They slammed through the methane-crusted dorsal observation dome of the Sol-Invictus in a blinding shower of frozen nitrogen shards and fractured crystal.
Rolling to her boots across the five-mile flagship’s grand concourse, Seraphina’s dragon-scale armor hissed as the superheated dawn aura radiating from her twenty-foot wings instantly boiled away the ambient minus-three-hundred-degree frost into swirling white vapor.
The ship’s interior was a cathedral of frozen antiquity.
Soaring vaulted arches of carved solar orichalcum stretched for hundreds of paces beneath ice-covered chandeliers of pure starlight quartz.
Lining the vast marble boulevard were thousands of cylindrical cryo-Sarcophagi, each containing a sleeping warrior of the ancient Sunblood royal guard.
Through the frost-webbed glass of the stasis pods, Seraphina could see their serene, immortal faces—golden-armored knights and archers holding carved sun-bows across their chests, preserved in deathless suspended animation for ten millennia.
Yet the ancient tomb had been violently violated.
A massive, barbed boarding drill from the Black Armada had punched through the port bulkhead, spewing twenty-foot pools of steaming black sludge across the pristine flagstones.
Scrambling out of the breach were two hundred Blood-Drudges of Malakor—chitinous, four-armed butcher beasts wielding vibrating soul-saws, their hunched spines bristling with barbed bone-spines designed to pierce cryo-glass and harvest sleeping immortal marrow.
Three drudges had already pinned a pod, their revving saws inches from the throat of a sleeping solar commander.
"Not on my watch!" Seraphina snarled, her paramedic soul revolted by the butcherous slaughter.
She unslung her sunstone recurve bow in a single, fluid motion. Drawing three plasma arrows across the crystal riser, she didn't just aim—she unleashed a sweeping volley infused with the azure electrical storm of the Heart of Susanoo.
Thrum-crack.
The three arrows shattered the acoustic barrier, screaming down the frozen boulevard like lightning bolts.
They struck the three drudges simultaneously, the concussive dawn-burst vaporizing their chitinous carapaces and hurling their smoking limbs twenty yards across the ice before their saws could even scratch the pod’s glass.
"Kaelen, seal the breach!" she shouted, stepping forward to defend the perimeter.
Kaelen Vance was already an engine of total war.
The High Sovereign didn't bother with arrows.
His eighty-foot shadow-wings flared into massive, razor-tipped black scythes as he plunged boots-first into the center of the drudge pack. Gloom-Weaver descended in a relentless, two-handed whirlwind of dark-matter destruction.
Every stroke cleaved two or three monsters in half, black ichor spraying across the ancient marble columns only to freeze instantly in the frigid air.
A hulking, ten-foot drudge berserker swung a heavy iron mace at Kaelen’s head.
Kaelen didn't even duck; he caught the spiked iron head with his bare left gauntlet, the dark-matter grip stopping the multi-ton swing dead in its tracks.
With a chilling, predatory snarl, Kaelen squeezed his fingers, crushing the solid iron into twisted scrap before driving his forehead straight into the beast’s snouted face. The impact pulverized bone and cartilage, dropping the berserker like a slaughtered ox.
"The breach is mine, little sun!" Kaelen roared, his silver eyes blazing with feral sovereign arrogance as he kicked the corpse aside. "Get to the Solar Hearth! The cryo-matrices are degrading—you have three minutes before the life-support wards fail permanently!"
Seraphina didn't look back; she trusted him with her life.
Vaulting over a frozen fountain of starlight crystal, she sprinted toward the towering golden gates at the end of the concourse: the Sanctum of the Solar Hearth.
Two drudges leaped from a balcony to intercept her, their saws howling.
Seraphina dropped her bow to its tether, drew her twin sunstone daggers, and slid across the ice beneath their swinging blades.
Her daggers carved upward in parallel arcs of five-thousand-degree plasma, slicing both beasts clean from groin to throat.
She kicked through the double doors, slamming them shut behind her and sealing the latch with an arc of welding starlight.
She stood inside the heart of the flagship.
In the center of the vast circular chamber rose the Solar Hearth—a colossal, spherical reactor of dark orichalcum, cold and dark as a dead planet.
Surrounding the sphere were the master command thrones of the ancient Sun-Emperors, their consoles flashing with frantic red diagnostic runes indicating complete core hypothermia.
Seraphina rushed to the central ignition pedestal, her bare hands slamming down onto the twin handprints carved into the gold.
"Wake up ,Sol-Invictus," she pleaded, pouring every drop of her burning Sunblood straight into the frozen conduits. "Your Queen is here!"