Chapter 201: Don’t Waste An Opportunity! II
Damian moved!
He gathered solar light from the reserves still burning within his existence and shaped it into sothing different than the weapons and chains and barriers he had been forging all day.
This was softer, a cushion of radiance that blood beneath the Hallowed Voice’s falling body and caught him gently, completely, without the burning heat that his solar constructs normally carried.
From below, it looked like a dying holy figure becoming enveloped in radiant light, descending from the broken heavens surrounded by the golden glow of sothing sacred, and the image was powerful enough to draw a sound from the Citadel that was half prayer and half wail!
The masses cried out. Paladins and Holy Won cried out. Hundreds of thousands of voices rose at once, grief and terror and desperate faith mixing into a sound that the white walls of the Covenant had never contained before.
BOOM!
Serala shot toward the fallen light.
Damian took a step and appeared within the cushion of solar radiance beside the Hallowed Voice, having crossed the distance between the crater and the sky in a movent so fast it registered as teleportation to anyone watching. He made sure the solar light surrounding them didn’t burn, adjusting its composition to warmth rather than heat, and he looked down at the state of the old man resting in the golden glow.
It was bad.
The Hallowed Voice’s body was grievously injured, bones broken in places that his robes couldn’t hide, blood seeping from wounds that his cultivation was struggling to close. His white hair was matted with crimson, and his lined face carried the pallor of a body running out of what it needed to keep functioning.
But his hands still gripped the cracked Sacred Ancestral Bone!
The solar light surrounding them was opaque from the outside. Nobody could see in, and nobody dared approach as Paladins and Holy Won ford a periter around the radiant sphere while the masses of the Citadel pressed closer.
Serala landed within the light and went to her knees beside the Hallowed Voice, cradling his head with hands that were far too large for the gesture but perford it with a tenderness that made the size irrelevant.
Her wing-shaped pupils were bright.
The Hallowed Voice looked up at her and managed sothing that wasn’t quite a smile.
"This may be it for this old man," he said, and his voice was weak but steady, the voice of soone who had made peace with endings a long ti ago. "You might have to take over. Beco the Hallowed Voice of this generation much earlier than either of us planned."
...!
Serala blinked at him.
"Well," she said, "maybe not just yet."
...!
She looked at Damian.
"Could you?"
Damian stepped forward and knelt beside the Hallowed Voice, who turned his dimming gaze toward this young man he had t less than an hour ago with the incredulity of soone who couldn’t quite fathom what was about to be offered.
Damian placed his hand on the old man’s leg, feeling the broken bones and the failing flesh and the cultivation that was spending itself trying to hold a body together that had taken more damage than it was built to survive.
"Persevere."
BOOM!
Blue flas erupted from Damian’s palm and surged into the Hallowed Voice’s body. The flas spread through the old man’s fra the way water spread through dry earth, finding every fracture and every wound and every place where the flesh had given up and reminding it that giving up was not permitted.
Bones knit rapidly, visibly, the fragnts pulling themselves back into alignnt and fusing with a strength that exceeded what they had possessed before they broke. Torn muscle reattached itself. Ruptured vessels sealed and resud their function. The blood that had been seeping from a dozen wounds reversed its course and flowed back into a body that suddenly had enough vitality to reclaim what it had lost.
The Hallowed Voice’s eyes went wide.
The years that had been sitting so heavily upon his features monts ago seed to lift by a asure, not erasing his age but restoring the vigor that age had been slowly stealing from him across decades. He looked down at his own hands, still gripping the cracked Sacred Bone, and watched the trembling in his fingers cease as strength poured back into tendons and joints that had been failing!
He sat up within the cushion of solar light.
"What..." he began, looking at his hands, then at his arms, then pressing a palm to his chest where the worst of the damage had been. He found nothing. No pain, no weakness, no grinding of broken ribs against punctured organs. He found only wholeness, and a vitality that felt decades younger than the body he had been carrying that morning.
Serala rose and stood beside Damian, and the smile on her face was bright!
"I’m not ready to beco the Hallowed Voice just yet," she said, "so hang in there."
...!
The Hallowed Voice looked at himself. He looked at Serala. He looked at Damian. He looked at himself again. Then he shook his head with the slow bewildernt of a man who had spent his entire life being the most capable healer in the Lands of Stone and had just been healed by sothing ridiculous!
"My thanks," he said, "My profound thanks."
Damian nodded and inclined his head and was about to wave his hand to release the solar light surrounding them when the Hallowed Voice said sothing that stopped him.
"Hold on."
...!
The old man looked at the opaque walls of golden radiance surrounding them, looked at the crowd and the Paladins and the Holy Won he knew were waiting just beyond it, and his kind eyes shone with a light that had nothing to do with healing or cultivation and everything to do with the shrewd intelligence of a man who had navigated the weavings of the Lands of Stone for longer than most beings had existed.
He smacked his own chest.
Blood, fresh and bright, burst from his mouth and spattered across his already torn robes. Before Damian could react, the Hallowed Voice twisted his body in a practiced motion that caused his posture to collapse into sothing hunched and broken, his spine curving, his shoulders dropping, his face arranging itself into a mask of sickly weakness that was so convincing Damian almost reached out to heal him again before he realized what was happening!
The old man’s eyes, bright and vital and full of restored vigor, dimd themselves!
"Never let an opportunity go to waste," the Hallowed Voice said, his voice perfectly steady despite the blood now dripping from his chin. "This will confuse our enemies and gain more sympathy from the people. An injured leader who still fought for them is worth more loyalty than a healthy one who erged unscathed."
...!
Damian stared at him as his eyes shone brighter than ever
This old man had just been healed from the brink of death, and his first instinct was to fake being injured! The shrewd, calculating nature of it was so far removed from the gentle healer image the Hallowed Voice had been projecting that Damian found himself reassessing the old man again!
The solar light dispersed.
The Hallowed Voice stepped out of the fading radiance like a man barely holding himself together, his body hunched, his steps unsteady, his blood-spattered robes hanging from a fra that looked like it had been through a war and was losing. The Paladins closest to him rushed forward with cries of concern. Holy Won reached for him with healing Mana already blazing in their palms. The masses beyond them wailed at the sight of their leader broken and bleeding!
Oh!
He raised a trembling hand, and the Citadel went silent.
"The demons," he said, and his voice was weak and wavering and perfectly calibrated to reach every ear within the white walls, "have been vanquished."
...!
OOOH!
The Citadel erupted.
Hundreds of thousands of voices rose, and the Hallowed Voice stood at the center of it all with blood on his chin and victory in his performance and eyes that, when they briefly t Damian’s across the distance between them, sparkled with the quiet mischief of a ruler who had just added another legend to his already considerable collection!
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