The warning was barely off Malakor’s lips when the stillness of the grand rotunda snapped like brittle glass.
From the deep recesses beneath the stepped basalt dais, shadows detached themselves from the stonework. Unlike the petrified silver legions flanking the avenue, these silhouettes moved with an oily, unnatural fluidity. Six figures emerged into the soft glow of the artificial constellations, clad in tattered cowls of void-spun silk over segmented chitinous armor.
Aurelia’s gaze sharpened, her hand locking onto her rapier hilt. "Veil-Reapers. Cultists of the Hollow Eye."
"Scavengers," Malakor corrected with cold disgust, unsheathing Void-Reaver. The five-foot expanse of black steel sighed as it cleared the scabbard, bleeding dark-matter smoke across the polished quartz floor. "They burrowed through the mountain's fractures while we were breaking the siphon."
At the center of the cultist line, a gaunt figure stepped forward, a jagged staff of petrified bone clutched in clawed fingers. The staff was capped with a cracked amethyst crystal that wept oily black miasma.
"The usurpers arrive," the lead cultist hissed, his voice grating like two dry stones grinding together. His eyes beneath the cowl were hollow pits of pale violet phosphorescence. "You bring the Five Keys to our altar. The Master of the Deeps thanks you, little star. Your marrow will feed the awakening of the Void-Father."
"Your master can feast on cold steel," Aurelia retorted coldly.
With a flick of her wrist, she drew her rapier. The blade erupted into a blinding corona of sapphire flame, answering the call of the Bound Shards within her chest. The ambient temperature in the rotunda plunged, frost blooming across the quartz tiles in jagged fractal wreaths.
"Take the woman alive! Carve the Shards from her breast!" the leader shrieked, slamming the base of his staff against the dais.
A shockwave of necrotic miasma surged toward them, followed instantly by the five chitin-armored zealots leaping forward with curved, twin daggers dripping with neurotoxin.
They never reached her.
Malakor met the vanguard with the force of an avalanche.
With a roar of pure nether-force, he swung Void-Reaver in an upward diagonal arc. The density of his dark aura altered the gravity within a ten-foot sphere; the two lead cultists were violently wrenched from their airborne trajectories, their forms pulled directly into the path of his cleave. The great sword sheared through chitin, bone, and flesh with brutal, contemptuous ease, bisecting both attackers before their boots could touch the earth.
A spray of black blood sizzled against Malakor’s breastplate, but he did not pause. Spinning through the momentum of the strike, he brought his armored elbow down into the face of a third cultist who attempted to flank him, shattering the assassin's skull with a sickening crack.
"Aurelia, the speaker is yours!" Malakor bellowed, parrying a flurry of venomous daggers from the remaining two zealots with a metallic screech that echoed up into the vaulted ceiling.
Aurelia did not hesitate.
Channeling the First and Fourth Shards, she surged forward in a blur of astral motion. The air cracked behind her like a whip. The cult leader gasped, frantically thrusting his bone staff forward to manifest a barrier of curdled nether-light.
Aurelia’s rapier struck the shield with pinpoint precision. Rather than testing the barrier’s brute strength, she inverted the frost-flame along the rapier’s tip. The sudden thermal collapse shattered the necrotic ward into a shower of crystalline embers.
Before the leader could recover, Aurelia closed the distance. Her off-hand seized the front of his ragged cowl, ripping him forward while her rapier pinned the staff to the stone.
"Who sent you into this sanctum?" she demanded, her hazel eyes blazing with sovereign fury, the sapphire aura around her face illuminating his withered features.
The cultist grinned, black blood welling between sharpened teeth. "The gate was not sealed from without... sweet princess. It was unlocked... from within."
Behind her, the sudden clatter of heavy steel resonated through the grand avenue.
Malakor, having already decapitated the last zealot, suddenly froze, his crimson eyes widening as he looked past Aurelia toward the stepped dais.
"Aurelia—back!"
The empty star-metal throne above them had begun to bleed. The floating orb containing the Sixth Catalyst shuddered violently, and from the deep shadows of the high seat, two eyes of pure, burning crimson opened in the dark.