The dowdy city street below was dark and drawn in the gloaming hour.
Aurelius rode the current of the late winter air through the smog above the City of Angels, listening to the empty howl of the wind and its hollow song. A dated basilica waited in the quiet street, its slanted roof burdened by the weight of a slouching birch tree. There were no symbols of denomination decorating the lintel, no definite sign of religious bias. Just stained glass windows and untouched autumn leaves.
The Absolian angled his wings and plummeted.
A web of scripts woven through the air tugged against him and tore like the gossamer strands they were. He thrust his hand out, raw energy held in his palm, and didn't so much as blink when he passed through the roof, shingles and rafters shattering into splinters, the beams breaking with calamitous sounds.
Aurelius twisted mid-air and landed upon the interior floor in a hailstorm of debris. A man in a black cassock balked and reeled from the downpour, crying in protests when the wooden pews scattered like terrified children in the presence of a cruel parent. The faux-priest laying prostrate upon the ground gawked in horror as the winged creature stood in the abrasive light reflected by the overhead pollution.
The Absolian granted the worthless mage a bored glance and a thoughtless gesture. Power swelled, invisible yet undeniable, and struck the mage across his torso. Flesh was rent and bones popped like rocks going through a metal fan.
Aurelius lowered his cold eyes from the red smear to the well-trod carpet. He sensed the other mages below him, scurrying about in their tunnels, alerted by his less than subtle entrance. Already their spells rose toward the church in effort to reinforce their barrier, dozens of masculine voices mixed in a terrified cacophony.
They thought themselves safe in the earth, safe behind their wards and scripts even as Aurelius' spiraling power shredded the incandescent constructs and runes etched into the church's rotting frame.
A smile tipped the Absolian's lips.
He concentrated and the unleashed magic changed, driving itself downward, forming large, cracked furrows in concrete and stone. The energy ripped itself in two opposing directions and, in an instant, tore the basilica's foundation apart, sending a shockwave out that shattered what windows remained and poured colored glass over the broken altar.
It's been too long since I've allowed myself a bit of fun.
The Absolian's dark wings disappeared as he hopped into the opened hole.
Many of the mages had fled deeper into the stone hovel, unable to fight their fear in the face of such an indomitable foe. Some men in their uniformed coats of gray and violet remained, older mages of an older generation, and they slung spells toward Aurelius with reckless abandon. Some landed, peppering his lean body with aggravating bites and stings, but most rebounded, glanced away, or were devoured by his riled magic.
Aurelius swung his arm perpendicular to his body and his power mimicked the motion, slicing outward in an unsheathed blade of screaming energy. It cut through the mages without hesitation, silencing their hurled spells, and they crumpled in so many piles of diced, crimson pieces.
He walked on, booted feet sluicing through red lakes as the ground trembled under his weight and his magic enveloped him in a storm of silent pressure. Cracks appeared in the concrete walls and crawled from Aurelius in shaken spirals, the corridor buckling and bowing as if a creature of much larger mass was traipsing its narrow confines.
Aurelius felt the heady warmth of his power burgeon in his chest, summoned from the realm of his creation, and he could almost taste the sweet air of Absolia and its interminable sunset. How those manifold colors of dying light had flavor was a mystery, but each shade of gold and red seemed to fill the Absolian's mouth with memories of his abandoned home.
As the river of kinetic force swept through him, so too did an unwelcomed voice.
<What are you doing, my son?>
Aurelius shoved the voice away, refusing it an answer.
He came at last upon this sorry band's leader. The short, shaved man was hunkered in a study with two of his lieutenants, and when Aurelius blasted the metal door out of his way, constructs burst into life with ugly, virulent colors. Electricity crackled along the Absolian's spine and he jolted when the wayward forks of lightning sunk through his heart.
Aurelius' lips parted in surprise as the taste of mage blood replaced the more savory flavor of home. The man wasn't as gormless as he seemed if he was willing and able to bring such a dark spell to fruition. Every nuance of the spell spinning in the Absolian's veins was laced with the mage's cloudy blood.
With two swift flicks of Aurelius' wrist, the mages on either side of the bald wizard were felled, heads rolling.
"S-shit!" was the only word to come stammering out of the man's mouth as he watched his compatriots crumple and the Absolian shook off the black spell's influence.
"You are the leader of this...?" Aurelius sought the right word, jaded gaze coming to rest upon the patch sewn to the mage's heaving chest. "Syndicate, yes?"
The man wished to deny it. The Absolian could see the lie crouching behind his scrunched, watery eyes, just waiting to leap past those chapped, trembling lips—but the wizard surprised Aurelius when he spoke truth.
"Yes. Yes, I am. I am Bekras Gray, leader of the Gray Arcanum!"
Aurelius hummed, unimpressed.
"I require a bigger man than you," the Absolian stated as he approached, unseen constructs snapping and breaking underfoot. "Speaking politically, of course. I need a bigger...syndicate, as this one—." He gestured at the short walls broken under his power, at the dark hallway and the blackened light, its energy sucked into his own. "Is much too small. The impact of its destruction would be limited."
"Limited—?!"
"Tell me the location of a larger syndicate," Aurelius commanded, his tone light but brooking no argument. "Tell me, and I shall spare the rest of your feckless brotherhood."
The man named Bekras ignited another construct, this one scratched into his inflamed palm, and though the bellow of the explosive spell hit Aurelius in the chest, the Absolian didn't waiver. What energy contained within the construct's roughly hewn definitions fizzled before it could make contact with Aurelius' lambent flesh.
White talons erupted from his fingertips and, before the spell's smoke could clear, they drove themselves into Bekras's shoulder.
The wizard let out a pained shout as he was slammed into the empty wall at his back. Aurelius held him there with one hand, his expression placid as he waited for the worm to speak.
"W-why are you doing this?!" Bekras choked as he fought to pull Aurelius' talons from his body. The Absolian applied more pressure, watching the red rivulets trickling along his golden skin. "This is not what you're supposed to do!"
Aurelius' head tilted in question and a lock of carmine hair crossed his forehead.
"The Wandergard are meant to enforce magical neutrality in the realm!" Bekras panted, saliva clinging to his teeth in thin strands as pain heightened the color in his pale face. "W-we've done nothing wrong! It's the Sins you want! Where are the rest of the Wandergard? They want the Sins, not us!"
The Absolian grinned then, letting his glamour dissolve until he towered above the tiny wizard and all of the Gray Arcanum's lair shook beneath the assault of his unrestrained power. He could hear the other living mages running, fleeing for their lives like so many rats bailing from a sinking vessel.
"What do you know of the Wandergard?" Aurelius whispered with derision, tongue lingering at the sharpened points of his teeth, each syllable stressed as he fought to keep speaking in this lesser language. "What do you know of me?"
Bekras withered before the terrible creature and almost fainted when its feathered wings appeared. He was powerless in the wake of this thing's torrential ability. He'd spent an entire lifetime building his syndicate's influence, studying and learning and molding his own inclinations until he shone as one of the western seaboard's best and brightest wizards—and yet he was little more than a ragdoll in the hands of a creature like this.
Aurelius twisted his talons and Bekras screamed.
"Where is your greatest syndicate? The largest one? The one whose destruction would most resonate throughout this petty little realm?"
Bekras's blunt nails scoured the Absolian's corded wrists, though no blood welled in the scratches, only threads of white light.
"Why?!" the mage demanded as he struggled. "Why would you do this? Why create such destruction when it is your purpose to stop it?!"
The Absolian dug his talons in until he could taste the wizard's pulse beating against his own. "I require an audience—," he said with the same flat, quiet intonation, his words disturbed by neither the screams or the steady flow of dirt raining from the ceiling as the tunnels began to collapse. "An audience with a man whose attention is quite difficult to gain, as he fashions himself an important figure."
Bekras didn't understand.
Aurelius leaned nearer and the wizard cringed when the creature's impeccable features came into greater focus. He was horrid in his beauty, vile and alien, so much so it hurt the man's eyes to look upon him.
"My aspirations cannot be contained by a dying realm of perpetual twilight," the Absolian murmured. "I have given much to rise to my station, but the time has come to take that which has been denied to me. I need more, and I will take more, for I have stagnated as a servant and require a throne of my own."
That was when Bekras understood what drove the High King's monster. Through gritted teeth, he began to laugh, and though the Absolian frowned and the sound was coarse, he didn't stop laughing. This was where he would die. What did it matter anymore?
"You mean to take the black throne from the King Below? You think yourself a match for a King?"
The skin about Aurelius' eyes creased as he drove his second hand into the wizard's other shoulder and Bekras wailed in agony. The Absolian sent rills of raw energy into the man's slack body.
"He is Fallen," he sneered. "He is Voiceless and Fallen, and I am the right hand of my wretched King—I am the First Commander! If he will not bow then he will break, and I will ascend to my rightful place!"
Aurelius funneled power into the mage, and though the wails rose in pitch and filled his mind, he maintained the coursing rush until a single, tremulous word came tumbling from Bekras Gray's bloody mouth.
"Ith...Itheria."
The Absolian cyan eyes widened with excitement, and as he burned the wizard from the inside out and what remained of the Gray Arcanum slowly crumbled to ruin around him, Aurelius cackled. Light issued from his skin and his wings spread wide in jubilation.
"Perfect."