Cassie called out to Effie and watched her drag her starved body into a deadly battle against a Supreme Demon.
At the same time, she called out to Jet and Kai, watching Kai lead a fallen god away from the Jade Palace in a suicidal pursuit. At the same time, she called out to Rain, wishing to make sure that the young woman was safe in the middle of a devastating confrontation between the Mad Prince and the Dreamspawn, which was happening just one flight of stairs below the Archway Hall of the Ebony Tower.
However, to her surprise...
Rain wasn't there.
For a moment, Cassie's heart seemed to stop beating.
But then, she found the Princess of Shadows again...
Rain was leaning on a white stone wall, breathing heavily. Around her, mangled bodies littered the floor.
Behind her, the skull of a dead dragon stared at the sky with empty eye sockets.
‘That's...'
That was the Ivory Tower.
[Rain? How did you...]
Rain flinched.
But then, Cassie knew how. She had taught the young woman how to repair the enchantment of the archway herself... she just had not expected that it could be done so swiftly.
[How did you repair the runic circle so fast?]
At the entrance of the Ivory Tower, a pale smile illuminated Rain's exhausted face.
"I... l asked the Ebony Tower to help — help me restore it to how it was meant to be. Strangely enough, it worked. When I started painting the runes, it felt like the stones themselves were guiding my brush."
Cassie spent a heartbeat digesting the information.
She wanted to ask why Rain had felt the need to leave. But the answer was obvious — the battle seemed lost, and Cassie herself had planned to escape. Or perhaps Rain had wanted to help in any way she could and made a desperate choice to leave the Ebony Tower for that reason.
“I am not a complete fool, you know. I wasn't trying to besiege the Ivory Island all by myself... however, it seemed like the King of Nothing had already killed everyone here, and the Dreamspawn himself had left the Ivory Tower behind to join the battle. So, I thought that it would be empty."
Rain's face darkened.
“Although it was not as empty as I had thought. Plenty of corpses, but more than a few skilled soldiers as well. They are all there, inside the tower... asleep."
Cassie drew a shallow breath.
[Asleep?]
Rain pushed herself off the wall and took a step forward, cautiously making her way into the Ivory Tower.
“Yes. It was me... I put them to sleep."
She reached the great hall of the ancient Citadel, where Hope's chains lay on the floor, forming the Gateway. Around them, dozens of figures were sprawled on the floor, fast asleep.
Rain swayed slightly.
“It's a funny thing... I thought that I wouldn't be able to assign all of them Epithets. But, you know? My Ascended Ability showed me that things have spirits, and places have spirits as well. Even collectives of living beings do, sometimes. So, that gave me an idea — I assigned a Name to this group of people, and then added an Epithet to that Name. And voila."
She pointed to the slumbering soldiers.
"Somehow, that worked as well."
Rain's voice sounded strained, as if she was on the verge of essence exhaustion. But she was safe, for now.
Cassie asked the next question carefully:
[So, what are you going to do?]
She knew what she wanted Rain to do. Needed her to do, really. But that was going to put the young woman at risk — if she could do it at all.
If she wanted to use the Gateway to flee the Dream Realm instead, Cassie was not going to hint at a different possibility.
Rain smiled weakly.
"What am I going to do? Well... I am going to steal a Great Citadel from beneath a Sovereign."
She took a deep breath.
"All I have to do is destroy the soul mark tethering him to the Gateway of the Ivory Tower, right? Granted, an Ascended like me has no way of achieving that... but I am not an ordinary Ascended, am I? My heart is supposed to be bonded deeply to the world, whatever that means. And I can speak to ancient towers. So..."
She took a step toward the vast circle of chains.
"Perhaps this will work somehow, too."
Cassie hoped that it would...
For both their sakes.
‘It's done, then.'
Bastion, Ravenheart, the Night Garden, the Ivory Tower — all four of the Great Citadels were on the verge of changing hands. Had the potential to change hands, at least, robbing Asterion of some of his power in the middle of a perilous battle.
Sadly, while the Citadels did make him stronger, the true source of his power was people, not the lands they populated. And even if those Great Citadels were conquered, the people inhabiting them would still be subjects of the Hunger Domain.
It was Cassie's job to liberate them from that burden.
And she was already close to snatching the first few victims from Asterion's claws... The shockwave of a particularly devastating collision between the two swords — one flawlessly white, the other vibrant red — slammed into Cassie like a wall of concrete moving at the speed of sound. She withstood it with a quiet grunt and staggered, her back pressing against the wall of the forbidden hall.
The six remaining incarnations of the Mad Prince had fused into three, changing in the process.
One suddenly seemed to be cast out of impregnable metal, infernal flames burning in his chest — he fought fiercely and ferociously, abandoning self-preservation in favor of unadulterated aggression. The other moved steadily and methodically, his body as solid and grounded as unbreakable stone.