When the white-gold aurora reached its zenith, the sound of the world ceased.
The ear-splitting roar of the dying storm, the screams of the wounded, the clatter of shell casings on the marble floor. All of it collapsed into an eerie, total silence, as if the space-folding fabric of the seventieth floor had been cut from the passage of earthly time.
Floating three feet above the glass-fused stone, Vesper’s physical form underwent its ultimate old family transformation.
She didn’t become a monster. She didn’t grow ugly hard shell plates or sprout unnatural limbs. In strict accordance with the ancient laws of the ancient Chinese star-patterns, the divine beast kept the pure, lethal perfection of an apex feline hunting beast.
Her body lengthened, reaching nearly four meters from her sleek, regal snout to the tip of her ringed tail. Her coat was a miracle of evolutionary transcendence. Not merely white, but a shimmering, blazing bright silver that absorbed and refracted light like polished starlight falling upon fresh snow. Subtle, semi-clear rosettes traced along her flanks. It glowed with the pale white-gold radiance of ancient sky star-maps.
Around her neck, the silver fur thickened into a royal ruff that rippled with razor-thin metal bristles. Her whiskers, fine as sight fiber cables, twitched in map point space, registering the gravity shaking of every particle in the hall.
