CELESTIA — CHAPTER 40: The Anvil and the Stars
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The sea never slept.
Maybe that was what Zayn loved about this place without realizing it — that certainty that something outside of him also refused to stop. The ocean struck the rocks below with a constancy that had nothing mechanical about it, nothing repetitive in the boring sense of the term. Every wave was different. Every impact carried something unique — a different pressure, a slightly altered direction, a sound that was never quite the same as the one before.
Like a fight.
Like training that never ended.
The sky above them was an almost violent blue — that particular blue of mornings that had decided to fully exist, without compromise, without the gray shades that soften things and give them an excuse not to be what they are. The sun struck the surface of the water and transformed it into something that looked like solid light, millions of glimmers disappearing and being reborn every fraction of a second.
Azel stood a few meters away from Zayn.
Arms crossed.
Eyes fixed on his student with that particular kind of attention — not cold, not distant, but precise. The attention of someone watching not what another person is doing, but what they are becoming.
— Attack me, he said simply.
Zayn looked at him.
— Seriously?
— Seriously.
— You're going to dodge no matter what.
— Probably.
— Then what's the point?
Azel didn't answer.
Which, Zayn had learned, was in itself an answer.
He sighed.
Raised his left wrist.
The OMNIHAND 307 pulsed softly — that familiar green light, that steady rhythm that resembled less a machine than something alive. Zayn mentally scanned through what he carried inside the Borealis. All those forms. All those Primals waiting in the darkness of the artifact like bottled storms.
He stopped on something new.
Something he hadn't tried yet.
A presence different from the others — not wild like Gravoc, not cold like Water Pulse, not dark like Pumpkin. Something more... compact. Condensed. Like an energy that had decided to focus on itself instead of spreading in every direction.
He clenched his fist.
And struck the center of the OMNIHAND.
---
The transformation was different.
Not Gravoc's explosion of stone. Not Crystal Hedge's purple crystallization. Something faster — more brutal in its brevity. The green light of the Borealis contracted into a point, then exploded outward in a wave of heat and burning rock that pushed back the air itself.
And where Zayn Al-Kage had been standing—
CANONROLL.
A stocky colossus. Massive. Built not for height but for density — every square centimeter of his body seemed to contain more matter than ordinary physical laws should have allowed. His shell of rock and ancient metal was crossed with glowing orange veins, as if something burned permanently inside and searched for a way out. His red eyes — two fixed, intense embers, unblinking — looked at the world with that particular manner of a being constantly evaluating the distance between itself and everything around it.
A voice — not quite Zayn's anymore, deeper, rougher, but still carrying something recognizable within it — came out of that massive form:
— Wow.
A silence.
— Who is this guy?
Azel raised an eyebrow.
— A new dude, the voice continued with obvious satisfaction. A crazy new dude.
---
Canonroll moved.
Not the way the other Primals moved. Not with Gravoc's heaviness or Crystal Hedge's crystalline fluidity. He compressed himself — that enormous mass contracting inward in a movement that defied all mechanical logic — and then launched himself.
Like a cannonball.
Literally.
His spherical body tore through the air with a sharp whistle, leaving behind a trail of heat and rock dust. The distance between him and Azel vanished in a fraction of a second.
Azel stepped aside.
Just one step.
Canonroll passed through where he had been standing, slammed into the ground in the Seraph's place, and the rock gave way beneath the impact in an explosion of rubble and dust. A shallow but undeniable crater opened in the stone.
Canonroll bounced back.
Straightened himself.
And launched again.
Faster this time — as if he had understood something from that first pass, as if failure had calibrated something inside him. He changed trajectory mid-course with surprising agility for his form, tracing a curve that tried to anticipate Azel's next step.
Azel dodged again.
Then again.
Every dodge was minimalist — a half-step, a slight turn of the torso, a tilt of the head. Never more than necessary. As if spending extra energy to avoid Canonroll would have been a form of impoliteness.
Canonroll's rocky shell endured the impacts against the ground, against scattered rocks, against the wind itself, without flinching. Something inside him resisted — not gracefully, but with the raw stubbornness of things that had decided not to yield.
Then Azel raised one hand.
Just one.
And an arrow of golden light appeared between his fingers — thin, precise, vibrating with an energy that seemed to contain more heat than its size should have suggested.
It fired.
Canonroll didn't dodge it.
He received it.
The impact against his shell produced a sound somewhere between metal and stone — something dense, final. And Canonroll... didn't move. Not an inch. The shell absorbed the arrow of light like a sponge absorbs water — completely, without residue, without even a visible mark.
Zayn's voice, from inside that massive form:
— HAHAHAHA! IT DID NOTHING!
Azel looked at his hand.
Then looked at Canonroll.
Something passed across his face — fleeting, almost imperceptible — that resembled satisfaction.
— Good, he said.
Then he raised both hands.
---
Two rings of pure light appeared — not arrows this time, not something sharp or directional. Complete, perfect circles, spinning slowly upon themselves with an almost hypnotic slowness. They approached Canonroll without haste, as if they had all the time in the world.
Canonroll watched them come.
And something in his red eyes shifted slightly.
The rings attached themselves to his wrists.
Not violently. Almost gently. As if they were fitting into the place they had always been meant to go.
Then Azel spread his hands apart.
And the wave came.
---
It wasn't an arrow. It wasn't a localized explosion. It was a wave — of pure, dense, compact light, traveling at a speed that transformed the air in its path into something different. The ocean below reacted — the waves briefly reversed direction, as if even the water had felt something pass.
Canonroll took it head-on.
The explosion that followed was silent for a fraction of a second — that strange silence that precedes real detonations, that void in sound announcing that something significant has just happened.
Then the noise.
BOOOOOM.
Dust swallowed everything.
The rocks around the impact point shattered. The sparse grass growing between the stones disappeared beneath the blast. The air itself seemed to recoil several meters in every direction.
Silence returned.
Slowly.
Then a silhouette moved inside the dust.
Straightened up.
Canonroll was standing.
His shell was cracked in places — thin black lines crossing the orange rock like miniature rivers. And from those cracks flowed something.
Blood.
Purple.
Not red. Not orange like the lava composing his body. Purple — deep, almost luminous, a shade belonging to no known natural palette. It flowed slowly, with the peculiar viscosity of something that wasn't entirely liquid but refused to be solid.
Zayn's voice, calmer this time:
— ...Okay. That was something else.
---
BEEP.
BEEP.
BEEEEEP.
The OMNIHAND sounded.
And with it, the sound — that unique sound, that cry of a wild lion mixed with something mechanical and ancient — announcing the return. Green light invaded Canonroll's form from the inside, fragmenting the rock shell into luminous particles that vanished into the air like embers carried away by the wind.
Zayn Al-Kage reappeared.
He staggered.
His knees buckled slightly and he had to place one hand on the ground to avoid falling completely. His hair was a mess. A thin crack marked his forearm where the shell had broken — and from that crack, a few drops of purple blood.
He looked at them.
Blinking.
— Transforming, he said in a slightly dazed voice, hurts like crazy.
Azel approached.
Looked him up and down with that cold, medical attention of someone evaluating damage without being distracted by how it looked.
— You'll get used to it, he said.
— You say that every time.
— Because it's true every time.
Zayn sat on the ground. Ran a hand through his hair. Looked down at the ocean below — those waves that kept going, indifferent, as if nothing had happened.
— He wanted to fight me, he said after a moment.
Azel looked up at him.
— Canonroll. He wanted to take control. I could feel him pushing against me during the entire fight.
— But you held on.
— Yeah.
A silence.
— Barely.
Azel nodded once.
— That's enough for today.
---
They continued.
Training didn't stop at one fight. Azel wasn't that kind of master. There was no bell, no announced end of session, no moment where you could sit down and consider the day's work finished.
There was only — what came next.
Always what came next.
Zayn found himself standing before a pile of rocks.
Not enormous. Not monumental. Just — significantly heavier than what a thirteen-year-old boy should reasonably have been allowed to lift. Three granite blocks arranged before him like a question whose answer wasn't physical, but mental.
He tried.
His arms trembled.
The rock moved a few centimeters.
Then refused to go any farther.
He tried again. And again. With that characteristic stubbornness — not methodical, not patient, but absolutely refusing to accept impossibility as a final answer.
The rock didn't move anymore.
Azel, several meters away, watched.
He said nothing.
Because some lessons can only be learned in the silence of effort. Because words, in moments like these, add nothing — they dilute. And Azel had long since mastered the art of knowing when to speak and when to let silence do the work in his place.
The sun continued its course.
And Zayn kept trying.
---
Far above them.
Beyond the clouds.
Beyond the atmosphere.
Beyond even low orbit where human satellites traced their invisible, repetitive paths — where space truly began, where the blackness was complete and the stars were no longer points in a sky but real presences in a real void — a ship traveled.
Fast.
At a speed that had no name in the vocabulary of civilian engineers — something between a missile and a thought, between a decision and its consequence. The UAP vessel crossed space like a signature drawn at full speed, leaving behind a luminous trail that disappeared as quickly as it appeared.
On its sides, the symbol shone.
The white J.
Cold. Certain. Indifferent to the void surrounding it.
---
Inside.
The ship's command room was silent — that particular silence of places where people have decided that words must deserve to be spoken before existing. Screens projected data continuously. Star maps. Reports. Numbers telling stories only those who knew how to read them could understand.
Arthur D. Blackthorne stood before the main observation window.
Motionless.
He looked at space.
Not with wonder — Arthur had long passed the stage where stars could still surprise him. He looked with that manner unique to him: as if what he saw was less a spectacle than a problem. As if every star, every point of light in that infinite darkness, represented a variable in an equation he had been constantly calculating for years.
His hands behind his back were perfectly still.
His black gloves didn't move.
Behind him, a few steps away — close enough to be useful, far enough not to impose himself — Julian waited.
Julian was one of those people who know how to exist without taking unnecessary space. Not short, not tall. Not striking, not forgettable. An honest face, eyes that looked at things with a sincere attention that held nothing calculating. He held a data pad against his chest with the slight stiffness of someone who had learned to be professional but hadn't yet fully learned not to be nervous.
He cleared his throat lightly.
— Sir.
Arthur didn't turn around.
— I hear you, Julian.
— Ginryuu's reports are... complete. ERROR demonstrated regenerative capabilities beyond our predictive models. And Ryuusei—
— I know what Ryuusei did.
Julian stopped.
Waited.
The way Arthur had said that — not with anger, not with impatience, but with that quiet certainty of someone who had already processed everything and filed it away in the correct compartments — didn't leave much room for continuation.
But Julian continued anyway.
Maybe that was his greatest quality.
— When are we getting rid of them? he asked. The Djinns.
The question was direct. Maybe too direct. Maybe the kind of question a more experienced assistant would have phrased differently — wrapped in protocol, conditional phrasing, verbal precautions.
But Julian had asked it.
Simply.
The way it was truly asked.
Arthur remained silent for a moment.
Space continued drifting beyond the observation window. Stars. Distant nebulas. The darkness between them, dense and deep like certainty.
— Soon, Arthur finally said.
His voice was cold.
Not cruel. Not threatening in an emotional sense. Cold the way things are cold when they were decided long ago and no longer need to be warmed by feelings in order to exist.
He didn't turn around.
His eyes remained on space.
— Soon.
Julian looked at his superior's profile — that face that seemed to have forgotten how to be surprised, those eyes calculating even when facing the void — and nodded slightly.
He asked no further question.
Some answers are enough.
---
Below.
On the cliff.
Zayn Al-Kage pushed once more.
His arms trembled. His knees too, slightly. The purple blood had dried on his forearm — a thin, dark mark reminding him what Canonroll had cost him.
The rock didn't move.
He looked at it.
The rock looked back at him with all the indifference only stone can oppose to human ambition.
Zayn released his effort.
Straightened up.
Ran a hand through his hair.
And said — quietly, just for himself, just loud enough for the wind to carry it away before Azel could hear:
— Don't worry. Tomorrow you're moving.
Then he took position again.
And started over.
---
The sun was descending over the ocean.
The cliff remained.
The UAP vessel crossed space toward Earth.
And somewhere between all of that — between training and the stars, between a boy's promise and a man's cold calculation — something was being built.
Slowly.
Like all things that last.
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