Chapter 228: The Demon Tower I
At this time, Zhuque burned!
The obsidian-gold solar flames wrapped around the pig-faced Ancestral Celestial from every angle, tendrils of THE Primordial Source threading through the fire and finding every layer of Primum authority left in his existence and pressing on it.
He wasn’t screaming anymore. He had moved past screaming into something quieter and more continuous, the sound of a being running out of the things it had assumed would last forever!
Damian watched this from a short distance and kept his attention divided between it and the Demon Emperor held behind him.
The Demon Emperor looked terrible. Not in the visual sense, though the four horns and the pallor of genuine fear were not doing his handsome face any favors.
He looked terrible in the sense of a being that had walked into a situation it had extensively prepared for and found that none of the preparation was relevant. He was shaking!
It was not the performative trembling of something buying time with displayed weakness, but the actual physical shaking of something whose body had decided to register what its mind was processing.
Damian looked at him.
"The next few seconds will decide your life and your death," he said. "From what you’ve seen, not even Ancestral Celestials can protect you. So." He let that sit for exactly one breath. "Some summers ago, you deposed Zuku Vakochev from his throne, killed him, and then took his wife. Where is she? Where is the Empress?"
...!
The Demon Emperor’s shaking got worse.
He coughed. He actually coughed, which was either genuine or the most committed piece of theater Damian had ever seen, and then he made the face of something trying to compose itself, trying to find the version of this conversation where he came out on the better end, the diplomatic angle, the framing that made the next sentence land better than it was going to land.
"You see," he started, "her existence and soul were extremely unique. I didn’t know she belonged to you-"
"Shut up."
The Demon Emperor shut up.
Damian’s obsidian eyes were cold. "I better not hear some nonsense about her existence being unique and so you gave her to Ancestral Celestials and now I have to go find her in the hands of an Ancestral Celestial. I really hope that’s not the nonsense you’re about to tell me."
BOOM!
Dark clouds gathered above the tumultuous River of the World, rolling in from every direction without wind to carry them. The black water below churned harder. The obsidian flames around Zhuque burned brighter in response to the shift in atmosphere, and his continuous sound got louder for a moment before dropping back down.
The Demon Emperor trembled further.
"Actually," he said, and the word came out careful, "after feeling your power at the Dominion of Crimson Stone, I called out to the Ancestral Celestials. The only thing that would draw them quickly was something valuable. The Empress, Rayhana, was just that thing." He swallowed.
"The Ancestral Celestials who would have taken her are, uh." He glanced at Zhuque in the flames. "Well. You’ve killed one and you’re currently doing whatever that is to the other."
He swallowed again.
"The Empress is back in the Demon Tower."
BOOM!
From inside the flames, Zhuque stopped making sounds.
Damian had pressed the downward arrow on what remained of the Primum Ancestor’s internal land with the same focus he had applied to everything else, and the Ancestral Land cracked fully this time, the foundation he had seen as feeble when he first looked through the lens of THE Primordial Source giving way completely under pressure it had never been built to resist.
The crack ran through everything and the everything came apart, and Zhuque went quiet.
A Primum Ancestor was dead!
The Demon Emperor was looking at Damian with the eyes of a man watching someone else receive a fate and calculating furiously how to avoid sharing it.
"I never treated her badly!" The words came out fast. Too fast. The composure was gone and what was underneath it was just fear, straightforward and undisguised.
"I never tortured her! She did what she was asked. She designed Panaceas for us, research, other things, but I never hurt her. I want you to know that. I really, genuinely never-"
"The Demon Tower."
"Yes." The Demon Emperor nodded, the nod of a man relieved to be cut off because it meant the conversation was still going. "Yes. I actually have a Demon Waystone on me that can take us directly to the teleportation rune the Empress helped set up. We can arrive in the Demon Tower right now. Immediately. It would take seconds!"
...!
He reached into his robes and produced a crimson coin, small and flat and carved with a design that shone with a unique internal light, the particular light of a Mana construct that had been made by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. It sat in his palm and pulsed steadily.
Serala moved slightly behind Damian’s shoulder. He could feel her looking at the coin, at the Demon Emperor, at the burning space where Zhuque had been.
Damian looked at all of it. The coin. The Demon Emperor’s barely managed terror. The River rushing below them. The dark clouds above.
His mother was in a tower on the other side of this.
"Let’s go," he said.
The Demon Emperor nodded, quickly, and closed his hand around the coin and began to chant. It took a few seconds. The crimson light built around them in a ring that expanded outward until it encompassed all three of them, Damian and Serala and the terrified Demon Emperor who kept chanting and kept his eyes on the light rather than on Damian because looking at Damian was apparently not something he wanted to do right now.
Damian watched everything. He watched the light build. He watched the Demon Emperor’s hands. He watched the River below and the dark sky above and the remnants of what had been two Ancestral Celestials drifting on the black current.
The light peaked.
An instant later, they were gone.
