I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 493: Sun of Heaven

The man who stepped through the gate wore simple white, no crown, nothing marking rank at all. Vane’s passive read threw a single line across his vision the instant the man crossed the threshold, the same line it had thrown once before, months ago, from a hidden distance.

Danger: Error.

Near the side entrance, the Grandmaster’s knees hit stone before he’d finished saying the name. "Alexander Aurelia." His voice broke in the middle of it. The two instructors beside him dropped a half second later, foreheads nearly touching the floor.

The Emperor didn’t look at them. His eyes found Nyx and stayed there, unhurried, the way a man looks over a piece he’s already decided how to move.

"So this is what a Calamity actually looks like." He tilted his head slightly. "The reports never quite capture it."

Ashe was already moving, blade low, crimson climbing her forearms in a wave. She closed half the distance before his hand came up, almost lazy, two fingers barely lifting off his side.

She was airborne before Vane’s eyes finished tracking the motion. Her spine hit the far wall hard enough to crack the stone behind it, and she folded down it in stages, one shoulder, one hip, then all the way to the floor, and stayed there. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out of it but air.

Valerica’s hands were already shaping something when Ashe hit the wall, gravity bending visibly around the Emperor’s boots, the floor beneath him darkening with the pressure of it. He didn’t sink. He didn’t even glance down. A breath later Valerica was on her back six feet from where she’d been standing, one hand still curled in the shape of a spell that had nowhere left to land.

Isole’s light came up fastest of all, gold and grey-dark woven into a wall between the Emperor and the rest of them. He walked through it the way a man walks through fog. It didn’t part around him. It simply wasn’t there anymore, and Isole went down to both knees a half second later, both hands pressed flat against the stone, gasping through a throat that wouldn’t take in enough air.

Nobody was screaming. That was the part Vane’s mind kept snagging on, uselessly, as he watched three people he loved get put down in the space of ten seconds. Nobody had time to scream. There wasn’t a version of this fast enough to make room for it.

Isaac arrived at the far doors just in time to see the last of it, frost already climbing both his arms, and got exactly one step into the hall before some instinct older than his training told him to stop. He stood frozen at the threshold, hands raised, not moving, watching a man who hadn’t drawn a weapon leave three of the strongest people he knew unable to stand.

He called Usurper’s Wing anyway, silver and crimson and violet erupting from his shoulders, and drove the spear forward with every last thing Spear Resonance had given him an hour ago.

The Emperor caught the tip between two fingers.

Vane felt his own momentum arrive at that point and simply end, the way a wave ends against a cliff, no give in it anywhere. His arm screamed. His shoulder screamed louder. He was still trying to push forward, uselessly, when the Emperor spoke again, mild, almost kind.

"Four Authorities. None of them yours by origin. One real synthesis at the center." He studied the spear the way he’d studied Nyx, curious rather than concerned. "You’ve come a long way in a short time, little Usurper." He let go. Vane’s own weight, no longer opposed by anything, threw him off balance and half a step forward. "I look forward to the day this reaches me properly. Today isn’t that day."

The palm that met Vane’s chest carried no visible mana at all. It felt like being hit by a wall that had decided to move. He was in the air before he registered leaving the ground, and the two support pillars he clipped on the way down took the worst of the impact meant for his ribs, and then the floor took the rest of him.

He lay there. His lungs wouldn’t fill. His fingers, when he told them to close, twitched and stopped. Somewhere to his left he heard Ashe breathing in short, wet gasps that hadn’t found their rhythm back yet. Somewhere behind him Valerica said something that might have been his name, thin, half-formed, and didn’t finish it.

Isole crawled the last few feet toward Ashe on her hands and knees, both halves of Samsara guttering weakly at her fingertips, and pressed them uselessly against ribs that needed more than she had left to give right now. Ashe grabbed her wrist instead, hard, not asking for healing, just needing to hold onto something that could still move.

He got one hand flat against the stone. He pushed. His arm shook once, violently, and gave out completely, and he stayed where he’d fallen, cheek against cold marble, watching the Emperor’s boots turn unhurried back toward Nyx.

"Now," the Emperor said. "Let’s discuss what’s to be done with you."

Nyx looked at Ashe, still folded against the wall. She looked at Valerica, one hand still shaking against the floor. She looked at Vane, pinned twenty feet away with his fingers scraping uselessly at stone that wouldn’t hold his weight.

She stepped forward on her own.

"I’ll come with you." Her voice didn’t shake. "Willingly. There’s nothing left in this hall that’s going to stop you. I’d rather they still be breathing when you take me than watch you prove that twice."

"Nyx." It came out of Vane as barely more than breath, his hand dragging an inch across the floor toward her and getting no further. "No."

She looked down at him, and her face came apart, slow, silent, tears cutting clean tracks through the blood already dried there. She was still smiling when she did it.

"Thank you," she said, only to him, quiet enough that the Emperor might not have even heard it. "For coming to find me. For not giving up on the words, even today." Her voice cracked clean through the middle of the sentence. "I meant it. Every word in that hall. Whatever happens now, that part was real."

She turned and walked toward the Emperor, chin level, tears still falling, and he watched her come the way he’d watched everything else today, unbothered, already lifting one hand.

His fingers were an inch from her wrist when another hand closed around his instead.

The Emperor’s head turned, slow, and something crossed his face that hadn’t been there for any of the last two minutes.

Vane, cheek still pressed to marble, followed the Emperor’s gaze through blurred, swimming vision, and saw who was standing there.

Varian.