The stillness that fell was not peaceful. It was the ringing, hollow silence that followed a calamity, a silence of noise so profound it felt like an actual pain. The envoy was taken away, his departure marked not by a fading of light, but by a sudden, violent stripping away of himself. The heavy hand of the divine was lifted, leaving behind it a void which in some curious way weighed more. The very air carried the imprint of it, smelling of ozone, burned stone, and coppery blood.Mount Pyre remained a monument to the fury it had endured. The smooth, glassy scar where the summit had been unmade glinted obscenely under the battered horizon. But that was only the most dramatic of wounds. The lawn of the rising Codex Sect was a realm of ruin. Smoking craters, flawless circles each where a piece of heavenly fire had struck, covered the ground. The freshly built Hall of Unbound Debate stood as a gutted shell, the beams charred to charcoal. The scriptorium's roof had been torn away, and pre

The stillness of the Sunken Peaks was not serene, but one of ravaging. The fractured black mountains notorious for consuming light and sound now fed on a new source: a bubbling, monolithic hatred. It was within these caverns where the stone itself seemed to bleed in darkness that Kael Draven re-emerged into the world. He was not that man who had survived Mount Pyre's fall. That man's pride had been shattered, his identity ripped away like the sacred books of his disbanded cult. Something else emerged from the black depths, a thing of loveliness and delicate shame, forged in his own.His presently dulled armor dented and mottled, but the eye was caught by the sword in his hand. The shards of his family sword, which had been laboriously recovered from the embers of the arena, were bound together not in master-smith's steel, but in threads of cooled, hellish flame. The blade itself was a jagged line of fiery purple and bruising black, pulsing with a slow, hungry rhythm. It was no longer

The air above Mount Pyre darkened with the promise of devastation. The Grand Coalition of the Four Sects surrounded the mountain, not only to surround it, but to suffocate it. The legions of the Stone-Spine formed an uninterrupted ring of grey steel at the base, their immobility more intimidating than any cry of war. Above, the Tempest Fist lashed the sky into a pot of battered clouds and crackling lightning. The Umbral Veil was a psychic miasma, a cloud of doubt crawling up the slopes, and from the south arrived the Sun-Rotted's rot spreading as an epidemic, transforming the lush lower forests into a necropolis of parched, blackened wood.From a richly appointed command pavilion set off the edge of the blight, the alliance's generals watched. The Stormcaller of the Tempest Fist, a woman whose eyes burned with tightly restrained energy, released a short, derisive laugh."A school of fools," she declared, her voice the rumble before thunder. "They congregate behind walls they had resha

The wind at Ember Peak did not whisper but shrieked. It buffeted Felix's simple robes, tossing dark hair against the face furrowed by a bone-tired grimness that hid beneath. At the twisted basin known as the Scar, an army was gathering. A sea of shining silver armor and light white flags, each carrying the consuming fire of the Blazing Sun Sect. They pressed forward in a cold, mechanical synchrony, a machine of steel and religious faith built for one purpose only: his annihilation.The air itself was thick with their shared intention, a psychic energy that would have broken a weaker man weeks ago. Felix Kane was not the man who'd opened his eyes, confused and weak, to this world of words and wonders. Survival's furnace had purified away his weaknesses, and the Codex pulsating in his brain was the hammer that'd accomplished the task.They're early," a voice said beside him, level but tightened with tension.Liora Vey stood upright, her robes of learning exchanged for weathered leathers

The quiet after the storm had a palpable weight. The war of fire and ice had died away, and in its wake lay a realm of ghastly contrasts: fields of glittering ice statues standing watch over stretches of blackened and smoldering earth. The air, once resonating with the screams of battle and the bellows of primal forces, was now thick and still with the smells of wet ash, ozone, and the metal tang of blood.The only sounds were the crackle of extinguished flames, the drop-drop of melting ice, and the sad moans of the wounded.Felix stood in the wreckage, the golden glow of his dawn-sword's light dying and going out, the burning letters on his skin fading and becoming spent silver. The power that he had tapped, the form of things that he had re-tapped to summon a dawn against an artificial winter, had consumed him to the bone. His body shook with a profound fatigue that had nothing to do with muscle or bone; it was a fatigue of the spirit. His eyes scanned the horrific spectacle before