A freezing, bone-chilling drizzle fell over the rolling chalk hills of Wiltshire.
The ancient grassy expanse of Salisbury Plain was drowning in unnatural, sulfurous gloom. The low grey clouds hung so heavy they practically brushed the damp sod, but above the prehistoric circle of Stonehenge, the heavens had torn wide open in a vertical cataract of weeping, coagulated blood.
The thirty-ton sarsen stones and smaller bluestones of the ancient monument had been ripped from their chalk beds.
Suspended thirty paces in the air by writhing tentacles of oily dark matter, the massive megaliths rotated in a slow, unnatural inverse orbit. Each ancient monolith was carved with glowing, weeping sigils of the Ashen Maw, bleeding liquid crimson corruption into the wet grass below.
At the center of the inverted circle, hovering above the blood-soaked turf, stood Blood-Archon Vaelakor.
Unlike the brute Azgorath or the gaunt Malidrax, Vaelakor was an aristocratic nightmare clad in articulated plate of flayed crimson dragon-leather and bone. His silver hair fell across a sharply aristocratic face adorned with obsidian horns, his crimson-slitted eyes burning with centuries of sadism.
In his right hand, he held the Chalice of the First Harrowing—a vessel of blackened soul-iron overflowing with boiling mortal blood.
At his feet knelt a pack of fifty Gloom-Hounds—monstrous, horse-sized quadrupeds of sinew and shadow, their maws lined with three rows of diamond-hard fangs that dripped corrosive bile onto the earth.
"Let the stones weep," Vaelakor commanded, his voice a smooth, cultured baritone that carried easily across the desolate plain. "When the final bluestone aligns with the Blood Moon, the gates of the Ninth Sphere will swallow this fragile island whole."
Suddenly, the freezing rain stopped mid-fall.
The suspended raindrops froze into thousands of levitating crystal beads, caught in the sudden, suffocating grip of absolute dark-matter gravity.
From the stormy clouds above, two silhouettes descended through the gloom.
Kaelen Vance arrived like a fallen god of midnight.
His eighty-foot shadow-wings flared against the grey English sky, releasing an atmospheric shockwave that flattened the surrounding grass for three hundred paces. His obsidian doom-plate gleamed with deadly, dark-matter luster, Gloom-Weaver resting against his armored shoulder as his molten silver eyes locked onto the Blood-Archon with lethal, sovereign hatred.
Beside him, Seraphina blazed like an incandescent nova of dawn.
Her twenty-foot wings of solar starlight cut through the misty drizzle, their golden radiance reflecting off the wet chalk hills. Her white dragon-scale armor gleamed, her sunstone recurve bow already drawn to its cheek-mark with three plasma arrows screaming with superheated fury.
"Vaelakor," Kaelen rumbled, his voice shaking the suspended megaliths in their orbits. "You always were fond of playing in the mud."
Vaelakor’s crimson eyes narrowed, a cruel, mocking smile pulling at his blood-stained lips as he raised the chalice in a mock toast.
"The exiled Sovereign and his mortal pet," Vaelakor sneered, gesturing with his clawed gauntlet toward the floating stones. "You are too late, Vance. The leyline is already inverted. In three minutes, my hounds will feast on the marrow of London."
"Your hounds won't make it past this ditch," Seraphina said, her voice clear, cold, and ringing with royal authority.
Vaelakor’s smile vanished, replaced by an expression of feral bloodlust. He lowered the chalice and pointed his claw straight at the sovereigns.
"Tear the meat from their bones!" the Archon shrieked.
The fifty Gloom-Hounds leaped forward in a synchronized, baying frenzy, their massive claws tearing up the wet turf as they charged across Salisbury Plain like a living tide of nightmare.
"Hounds are mine," Seraphina said, her amber eyes burning with plasma fire.
"The butcher is mine," Kaelen growled, his boots exploding off the turf in an earth-shattering sonic boom.
The battle for the Fifth Anchor had begun.