Underlord (Cradle #6)(3)

Armor and powers broken, Pariana drifted into death alone.

…but as the darkness had almost claimed her entirely, it stopped.

“Fear not,” said a woman’s warm voice. “I have come for you.”

The world reversed itself.

Pariana was pulled to her feet as though on a puppet’s strings, her vision returning, her flesh stitched up and her armor restored.

The cascade of debris fountaining into the sky froze, then drifted back down, sliding back into place.

Pariana’s Presence, a squirming mass of silver, ripped itself from the hands of the Vroshir in furs and settled back into her mind. She sobbed again, in relief at having this piece of her restored. One by one, she could feel the lives of the colonists coming back, like candles being lit once more.

The only things in the world that had not been reversed were the Vroshir themselves. They resisted, pitting their wills against the power that had rewound the entire Iteration. They all rose into the air again, facing the source of that power, and of the blue light that shone down on the scene.

Suriel, the Phoenix, Sixth Judge of the Abidan Court, floated with the power of the Way streaming off of her to either side like massive wings. Her mantle blazed behind her, like a river of light, her armor seamless and white—identical to Pariana’s. Ghostly correlation lines, like strings of gray smoke, ran from her fingertips to the back of her skull. Her hair drifted behind her, bright shining green, and her eyes blazed with purple formations that could see Fate. At her hip hung Suriel’s Razor, dormant now, like a meter-long ruler of blue steel.

Pariana sagged forward, lowering her head in both respect and relief. A Judge had come for her.

Now everything would be all right.

The woman in furs began to laugh.

Ignoring Pariana, she threw her hands to the sky. Black smoke gushed from her hands, covering the world. The man in the red visor swirled his fingers in a significant pattern, and the smoke was threaded through with red lights. Pariana’s golden formation-circles drifted beneath them, still under his control. The robotic figure pulled a mechanical device from behind him, like a computerized bear trap, activating it with a touch.

And Pariana realized she could no longer touch the Way. The lives of the people behind her had been restored, and her connection should have returned with them, but now it was as though the Way had vanished completely. The world had been cut off.

Suriel’s mantle dimmed, weakening immediately, but the scars in the earth finished knitting themselves together. Finally, the entire Iteration had been restored to pristine condition. Only then did her mantle gutter and die. Even the blue ‘wings’ streaming from behind her vanished, leaving Suriel surrounded by enemies.

Without the Way, the world’s laws would eventually crumble, which the Vroshir wouldn’t want any more than the Abidan would. They wanted to use this world, to add it to their network, not to see it dissolve into fragments with no causality or consistent physics. But that would take time. For now, they had simply rendered any Abidan in the world powerless.

This had been a trap from the beginning.

Suriel still floated in the air, but now she was relying on her own power, not her authority as a Judge. Pariana ran beneath her. “Do we have reinforcements coming, Judge?”

“Stand down, Titan,” Suriel said, and her words were calm and certain. “I am enough.”

A rifle, two sickles, three golden formation-circles, and a maw of smoke all turned toward Suriel. Each weapon carried enough power to rend continents and shatter space.

The Phoenix faced them all with nothing but her own personal power.

“Surrender, and I will grant you mercy,” Suriel said.

The black-haired woman bared her teeth in what Pariana hesitated to call a smile. “Keep your blighted tongue still, tyrant.”

With no discernible signal, all four Vroshir attacked at once.

The aquatic woman slashed her sickles together, sending a cross of violet power rushing through the air. The attack cracked space behind her, the world splintering for hundreds of kilometers in her wake. The earth quaked and shook, and Pariana could feel the world’s tenuous hold on reality begin to shake.

The woman in lion fur conjured a thousand ghostly mouths on worm-like bodies of black smoke. They dove for Suriel, and each one felt like a plague that could decimate planets. They carried ancient hatred that soaked Pariana’s soul, and only her Presence’s protection kept their energy from sending her into madness.

The armored man’s rifle cracked, and this time the sound echoed through the entire world. Air exploded away from him at the sound, and the bullet flashed forward with a thousand times the power he had used to kill Pariana the first time. That one shot alone carried enough energy to obliterate everything in this Iteration.

Finally, the red-visored man triggered the three golden formations. They fired pillars of superheated destructive energy. The columns of light blasted down.

Obliterating him instantly.

The attacks happened instantly and simultaneously, so Pariana had to piece the entire scene together afterwards. Without being empowered as an Abidan, and without the Presence’s effect on her mind, she wouldn’t have been able to follow what happened at all.

The formations fired, not at Suriel, but at the one who had taken them over. As she arrived, Suriel had taken control back, and neither Pariana—their designer—nor the red-visored Vroshir had noticed a thing.