The wind atop the Sunken Spire tore at the silks of the High Inquisitor’s vestments, howling like a chorus of condemned souls.
"Form the sunburst!" Vane screamed, leveling his golden reliquary mace toward the shattered doorway. "Cut the heretic down! Cleanse the witch with solar flame!"
The thirty Paladins of the Solar Dawn reacted with terrifying, mechanical discipline. Their gilded tower shields slammed together in an impenetrable wall of interlocking steel, while their heavy eight-foot halberds leveled through the crenellations like an iron porcupine. Runes of holy fire flared along the rims of their shields, casting an blinding, golden wall of heat that pushed back the freezing marsh mist.
Malakor didn't slow. He didn't seek cover.
He charged the center of the shield wall with a primal, earth-shaking roar that silenced the wind.
As he crossed the twenty paces of open flagstones, he drew upon the silver tether bound to his heart. The combined fury of sovereign fire and abyssal frost flared around his great sword in a swirling vortex of white-hot lightning and violet void.
He struck the center shield like a falling comet.
The impact was catastrophic. Three tower shields buckled inward under the terrifying thermodynamic shockwave, the steel shattering into shrapnel that tore through the paladins’ breastplates. Malakor spun through the breach, his great sword cleaving three men in two with a single backhanded sweep, his shoulder driving a mounted sergeant over the terrace wall into the dark abyss of the fen below.
Aurelia was already airborne.
She used the shoulder of a collapsing paladin as a springboard, vaulting twenty feet over the melee into the open space behind the shield wall. She hit the wet stone like a cat, twin daggers drawing two arcs of silver light through the rain.
Two paladins lunged at her flank with broadswords raised.
Aurelia slipped inside their reach, the silver runes on her palms flaring with abyssal cold. Her left blade drove upward through a warrior’s gorget, severing his windpipe, while her right dagger swept across the hamstrings of the second, dropping him to his knees in a pool of blood.
Ahead of her stood the High Inquisitor.
Vane swung his colossal reliquary mace in a desperate, two-handed overhead arc. The golden head ignited with a deafening crackle of solar fire, descending toward her skull with enough raw kinetic force to smash through castle stone.
Aurelia didn't retreat.
She crossed her twin daggers above her head, channeling the raw essence of the Veil into the steel. When the mace struck, the sound was not metal on metal—it was a metaphysical rupture that rattled the foundations of the tower.
A sphere of silver frost and golden flames exploded outward, scorching the stone floor and throwing the remaining guardsmen from their feet.
Aurelia’s arms trembled under the immense weight of the strike, but her knees did not buckle. She looked into Vane’s bloodshot, terrified eyes through the blinding shower of sparks, her lips curving into a cold, lethal smile.
"Your light is hollow, Vane," she whispered.
Before the Inquisitor could wrench the mace back for a second strike, a shadow fell over them both.
Malakor arrived like a mountain collapsing into the sea.
He didn't use his blade. He grabbed Vane’s right wrist with one massive, iron-shod gauntlet, twisting the arm with a sickening snap that sent the reliquary mace clattering across the stones. With his other hand, Malakor seized the Inquisitor by the throat, lifting the grown man three feet into the air with one arm.
Vane choked, his legs kicking uselessly in the wind, his hands clawing at Malakor’s iron fingers as the sovereign fire in the warlord’s grip began to scorch the skin of his neck.
"Spare... me..." Vane wheezed, spit flecked with blood bubbling on his tongue. "The Emperor... will burn your lands to glass..."
Malakor’s amber eyes burned with unyielding, merciless finality.
He looked at Aurelia, who stepped to his side, her chest heaving with exertion, her daggers dripping blood onto the stone. The sovereign-veil bond between them sang in absolute, triumphant unison—a chord of conquerors standing upon the summit of their first kingdom.
"Tell the Emperor," Malakor growled, his voice carrying clearly over the howling wind to every corner of the battlefield below, "that the Northern Crown is coming to collect his skull."
With a single, brutal twist of his forearms, Malakor snapped the Inquisitor’s neck, tossing the lifeless corpse of the Solar Concord's supreme judge over the parapet into the burning ruins of the causeway below.