Page 174

The holo vision snapped away, and she turned to Sulfiqar.

The flicker of amusement in the Highest’s eyes was infuriating.

It was clear he cared little about what her father had undergone.

She swallowed her rage, her body vibrating with the energy required to keep from combusting.

Rising to her feet, Issa reached up, her fingertips lifting off the delicate jar-shaped earrings that hung from her ears.

She held the mesmerizing glass-like orbs, staring down as they swirled with luminous red, pink, and gold atoms, their celestial radiance shifting with her every movement.

The jewelry glowed, the swirling spheroids melting together, fusing into a single entity.

The air trembled, and a whisper of sacred energy encircled her as the two halves became one, the Sanopic Jar, whole once more.

She clutched it in her hands, its incandescent glow casting light across her face.

She’d fought to keep this out of the god’s voracious grasp for years.

She’d bled and burned to protect it.

Now, with a suck of her teeth, she extended it toward the Divine Immortal.

Sulfiqar’s golden eyes gleamed as he reached for it, his expression unreadable.

As his fingers closed around the ancient vessel, the sacred essence within it pulsed one last time against her palms as if reluctant to leave her.

Then, twas ripped from her grip, and so was her fate.

The chamber convulsed as a new storm erupted.

A violent shockwave hit, hurling luminous embers of ethereal combustion across the crystalline floor.

Thunder cracked overhead, splitting the heavens open with raw celestial rage.

A tempest of violet lightning streaked through the gilded ceiling, illuminating the space in flashes of white-hot brilliance.

The walls trembled, and the atmosphere shifted to a primordial, ancient, and wrathful ambiance.

The towering doors slammed apart, the force rattling the marble pillars.

Gilded dust cascaded from the high arches as Somayeh, the Goddess of War, stepped through the storm.

Her arrival was not gentle nor subtle.

It was a declaration. A conquest. A reckoning.

She marched forward, her strides unyielding, unrelenting, unstoppable.

Her obsidian armor shone like a polished celestial blade, etched in silver glyphs that pulsed with the light of a thousand battlefields. Over her chest, an imperial crest of ancient warlords blazed with the intensity of an eternal flame.

Two blackened scimitars sat strapped to her side, each honed edge flickering with whispers of the wars they won.

At her hip, a curved dagger gleamed like a beast’s fang. Twas chiseled from the tooth of a primordial Leviathan, its edges pulsating with the force of multitudinous past battles.

Across her back, a massive shield rested, inscribed with forgotten battle hymns.

In her right hand was the war spear of living lightning, its shaft carved from the spine of a fallen titan, its blade a flickering tempest.