The woman beside her burns with light, like the setting sun through flawless ice. The pale-skinned red-head gestures, and the transparent knife she throws splits, sparkling in the light as the shatterglass spread slices through the archons before her. The deva scream as the light of holy judgement burns through them, and their souls are devoured in the conflagration, dead and gone forever. A single glance back shows the squadron behind her, serried ranks of jade armour and weaponry within the fury of the elements that whips around them, and perfectly disciplined, they march through the ranks of their foe, burning and poisoning and cutting and destroying, utterly.
She burns too, terrible sun-bright radiance leaching all colour from the world. She raises her blade, and, one roared work cutting through the noise of battle, orders the charge.
These deva were only the beginning. Gold-Shattered Arrow had already cut through their patrons, and their ultimate foe was weak, depleted from the effort to respawning all the third-circle archons that he had led the children of Mela against. He was weak, vulnerable, and they had bought so many forces, that covered from horizon to horizon. Dragonblooded and Dragon-kings and the People of Adamant and seven score Chosen of both the Sun and Moon marched together, anima banners illuminating the world with an intensity which matched the Daystar.
The Primordial fills the other horizon.
She still charges.
"Who are you!" she screams, leaping up, running along the mountain-jouten, a constant refrain. Her blade is gone, sacrificed in the ploy, but it worked! The others are left behind, holding off the force of the Archon Samaneth, who draws upon her Progenitor and is mighty because of it, but she has broken through to the jouten! It pelted her with rock and pain and the authority born of its nature, but it could not strike her. She screams at it, attacks its identity, and it cannot fight her, for while it is uncertain, it is weak.
And one fist-blow breaks through the last barricade upon the Mountain, to reach the Beast Upon the Mountain, and it is her foe and she is ready.
It is not an eternal testament to its own existence. It relies on others
Her hands fasten around the neck of the titanic being, and she fastens on, squeezing tight and tighter, with force that can split rocks and shatter mountains and she feels the jouten buck and fight under her, but it cannot break free, and it is weak, so weak, and the uncertainty that she forces upon it is imperfect, uncentred.
"Who are you! Tell me who you are!" she roars, as it tries to break free, but cannot, and as its lifeblood of motonic essence flows away, it panics. "What are you without servants, without your thralls! Creation does not remember your name! Who are you! Where are you! What are you! Tell me!"
And then.
A simple snap.
And blazing like the dawn, she kills it utterly, the rush as it rushes into her, and something screams in her skull about how wrong this is, now that this impossible deed has been done and its in her mind and in her soul and it hurts, an agonised moment of infinity reaching out forever, and...
... and then it is nothing more than a corpse.
"Who are you? You're nothing," she says to the corpse of Mardukth.
