The meeting was breaking up when a middle-aged man burst through the door without knocking and dropped to his knees, pressing his forehead to the floor.
"What is going on? Why did you just break my door?" the Third Elder asked, with the slow tone of a man who had not yet decided how angry to be.
"There's... there's a force out there." The man's voice shook. "The kind of force that was supposed to stay buried."
The Second Elder's expression sharpened. "A force that was supposed to stay buried? Are you talking about Abyssal Force?"
Nobody waited for a full answer. They moved outside together.
Abyssal Force was the power carried by monsters born in the Abyssal Realm, creatures that crossed into the world of Life and Death through fractures torn open by their own energy. These fractures were called Gates of the Abyss, and they appeared without warning anywhere on the surface of the land, without pattern and without mercy. Most cities went their entire histories without seeing one. The Neril estate, it seemed, was not going to be so fortunate.
What greeted them outside was not subtle. A large force of Abyssal creatures tore through everything in their path, indifferent to what stood in front of them. The garden wall was already rubble. Two of the outer buildings were dark with something that was not quite fire. Servants had scattered. The air smelled wrong, heavy and cold, the way it does when something from the Abyss has been in a place long enough to leave its mark on it.
"There are too many." The Fourth Elder surveyed the destruction with the expression of a man already composing his excuses. "We can't win this."
One of the Neril family knights stepped forward and bowed his head toward Metania. "Shall I call for reinforcements, Master?"
"We can send for help," Metania said, calm in the way that very powerful people sometimes are when things are falling apart around them. "But I doubt they would arrive in time."
"Why are we asking for help when we can handle it ourselves?"
Neolan said it simply, with the quiet confidence of a man who had been looking forward to exactly this kind of moment. He was already rolling up his sleeve.
Metania looked at his son. Then both of them started laughing.
"I want to point out," the Second Elder said, slowly shaking his head, "that this is probably the worst possible time for the two of you to be doing that." He glanced at the Fourth Elder, who was still busy surveying the destruction with his hands clasped behind his back and contributing nothing. "I think I'll head back inside. Goodbye." He turned and walked back into the house as though the matter was entirely settled.
As a servant of the God of Life, the Second Elder rarely had reason to fight. His divine selection had given him immortality, which depending on the day felt like either a gift or a punishment. Any other ability he had was his own to find and costly to use, draining divine energy faster than most things were worth. He had decided long ago to be very selective about what he considered worth it.
An Abyssal raid on the family estate, apparently, did not make the list.
Behind him, Metania and Neolan raised their hands in unison.
"Divine Sword."
Two blades of light formed in their palms, steady and brilliant, casting sharp white shadows across the ruined ground. The creatures nearest to them slowed. Some stopped entirely. The light that came off a Divine Sword was not merely bright. It was deeply, fundamentally wrong for anything born in the Abyss to be near.
"Light Step."
The world around them seemed to slow. This was the moment the family's strongest selection earned its reputation.
In the space of a single breath, the Abyssal force was gone. The battlefield fell silent.
Then the darkness shifted.
The scattered remains of the creatures gathered, pulling inward, forming a shape like a black egg standing in the middle of the ruined ground. Something moved inside it. The shell cracked. A creature emerged, shaped like the shadow of a man but wrong, horned, winged, tailed, and radiating a pressure that had no name but pressed against the chest like a closed fist. It was larger than the creatures that had come before. Older, somehow. The kind of thing that does not appear at the front of a raid unless it has a reason to be there.
It said nothing. It didn't need to. The pressure alone drove both Metania and Neolan to one knee, light swords still in hand. Even the air around them seemed to compress, pushing downward, as though the creature's mere presence was enough to remind the world of its weight.
Then a slash came, a blade of dark energy cutting directly toward their necks with the calm precision of something that had done this before.
Time slowed again.
In that fraction of a second, Neolan spoke.
"Divine Circle."
The ability pulled all the light within reach toward him and compressed it into a single spinning circle that, if released at full force, could level a city. He held it for a moment, feeling it hum against his palm, dense and patient and enormous. Then he threw it.
It drifted forward at roughly the speed of a leaf falling from a tree.
Metania stared at it. Then he stared at his son. "Why did you throw it like that?"
"Just watch, Father." Neolan kept his eyes on the circle. "If I kill this thing, will you find me a wife?"
Metania considered this seriously for a moment, which said a great deal about the kind of man he was. Then both of them started laughing again.
The shadow creature watched the slow circle approach. It did not move. Perhaps it saw no reason to. Perhaps it was curious. Perhaps nothing in its long existence had ever thrown something at it this slowly and it simply did not know how to respond. Either way, the moment the circle made contact, it released everything at once. The explosion that followed was not the kind that makes a sound so much as the kind that simply removes the thing that was there before. The light consumed the shadow completely, and when it faded there was nothing left. No ash. No trace. Just the empty space where something very dangerous had been standing a moment ago.
The Second Elder reappeared in the doorway, clapping slowly.
"Well," he said. "I suppose that's why he's the firstborn."
Asentha, who had been watching the entire thing from a very safe and carefully chosen distance, looked at what remained of the family estate. The walls. The garden. The outer buildings. Then he looked at the empty space where the main hall used to be.
"That's great," he said. "Genuinely impressive. But our house is gone. Where exactly are we supposed to sleep?"