Three days after Solaris's crowning at New Tara, peace shattered in the dark hours before dawn.

  Solaris jolted awake, already in his integrated state—black sclera with blue irises gleaming in the darkness of his room. A precognitive dream had yanked him from sleep with brutal clarity: a massive spaceship with three Anunnaki seconds from attacking Maron's mountain compound.

  His mind raced with tactical options. Three seconds. That's all he had before the Anunnaki vessel would crash into the mountain at Mach 2.

  Eli!! He projected telepathically, the message compressed into a single burst of thought containing both the imminent danger and his emerging plan. Warp outside, create a barrier large enough for everyone!!!

  No questions, no hesitation—in an instant, Eli disappeared from her quarters, reappearing in the night sky above the compound. Golden light bloomed around her hands as she began manifesting the protective sphere.

  Solaris moved with impossible speed, warping from room to room throughout the compound. Maron first as Solaris's hand closed around his shoulder, depositing him within Eli's golden barrier before warping away again. Eleanor next, then Akira, then each of the other Sovereigns in rapid succession.

  The Tokyo trio's faces transformed from confusion to alarm as he appeared in their rooms. No time for explanations—just grab, warp, return. With each transfer, he felt his energy reserves diminishing, the strain of repeated translocation accumulating rapidly.

  The last to emerge was Era—her eyes meeting his for a fraction of a second before they both vanished, her reappearing within Eli's golden sphere. The moment they materialized, a blinding flash erupted below them, a searing white-gold light that transformed the night into harsh daylight. The brilliance reflected off the snowcapped peaks, creating a corona of illumination that rippled across the mountain range.

  The flash was followed by a thunderous impact that shook the very air around them. The sound was deafening—a cacophony of tearing metal, splintering stone, and released energy. The mountain face itself seemed to scream as something massive tore through rock and earth, sending a plume of debris skyward that blotted out the stars.

  A few heartbeats later, the shockwave hit. The concussive blast rolled through the atmosphere, compressing the air into a physical force that struck Solaris, Eli, and the golden sphere with the power of a tidal wave. Even those within the protective barrier felt the pressure squeezing their lungs, rattling their bones.

  Eli and Solaris instinctively raised their forearms to shield their faces as their hair whipped backward, dancing wildly in the turbulent air, eyes wide in what could only be described as shock and horror. The golden sphere held, but oscillated dangerously as hurricane-force winds battered it from all directions. Superheated air rushed past them, carrying the acrid smell of scorched earth and something else—a strange metallic tang unlike anything found in nature.

  Below, the mountainside had transformed. What had been pristine forest was now a jagged wound carved into the earth, edged with flames that licked greedily at the surrounding trees. Snow vaporized in an expanding ring, creating a ghostly fog that swirled around the impact zone, illuminated from within by occasional flashes of electrical discharges.

  As the initial violence subsided, secondary explosions pulsed from the impact site, sending tremors through the mountain and showers of sparks into the night sky. Each detonation was punctuated by the sound of collapsing rock as the mountain itself adjusted to the violation of its ancient structure.

  Through it all, Eli maintained the golden sphere, her face set in concentration as she fought to keep them stable against the continuing onslaught of aftershocks and wind. Era clung to the sphere's interior, her expression a mixture of awe and horror as she witnessed the destruction below.

  An Anunnaki warship—nothing like Ereshkigal's cubed vessel—had plowed directly into the mountainside at supersonic speed. The craft resembled something from a military science fiction game, bristling with energy weapons and propulsion systems far beyond human technology. Its front half was buried deep in the mountain where Maron's compound had stood moments earlier, while its rear section jutted outward, wreathed in flames and belching black smoke into the night sky.

  "No..." Maron whispered, his normally stoic expression cracking with disbelief. More than a decade of preparation, planning, and construction—obliterated in less than a second.

  Before anyone could fully process the devastation, three figures rose from the wreckage, hovering in the air several meters from Eli's golden barrier. Even from a distance, their rage was palpable—ancient beings of immense power focused entirely on the gathered Sovereigns.

  "SOLARIS!" The lead figure bellowed, his voice carrying easily despite the distance. "MURDERER OF MY WIFE. SLAYER OF ERESHKIGAL!"

  The three Anunnaki floated closer, their features becoming distinct in the moonlight and the glow from the burning wreckage below. Lord Nergal led the trio—his massive frame covered in what appeared to be living obsidian armor that shifted and rippled like liquid despite its crystalline structure, eyes burning like golden flame within deep-set sockets, his face contorted with hatred beneath a crown of jagged black spikes. Beside him floated Lord Enki, leaner but no less imposing, with silver-blue skin that seemed to contain currents of liquid flowing beneath its surface, six arms extending from his torso, each holding different technological implements of disturbing complexity. Lady Inanna completed the group, her form both beautiful and terrible—an iridescent gown of impossible material flowing around her sylph-like body, and her hair a cascade of what appeared to be liquid mercury.

  "You've gone too far, little Sovereign," Nergal snarled, his voice resonating with layers of harmonic undertones that made the air itself vibrate. "My wife's atoms scattered across your atmosphere. The Phoenix Ascension system damaged beyond repair. Your pathetic rebellion ends tonight."

  "YOU DARE SPEAK OF GOING TOO FAR?" Solaris responded, his voice carrying the combined authority of his integrated consciousness, scathing anger welling up from within. "After twenty-two million years of imprisonment? After countless souls harvested for your pleasure? AFTER WHAT YOU'VE JUST DONE!?"

  Eleanor moved closer to the rest within the barrier, her voice low and urgent. "They're Council members, not just operatives. Nergal and Enki were among the original architects of the Phoenix Ascension system."

  "And Inanna specializes in psychological warfare," Eli added grimly, a thin sheen of sweat already forming on her brow from maintaining the barrier. "This isn't random retaliation. This is a coordinated extinction attempt."

  Solaris assessed their situation with growing concern. The golden barrier protecting them was impressive, but maintaining it while suspended in mid-air was clearly taxing Eli's reserves. Her face showed increasing strain with each passing moment—they couldn't remain airborne indefinitely. Perhaps this was the consequence of not having completed any System Zones, thus not raising his ORT a single tier. Even though he was a glaring exception to the rule, he was still within the system.

  "Fuck, we need solid grou—," Solaris began, but never finished the thought.

  The attack came without warning—Enki and Inanna raised identical weapons that discharged beams of searing red energy. Solaris warped instantly, narrowly avoiding the blast, while Eli managed to strengthen the barrier's front section just in time to deflect the second beam away from the other Sovereigns.

  Nergal seized the momentary distraction, launching directly at Solaris with catastrophic force. Their bodies collided mid-air, the impact sending them both plummeting toward the mountainside with insane speed. Solaris felt himself being driven deep into the rocky surface, Nergal's enormous form pinning him against unyielding stone, their faces mere inches apart.

  The Anunnaki lord's breath was hot against his face, carrying an alien scent that reminded Solaris of metal and ozone. Nergal's golden eyes burned with hatred so intense it seemed to scorch Solaris's mind.

  "I will take particular pleasure in disassembling you, atom by atom," Nergal hissed, obsidian armor flowing like liquid as it began to encase Solaris's limbs.

  Solaris focused and warped again, reappearing in the air near Eli's barrier. The scene above was deteriorating rapidly—Eli warping repeatedly to dodge energy blasts while maintaining the protective sphere around the other Sovereigns, her movements becoming visibly slower with each evasion.

  Blood trickled from her nose, her face pale with exertion. She couldn't keep this up much longer. None of them could. Even Akira, with all his martial prowess, would be helpless against beings who had manipulated reality for millions of years.

  Time slowed as Solaris reached deep within himself, past Alice's integration, past his memories of Tara, to something more fundamental. If this was truly the end, he would face it with everything he had.

  His hand extended, fingers splayed as he summoned Solarion-Omega. The legendary blade materialized in his grasp—no longer just a construct of solar energy but something that seemed woven from the fabric of reality itself. Its surface gleamed with inner light as he leveled it horizontally before him, sliding his palm from cross-guard to point. The weapon responded immediately, its hum deepening as halos of golden light formed around the blade.

  “Burn away all impurities…” He whispered.

  Nergal had returned to hover alongside his companions, watching this display with evident disdain.

  "Kill him while he postures," Enki urged, raising his weapon again, his six arms working in perfect coordination.

  "Silence," Nergal commanded. "Look at them—already fading. This will not be the end of us."

  Solaris closed his eyes, centering his awareness within his core. He felt the pulse of his own heart, each beat connecting him to the vast network of life spanning Earth and beyond. He gathered every emotion that had driven him forward—the pain of loss, the rage against injustice, the isolation of being different, and the weight of responsibility for those who depended on him and for those who didn't know they were being fought for.

  “Burn…”

  He thought of Earth's billions, unaware of the cosmic drama unfolding above them. He thought of New Tara, and the fragile but ancient hope it represented. He thought of his Oversoul family, waiting and watching from dimensions beyond. He thought of every incarnation he'd experienced across millennia of separation and forgetting.

  “Set my heart ablaze.”

  Something shifted within him—a boundary dissolving between power sources he'd never fully tapped. The blade in his hands began to vibrate, the energy within it resonating with his changing consciousness. Solarion-Omega's surface rippled like quicksilver, its structure destabilizing as it responded to him.

  The blade didn't so much disintegrate as it did flow—the metal becoming liquid light that streamed toward Solaris's body, coiling around his limbs before sinking beneath his skin. The weapon wasn't dissolving; it was becoming part of him, each molecule of its celestial construction merging with his physical form.

  In the heartbeats following, as the last of Solarion-Omega disappeared into his body, blue flames erupted from within—not emanating outward but seeming to consume him from the inside out. The temperature around him skyrocketed, air molecules becoming excited to the point of visible distortion. For hundreds of kilometers in every direction, thermometers spiked, wildlife fled in panic, and sleeping humans woke instantly to sweat-soaked bedding and cracked lips despite the winter night.

  Even within Eli's barrier, the effect was immediate and catastrophic. The temperature inside the golden sphere rose past uncomfortable into dangerous territory within seconds.

  "What's happening?" Yuki gasped, her skin already reddening from the heat.

  "It's Solaris," Eleanor managed, her aged face flushing dangerously. "He's drawing the moisture from the air!"

  Indeed, humidity levels were plummeting as water molecules were stripped from the atmosphere surrounding them. The air within the barrier became painfully dry, each breath feeling like sandpaper against parched throats.

  "We need to help Eli," Maron commanded, military training overriding his shock. "Channel everything you've got into her barrier."

  Without waiting for confirmation, he placed his hands on the barrier, mentally directing his energy into it. One by one, the other Sovereigns joined, each lending their power to strengthen the barrier even as the temperature continued to rise.

  Eli's skin began to blister as third-degree burns formed along her exposed arms and face. Blood vessels burst beneath her skin, creating a mottled appearance that spread across her body. Still, she maintained the barrier, drawing on the combined power of the other Sovereigns to reinforce it against the oppressive heat radiating from Solaris.

  "SOLARIS, STOP!" Eli screamed, her voice cracking with agony as her throat blistered from the inside out. "YOU… WE MIGHT NOT COME BACK FROM THIS!"

  Other voices joined hers—Maron's gruff command, Eleanor's authoritative warning, the Tokyo trio's unified plea. But Solaris was beyond hearing them now, surrendered to the transformation cascading through his system.

  The blue flames receded slightly, reshaping themselves around his form. Where once stood the integrated Solaris now hovered something both familiar and utterly alien—a being of pure blue flame shaped like a human but possessing the menace of Veldt. A massive mane of blue fire extended several feet above his head, while his face had disappeared entirely behind the flames, leaving only two circular red eyes and a wide, curved smile of the same color.

  Each slow breath this entity exhaled released billowing clouds of steam, as if the very essence of moisture was being consumed and expelled as vapor. The air around it rippled with heat distortion so intense that reality itself seemed to waver and bend.

  "Is that... is that still Solaris?" Mei whispered from within the barrier, voice trembling as their skin continued to redden and crack from the heat despite Eli's protection.

  "I don't know anymore…" Eleanor answered honestly, her silver hair now singed at the edges.

  "Sun God..." Era's voice carried a strange undertone—Draco emerging with unexpected enthusiasm. "YES! YES! BURN THEM ALL, SUN GOD! SHOW THEM WHO IS TRULY ORDAINED!"

  Steam escaped from the now-jagged smile as the being that had been Solaris exhaled. When it spoke, the voice that emerged was barely recognizable—a deep, guttural growl layered with subsonic harmonics that vibrated in everyone’s bones.

  "YOU."

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Nergal opened his mouth, undoubtedly to deliver another taunt—but never got the chance.

  The flaming entity moved faster than perception could track. One moment it hovered before them, the next, it appeared an inch away from Nergal, sending him crashing into the mountainside with catastrophic force, the impact creating a shockwave that knocked surrounding trees flat for kilometers. Where the Anunnaki's body struck the earth, rock transformed to glass from the transferred heat.

  Outside the barrier, the pain of Eli’s burns momentarily overcame her concentration. The golden sphere flickered dangerously before stabilizing as the other Sovereigns poured even more energy into it.

  "Stay conscious!" Maron shouted. "Let the pain keep you awake!"

  "Help…" she gasped, blood streaming from her nose, ears, and the corners of her eyes. "Hurts..."

  "Use the pain," Eleanor instructed, her voice calm despite her own suffering. "Let it anchor you. Focus on the barrier."

  For three hundred kilometers in every direction, a perfect sphere, an impossible heat wave had engulfed the winter landscape. In nearby towns and cities, residents woke in confusion as temperatures soared from freezing to sweltering in seconds and minutes. Children cried out in the night, their small bodies drenched in sweat. The elderly struggled to breathe in the suddenly arid air, oxygen thinning as moisture evaporated. Emergency services found themselves overwhelmed with calls about burst pipes, melting electronics, and spontaneous nosebleeds as capillaries ruptured in the unnatural dryness.

  In the forests surrounding the mountain, ancient pines that had withstood centuries of harsh winters now stood as eerie steam generators, their snow coverings vaporizing in plumes that rose like phantoms into the night sky. The thick layer of snow that had blanketed the mountain slopes liquefied instantly, creating flash floods that cascaded down ravines and gullies. Streams swelled dangerously before their waters, too, began to evaporate, leaving fish flopping desperately in rapidly shrinking puddles.

  Wildlife fled in primal terror. Deer bolted through the underbrush, their instincts screaming of forest fires though no flames were visible. Hibernating bears woke in panic, abandoning winter dens to lumber frantically through the steam-filled forest. Birds took flight en masse, creating dark, disoriented clouds that wheeled chaotically against the night sky.

  Even insects, dormant for winter, stirred in the sudden heat—ants boiling out of their colonies only to dry and shrivel on the surface, beetles emerging from tree bark only to fall dead as their exoskeletons cracked in the impossible aridity.

  The mountain's ecology transformed in seconds, let alone minutes—permafrost that had remained frozen for thousands of years suddenly thawed, releasing ancient methane that bubbled up through mud and melted snow. Alpine flowers that should have remained dormant until spring burst into brief, confused bloom before withering in the intense heat. The very soil steamed as its moisture content was stripped away, leaving parched earth that cracked and split like wounded flesh.

  The few humans unfortunate enough to be camping in the wilderness experienced something beyond understanding—those that survived would later describe it as "the mountain breathing fire." Rangers in a lookout tower twenty kilometers away reported their instruments melting on the walls before they abandoned their post. A group of college students on a winter camping trip found their tents and equipment suddenly smoldering, forcing them into a terrified retreat down forest trails suddenly bare of snow and teeming with equally terrified wildlife.

  Lakes within the heat radius began to simmer at their edges, creating unearthly mists that glowed in the moonlight. Water towers in nearby communities developed stress fractures as their contents expanded in the heat, some rupturing to create artificial geysers that cast ghostly rainbows above.

  In Maron's compound—or rather, what remained of it beneath the crashed Anunnaki vessel—underground water tanks burst their seams, sending scalding steam through ventilation systems. Security cameras melted on their mounts, hard drives warped beyond recovery, and emergency generators ignited as their fuel lines ruptured. Years of careful preparation and accumulated resources vaporized in seconds, leaving nothing but superheated wreckage.

  Inside Eli's barrier, the Sovereigns huddled together as close to the center as possible, their skin reddening and blistering despite the protection. The golden sphere had taken on an orange tinge as the external heat warped even its energetic structure.

  Maron's military assessment cut through. "SOLARIS! YOU’RE GONNA KILL US ALL IF YOU CONTINUE THIS RAMPAGE!"

  "I can still… feel him…" Eli managed between pained breaths, blood vessels further rupturing in her eyes as she maintained the barrier.

  Akira shifted to better shield the others from the heat. "In Japanese mythology, we have tales of the sun goddess Amaterasu's rage—when she withdrew her light, the world plunged into darkness. But her fury was equally devastating. This is the consuming fire, not the nurturing light."

  "If he doesn't come back..." Maron began, but couldn't finish the thought.

  The fiery entity that had been Solaris turned its attention to Enki and Inanna, its jagged smile widening with menace. For the first time, genuine fear flashed across the Anunnaki lord and lady's faces—ancient beings who had witnessed the birth and death of stars now confronted with something beyond their experience.

  "Hmmmm…" the entity rumbled, steam billowing out of its mouth.

  Without a word exchanged between them, both Enki and Inanna activated their dimensional displacement devices—the same error Ereshkigal had made in her final moments. Their forms began dissolving as they entered liminal space, attempting to return to the safety of Nibiru.

  But liminal space was no longer the sanctuary they expected.

  Two slits tore open in reality itself—not portals in the conventional sense but wounds in the fabric of existence, ragged and cauterized at the edges as though reality had been cut with a superheated blade. The fiery entity thrust its arms into these impossible openings, reaching directly into the liminal space where Enki and Inanna were transiting.

  Within liminal space, a transitionary realm of pure possibility where consciousness existed without physical constraints, both Anunnaki experienced something unprecedented in their millions of years of existence—raw, primal fear. The liminal void had always been safe, a space between dimensions where they could go from A to B without worry. Yet now this sanctuary turned against them, as heat—a concept that should have no meaning here—invaded not just their perception, but their core frequency of being.

  The non-space around them began to liquefy, reality's foundation melting like ice under a blowtorch. Enki's vast consciousness, which had calculated the mathematical underpinnings of the Phoenix Ascension system, now struggled to comprehend this impossibility. Heat in liminal space was like wetness in a vacuum—an absolute contradiction of fundamental principles.

  As their essences began to soften and run like heated wax, both Anunnaki experienced something they had inflicted countless times but never suffered—total vulnerability. Their power, their knowledge, their very identity became fluid, losing cohesion as the heat intensified. It was like the heat was not only melting their imaginary bodies, but their minds and souls too. They reached desperately for the cosmic failsafes they had embedded throughout the dimensional landscape, only to find these ancient safeguards evaporating before they could be activated.

  Worse than the physical distortion was the growing awareness that confronted them—this entity wasn't merely Solaris enraged. It was something that existed before them, before the Anunnaki, perhaps before conscious thought itself. The primordial force of destruction that always came paired with creation that was encased in all things regardless of dimensionality. In their arrogance, they had awakened something that their kind had long forgotten to fear. A wrath predating thought or form.

  Their forms began to warp and distort—Enki's six arms melting into his torso at unnatural angles, his silver-blue skin bubbling and popping as internal fluids boiled within. The complex DNA that constituted his higher consciousness began to unravel, reducing as the heat stripped away his fundamental being. Billions of years of accumulated knowledge from countless fallen time matrices evaporated, leaving only animal terror and the memory of what he once was before adopting any outward form—love.

  Inanna's transformation was equally horrific—her sylph-like body now asymmetrical and distorted, one side compressed while the other had expanded grotesquely. Her mercury hair hardened into jagged metallic protrusions that pierced her own skull in multiple places. The reptilian slits of her eyes—containing the mapped emotional states of hundreds of trillions of sentient beings—collapsed within themselves. Half of her face had melted completely away, revealing a lattice of crystal and circuit beneath where bone should have been. Her consciousness, which had manipulated the collective human psyche for millennia, now fragmented into contradictory emotional states, experiencing all at once the terror and pain she had so carefully orchestrated in others.

  All they could perceive through their agony were those terrible red eyes and the jagged red mouth, floating in absolute darkness, accompanied by the two burning hands that held them immobile. The entity seemed to drink in their suffering, not with pleasure but with an indifference more terrifying than malice—the impersonal balancing of the Godhead itself, beyond good and evil, polarity, or the theatre of consciousness itself.

  A voice filled their consciousness—not spoken but imposed directly into their awareness. It barely resembled Solaris's normal tone, instead carrying a bestial growl that seemed to emanate from something far older and more primal than the being they'd confronted moments earlier. The vibrations penetrated to the most fundamental aspects of their being, resonating with frequencies that predated the formation of this fifteen-dimensional time matrix.

  Burn away all impurities… The thought-voice stated.

  True to its word, the temperature increased exponentially. Enki and Inanna tried to scream but found they had no mouths in this state—their bodies mere potential rather than physical form. The heat became so intense that liminal space itself began to melt away around them, reality dripping into magmatic nothingness under the impossible inferno.

  In their last seemingly coherent moments, both Anunnaki experienced another emotion unfamiliar to their kind—regret. Not merely for their present suffering, but a deeper recognition of cosmic error. In their manipulation of consciousness, their harvesting of emotional energy across time matrices, their construction of the Phoenix Ascension system in this dimension, they had violated something fundamental. This punishment seemed not random but proportional, a cosmic correction to their millions of years of energetic parasitism.

  Inside and around Eli's barrier, the situation was deteriorating rapidly. Despite the combined power of the Sovereigns, the heat continued to rise to lethal levels. Eli's skin had blackened in places, the third-degree, turned fourth-degree burns, spread across her body. She maintained consciousness only through the sheer intensity of the pain, each wave of agony jolting her awareness back when it began to fade.

  "Gack…" she spluttered, no longer able to form words.

  Her golden barrier, now only barely big enough for the Sovereigns within its protection, had become the sole sanctuary for hundreds of kilometers. Beyond its small radius of protection in the sky, a space that was getting smaller by the second as the reserves of her reserves were dwindling, even microorganisms were dying in the soil, their cellular structures rupturing in the extreme heat. The atmosphere itself had changed composition, oxygen molecules splitting and recombining in ways that would have been impossible under normal conditions. Weather patterns distorted as the superheated air created a massive thermal column, drawing in cooler air from beyond the affected radius to create cyclonic wind patterns visible from space.

  "Don't you dare give up," Maron growled, his own skin blistering. "That's an order… soldier…"

  "I… can’t even think anymore… the heat…" Yuki groaned, her dry throat barely able to host her voice.

  "Will he come back…?" Mei's question hung in the superheated air.

  No one answered. No one could.

  Within liminal space, Enki and Inanna noticed something unexpected through their torment—the red eyes and mouth were flickering, destabilizing with increasing frequency. The entity that had invaded liminal space was losing coherence.

  Suddenly, they weren't so much ejected as rejected from liminal space, as though the dimensional void itself could no longer withstand this flagrant violation.

  Back in physical reality, the fiery entity hung suspended in the night sky, its arms extended into the two reality-wounds. Its form flickered and failed, blue fire diminishing as its energy reserves finally depleted.

  As the transformation collapsed completely, Solaris reverted to his human form and began to fall—unconscious and utterly depleted.

  What happened next left everyone within the barrier speechless with horror.

  Enki and Inanna emerged from the portals violently, their bodies catastrophically malformed.

  Enki's once elegant form was now a nightmarish sculpture of melted flesh and fused technology—his six arms partially absorbed into a torso that had collapsed in on itself like heated plastic, his silver-blue skin bubbling with fluid-filled blisters that burst and reformed continuously. Three of his eyes had melted into a single misshapen orbital cavity, while technological components protruded from his flesh at unnatural angles.

  Inanna's transformation was equally horrific—her body now asymmetrical and distorted, one side compressed while the other had expanded grotesquely. Her mercury hair had hardened into jagged metallic protrusions that pierced her own skull in multiple places. Half of her face had melted completely away, revealing a lattice of crystal and circuit beneath where bone should have been. Where her heart should have been, a pulsing void had formed.

  Yet despite their grievous injuries, they moved with coordinated purpose to catch Solaris's falling form.

  The two Anunnaki brought his unconscious body up to the level of the golden barrier, holding him between them with unexpected gentleness. Their faces, though horribly distorted by partial melting, showed something none of the Sovereigns had expected to see—a glimmer of genuine emotion beyond rage or hatred. Was it fear? Respect? Or something more complex—the recognition of a power they had never anticipated?

  "L—" Eli tried. Her scalded body trembled with exhaustion, the golden sphere flickering dangerously around its edges. Her once white nightclothes were now stained with blood and fluid from her ruptured burns, clinging to her devastated skin.

  As the entity's heat dissipated, the landscape around them began to stabilize—though irreversibly transformed. Where lush forest had stood, now only charred trunks remained, their upper portions completely vaporized. The snow-covered mountain had been reduced to bare, cracked stone, with glass-like formations where sand or soil had melted under the extreme heat.

  The wildlife that had survived the initial onslaught now cautiously returned to the periphery, instincts confused by the sudden temperature drop. Birds circled high above, unwilling to approach the devastated region. The ground steamed as cooler air made contact with the superheated earth, creating a thick, eerie fog that swirled around the greater area.

  Then came the rain.

  It began as a few scattered droplets, sizzling against the hot ground like water on a griddle. The moisture in the atmosphere, disrupted by the extreme temperature variance, rapidly condensed into heavy clouds above the impact zone. What started as a gentle patter quickly intensified, becoming a relentless downpour that seemed to arrive from nowhere.

  Sheets of rain slashed diagonally across the devastated landscape, driven by winds born from the collision of hot and cold air masses. The deluge turned from clear to gray as it mixed with ash and particulate matter suspended in the air. Steam rose in ghostly columns where the heaviest rainfall met the hottest sections of scorched earth, creating a surreal landscape of mist and shadow.

  The hard, dry clay of the exposed mountainside couldn't absorb the sudden volume of water. Rivulets formed, then streams, then torrents as the rain carved new channels into the wounded terrain. The runoff, black with ash and debris, cascaded down the slopes, carrying remnants of the devastation into the valleys below.

  Lightning flickered through the storm clouds, adding staccato bursts of blue-white illumination to the chaos. Each flash revealed the rain falling in solid silver curtains, momentarily transforming the devastation into something almost beautiful in its terrible power.

  Within Eli's protective sphere, they watched in silence as nature attempted to cleanse itself, the rain simultaneously erasing and revealing the extent of the destruction. Water streamed across the golden barrier, distorting their view of the outside world into abstract patterns of light and darkness.

  The impromptu storm marked the land's first response to trauma—water washing away what fire had claimed, beginning the long process of healing that would take decades to complete.

  Nergal reappeared, ascending from the mountain below. Though clearly battered from Solaris's attack—his obsidian armor cracked and leaking black fluid, one eye dimmed to embers rather than flame—he moved with frightening purpose, ignoring his injured companions to focus entirely on the unconscious Sovereign they held.

  Without a word, he seized Solaris by the hair, dangling him like a trophy.

  “Now,” Nergal’s voice slithered deeply. "Who will give out first?" He asked, his voice carrying easily through the night air. "You?" He shook Solaris's limp form. "Or the barrier?"

  Eli's form was deteriorating rapidly. The strain of everything had pushed her far beyond any limits she thought she had. Bloody tears streamed down her charred face as she fought to hold the protection in place.

  She couldn’t even speak, but not because she didn’t want to. Her vessel was far beyond any real mechanical function. Her physical manifestation was breaking down from within and without.

  "I will be taking Solaris," Nergal announced with cold finality. "The Convergence is over. The Anunnaki have prevailed, as we always have. There is no Guardian, no Sovereign, no power in this universe that can save him now."

  With a gesture, he activated his dimensional displacement device. Enki and Inanna moved closer to be included in the translocation. In a shimmer of distorted reality, all four figures disappeared.

  With her last reserves of strength channeled from the energy the other sovereigns were giving her, Eli warped them to the closest and least dangerous spot she could manage—the burning wreckage of the Anunnaki ship protruding from the mountainside. As their feet touched solid ground, the golden barrier dissolved completely.

  Eli collapsed without a sound, unconscious before she hit the ground.

  Yuki and Mei immediately moved in tandem, their movements synchronized with the practiced fluidity of longtime friends. Yuki's hands traced swift patterns in the air, leaving trails of starlight that coalesced into a thin dome above them. At the same moment, Mei extended her palms downward, drawing moisture from the saturated air.

  The water responded to Mei's call, gathering into a shallow pool beneath their feet that lifted them several inches above the scorching ground. The liquid platform shimmered with Yuki's starlight, the two elements merging into something both beautiful and functional—water and stars forming a fragile sanctuary amid devastation.

  Their combined barrier was thin but remarkably effective, deflecting falling debris and repelling the torrential downpour that threatened to drench them completely. The rain drummed against the star-flecked barrier, creating rippling patterns that cast dancing shadows across their faces.

  "I can't... hold this long," Mei whispered, strain evident in their voice as they struggled to maintain the water's cohesion.

  "Just... a little longer," Yuki responded, her own face tight with concentration as she reinforced the starlight canopy, small beads of sweat forming on her brow despite the shield's protection.

  The remaining Sovereigns gathered around Eli's fallen form, trying to process what had happened, the burning wreckage casting hellish light across their stunned faces.

  Solaris was gone. The Anunnaki had won.

  The Convergence now hung by a thread.