The Eternal Forge was silent, but it was not empty. It was filled with the crushing, invisible weight of a planet's crust.
Zephyr sat at the center of the vast, three-dimensional aetheric grid, his perception stretched thin across the tectonic plates of Aerthys. He was not looking at maps. He was feeling the planetary stress fractures resonating through his own divine architecture. Beneath the Sovereign Imperium, miles deep in the bedrock, the Morreth Entity pushed upward—a blind, starving leviathan of shadow and stone trying to breach the surface.
And Zephyr pushed back.
He did not use muscle, and he did not use armies. He used the sheer, focused gravity of twenty-seven million believers. The FP flow was a torrential river of golden light, pouring from the fanatical prayers of the Imperium directly into the crystalline lattice of the starvation shell Zephyr had constructed around the entity. The math was absolute. The shell held.
But the mortar was bleeding.
