seconds before it spun out of view. One of the green lights was a shining emerald tree locked into a transparent glass globe. From the shape of an orange spot, Calder suspected that it was a blazing flame carried on the back of a beetle that swam through the infinite black.
It was madness and darkness. The home of the Elders.
And now Urg’naut was free.
But there was one more thing in the void, and Calder’s eyes were drawn magnetically toward it.
A disc of pure, bright azure blue shone down like the sun. It wasn’t a remaining piece of sky; it was too vivid for that, too many different shades of blue layered on one another.
A man stood between that disc and the planet below. He was so far away that Calder shouldn’t have been able to make him out, but somehow he had no trouble. As though distance had less meaning than it once did.
His white hair hung behind him, his armor glistened black, and he carried a dark scythe the size of his body in a one-handed grip. With a cold expression, he looked down on the newcomer that rose from Calder’s world.
Dressed in silvered steel, the faceless man drifted into the void. Now that he was free, Urg’naut’s shadow stretched far beyond his host body. It blocked out the colored lights behind him, so Calder could make out the shadow’s shape only in silhouette, but it resembled a seething nest of twisting serpents.
Urg’naut and Ozriel regarded one another for a moment across the abyss.
Then the entire sky flashed.
Calder screamed and looked away, blinded for an instant. He saw it as a burst of white light, but he was certain that was only because his eyes couldn’t comprehend the battle between two celestial beings.
He blinked his vision clear, hurrying back down to The Testament. Every few seconds, light flashed from overhead like a thousand lightning bolts at once. Instead of thunder, he heard crackling, like a forest of trees burning. The air buzzed and trembled with each blow.
The ground shuddered and pitched like the sea in storm as the world ended around him.
He filled himself with a goal: he had to get to his ship.
He could see only one hope. They needed to get the two remaining Regents together with as many Guild Heads as they could call. Together, they needed to keep the remaining Great Elders sealed.
He knew where to find Loreli, but she was at least a day away on the Aion Sea.
Fortunately, he had the fastest ship in the world.
Just as he thought so, he reached the end of the path heading down to the harbor and saw The Testament running away.
Beneath the void-blackened sky, the Lyathatan waded through the ocean. It dragged the ship behind as though an afterthought, leaving the vessel to rock chaotically in the water like a toy.
The Elder had decided its contract was up.
Calder’s heart fell lower than he thought possible. How could things get worse after the world crumbled to pieces?
‘When all is lost, that is the worst time to give up. After all, you have nothing left to lose.’
Loreli, the original strategist.
He slid his helmet back onto his head. He adjusted the saber in his sheath and patted Shuffles lightly. The Bellowing Horror preened and chuckled as though it were having the time of its life.
Calder sprinted for the edge of the cliff.
The Lyathatan had just cleared the harbor, so it wasn’t out of reach of the island yet. Calder pushed his new body to its limits and found the world blurring past. As the Great Elder and the divine executioner clashed overhead, Calder ran.
When he reached the crumbled section of wall still gripped by the cliff, he leaped onto the blocks of masonry without slowing down. The wall tilted over the ocean, and he ran out to the very edge.
Whatever the merits of the Emperor’s armor, it wasn’t meant for swimming. If he landed in the water, he would die to mundane drowning before the Elders or Gardeners could get to him.
In the split second before he kicked off from the edge of the cliff, Calder looked beneath him and saw that he was directly over the stretch of ocean between the Lyathatan and the ship.
He adjusted his angle the last moment, kicking off. His sword blazed orange in the unsteady light.
“FIRE!” he shouted in midair.
“FIRE,” Shuffles repeated. The Horror matched his speed, flapping its stubby wings as they fell together.
Foster stood behind a cannon, shooting-glasses perched on his