I looked down at the kneeling calligrapher and found that his reaction didn't surprise me at all.
A Rank 6 Lightweaver would have spent decades, if not centuries, in the Academy's libraries, and buried in those libraries, beneath all the doctrine and the carefully curated histories, were the older records that spoke of a time before the Sundering, a time when there had been one sun instead of two.
Every practitioner in this world learned that history in some form, and then every practitioner was taught to treat it as a fairy tale, a myth from an age so distant it might as well never have happened, because the academies had built their entire identities around the worship of their own fragment and a fairy tale about wholeness was inconvenient for institutions built on division.
Corwin had clearly read those records, and now the fairy tale was towering over him, wearing a village boy’s face and glowing with the light that his own sun had been carved out of.
As for why he had surrendered so easily, I couldn't tell whether the energy hierarchy had unraveled his floating characters on its own, the Golden Sun's presence dissolving blue sun constructs the same as a superior authority dismissing subordinates, or whether Corwin himself had released them the moment the avatar rose over the Sacred Ring.
Both explanations fit what I had seen. The Golden Sun sat above the blue in every hierarchy I understood, and at the same time Corwin had never been as blind as the others, which was why I had kept trying to reason with him throughout this entire fight when I hadn't wasted a single word on Bram after the first exchange.
In the end, the distinction didn't matter to me. What mattered was that the fight was over, that I hadn't been forced to kill a man who had apologised to me before attacking, and that I could finally do what I had crossed a world to do.
I needed to reach the Eldest Tree before something else went wrong, because if there was one lesson that multiple loops in this world had carved into me, it was that something unexpected always went wrong, and it usually chose the exact moment you allowed yourself to relax.
Beric was already dead, but I doubt that would be the end of it.
As for Elder Thorn, he was still holding his own against the two remaining Rank 7 elders, but holding your own against two opponents of your own rank was an equation that only ever resolved in one direction given enough time, and I could hear that equation being worked out above the treeline in concussive bursts.
"The old heretic fights well for a corpse," Dayen called out across the sky, his finger already dragging another burning construct into existence. "How long do you think he has left, Sorrin?"
"Long enough to watch his Saint exposed for the monster he is," Sorrin answered, and his glowing eyes flicked down toward my avatar for only an instant before returning to Thorn. "Did you see it? The golden light? The abomination down there is the reason the Blue Sun woke us. Kill this relic quickly, I want my hands on that thing before it reaches the tree."
I had half expected the avatar's appearance to shake them the same as it had shaken Corwin, and instead it had done the opposite, it had sharpened them, filled them with a hungry urgency, because whatever the Blue Sun had poured into their skulls during that communion clearly recognised what I was and clearly wanted me stopped before I could finish what I had started.
"You will touch nothing," Elder Thorn said, and then the sky became violence.
Thorn’s hand blurred through eleven strokes in the space of a breath, characters for "pierce" stacking into a lance of compressed blue light that screamed across the gap between them.
Sorrin twisted his body sideways so that the lance passed close enough to shear a strip of fabric from his sleeve, and in the same rotation his own finger painted a flock of razor-edged birds that scattered outward and then converged on Thorn from five directions at once.
Elder Thorn wrote "wall" and the birds detonated against a hexagonal barrier in flashes that lit the undersides of the clouds, and while his attention was divided Dayen came in from below with a painted spear of orange light aimed at his spine.
Thorn didn't turn, instead, his left hand flashed gold for a fraction of a second, a partial gauntlet of Golden Sun energy wrapping his forearm, and he swatted the spear aside with a backhand that shattered the construct into dissolving fragments and sent a shockwave rippling outward that flattened the canopy of the forest below in a widening circle.
The gold winked out immediately, his hand returning to ordinary flesh, and he was already writing again with blue light before Dayen had recovered from the deflection.
I understood exactly what he was doing, and I had to admit it was smart. His converted Golden Sun reserves were tiny, three days of crude refinement for a single combat application, so he was fighting the entire battle on blue sun energy and spending the gold only in split-second bursts.
A deflection here, a burst of impossible speed there, just enough to even a fight that should have been unwinnable, because if he tried to sustain it he would burn out his reserves in under a minute and the two of them would tear him apart at their leisure.
The exchanges between the Rank 7 occurred so quickly that not even a second had passed.
"I've been blind all along."
Corwin's murmur pulled me out of the sky and back down to the churned grass of the Sacred Ring and the Rank 6 Lightweaver kneeling before me.
"All those years of study, all those texts they told us were allegory, and the whole time the elders knew, they must have known, the sealed archives, the forbidden sections, they knew and they let us worship a fragment while calling the whole a myth..."
He kept murmuring, working through his revelation out loud, and I didn't answer him, because as much as some part of me wanted to sit that man down and give him the full history he was groping toward, I didn't have the time to waste on a theological crisis while the fate of this world was measured in seconds.
So I did what I had to do, with a quick activation of Blink Step, the world lurched, and I appeared directly before the Eldest Tree with its ancient bark filling my entire field of vision, I kept the avatar with me.
It had shifted through the Blink Step along with my body, and it now stood beside the Eldest Tree in silent golden enormity, its head level with the lower branches, its light washing across the bark and making the root-lines glow faintly amber, a thirty-foot figure of condensed sunlight standing guard over a tree that had been waiting since before the Sundering for this color to return.
Dismissing it now would have been a rookie mistake of the highest order, the exact mistake that got protagonists ambushed in every cultivation novel I had ever read, because the moment my palm touched that bark I would be locked into the connection and utterly defenseless, and the avatar was the only shield I had that could maybe for a second stop a Rank 7 who slipped past Elder Thorn.
I raised my hand toward the bark, and that was when I heard the tearing sound.
It came from everywhere at once, a long, dragging rip that I felt in my teeth and in the roots beneath my feet, I pushed my palm the final few inches toward the tree and discovered that my arm would not move.
Actually, nothing would move. My hand hung frozen a hand-span from the bark, my feet were fixed to the grass, my lungs were still drawing breath but every muscle in Tomas's body had been locked in place by a pressure that had arrived without warning and without any energy signature I could name.
Dammit. I was so close. My fingers were close enough to the bark that I could feel the warmth radiating off it, close enough that the Genesis Seed was already stirring in anticipation, and I couldn’t cross the final distance.
The only things still under my command were my eyes, so I looked up.
There was a tear in the sky.
It hung directly above the Vermilion Vale, a ragged vertical wound in the fabric of the world itself, and through the widening gap there was no sky and no stars and no color that belonged in this world, only a depth that my mind refused to assign a shape to.
A blood-red eye looked down at us.
It was vast beyond any scale I had a reference for, a single vertical iris the color of arterial blood, and its gaze pressed down on the Vale with a pressure that made the power of a Rank 7's aura feel affectionate by comparison.
The sounds of battle had stopped completely.
I strained my eyes upward and to the side and found the entire sky arrested in place, Sorrin frozen mid-stroke with a half-finished painting dissolving in front of his motionless fingers, Dayen locked in a defensive crouch with blood suspended in droplets around his lips, Elder Thorn caught mid-lunge with golden light still wrapped around his outstretched fist, all three of them hanging in the air with the helpless stillness of insects in amber.
Below, at the edge of the Sacred Ring, Lady Laelyn knelt frozen at the rim of Beric's crater with her hand still pressed to the scorched earth, and Corwin remained on his knees where I had left him, his upturned face fixed in place, his lips parted around a word he wouldn’t be finishing.
The eye swept across all of them, its attention sliding over Rank 7 elders and a Saintess and the ruin of the battlefield as though none of it registered as worth acknowledging, and then it settled on me.
What it said filled me with existential dread that every plan I had built for this loop turned to ash between one heartbeat and the next.
"World walker,” the voice arrived inside my skull without passing through the air, “we meet at last."