Fragments of the ruined spear continued to turn above the Fireside Ascent, shedding strips of black mana and pale light while Rava sat where the shockwave had planted him, one hand braced behind his back and his staff trapped awkwardly beneath his boot. Across the cavern, the Sixth Witch watched him through the collapsing remains of her attack, her mouth still parted around whichever explanation had failed to arrive.
Roy made it through one breath before the first laugh escaped. By the second, he had folded forward with a hand against his stomach, pointing helplessly from the young Rava on his butt to the ancient terror hanging above the battlefield, and the harder he tried to speak, the worse it became. Harmony brought one drone closer to catch his face while another held the Witch in frame, preserving every second of her bafflement for the broadcast audience before dignity could find its way back to her.
"You should see your face," Roy managed, though another look at Rava ruined whatever he meant to say next. "Ten thousand spells, thousands of years alive, and you just lost to a kid who wasn't even sure he could see the targets."
"That child did nothing." With the last pieces of the spear dissolving around her, the Sixth Witch drew herself upright and tried to gather the old ritual authority into her voice. "The elf must have interfered. Yes, perhaps there was another structure concealed within his attack, or perhaps the boy carries an artifact whose function you have misrepresented for this spectacle."
From his False Void platform, Lynder examined the empty space through which the spear had passed and gave her denial considerably more care than it deserved. "Fool, I never touched the spell. The young man struck four stable failure points in the proper order. Your own magic supplied the force that destroyed it."
Roy's laughter rose again, louder than before, until the Sixth Witch's face hardened beneath the cameras and her corrupted pillar began climbing through the air. "Don't bully her, Lynder. She needs the artifact theory to preserve her unearned pride. Let her have it. Maybe Rava has the legendary Stick of Beating Old Ladies, and after three thousand years, fate finally led it to the hag who needed it most."
Behind him, Rava struggled to his feet while trying to free the staff from beneath his boot. "I would really appreciate it if the 'legendary stick' could take me away from here now."
"You did great," Roy said, wiping at the corner of one eye before facing the Sixth Witch again. "Go stand by Zehrina before our last great witch tries to preserve her legacy by flailing even longer."
As Zehrina descended toward the platform and drew Rava within the shelter of her Navi'N dust, Skelly Mom's voice entered Roy's private channel with none of the laughter that had accompanied the humiliation. "Roy, I would like to attempt something."
Keeping his attention on the Witch for the cameras, Roy lowered his hand, already wary of the deliberation beneath her lingering giddiness. "What kind of something? Are you still not done terrorizing this poor girl?"
"A dangerous one." Beyond the dimensional opening, the obscurement veil shifted around Skelly Mom's skeletal outline, still concealing her from Lynder and the crew while her hollow gaze remained fixed upon the battlefield. "Your soul, your vessel, your mana and the strange little fragments you have spread among your servants create conditions I cannot fully predict. Consequences unfavorable to me remain possible." Satisfaction returned slowly to her voice, edged by an older hatred that had survived every other failure of her memory. "Yet I would love nothing more than to deliver one final insult to my mother and everything that came crawling after her."
"Absolutely not."
"I have survived dangers beyond your understanding, sweet boy."
"And you just admitted this one is beyond your understanding." Roy angled himself farther between the portal and the nearest drone, preserving the appearance that he was merely watching the distant Witch. "You already proved your point. She got embarrassed by Lynder, then Rava knocked her on her flaps without even hitting her. Enjoy the win."
"I have yet to enjoy anything." Regal offense weighed down every word. "That creature still believes she has witnessed the limit of my answer."
"Then she can keep believing it. You're done. I have recovered enough mana to end this farce."
Argument left Skelly Mom so completely that Roy finally glanced through the portal. At first, only her posture had changed, the restless bend vanishing from her spine while both feet settled upon the shower floor. Flesh followed in pale, deliberate layers over her skull, throat, and shoulders, restoring a face whose beauty carried the force of something shaped before human ideas of beauty had acquired their present form. Long blonde hair descended past her waist. Across the pink pigeon robe, darkness spread from seam to seam until the soft fabric lengthened into an imperial gown of drifting gray fire, and above her restored brow, a white crown assembled from narrow blades of light.
Even through the obscurement veil, the others felt enough of the transformation to instinctively retreat from the portal. Warrex moved Takara and the Trio behind him, while Lutrian raised a defensive screen across the open side of the Fireside Ascent. Lynder attempted to turn from the Sixth Witch and toward the distortion surrounding Roy, but something in him demanded he look away.
Roy answered the transformation with a yawn. "The whole terrifying empress thing isn't going to scare me into obedience. I've seen you spend four hours arguing with a television because a cartoon dog stole somebody's sandwich."
Without dignifying that memory, the Noonshade Empress approached the dimensional boundary and rested one palm against the open plane. Nothing crossed from the brig, but beneath Roy's boots, however, his shadow lengthened against the luminous deck and climbed upright behind him, drawing a second woman from his own outline until her ethereal arms could circle his shoulders. Both hands came forward to cradle his cheeks, careful enough that her fingertips scarcely displaced his skin. She circled in front of him and when her forehead settled against his, the violence contained within her soul surrounded him without placing so much as a grain of its weight upon his body.
For most of his life, touch from his mother had belonged to an age he could no longer remember. Roy had forgiven the vacancy years ago because anger would never repair what had happened to her, and because understanding another person's wounds had always come easier than admitting what their wounds had done to him. None of that prepared him for twenty thousand years of motherhood longing for a son she never had gathering around his face, for a creature who could tear the living from existence holding him with the certainty that every blade in her would turn inward before one ever reached her new son.
Spectral hair drifted across his nose. Roy blew it aside, kept his expression carefully bored, and found the single word she offered him far harder to survive than the power surrounding it. "Please."
"Um..." He paused for a beat, then another, and when a third began passing without either of them moving, the excuse of considering her request grew thin enough to become embarrassing. Still, Roy held the position until the last tolerable instant, stealing several more seconds from an embrace he knew she might forget how to give by morning.
"Fine," he said at last. "But emotionally crushing me doesn't mean you won the argument."
A smile touched the Empress's lips close enough for him to feel it. "This will be a show worth broadcasting."
The apparition withdrew through Roy's shoulders and sank into his shadow, leaving a faint pressure behind his ribs as the physical Empress lifted both arms on the far side of the portal. Her first words carried too little sound for the comm to capture, yet every syllable pressed against the fragment of soul buried near his abdomen, drawing a sharp and painless line from his body toward the Nightshatter.
Somewhere behind the Empress, Sorrowclaw began crying. Riven joined her a moment later with the broken, furious sound of a man trying to hide terror from neighboring cells, and Roy had to bite the inside of his cheek while the Empress continued chanting through their misery.
"Captain!" Serenity entered his comm so hard that the channel distorted around her voice. "Order her to stop! A highly dense mana field has emerged around the reactor and has expanded across its outer architecture, and I cannot model what it is doing."
"The raw input hasn't changed," Tranquility said, speaking faster with every new reading. "Output has increased by four orders of magnitude. Five. Seven. That progression lacks any defensible relationship to the available energy."
"It is okay, that mana is ours," Skellbro chimed in over the comms. "And His," she added quietly.
Deep within the Nightshatter, the mana of the Immortal Family spread beyond the territory it had claimed over the reactor. Once that ancient reservoir reached the fragment of Roy housed inside the ship, pathways designed for arcane and runic conversion began reorganizing around a magical inheritance older than every magical system connected to them.
When the chant ended, runic writing surfaced along Roy's wrists and crawled beneath his sleeves, thousands of narrow characters crossing his arms, chest, throat, and legs before each line locked into his skin and disappeared. Alongside the reinforcement came a thin distortion of dark blue mana that whitened toward its edges, faint enough to bend the air around his body without flooding it.
Roy searched the Empress's restored face. Strain had entered the corners of her eyes, though she remained standing with both arms raised and the white crown steady above her head. "Mama... are you okay? Am I okay?"
Her answer came slowly, filling the portal and the private spaces behind his thoughts at once. "Stand tall... in my shade, son."
Across the cavern the Sixth Witch recoiled so violently that several people on the Fireside Ascent raised their defenses.
"Not her," the Witch whispered. "It's not possibly her..."
The Empresses clocked the recognition and scoffed. Within the brig, she lowered her hands. "Soul Magic: Tenebration."