Ascension Of the Divine Sovereign

CHAPTER TWO: THE SECOND WAVE

The memories came without permission.

They always did when the fear got bad enough, crashing through the walls Chase had carefully built around them, flooding everything until the present moment dissolved and he was small again. Five years old. Crouched beneath the crumpled shell of an overturned car, knees drawn to his chest, hands pressed over his ears as the sky above the Galactic coastline filled with wings.

Not the Myrathon's wings. Smaller ones. Dozens of them.

The Vorath had attacked first, after the war, a flock of giant carnivorous birds with large wings and yellow eyes. People had scattered screaming through the streets, and his mother, Valencia Baltimore, had done the only thing she could think of.

She had looked at her five-year-old son, and even through the terror, she had smiled, that specific smile mothers reserve for moments when they need their child to believe everything will be alright. Then she shoved him hard beneath the wreckage and turned to face what was coming.

She was snatched away; he was just a little boy but how much he had wished he had enough divinity to save her.

"Don't wanna die. Not here. Not like this."

He prayed, that was the only thing he was good at. His body was shaking, uncontrollable trembling that lived beneath muscle and bone. Around him the crowd surged and crushed and screamed, and somewhere behind all of it the Myrathon bellowed again, and the ground answered.

Chase ran.

His legs felt disconnected, too light, operating on something beneath conscious instruction. The coastal street ahead was pure chaos, a fruit vendor's stall reduced to splinters, a motorbike on its side with its wheel still spinning, a woman dragging two small children by their wrists while a third stumbled behind her, wailing.

Then the sky darkened. They were back again, Vorath, hundreds of them. They moved low and fast, skimming over the heads of the crowd, and where they found someone isolated or fallen, they descended without hesitation.

The screaming changed pitch entirely.

"Mama — MAMA!" A boy no older than six stood frozen in the middle of the road, arm outstretched toward a woman being dragged backward by a Vorath that had locked its talons into her shoulders. "Mama, get up, please get up —"

"Somebody help her — HELP HER!" a man roared from somewhere in the crush, but nobody stopped, because stopping meant dying, and survival had already overridden everything else in everyone around Chase.

He grabbed the boy by the collar without breaking stride and pulled him into a recessed doorway, pressing them both flat. A Vorath skimmed past so close he felt the displaced air across his face.

The Myrathon discharged a bolt of lightening. The bolt swept the mid-section of the seafront at chest height, a horizontal column of white lightning that erased the row of seafront restaurants in a single blinding instant.

The shockwave arrived half a second later. Chase was tossed away the pressure physically lifting him off his feet and throwing him down the street. He hit the ground rolling, cracked his shoulder against a low wall, and lay still for a moment, staring at a sky that wouldn't stop spinning.

Get up.

Somewhere above him, a building was groaning.

Get up right now.

He rolled just in time as the outer wall of the apartment block above came down in a cascade of stone and glass, burying the spot where he'd been lying under chunks the size of tables. Dust consumed the street in a grey avalanche. He crawled blind, hands finding the kerb by touch, and dragged himself through it into open air.

Verath was unrecognisable.

The promenade, the one with painted lamp posts and weekend markets and children on bicycles, was a battlefield of collapsed facades, overturned vehicles burning orange, deep furrows carved through the street grid where the Myrathon had dragged itself further inland. The heat was extraordinary. Somewhere to his left, a gas main had ruptured and the fire climbing the side of a building reached the fourth storey and kept going. A man stumbled past Chase with his shirt on fire but it wasn’t just him.

"Daddy — Daddy, where are you!" A small girl, no older than eight, sat in the middle of the road surrounded by rubble, bleeding from her forehead, turning in slow circles yelling for her father.

Chase moved toward her automatically. A hand grabbed his arm.

"Keep moving, boy — MOVE!"

A coastal knight in cracked silver armour dragged him sideways just as a Vorath dove at the space where Chase's head had been a half-second earlier. The knight discharged a pulse of amber energy that caught the creature across its flank, sending it spinning into the rubble.

Ahead, through the smoke, Chase found them a cluster of coastal knights in a tight formation around perhaps fifty civilians, shields raised, energy weapons cycling in short controlled bursts as Voraths dove and wheeled and picked at the edges of their perimeter. They were holding just barely.

"Close the formation — close it NOW!" The voice punched through the chaos. A broad man in coastal commander's armour, pauldrons cracked, one eye swollen nearly shut, blood tracking down the side of his jaw, moved through his knights with absolute purpose, directing, striking, redirecting. General Saltos of the Coastal Line. Chase knew him from papers on his father's desk.

"Don't engage the Myrathon!" Saltos drove his blade through a diving Vorath without breaking stride, blasting a second from the air with his free hand. "It is above your grade, every one of you! Imperial knights are inbound — our job is to keep these people breathing until they arrive! Nothing else! Nothing else!"

A knight to his left went down under three Voraths simultaneously. The gap opened.

Through it, one broke free, low, fast, locked on Chase with the empty purposeful focus of a creature that had identified its meal. Chase stumbled backward, legs finally surrendering, going down on one knee in the open street. Pain seized his entire body at once, ribs, shoulder, the side of his skull where the wall had clipped him.

Don't wanna die. Not here. Not like this.

The Vorath folded its wings and dove. Just then, Ice spears descended punching down from above in a precise volley, white and blazing, each one finding a Vorath mid-flight with accuracy. Bodies dropped around Chase. The creature aimed at him took three spears through its wingspan and crumpled six feet to his left, twitching once and going still.

Then the temperature dropped. Frost crept across the broken cobblestones in delicate geometric patterns spreading outward from a single point above him. The Voraths still wheeling overhead peeled away, suddenly and urgently. All could sense the danger that arrived.

Chase looked up. Through the smoke and the dark starry night, the flames burning around him, the white wings were visible, the cold energy surrounded him as every single step of his was on a ice step wall that materialized beneath his boots.

It was the Throne’s Saint Knight.