The tremor was a lie.
It wasn't the ground that was shaking; it was everything the ground supported. It was a dissonant chord struck in the very bones of the tenements, a vibration that found the ancient, hidden fractures in the mortar and tore them wide open. Ravi wasn't unleashing a shockwave. He was conducting an orchestra of decay.
"What are you doing?!" Lyssara's voice screamed in his head. In the vault, she would be watching the scrying table turn into a map of pure, unfolding catastrophe.
The crowd in the windows turned from panicked onlookers into a stampede of desperate souls. They flooded into the rickety wooden stairwells and out into the narrow streets, their screams a rising tide of terror. They were finally listening. He had spoken to them in the only language that had ever truly mattered: fear.
"Stop him!" the magister shrieked, his arcane composure shattering. "He's bringing it all down!" He raised his gnarled staff, and a shimmering purple barrier of pure force snapped into existence in the air before him, a wall meant to contain a man.
Aurelise's agent reacted with cold precision. "Net him! Subdue! Do not let him channel!" Her squad raised their casters, the tightly wound nets crackling with a faint, blue energy designed to ensnare and paralyze.
Only Kaelith Ardentor stood frozen, his face a mask of conflict. He was witnessing not a benevolent miracle, but a terrifying, apocalyptic display of divine wrath. This was not the gentle sun. This was a supernova.
They were all too late.
The keystone above the archway of the largest tenement—a behemoth of sagging wood and crumbling brick—disintegrated. Not with an explosion, but with a silent, terrifying implosion, turning to a shower of dust and gravel. The entire five-story structure groaned, a deep, final sigh, and began to lean, its fall slow at first, then hideously, unnaturally fast.
It wasn't a natural collapse. The building didn't just crumble downward. Propelled by the unnatural resonance still pulsing from Ravi's touch, the entire facade tore free and fell outward, a solid wall of brick and timber plunging directly into the center of the square.
The magister's purple shield, designed to stop a man, met ten tons of collapsing history. It shattered with a sound like breaking crystal, and the magister was simply erased, buried under an avalanche of rubble before he could even scream. The first two rows of Warden's Watch went down with him.
The street erupted into pandemonium. Guards and agents who had been moments from battle were now scrambling for their lives, dodging chunks of masonry the size of small carts. The carefully drawn battle lines dissolved into a mad, every-man-for-himself scramble for survival.
Ravi stood his ground, a calm island in the heart of the hurricane. The falling debris parted around him, a small pocket of safety created by the outward trajectory of the collapse. He had aimed the devastation, using the most horrifying artillery imaginable.
A second building went, then a third, collapsing in a planned, domino-like sequence. He was leveling the block, turning a neighborhood into a tomb, but in doing so, he was herding the chaos, channeling the destruction away from the escape routes where the residents were now fleeing in a human torrent. He was a monster, but he was a monster with a purpose.
Through the dust and the screaming, he saw her. Aurelise's agent. She hadn't run. She stood firm, her net-caster raised, her cold, professional gaze unwavering. She had her shot.
She fired.
The net flew through the air, a web of glowing, blue wire unerringly aimed at his chest.
Ravi didn't dodge. He didn't raise his hand to unmake it. He couldn't. His hand was still pressed to his standard, the anchor point of his terrible concert.
He simply stood and watched the net close in. It was a spatial trap, Lyssara had warned. A box you can't touch.
The moment before it hit, a silver-white blur intercepted it. Kaelith Ardentor, his face a grim mask of terrible resolve, threw himself in front of Ravi. The net slammed into his broad chest, and the blue energy flared, enveloping the massive War-Priest. He grunted, his muscles locking, his body spasming as the paralytic charge coursed through him. He crashed to the cobblestones, bound and neutralized, but his eyes, filled with a defiant, triumphant light, were locked on Ravi. He had made his choice. He had protected his god.
Aurelise's agent cursed, already reloading. But the collapsing world gave her no time for a second shot. The ground beneath her feet buckled as the foundations of the last tenement gave way. With a cry of alarm, she was thrown off her feet, swallowed by the roiling cloud of dust and debris.
Ravi pulled his hand from the standard.
Silence.
The terrible groaning of stone ceased. The unnatural resonance faded. A thick, choking cloud of dust filled the square, so dense it blocked out the twilight sky. The only sound was the distant, fading screams of the fleeing residents, and the pained groans of the guards who had been crushed or crippled in the collapse.
The deed was done. He had bought them their lives, at the cost of their homes. He had made a choice and paid for it in rubble and ruin.
He coughed, the thick dust coating his throat. He turned to Kaelith, who lay paralyzed on the ground, the blue net still flickering around him. "Why?" Ravi asked, his voice a hoarse rasp.
Kaelith's lips moved, his words slurred by the trap. "A god who bleeds… for his people… is a god… worth following." He coughed. "They did not… see… a warning. They saw a threat. I… I saw a shepherd."
Before Ravi could reply, a new sound cut through the silence. A rhythmic, metallic thump... thump... thump...
It was slow, heavy, implacable. And it was getting closer.
From out of the dust cloud, a figure emerged. It was not a soldier or a priest. It was a massive suit of articulated, dull iron armor, walking with the heavy, unhurried gait of a golem. It was twice the size of the Automaton Warden from the Nethervault, its design cruder, more brutal. In one hand, it carried a massive tower shield. In the other, a chain, thick as a man's arm. There was no visible wielder, only a faint, pulsing purple light seeping from the joints.
Ravi recognized the energy signature. A magister's work. It was a containment unit. An animated cage.
The iron construct stopped twenty feet away. Its head, a featureless block of riveted metal, tilted. A voice, amplified and distorted by the armor's internal runes, boomed through the dusty square.
It was not the magister who had been crushed. It was a different voice. Colder. Older. And filled with an ancient, chilling authority.
"Anomaly," the voice declared, the word a pronouncement of sentence. "You have been classified a Level-Three Reality Contaminant."
The iron suit took another thunderous step forward. "My name is Magister Keldran Rhyl. And by the authority of the Imperial Compact of Edicts, I am here to seal you."