It had been hard enough to march across the landscape with it constantly shaking under the footsteps of two giants. The most vulnerable members of the clan, and the families with small children—including the Patriarch’s wife and children—had flown off long before, but the Kazan had no abundance of flying mounts or constructs.

Therefore, they had to make their painful way across a ground that tossed like a sea in storm as the Monarch clashed with the Dreadgod. Each arrow that crashed into the Titan’s skin sounded like a collapsing tower, though Ziel recognized that the Monarch’s might was suppressed by the field around Sacred Valley just like everyone else’s.

Every step the clan took was shrouded in fear, because the very earth could betray them. A tree might fall, crushing someone, or a wagon would be swallowed up by a chasm.

Even Ziel cheered her on. In his own way. He nodded approvingly and grunted once or twice, at least.

He would rather lose someone here and there to accidents than everyone to a Dreadgod. At least in this scenario, when he was quick enough, he could save some.

And Akura Malice was pushing the Titan away. In only a few more steps, it would be drawn away from Sacred Valley entirely.

So when he and the Kazan clan did finally reach the mass of humanity pushing to leave through Heaven’s Glory, Ziel’s heart flooded with relief. He made the mistake of thinking, We made it.

Then the crystal song of a giant bird filled the air. Rather than peaceful, it sounded like a war cry, and the sky began to swirl with red.

Ziel had never heard that song before, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out what it was.

He called his hammer from his soulspace. Not that he thought he could fight; he clutched it to stop his hands from trembling.

Around him, Kazan men and women mounted on their craghounds shifted and muttered uneasily. The Patriarch and several elders looked to Ziel. “Pardon, but what was that?”

Ziel’s gaze was nailed to the east.

He remembered the storm rolling in, flashing blue and gold as living lightning slipped in and out like fish in the sea. The majestic roar, as the Weeping Dragon approached. He had watched the horizon then, awed by its majesty.

His mouth was too dry for the first word. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and tried again. “Run,” Ziel whispered.

Around them, some of the other Kazan began to scream. They had traveled overland during a fight between the Wandering Titan and a Monarch; not one of them was free of scratches and bruises, even discounting the greater wounds.

Wherever blood dripped from the ground, separating itself from the body of the host, bloodspawn began to rise.

They were slow here. Weak. The blood aura was thin.

The Patriarch seized Ziel by the front of the outer robe. “What is happening?” he demanded.

“Go to the north,” Ziel said. “Or the south. Anywhere…anywhere else.”

A Dreadgod to the west, and a Dreadgod to the east.

What had he been thinking, staying with these people and taking his chances with the Titan? Then again, how could he have known they were only moving toward the Phoenix?

Effortlessly, he broke the Patriarch’s hold on him and returned to the one remaining flying transport in the clan: his own Thousand-Mile Cloud.

He rose into the air even as the Bleeding Phoenix itself flew past Samara’s ring. It seemed as big as a mountain, and it looked exactly as he’d always heard: smooth as a liquid, pure red, and somehow…revolting. Twisted. Wrong.

The Dreadgod gave another resonant, echoing cry, and spewed red light down on the land outside the valley.

Ziel flew resolutely away.

His hammer weighed down the Thousand-Mile Cloud, so he sucked the weapon back into his soulspace, but without anything to hold onto, his fingers kept shaking. He had to clasp them together.

He paid no attention to the screams from beneath him, because they were drowned out by other screams. Older screams.

The Weeping Dragon had brought with it lesser dragons, spirits of Stormcaller madra, which had been repelled by the Dawnwing sect’s defenses. Until the Stormcallers themselves had torn those defenses down.

Then he’d seen hungry lightning tear men apart.

Ziel intentionally fixed his eyes on the sky so as not to see the bloodspawn, so it was with a strange sense of separation that he realized he was actually staring at the ground.

Bloodspawn, like little parodies of men constructed from blood madra and the will of the Phoenix. They were red puppets, some of them shifting to take on crude shapes of the madra of those they fed on. When they rose from the Kazan clan, they were mostly blocky clay men.

Here, a Kazan woman pushed her copy back and smashed its head open with a club. Some of his followers had resisted the dragons too.

There, a young man was beaten down by the hammer-like fists of a bloodspawn. He was lucky. The dragons had been even more brutal.

Directly beneath Ziel, a bloodspawn’s head opened wide to feast on a fallen man. This was the one common aspect between all the Dreadgods: hunger. Those of them that Forged these spirits did so to feed.

So he had seen this before. Over and over again. As the Sage of Calling Storms bound him in place and propped him up so he could see the rest of the sect being devoured.

At first, he had strained, trembling in helpless fury. Wishing he could tear free, his hammer in hand, and splatter the dragons into a red spray.

Wait.

The dragons were spirits of lightning madra. They had no blood. When they were destroyed, they splattered into blue essence and gold sparks.

So why was he covered in slowly dissolving blood madra?

The fallen man at his feet stirred, but Ziel had already swung into another of the spawn nearby. The feeling of it splattering was viscerally satisfying.

He focused on that with such intensity that he forgot his fear of the Dreadgods. Their situation faded into the back of his mind.

It was all about breaking bloodspawn.

He crushed a few more, but others already rose. If he really wanted to win this game, he would need his Path.

He poured himself into Forging a green rune, bigger than his chest, complex and intricate. He threw it hundreds of yards away, but it would only hover as long as he didn’t quite complete the Forging. So he had to hold the technique as he Forged more and more.

As he did, the Kazan clan gathered around him. They fought the spawn of the Bleeding Phoenix, covering Ziel, apparently realizing that whatever he was doing, it would win them the day.

But the bloodspawn realized something too, pushing against the human barrier around Ziel. One of their necks stretched, carrying its featureless head close to Ziel. A mouth stretched across its blank crimson face, cracking into a maw full of teeth so it could take a bite out of Ziel’s flesh. His body was stronger than the others here, richer in blood aura, so it was the most tempting treat.

Ziel didn’t care.

He was solely focused on breaking as many of these spawn as possible. It was the only thought he still had room for.

The bloodspawn’s jaws snapped down on him, its upper teeth scraping his horns.

Then he triggered his boundary field.

Every one of the bloodspawn exploded.

They sprayed liquid blood madra—and in some cases, actual blood—over everyone around. Ziel stood in the center of seven orbiting green runes, and the circle was perhaps three or four hundred yards wide. He had caught hundreds of spawn.

Or so his spiritual sense told him.