On the sixtieth night of the siege, the northern sky turned a shade of indigo so dark it looked like bruised void-skin.
High above the battlefield, inside the frozen chambers of the Hall of Edicts, Sovereign Nyx stood before a tall archway of void-glass.
Below her, eight thousand six hundred and forty miles across the cold vacuum, Moon Six continued its slow, steady crawl along the celestial winch cables.
For sixty days, Sovereign Vael’s trebuchets had pounded the lower satellites without a pause. Millions of tons of white-hot plasma had rained down upon the rebel strongholds.
Yet the cratered crust of Moon Six had not cracked.
Worse, the terrifying sovereign aura that had vaporized the Flame Envoy two months ago had vanished entirely.
For sixty straight days, Nyx’s divine sense had swept the surface of Moon Six every hour. She had found no soaring pillars of sword Qi, no grand defensive rituals, and no signs of sovereign cultivation.
There was only a baffling, dead stillness.
