Sixty-Seven: Rending the Heavens

“Lilith, if it were you, how would you attack Morris?”

After speaking with her operatives, Elasha drifted to the Little White Dragon’s side. She and Lilith lifted their chins toward the sky veiled by the city over Morris, a calm question in her voice.

“If it were me…” Lilith tapped her chin, thoughts trudging like oxen in mud. Strategy wasn’t her craft, but she scraped together a clumsy idea. “I’d use water. Flood it from outside and drown Morris.”

“A pity. Morris has a mature drainage web, hidden like roots under stone.” Elasha shook her head, her tone cool as deep wells. “If your Demon named Eve scouted, she’d know. Think again: if you were her, how would you throw Morris into chaos?”

“Ugh…” The Little White Dragon’s brow knotted like a tightened bowstring. She wasn’t built for pondering. She barely knew Morris; she hadn’t even strolled it proper. Since diving from the city above, she’d been running like wind chasing dust, never a day quiet.

“I guess… plant agents to wreck public order?”

“The Void Sect’s believers are still chained in Morris’s dungeons,” Elasha said, touching the floor with a toe, voice flat as night fog. Lilith didn’t need a tour to picture purple-robed Demons bound behind iron doors.

“What else then? Poison gas?”

“Few gases bite Vampires. And mass deployment over Morris isn’t real; the wasteland swallows most invading ambition.” Elasha denied Lilith’s guess with a soft shake, yet her words carried warmth, like hand to shoulder. “You’re close. Think again. You’ll find it.”

“Why do you look like you’re teasing a little sister at home?” Lilith gave dead-fish eyes, eyelids heavy as oars, and shot Elasha a weary glare. The Little White Dragon looked to the ceiling the Vampire Princess had studied. Elasha had all but spelled it out. It had to tie to the city that shrouded Morris.

“I’ve got it. Drop Udis, bury Morris.” Lilith proposed, then killed her own thought with a sigh. “But the Vampires’ magi aren’t pushovers. They’d deflect falling stone.”

“Close. But the killing blow isn’t the falling city. It’s what still hangs in the sky after Udis disappears.”

Elasha raised her gaze. Crimson eyes held a weather Lilith couldn’t read, like storm-lines etched on glass. The Little White Dragon couldn’t guess her mind, but the meaning rang clear as bronze.

“You mean… the Black Sun?” Lilith remembered that devouring disk still hanging over Spuiset, a hunger that ate all living light. If the lid over Morris were lifted and Black Sun Devouring poured straight in, the city wouldn’t last an hour. It would go cold, a dead city.

“Then what do we do? That’s dangerous.”

“Is it? I see an opened gate, not a doom.” Elasha’s smile was dawn behind frost. “I sealed Morris decades ago and waited for a single chance. Now someone gifts me a moment to keep the Vampires in hand. I won’t waste it. I might even thank Lady Eve. Without her, I’d wait more decades for a reason to enact my plan.”

“What? What are you talking about?” The Little White Dragon felt the chill first, then the prickle of bad luck. The Vampire Princess she knew—elegant, measured—felt distant. Her gut said Elasha was sketching a bold gamble, a mad weave of risk and rain.

“It’s fine. You’ll know soon.” Elasha didn’t unveil the map. She simply watched the inverted city overhead and spoke like curtains parting. “The grand unveiling has begun. It’s our cue to step on stage.”

Her words hadn’t faded when a sharp hum split the sky over Morris, a blade-note like metal gnawing bone. Lilith’s hearing was keen as a fox’s. The impact crashed like a war-hammer against her skull. Ears ringing, she clutched her head and dropped into a squat, trying to smother the pain like coals under ash.

Elasha stood untouched by the noise, composed as still water. She lifted a blue crystal from her desk and crushed it, shards glittering like sleet.

In the next heartbeat, Morris flushed blue.

The city, grimy and dusk-stained, turned new in an instant. Wide, round sewer mouths sprang from the streets like bamboo after rain, splitting the paving, turning half the lanes into channels to carry flood. Vampires laughing under street lamps darted indoors like swallows before storm. Doors slammed; windows latched; thick locks clamped down on handles, iron kissing iron.

Then, with a deep dragging grind, like stone against stone, the sky over Morris brightened.

Udis had been cut open.

A city that hid beneath the Black Sun for millennia finally saw an unbarred sky again.

A hooded black figure hung in the exact center, sword in hand, a vast dark-violet vortex boiling behind her. She stood like an imperious war-god, fixed above the city’s heart.

The Black Sun loomed above her, night and hunger fused. She was a Grim Reaper of light, and with that ancient foe of Vampires, she nudged Morris’s great gates wide.

“Eve…” The Little White Dragon shook off the ringing, blue eyes blazing at the woman floating in air. Didn’t she know the Black Sun would reap countless lives? Why open the city that shielded Morris?

“Elasha, do something. Hiding indoors slows the Black Sun’s taint, but the weak will still be devoured with time.” Lilith grabbed the Vampire Princess’s arm, panic fluttering like trapped sparrows. Elasha looked calm, as if all this was written on her palm beforehand.

“Don’t worry. It’s fine.”

The Vampire Princess soothed the small dragon with a voice like warm tea. She lifted her eyes to the proud Demon and murmured as if telling the sky a secret.

“It’s time for rain.”

A few milk-white crystals arced up from Morris into the heavens. Black clouds rolled in under the Black Sun, thick as ink, wrapping everything in rain without end.

And then, it rained.