High above the boiling lake of soul-fire, Sovereign Solon suddenly went entirely still.
The roaring lightning wreaths around his sleeves sputtered, their crackling fury dying into strange, frozen silence.
His ancient, cold gaze had shifted away from Kaelen’s face, dropping toward the wooden picnic table on the obsidian floor. His eyes widened, locking onto the battered, dog-eared leather recipe book resting beside Claire Vance’s teacup.
“That binding...” Solon whispered, his voice trembling with disbelief that cut through five millennia of imperial pride.
He leaned forward from his star-core throne, his divine sense lashing out across the cavern like an invisible spear. The golden aura bored into Kaelen’s brow, attempting to pierce the young man’s sea of consciousness.
Inside Kaelen’s mind, the Fallow Slate flared with soft, unyielding jade light, deflecting the probe with effortless ease.
Solon recoiled as if he had touched white-hot iron.
“The Complete Fallow Slate,” Solon hissed, the words trembling with genuine horror. “It is impossible. I shattered that heretical stone with my own hands. I scattered its dust across thirty-three thousand lower worlds five thousand years ago.”
