It took effort for Vex to hold back his mana as much as he did. A not-insignificant part of him wanted to unleash it all, in no small part driven by the frustration he still felt with his father — but he grit his teeth and held it back. The dragon-transformation had done a lot for his mana channels, and the amount he could now hold exceeded even Derivan, whose Slime stat also let him carry far more mana than the average adventurer.

There were so many other ways to store mana. If his family had just bothered to look—

Vex forced himself not to think those thoughts, and he thought he caught Derivan giving him a sympathetic look, though the armor's focus was mostly on maintaining the portals.

Just gotta complete the spell.

It was easier said than done. For all that he understood glyphs better now, the working he was trying for wasn't something he'd done before — it was a combination of several glyphs, including Derivan's personal Sign, a spatial glyph, a transportation glyph, a directional glyph...

Derivan's Sign was what held it all together, and if the armor hadn't donated a portion of his mana, the spell likely wouldn't work at all. Even now, it was complicated enough that it was taking an immense amount of mana and no small amount of time. Karix, to his credit, was putting his full effort behind completing this spell; Vex no longer thought his father was trying to trick him.

It was only a small relief.

Trickles of mana spilled out of the glyph they were empowering, flowing out through the kingdom of Elyra. If he focused, Vex could sense the way each trickle split and separated, making a connection with every remaining individual — but that quickly became impossible to track.

"How... much longer?" Karix asked, gritting his teeth.

"Two minutes," Vex said.

It was just a guess, but it was an educated one. At the rate mana was flowing out, they needed to maintain the state of the glyph for another two minutes — which was already remarkably fast, considering how much ground the spell had to cover — and then they could activate the spatial transportation part of it and teleport everyone out.

Vex was aware that with every passing second, more and more of the kingdom was being taken by the Void. Derivan and the others were doing their best to keep everyone away from the telltale cracks in reality, but only those connected to Misa's anchor could really tell that they were there at all.

[ Prime Anchor has reached critical integrity. Please evacuate. ]

"We're trying," Vex muttered. Karix read the same message on his system with an impassive expression, though Vex felt the flow of mana from his father increase slightly as he strained.

If nothing else, he was at least taking the threat seriously now.

—

The Speaker was furious.

He'd be hard-pressed to pinpoint exactly what was making him so furious. The defiance of House Ashion was a major factor in it — he'd sensed the exact moment Karix had changed his mind on his allegiances and decided to help his son instead, despite all mental scans not indicating even the slightest chance of that happening.

But that wasn't the only thing going wrong. Of the three Platinums he'd sent out to capture the rebels, only one of them still reported to him, and he had no idea what she was thinking; Liz had somehow found a way to lock him out of her mind entirely. The fact that she was still doing what he told her was a small miracle, considering the other two had stopped responding entirely.

The Ascension Project was very close to failing. The nascent mind and divinity was still stored within the Wisfield estate, and the rebels disrupting the ritual hadn't dispelled it entirely — but without the Wisfield elders maintaining its domain, the other gods flooded back into Elyra, strengthening it with their various divine protections. It made him weaker, made his projects that much less effective; no longer could he control the populace.

And yet.

And yet.

He wasn't done. Not by a long shot. He had contigency plan upon contingency plan, and although most of them had failed to some degree, he still had enough control to make it all work. If the damn Ashion heir would just stop throwing fireballs at him and his team—

"Can you not kill him already?" he snapped to one of his guards. The man flinched back, looking nervous, and shook his head.

"He's very strong," he explained quickly. "Every time we get close he heats up the air around him so much we can't get any closer, and he's got some kind of flash shield that incinerates any arrow we send towards him."

"What about Liz?" the Speaker growled. "She can kill him just fine."

"She's preoccupied with your other orders, sir," the guard said. He didn't meet the Speaker's eyes, and that was fine; the Speaker preferred it that way. He'd forgotten about his orders. He'd asked Liz to go to the Wisfield estate and retrieve the divine anchor they'd built to store their divinity — what was taking her so long?

"Fine," the Speaker growled.

It didn't matter. They had their own mages that could hold off Helix, even if they had to take turns just so they could counter the lizardkin's massive mana pool, and his personal protections would prevent any type of mana from coming into contact with him even if those mages failed him. The Ashion heir couldn't do a thing to him — The fireballs were an irritation, not a true threat, and once Liz returned...

The divinity they were building was based on the combined mental weight of all of Elyra's citizens. Once he had it in his hands, he could force it to awaken, nascent creature or not — and once he had the power of a god in his hands, he could fix everything.

He knew he could. The god had been able to do so much. It had been able to direct the attention of the Void, to make it consume something specific rather than eat away at everything in sight. Choosing it to eat away at the concept of Growth had been a necessary sacrifice; it would prolong the Void the longest, according to their diviners...

The Speaker blinked.

In the span between one moment and the next, everyone around him had vanished. The mental weight around him had similarly disappeared. To all his senses, Elyra seemed empty.

"This isn't funny, Illyr," the Speaker said. He took a step forward, and the sound echoed through the empty streets of Elyra. "...Illyr?"

But the city was empty.

—

"That should be everyone," Vex said. He was panting, strained, and his father was even worse off; the older lizardkin was outright unconscious from mana overuse. Derivan was carrying him in his arms — they were, as far as he knew, the only three people left in all of Elyra. Now all they needed to do was evacuate.

"I am unable to check," Derivan cautioned him. "I have exhausted the part of myself that can use Shift. If anyone remains..."

"No one should be able to," Vex said, frowning slightly. "We'll keep an eye out, but that spell should get through most if not all mana defenses. You'd need something divinely ordained to block it, and all the gods in Elyra are on our side."

Derivan nodded at that, though he looked uncertain. "Then we should meet with the others. They will be at the northern side of Elyra."

The streets of Elyra were... strange, for lack of a better word. Vex had traveled them often, as a young child and then as a teen; they had never been this empty. The silence was unnerving, and the outright missing buildings were even worse. Holes in the street where he knew one of his favorite shops should have been, or alleyways that were entirely missing from the city he was so familiar with.

It felt, in a lot of ways, like a bad dream.

Derivan nudged him gently with a shoulder. "Are you alright?" he asked, concern clear in his voice.

"As much as I can be," Vex said. He tried to put on a brave smile, but even that seemed like too much effort; it lapsed again as his attention wavered. "Just hard to believe we're saying goodbye to my home. If the Elyran Prime Anchor collapses, I might never see any of this again. I spend all my life wanting to get away, but... I'm still going to miss this place. I have a lot of memories here."

"At least you will remember them," Derivan said quietly. "To have someone remember the true state of things is perhaps the greatest gift, in a world where no one can."

"You would know, I suppose." Vex remembered what Derivan had told him of the Void and what he'd seen in it — all the people that had lost their homes and large swathes of their memory, just waiting to dissolve into nothing. "I wonder if any of us really remember anything at all, compared to Sev."

"Even he does not remember everything. He..."

"Doesn't have most of his memories, I know," Vex said with a small sigh. "I just... it's sad, how much we've lost, don't you think?"

"It is." Derivan was silent for a moment. "But as long as we are alive, we can always work to get it back."

"Misa did get her family back, after all." Vex managed a small, real smile, then. "Come on. Let's go meet with the others."