Elara’s back.

She was still listening even while fighting.

The sound did not come from one direction.

It travelled through the bedrock, through the stones beside her, through the dust settling upon her cheek.

’Ter...’

Her heart beat harder.

She had been searching for a better word.

But the element was answering with a name of its own.

Another feather grazed her jaw.

Sonya barely felt it.

Elara’s movements grew sharper, more desperate. Every beat of her wings sent pain through the shining pathways beneath her skin, and the Kragh was still slipping beyond her reach.

Sonya caught the falling stone beneath herself and let her awareness settle deeper.

She stopped demanding an explanation.

For a breath, she simply listened.

Terra.

The name reached her through the same sense that told her where the mountains stood.

It was clear, whole, and unmistakable.

It carried the feeling of the stone before her, the mountain she had lifted, and the remembered ground beneath her mother’s home.

The same presence in worlds that had never shared a sky.

"Terra," Sonya whispered.

The ground answered.

Snow lifted across the clearing. Beneath it, thousands of loose stones rose a finger’s breadth, while a deep tremor travelled from Frostveil’s foundations into the distant mountains.

Sonya’s breath caught.

The connection had deepened.

The mountain no longer reached her as a distant, indistinct weight. She could feel the strain along individual cracks almost as clearly as the grit beneath her nails.

It was the same element.

But she had never felt this close to it.

Before she could explore that difference, another presence intruded upon her awareness.

It appeared near the rift, and it was familiar yet terribly wrong.

She recognized the presence immediately.

Darius.

Yet the power occupying his body was not the power she remembered.

Sonya turned her head. The stones she had raised hung motionless.

Across from her, Elara stopped advancing.

"Darius..."

Relief softened her face. Her brother had returned.

The God of War had brought him back.

However, that relief faltered when Aether began gathering above the rift.

An enormous spear appeared.

Then an axe.

A sword and hammer followed, hanging over the place from which her brother had just emerged.

Elara drew the blizzard closer to herself, clearing her view across the distant valley.

Why was he aiming at the rift?

Below, Akaza straightened.

Virella’s hand tightened against the stone wall, and Ammor looked toward the same oppressive presence.

On Frostveil’s damaged battlements, surviving officers abandoned their arguments over the broken formations.

Those strong enough to endure the pressure looked outward.

A man beside Winterspine lowered the viewing artifact from his eye.

"Divine weapons..."

Others could see the enormous shapes without assistance.

But nobody could explain what they were waiting for.

Then someone emerged from the rift.

Sonya’s expression changed.

She knew that presence.

’Little kitty!’

Alarm struck before anything else.

The being inside Darius was far beyond the opponent Simon had been fighting earlier. Those weapons were waiting directly above him.

He would be-

Sonya went still.

Something was different.

The familiar presence remained, but the strength surrounding it did not fit her memories.

’Is that really you?’

Akaza felt it too.

"Blackmoon?"

The distance denied him a proper measure of what he was sensing. He could recognise his ally, but not account for the strange weight beneath that recognition.

Elara stared across the valley.

The one-horned demon was alive.

How?

The god had pursued him into the Demon Realm.

Why was he returning?

Her fused spirit sharpened her vision as she focused on Darius. She made out the scorched armour, the blood staining it.

Then the arm that ended before it should.

Her stomach tightened.

’His hand...?’

The weapons fell.

BOOOOOOM!

Iron-grey light swallowed the ground before the rift.

A spear drove into it. The axe followed, then the sword split the rising earth before the hammer crushed it flat.

The figures below were gone.

Sonya felt their abrupt relocation a moment before the tremor reached Frostveil.

The frozen ground lurched.

Long cracks raced between the ruined pillars, opening toward the wall protecting her companions.

She pressed her palm downward.

Deep stone shifted into place beneath the fractures. The spreading gaps caught against it, their edges grinding together instead of tearing farther apart.

Ammor braced himself.

Without her, the shaking would have ripped their footing open.

Elara’s wings remained spread, but she had forgotten to attack.

Across the valley, Darius raised another spear.

It was too small for the others to distinguish clearly, but its release was not.

A straight wound opened through the air.

A distant metallic crash reached them, and something dark was driven backward along a trail of shattered rock.

Sonya felt the resistance.

’’He’s still alive?’

Sonya felt relieved when she perceived that Simon was still holding on against the attack.

Then the line veered.

A mountainside farther away burst outward along a narrow path. Stone poured from a hole driven through its bulk, while the clouds behind it separated in the same direction.

The arriving shockwave tore snow from the clearing.

Sonya reinforced the ground again.

But her fingers had tightened.

The strength behind that attack...

Aether gathered around Darius once more.

Six enormous arms unfolded behind his shoulders.

The survivors upon Frostveil saw a spear, a greatsword, an axe, a bow, a chain, and a warhammer take shape in their hands.

At his missing forearm, iron-grey light formed another wrist and hand.

Eight arms.

Elara’s eyes widened when she saw the terrible form emerge from her brother.

Eight-Armed Calamity.

What was the god of war facing for him to use so many powerful attacks.

Sonya saw none of it.

However, each movement pressed against the air, and the scattered stone through which she sensed the valley answered.

A spear’s narrow displacement. A hammer’s heavy sweep. Six enormous limbs moving around the smaller body beneath them.

The image forming in her mind was incomplete, but the danger was not.

"Little kitty..." Sonya whispered.

Across the broken ice, Elara’s golden eyes remained fixed upon the distant figure.

"Brother..."