Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

Kori flew.

Not the way Osamu had thrown other things over the years. Kori had asked for a proper throw, and Osamu had given her one - full force, full extension, the release timed at the perfect apex of his rotation. Her body cut through the night air at a speed that would have killed an ordinary person on contact with anything solid. The wind tore past her face. The buildings flashed by below, their lights a horizontal smear, the eastern district unspooling in a single long line as she crossed it.

The amplification phenomenon was still active. Her body, threaded through with more Eon than she had access to on a normal night, took the speed without complaint. Her grip on her knives was steady. Her balance, even in the middle of an aerial trajectory, was something she didn't have to think about. She was a Phalanx. The air was a medium she had learned to operate in years before Arashi was even born.

She laughed.

She laughed because her whole body was shaking with the velocity and the wind and the absurd, brilliant joy of having Osamu's grip on her ankle again - the ridiculous trust of being held by hands that could crush stone and being launched by them across a city skyline. She laughed because she had forgotten this. Forgotten what it felt like to do this. The Chasmis had taken most of the joy out of her work years ago, and tonight, with the amplification and the speed and the wind, some small fraction of it had come back.

Her mind drifted. Mid-flight, suspended between rooftops, the muscle memory of being thrown by Osamu pulled up a memory she hadn't visited in a long time.

The first time.

✦ ✦ ✦

--- Velarion. Eleven years ago. ---

The Anathema known as G-2, was eighty meters tall and had not moved its lower body in two hours.

This was, by Kori's professional assessment, mostly an aesthetic problem. The thing was huge - a deformed, bloated mountain of humanoid darkness and had become this through processes that nobody understood. Its head was quite small for its size, a spiky thing perched on a neck that had almost collapsed under its own weight. Its lower body was a pillar of accumulated mass that no longer functioned as legs. The Anathema didn't walk. It hadn't walked in the past few hours. It just sat where it was and consumed, and the things it consumed became part of itself.

Greed.

The Anathemas were named for what they were. There were seven of them - at least, seven that anyone had guessed, at that time. Somewhere between that and the years where Raizen appeared in her house, they had become 12. But even that was a wild guess – there was no official data, and not even Alteea knew for sure. Each one represented a thing in humanity that the ancestors observed. Greed was the second. Kori had personally never met the first, and she preferred to keep it that way.

The Anathemas were not monsters. Monsters was the wrong word. Monsters were things you could fight, things you could outsmart, things you could starve out or chase off. The Anathemas were predators - the kind of predators that sat at the top of food chains so old that the things they ate had stopped having a name. They didn't fight. They consumed. They didn't kill. They owned. Every creature within their range - every animal, every Nyx, every human - was their prey, and the only reason they didn't always claim it was that they were almost always… Absent. Nobody knows where, nobody knows how, nobody ever knew when – only when it was already too late.

But if the Anathemas were predators… The Phalanx were, too. Just a step below them on the food chain, but the only ones that actually stoof a chance.

The Phalanx had been fighting G-2 for seven hours.

Kori was crouched on the upper edge of a collapsed apartment block, half a kilometre from the Anathema's central pillar, with both hands extended. Two ice chains the size of municipal water mains stretched from her palms to the base of the thing's lower body, where they had wrapped around the pillar in dense, layered coils. Each chain was thicker than a freight truck. Each link was longer than two people. The total Eon she was channeling into them was somewhere in the range that would have killed any other practitioner in the city within seconds.

She had been channeling for an hour and a half.

The chains were working, in the sense that the thing's lower body wasn't moving. They were not working, in the sense that they were not the reason its lower body wasn't moving - they had simply added themselves to a list of restraints that the Anathema had been politely ignoring while it focused on the things higher up.

"Plant girlie!" Kori shouted.

A voice from somewhere across the rubble field answered, "WHAT."

"Vines! Now!"

"My VINES don't go up THAT HIGH, KORI."

"FIND ONES THAT DO."

Phalanx Five, called "Plant girlie" by Kori in private and by approximately zero people in public - was holding the eastern flank with an array of accelerated vegetation that was wrapping around the Anathema's lower tendrils. Vines as thick as old-growth tree trunks. Roots driving themselves down through the quartz pavement and back up through stone. The whole eastern side of the battle zone was being absorbed into a slow-motion forest that Mireille was growing in real time. Even her output had a ceiling, and the ceiling was approximately the sixtieth metre of the Anathema's height. That, when it came to vines – her trees reached even 150 meters on a good day – but trees would be utterly useless in this situation.

Above that, the Anathema's body was untouched. And from the upper part of its back, the tendrils came.

Six of them. Each one as thick as a small building. They emerged from the Anathema's back in arrays of three, sweeping out in long, weighted arcs across the city's half, smashing into buildings with the casual force of severe geological events. Every time a tendril made contact with a structure, the structure toppled like a castle made of playing cards. The tendrils didn't grip. They didn't crush. They simply moved through, and whatever had been in their path became a big pile of rubble.