Titan King: Ascension of the Giant Chapter 1714 The Last Day of Timira

Leonidas watched Pallas, a sharp light banked behind his eyes and held there. Pallas in this state was a fine chance to guide.

"We measure ourselves against ourselves. Quiet the heart, clear the soul, make the me of today more at ease than the me of yesterday. Watching the heart is like looking in a mirror—every day it shows back one of your own shortcomings, and we set them right a little at a time. Fall down, get up. Fail, then look hard at why. The road ahead isn't as cruel as you make it out—one step, one footprint is the simplest, most direct way that works."

To feel into yourself, to mirror your own heart—that was the root of grasping the demigod rule. Leonidas was in earnest; he'd already started steering Pallas down that road.

—

Far off, in open country.

Since leaving the Bastion Wall, Orion had kept Scamp by the tail the whole way, carrying him along upside down.

"There's a cave in this great canyon, and a nest of insects hidden inside it." On a hillside, Orion stopped and looked down into the canyon through narrowed eyes.

Scamp rolled his bright, quick eyes, sweeping the canyon below the same way.

"What are you up to?" Scamp had a bad feeling and glanced up at Orion—and caught, just then, the faint curl at the corner of Orion's mouth.

"Pa, what are you up to?" A chill ran down Scamp's spine, his scalp prickling, the bad feeling climbing higher and higher.

"Big Pa, no—no—aaah—" The aah hadn't fully left him, dragging out long, before Orion hurled Scamp down into the canyon.

"Three days. Kill every insect in here, or you're not fit to be my student." Orion's voice came drifting up, flat, carrying across the whole canyon.

The next moment the canyon filled with a dense buzzing and chittering, mountainous, oceanic, drowning out Scamp's smooth-tongued bawling for his ma and pa.

—

Timira. The Snail-Dragon tundra.

It was a damp stretch of tundra—the heart of the world, and the Snail-Dragons' most central habitat. Every grain of soil held a vast vitality. Over long ages the tundra had been steeped in the Snail-Dragons' breath, leaving the ground slick and the climate mild and moist.

Elara sat astride her Snail-Dragon at the tundra's edge, gazing far off, her face so calm nothing showed on it.

"I can feel it. This is the heart of the whole world, and there's an unknown danger hidden up ahead." No demigod, but as a world-spirit Elara still caught something out of the ordinary, and held where she was.

"There's a Divine Kingdom up ahead. No telling what happened here—someone folded a Divine Kingdom into this land. Your Highness, this is a thorny one. The enemy's most likely a being above demigod fourth stage." With his standing as the Order of the Dandelion's Vice-Master, Aednor had the eye for it; he knew well that whatever could craft the masterwork before them had to be a being above demigod fourth stage.

"Demigod fourth stage?" That is a touch hard to handle. Elara held the foundling infant in one arm, working her free hand through the little one's mussed hair, eyes narrowed in thought. "Lord Aednor, you're sure this is Timira's last core region—no hidden sanctum like a Pocket Dimension?" She turned and fixed Aednor, confirming the word once more.

"None. I'm certain." Aednor raised a magical detector in his hand, something like a globe, to show this world held no Pocket Dimension.

"Lord Aednor, if I've read it right, you only came to pick a side, not to lay your life down for me. Elara's thin-skinned—I can't credit myself with that much charm." Aednor shook his head, not answering Elara, no way to tell whether he confirmed or denied the guess.

"Never mind. It doesn't matter—you've done plenty already. Hee. Truth is, Elara's played enough too." All at once Elara loosed an easy laugh, her small face turned up to the sun, the smile on it thick as a golden peony in full bloom.

"In that case, straight to the last step." Elara drew the trident slung at her back. The Flame of Will gathered on it, a dark-gold fire kindling and bursting.

As though it had loosed some signal, they all felt the ground tremble, the world rock. From deep underground came a low, muffled roar, like some ancient beast waking, a lizard's long cry. Then a ceaseless cracking split the air, and what showed before them was the earth tearing open, the rock strata breaking, terrible spiderweb fissures snaking out across the whole Snail-Dragon tundra.

"Rise—Bloodline Worldtree."

Elara's voice reached every ear, fevered and devout, smug and proud. The astonishing scene before them was her own handiwork.

With a rolling rumble, a Bloodline Worldtree burst from the soil, blood-red through and through, dense with branch and leaf, trunk like a sky-bearing pillar, root-tendrils gnarled and coiled like lizards. As the countless roots twisted and writhed, the topsoil heaved over and the stones crumbled, and through the flying dust the Bloodline Worldtree rose by degrees to blot out the sky.

"Shatter." Elara's voice, going cold by degrees, rang across heaven and earth, and as the words fell, the Bloodline Worldtree—hung thick with fruit beyond counting—shook all over, and the blood-fruit, glinting with a baleful sheen, burst one after another. Down on the ground, the slaves who'd eaten the blood-fruit and fallen under Elara's control turned, every one, into clouds of blood-mist.

"By blood for the spark, by fruit for the offering, in the name of the Stoneheart titan, I light the never-dying ember in the blood—come, Father God, descend." Elara rose into the air and took on the four-headed, eight-armed Stoneheart titan form, awe-inspiring.

An offering Divine Art? Aednor and the rest, who'd only watched until now, all fixed on Elara, wanting to see what grand spectacle the Stoneheart Horde's eldest daughter would conjure, how she meant to take the Snail-Dragon world of Timira.

"Glory is my body, glory is my life—My Lord's radiance lights ten thousand worlds. Glory is my body, glory is my life—My Lord's radiance lights ten thousand worlds—"

Behind Aednor and the others, the fevered, reverent roar of the Anubis gnolls and the massed guards came sweeping in like surf, and a suffocating thrum and weight came down all at once. Aednor, Thaddeus, Naya, Braham, Anya, and the two demigods of the Saint Gran Council all looked up—toward the void, toward the quarter the pressure came from.

Crack. Crack.

Two breaking sounds from the level of the rules rang out one after the other—the sound of the Realm Barrier being whipped to pieces by the World Tree's roots. Timira, this beguiling Snail-Dragon world, from the instant the foreign World Tree roots broke through the wall and entered, spun end over end—the clouds scattered, the wind died, the sun sank and the moon went into hiding.

The whole world lost its luster.

Every person, every living thing, looked up at the sky. There, in the void, hung the one and only radiance. The everlasting World Tree roots reached out of the black, gaping void, and a four-headed, eight-armed war god beyond all matching, trident in hand, looked down on all creation and came stepping, slow and steady, down the World Tree's roots.

Timira—the last day dawned.