When the corridor was cleared of every last foe, Raidon paused. Or rather Angul did. Angul relished the perfection of its new vessel, now the blade's to direct.

The monk's body turned and sprinted up the corridor after a wisp of churning mist, Angul raised high in one hand. Raidon's throat screamed, "The Eldest wakes to the end of its interminable existence!"

A sprint up a steep, winding slope finally saw Raidon into Xxiphu's throne chamber.

Dozens of entrances like the one Raidon had passed through were arrayed along the floor of the vast chamber.

Most vented white plumes.

Thousands of cavities honeycombed the high walls of the throne chamber, each large enough to hold an adult aboleth in a comfortable bed of slime. Though most gaped empty, several hundred squirmed with the recently awakened. Each occupied berth burned with a purple flame.

Self-scribing lines rayed across the floor, illustrating concepts that couldn't exist in reality. Flares of multihued light leaped from the crevices and canyons of the shifting diagrams. The inconstant light played on the bellies of the things that hovered Overhead.

Aboleths circled above the writhing floor, flying in perfect formation. One creature followed the next through the air, creating a great ring that could have spanned a city bazaar. Each creature glowed with phosphorescent vigor.

Some of the aboleths were human sized, others were two or three times larger. Many sported hides of brown, rust, jade, and even white. However, several were black as ebony, and these were large as dragons.

Angul presumed these were elder aboleths, old beyond the reckoning of history and swollen with centuries of growth and fell power. They flew with their lesser kin in geometric formation, screaming out the repetitive stanzas of a magical working. The ritual they attempted sent shudders through the air with each revolution of their flying ring.

The mist pouring in from the ground-level entrances was sucked into a vortex shaped by the spinning ring of levitating aboleths. The vapor was constricted to a rivulet of white so dense it seemed a liquid, which spilled upward toward the chamber's apex, into the darkness high above.

The monk's eyes were blind behind a cascade of tears, but he did not stumble as he raced across the great floor of the chamber. He easily vaulted the undulating patterns. Angul's preternatural senses did not require Raidon's eyes to take in the wonders of the chamber.

To the Blade Cerulean, the throne room was like a treasury laid out for ransack. Forged in Stardeep to put down a priest of the Sovereignty, Angul came close to being awestruck despite the blade's single-minded nature. For here were the creatures who the priest had served! The gathered aboleths in the chamber made up the Sovereignty itself! Only one being seemed missing from the tableau...

Angul exploded in cerulean fire. A flaming blue sphere leaped from the razor-sharp tip. The blaze hurtled toward the ceiling as if hurled from a catapult. It dazed the eyes of flying and perching aboleths alike.

The fire arced high and pierced the haze of shadow clinging to the ceiling. In the light of the flare, something appalling was revealed.

A gruesome shape was lodged in the ceiling. No, Angul saw. That assessment was incorrect.

The thing was the ceiling. The flare's light revealed a bloated thing the size of a temple complex, one whose bulk stretched at least as wide as what should have been the roof. The creature's stony hide was as desolate as the dead face of a moon and seemed nearly as large. However, what moon ever possessed dead eyes for craters?

Thousands of eyes speckled the gray expanse of petrified flesh, some small as coins while others were large as houses. Most were closed, but some stared blankly like the glassy orbs of corpses. These gazed into the empty space beneath the creature, down upon the circling aboleths, and across the prophecies scribed on the floor.

It was the Eldest. It presided over its progeny as a statue might, without breath.

Angul comprehended what was happening within the chamber: the last of the recalled thoughts and memories distributed throughout Xxiphu were splashing upward and being absorbed. Before, a single thought turned over once every ten thousand years in the thing's gargantuan brain. But now, hundreds of new sensations quickened beneath its hard carapace.

Angul hesitated. The blade did not know fear. But the panorama of the throne room complete with the Eldest was beyond the blade's experience. Even Angul's arrogant belief that it was up for any challenge Anally slammed against stark reality. The Blade Cerulean's light dimmed. Angul recognized its strength alone could not hope to win the hour.

It needed to join its power to the Sign's. To do that, Angul needed Raidon Kane after all.

*****

Jagged shards scraped and punctured him. The world was a broken mirror, and he lay in its ruins. An image showed in each shard. Some revealed a man named Raidon Kane. Some were of a girl named Ailyn. A few showed the likeness of a different child named Opal.

If he didn't move, he felt hardly any pain at all. He'd learned that despite not really having a body, attempting to see the pieces as a whole was agonizing. When he tried to stand up to see more than a few splinters at once, pieces of him were flayed off by the crush of shards, each as sharp as a torturer's scalpel.

Better to just lie still and watch the events in the glass unfold. In some, Raidon laughed. In others he slept, ate, or walked. In several he fought. He didn't like to watch those. If he did so too long, he shifted his perspective so often in order to follow the action that he sliced himself anew on the images' sharp edges. Welcome, agony.

So he observed images other than his own, chiefly of the girl Ailyn. These were mostly idyllic. Mostly. A couple showed grave markers. When he turned his attention to avert his gaze from them, the shards cut more cruelly than ever.

Thus when the sky blue Are blasted into him, tumbling his perspective end over end through the shattered splinters of his mind, Raidon screamed like a lost soul. The fire roared, furnace hot, across the bed of broken glass. The shards wilted under the heat. They slumped into reddish goo that began to congeal. When the flame puffed out, the melted pieces had formed together in a lumpy, sharp-edged mass.

The mirror was reassembled, but crudely and with mismatched seams. Nothing reflected in its crazed surface would ever look the same again.

*****

Raidon heard music that he guessed was played on instruments forged of rotting skin and hollowed bones.

Unwept tears filtered everything through a quilt of fractured glints. The monk wiped his eyes with the back of his free hand and saw the throne chamber of Xxiphu. He saw the spiraling elder aboleths—and that which stared down with its ocean of eyes high above. The noise was the creatures' chanting ritual.

"I don't care," Raidon said. "Let me go, Angul."

All aberrations must be purged. You know this. Pull yourself together and join with me.

"I'm empty. I'm done."

Raidon made to throw down the sword, but the Blade Cerulean overrode his intention. Instead, the weapon pointed up at the ceiling.

Angul said, That is what we must defeat. Afterward you can collapse in upon yourself and embrace your weakness until death finds you..

"I killed her!" the monk screamed. His voice rang out into the throne chamber. "I cut her down! It is something that can never be forgiven!"

You did nothing that requires forgiveness. You did what was necessary. You cleansed an abomination, Angul offered.

"No!" This last denial was offered at such a volume that a few aboleths flying in formation overhead twitched.

Raidon briefly wondered why they weren't reacting to his presence. The effort of even that small question exhausted him.