The air over Mount Apex had grown as heavy as wet cement.
High above, perched upon his rusted iron throne, Scribe Lord Mo Sha was breathing in ragged, choked gasps. Two ancient styluses lay shattered in his lap. The first reduced to chalk, the second crumbled into brimstone grit.
Around him, the leftover nine Void Calligraphers hovered in a tight circle. Their fine china masks shook as they clutched their dripping spine-bone brushes.
“Two anomalies...” Mo Sha snarled, his voice shaking with poisonous frustration. “One anchored by mortal steel... One restored by an insolent boiler drill... But the Law of Erasure doesn’t bend to parlor tricks!”
Mo Sha raised the third metal pen high.
Carved from the hardened thigh bone of an Ancient Nether Behemoth, the heavy bone pulsed with sickly, rotting emerald lightning.
“The third apprentice,” Mo Sha incanted. His black glass eyes locked onto the broad-shouldered, denim-clad figure standing by the digging trench. “Niu Mang. An abandoned beast of burden. Born with the dull intellect of an ox, fit only to haul stones until his spine broke in the mines.”
Mo Sha dipped the jagged behemoth bone into the boiling well of void-bile.
