High above the trembling peaks of Mount Apex, the sky curdled into a sickly, bruised violet.
Scribe Lord Mo Sha sat hunched upon his rusted pig-iron throne, his chest heaving with ragged, wet wheezes. Three ancient relics lay destroyed in his wake. The bone metal pen shattered, the brimstone metal pen boiled away, the behemoth bone snapped clean in two.
Below him, three of his twelve Void Calligraphers were already smeared across the gravel as dried black soot.
Yet down on the sunlit central platform, Frank was calmly putting his tools away. His grease pencil was tucked behind his ear.
“Three failed erasures...” Mo Sha hissed, his voice trembling with manic, desperate venom. “Three times, you mock the Ledger of Heaven with stamps, drills, and shovels. But you can’t patch every crack in the dam, carpenter! You can’t insulate the soul against the Primal Discord!”
Mo Sha plunged both hands into the dark folds of his funeral shroud.
He drew his arms back out. Then, he held two slender, bone-white flutes carved from the stone-hard throat cords of Ancient Nether-Sirens. The flutes were riddled with jagged sound sky-slits, pulsing with an eerie, high-hum static hum that caused the hair on everyone’s arms to stand straight up.
