19
THE HUNT
Across Eretz, a pulse of magic surged. There was no Wind to presage it this time, no sound or stir, so nearly everyone who felt it—and everyone felt it—believed it theirs alone, their own despair. It was a wave of raw emotion so potent that, for an instant, it carved out every other feeling and took its place, in its brief passage colonizing every thinking creature—every feeling creature—with the absolute conviction of the end.
Its passage was swift and bleak; it raced across land and sky and sea, and no creature was immune to it, and no material nor mineral barrier to it.
Far faster than wings could have carried it there, it swept through Astrae, the capital of the Empire of Seraphim, and just as fast was gone again. In its silent aftermath, no citizen connected it with the shattering of their great Tower of Conquest.
But at the site of the Tower’s husk, inside the vast and twisted metal skeleton that was all that remained of it, there stood five angels who did. Seraphim they were, but not citizens of the Empire. They’d come from afar, hunting—hunting hunting hunting—and now, in unison, like compass needles spun by the same magnet, they turned south and east. This overwhelming despair was trespass and violation; they knew it was not their own, and each paused just long enough to sound the depths of its appalling power before thrusting it away. Another taste from the unknown magus who plucked at the strings of the world.
“Beast’s Bane,” they’d heard him called in the harsh rumor-whispers of this craven city. Murderer and traitor, chimaera-killer, bastard and father-slayer. He had done this.
Now, with eyes the color of fire, the five Stelians fixed on the distant Adelphas Mountains.
And Scarab, their queen, spread her wings and said, with perfect wrath, through sharpened teeth, “On with the hunt.”