The sanctum at the apex of the Frozen Loom was an amphitheater of impossible geometry.
Suspended in the center of the dome of chronal diamond was Morvath, the Weaver of Frozen Time.
Up close, the third Harbinger was terrifyingly immense—twenty feet of chiseled glacial ice and interlocking gears of blackened celestial brass.
His torso was hollowed out, containing a spinning, multi-faceted sapphire pendulum that swung with the deafening cadence of a dying universe's final heartbeat.
His six crystalline arms each wielded a massive, five-pronged weaving shuttle crackling with chronal frost.
"Linear maggots..." Morvath’s voice echoed in dual tones, one voice speaking a second in the past and the other a second in the future.
"You severed my external threads, but inside this sanctum, I am the beginning and the end. Your deaths were recorded ten million years ago!"
The titan lunged, his six arms thrusting the weaving shuttles forward in a blinding, synchronized blur.
The air tore open with fissures of absolute-zero frost, freezing the physical space between them.
"Scatter!" Seraphina shouted, launching thirty feet into the air on her starlight wings.
Kaelen didn't leap away; he stepped directly into the frost-storm.
His eighty-foot shadow-wings flared with pure, dense dark-matter, forming a curved buckler that deflected the glacial shuttles with thunderous, echoing impacts.
The absolute zero clawed at his armor, frosting his cheekbones and crusting his dark hair in ice, but his molten silver eyes burned with ruthless, predatory savagery.
"You talk too much for a grandfather clock," Kaelen roared, his deep voice shaking the diamond sanctum.
He drove Gloom-Weaver into the floor, channeling the Obsidian Ring of the Void-Consort.
A massive wave of gravitational shear ripped through the crystalline platform, targeting the brass clockwork joints of Morvath’s lower body.
The gears shrieked as hundreds of tons of artificial gravity buckled their teeth, arresting the titan’s forward momentum and locking his lower four arms in place.
"Seraphina! His chest pendulum!" Kaelen snarled through clenched teeth, his muscles straining as he held the gravity lock against the thrashing god.
"That sapphire is the temporal regulator! Shatter the pendulum and his causality collapses!"
Seraphina was already in position.
Hovering at the apex of the dome, she did not draw her bow.
She summoned the Scepter of the Astral Sovereign with both hands, driving the full, unadulterated thermonuclear fury of the Solar Dynamo of Ra straight into its miniature rotating nebula.
She reached deep into the mate-bond, drawing on Kaelen’s bottomless void-fire, wrapping her solar plasma in a dense, pressurized envelope of gravity.
Her white dragon-scale armor radiated blinding white-gold brilliance, her golden crescent mark glowing like a miniature sun at her throat.
Morvath saw the apocalyptic spear forming above him.
His top two arms broke free, raising a circular shield of petrified, backwards-flowing time to absorb the blow.
"You cannot kill what exists outside the stream!" Morvath shrieked.
"A wound that doesn't heal is just necrotic tissue," Seraphina countered with cold, surgical clarity. "And I am excising you!"
She dove from the ceiling like a falling star, driving the white-hot head of the Scepter straight down into the center of his temporal shield.
CRACK-BOOM.
The heat of the First Dawn shattered the backwards-flowing time barrier like thin glass.
The tip of the Scepter plunged straight into the hollow chest cavity, striking the spinning sapphire pendulum.
Seraphina detonated the charge.
Ten thousand degrees of stellar plasma and void-gravity detonated inside the sapphire regulator.
The pendulum fractured into a million blinding blue sparks.
Morvath let out a gargantuan, reality-shattering shriek.
Without the regulator, time within his body began to move at conflicting, impossible speeds.
His left arms aged ten million years into crumbling dust in a fraction of a second, while his right side regressed into unformed liquid brass.
His glacial face cracked from brow to chin, and with a final, blinding flash of white-gold dawn fire, the third Harbinger exploded into harmless, drifting snowflakes.
The diamond sanctum fell silent, save for the gentle hum of the dissipating dawn fire.
Seraphina landed lightly on her feet, the smoking Scepter dissolving back into starlight, her breathing heavy and ragged.
Before her knees could buckle from exhaustion, Kaelen swept her up from behind, his strong, armored arms wrapping securely around her waist, lifting her off her feet.
He buried his face in the crook of her neck, his ragged breaths hot against her skin, his chest heaving with fierce, intoxicating relief.
"Three down, little sun," Kaelen growled huskily, turning her in his arms until her amber eyes locked with his molten silver gaze.
"Three down."
Seraphina smiled, wrapping her arms around his broad shoulders, sinking into the delicious, blood-warm heat of his embrace.
"Three down, six to go," she whispered against his lips.
Kaelen groaned softly, capturing her mouth in a slow, deep, devastatingly sensual kiss that tasted of victory, ozone, and unyielding devotion, warming the frozen chamber with the blazing fire of their love.
From the shattered remains of the clockwork god, a glowing blue artifact rose into the air: theChronos-Anchor of Morvath.
The crusade across the Outer Rift had claimed another relic—and their journey toward the final six was just beginning.