A spawn lunged at Kaelen from the left. He was the last in line, but the lightning took it, and the lightning did not make a sound because the lightning had stopped making individual sounds and was now one sound.
Waves of spawns climbed over the ash of the spawns the lightning taken, and the lightning took them too, and the air inside the corridor was so charged that Elias almost felt as if they were swimming in a soup made of energy.
Sera, behind him, screamed something. He could not hear what. He turned his helm a fraction. A spawn had come down from above, dropping from the ceiling of the temple where the lightning had not yet reached, and Elara was already there.
The light around her bent the spawn's path by an inch and a half, and the spawn's outstretched claw missed Sera's neck and tore a strip from her pauldron instead, and then a spider-leg, the first of the six Elias had been re-summoning since his boots hit the glass, swept down out of the air, and the spawn became ash.
The Lumina Construct was back. He had reached the floor; he could anchor again. Vein Completion of the Void Scripture, the Art of Stone, and Crimson Vein Dominion ticked at the edge of his vision, but he did not look at the number.
Reaching the peak of Fury Forge was enough for others, but for him, he had to have a perfect foundation, which meant all of his forging must reach one hundred percent. Only with this foundation could he have had the determination that he was crossing to the Mist Phantom stage with the highest possibility of his future survival.
The corridor created by the lightning was four hundred feet long, and at any moment from now, it could end if Tarian could no longer hold back the storm, and they would all die.
He could run away even now, but that meant he had failed the trial, and he was not sure if his master would waste her time any longer trying to forge him into a being that could resist the ending of all things.
The blood that left Tarian was being funneled into the cloud, and it drank it before pouring lightning down to the ground. Every drop of blood that entered the cloud bought them another second of corridor. Elias did not know how much blood a man had, but he knew the stream had not slowed yet. For how long would this last?
A column of lightning, larger than the others, struck the floor of the temple thirty feet ahead of him. The glass it left behind was not the glass of the smaller strikes. It was deeper, blacker, fused all the way down to whatever stone the temple had been built on a thousand thousand years ago. Through the new hole, Elias could see further than he should have been able to see. He saw, for an instant, a depth below the temple that was not a chamber but a darkness, and inside the darkness, something turned.
Then the hole sealed itself, the spawns above it pouring inward to fill the gap, and the next strike took them, and the corridor continued. By some miracle, they had already crossed halfway through the horde.
The mountain of flesh growled in anger, its eyes, all thousand of them, had narrowed to slits, and Elias knew, with the certainty of a hunter who recognized another hunter, that it was hurting. Tarian's storm was not just clearing a path. It was wounding the thing.
A new sound entered the storm, and Elias almost stumbled when he recognized it. It was a tearing sound, like a great rope of muscle finally giving way. He glanced up, against his better judgment.
Tarian was now a bright shape in the dark above the rim, blue at the center, white at the edges. His arms were still spread, his head tilted back, and the wounds on his body had expanded, and now a river of blood was pouring from his body.
The cloud above was answering with strikes that came so fast the corridor was no longer a corridor of light but a single solid wall of light that reached from cloud to floor and only ceased existing for the sliver of a second when each strike paused before becoming the next.
"COVER," Sera shouted, and Elias understood her without hearing her, and he raised his shield, and the others ducked behind him, and the last strike, the one Tarian seem to have been holding for them, came down behind them in the corridor itself, a single pillar a hundred feet across that turned the entire path they had just run into a sheet of glass and a wave of pressure that lifted Elias's boots off the ground and sent him through the gap between the eastern columns and into the temple proper, his five behind him, the eastern columns closing in their wake as the spawns surged over the cooling glass to fill the corridor that no longer existed because the man holding it had nothing left to hold it with.
The storm above the rim continued for another half-second, and then it began to fade.
Tarian was still aloft. His arms were still spread. The blood was still leaving him. But the cloud was thinning, the strikes were slowing, and the bright shape that had been a man was dimming, and the dimming was the dimming of a candle that had been told it could burn as bright as the sun and had agreed and was paying the price.
Elias landed inside the temple, between two columns that bore the carving of winged figures with their hands raised to the ceiling, and he turned, and he saw what was left of the prince of Stormfall.
The blood was no longer rising. It was beginning to fall.
It fell in a slow, heavy rain, and it fell onto the cooling glass of the corridor that no longer existed, and the spawns standing in the rain did not dare to drink it.
Tarian's body was still in the air. His arms were beginning to lower. His head was beginning to tilt forward. The color of lightning was draining from his eyes, and what was left underneath it was not pale gold; it was a dim, exhausted grey that Elias did not think would come back to gold for a long time, if it came back at all.
The storm was ending, and the mountain of flesh, in the center of the temple, had opened all of its eyes again.
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