"And you seem to have forgotten," Althea's voice rang through, steady and sharp, her ruby eyes locked on the man with the lance. "Who you're fighting with."
The man hesitated, just briefly, perhaps sensing the shift in her presence. The mana that radiated from her was not divine in the gentle sense people often imagined, it was suffocating, like a pressure that crushed the air out of one's lungs. Even with debris and dust clouding the hall, her figure was distinct, her red dress flowing like a banner of war amid ruin.
But before all of that happened... she remembered how the floor explode beneath them, from the middle of the hall, where the ornate crest of the royal theatre once gleamed. The marble cracked like ice, spidering outward in jagged lines.
Shards of stone and mana erupted, and a wave of dust surged upward like a storm. The mana signature that accompanied it was wrong, too primal. It pulsed beneath the ground like a heartbeat, dark and rhythmic.
