Krahe felt her life flash before her eyes. This path, which she had painstakingly and far-too-often walked in the near past, simply zipped by her now. There was neither doubt, nor confusion to speak of. This outpouring of what she deemed to be “Liquid Identity” from her palm was nothing more than a reaffirmation, a recitation of a hymn she knew by heart, and its flow dragged the guidestone’s power out of its shell, reams of scrawl flowing along the current. As they settled, their whitish glow flashed through the trench like the strikes of lightning within a storm cloud. These “scrawl-serpents” moved along the grand glyph’s perimeter, their movement represented on the floating diagram by the subtle shifting of colour, and, after making the full circuit, they gathered in the circle surrounding Y’Alha’Zor and reached up from the trench, forming an upside-down curtain around the vessel. After all, the guidestone’s eidolon-binding power was to be used for this purpose.

  Pulled along by its threads, the guidestone fragment “slipped” out of her grasp, carried with the final current into the trench. It immediately became clear that there was a subtler and far more profound role for the guidestone to play in this rite. Once more, she was reminded of how little she knew before one such as the King of Many Colours. It was entirely possible that this exact, specific variation of this ritual was simply one of many within his repertoire, and that his knowledge was so vast he could simply substitute or alter parts of it on the spot with perfect confidence.

  “Y——KH!”

  The King of Many Colours invoked. Myriad voices answered, matching his call, all soldiers in accord, answering without question, without hesitation, answering simply because that was their place, to support their King in all endeavors. From everywhere and nowhere at once came the voices, voices from the deep, the singing of beings great and small, from every tower that hung above the Grey Fog. From the black spires of Zor’Aguhastra, calling, invoking, commanding, an impenetrable tapestry. All of Zor’Aguhastra became the ritual choir.

  A distant, indistinct thumping carried from below, the contribution of those interred in the Grey Fog, those who had carved off their own faces and thus had no mouths with which to sing. Drums, drums in the deep.

  Once more, the King invoked: “Y——KH!”

  Only now, as Krahe moved to raise her hands from the basin and found herself moving in slow motion, she finally noticed the pressure that had begun bearing down on her from the moment the King began drawing the ritual glyph. This crushing force, ten thousand times the force she had withstood when the King carelessly stepped off his throne, ought to throw her to the ground and squeeze the life from her, yet it wasn’t doing that. Despite being surrounded and pressed upon by this tyrannical presence, she was completely fine; it was as if she had dived to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a tin can, and the ocean simply chose not to crumple her.

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  “Y——KH!”

  With the third invocation of its name, a cold, savage, and lurid aura washed over the throne room. The vessel that was Y’Alha’Zor came alive, a greyish-blue glow filling its flesh. The entity within its confines raised the vessel’s arms as if to examine it with its nonexistent eyes, only for the collar and head to slam down upon its shoulders, its respective nails slamming into place. The Black Crucifix followed, each nail finding its place unerring. The more Y——kh struggled, the more of the guidestone’s scrawl wrapped itself around the vessel’s limbs.

  By the end of it, as the exoframe locked into the posture of crucifixion, Y’Alha’Zor was strung up like a puppet. Some reams of scrawl cruelly bound the vessel’s flesh and cut into it, while others stretched between the nails that pierced its limbs like the strings of a guitar, and others still crawled beneath the flesh in the same manner as Krahe had observed with Sorayah. Gradually, they faded out of view, sinking fully into the vessel..

  “Cease this farce at once. You have agreed to the terms, knowing your vessel-to-be,” the King of Many Colours scoffed. The indignant aura that swirled about Y’Alha’Zor didn’t let up even a bit.

  As the reams of its script entangled Y’Alha’Zor and bound the true essence of Y——kh within it, the stone itself flew into the middle of the triangle, hanging there.

  “Now, F———A!” the King called, gesturing towards the vessel of Zhah-Rhan-Thule. The sensation of an impending meteorite strike overcame Krahe, she felt the blood drain from her limbs, and simultaneously felt a searing heat well up in her stomach. Then, as swiftly as it had come over her, the sensation passed. A pillar of pale fire consumed Zhah-Rhan-Thule, obscuring it from sight, only to be sucked into the sigil of Phlogiston upon the glass moon’s surface. The vessel’s appearance was the same, and yet its presence completely changed in a way Krahe couldn’t properly put into words even if she tried. The line between the circles of Y’Alha’Zor and Zhah-Rhan-Thule erupted with a curtain of iridescent-black, an inverted waterfall akin to an Archon Flash, only devoid of the screaming noise. Krahe could still easily see the King through this curtain.

  An expression of disgust and hesitation took hold of the King’s features as he turned towards Barzai.

  “And… Lastly, you, o Nameless Thing; you, who are a Herald of Ruin and an Executioner’s Assistant.”

  Barzai barely moved. He inclined his head ever so slightly, his eyes flashed red, and that was it; the lines joining his circle to the two others also erupted with the same iridescent-black.

  The trench overflowed, yet its contents spilled out only inward, and the darkly-pearlescent fluid surged upward, enveloping the guidestone in an upside-down vortex. Slowly and gradually, but at the same time within the span of only seconds, an enormous slab of dark stone solidified around the guidestone fragment. It simultaneously towered far out of sight, but it was also the exact right dimensions to be “just big enough” for Krahe to lay atop it. Tendrilous shapes framed each of its faces, and Krahe knew just by seeing them that they represented the Snare-sign of Blackest Pitch, the strength of theurgy she already possessed. Teeth lined the insides of these tendrils, as if “biting into” the obelisk, and, just the same as with the tendrils, Krahe immediately knew them to represent the Wound-like Grin, proving this was not a simply matter of what the Seven Spokes System recognized as “Boons.”

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