Arc: Bastion

Resonance: Kingdom Breaker

Tiberio Wavebreaker is built like the kind of man Aurelia would place at the head of its armies.

Tall, broad-shouldered and powerfully built, he carries the physical weight of a lifelong Bastion warrior. Long dark-brown hair falls around a hard, scarred face, while striking golden eyes sit beneath heavy brows. A jagged scar cuts across one cheek, one of the few marks left by the years of war behind him. His black-and-white High Marshal attire is worked in gold, carrying the authority of his position without ever disguising the fact that Tiberio still belongs on a battlefield.

He is the eldest of the Wavebreaker brothers and the High Marshal of Aurelia, the highest military authority within the kingdom’s unified command structure.

Beyond his authority as High Marshal, Tiberio commands one of Aurelia’s great military forces, with hundreds of thousands of skyships spread across its fleets.

Aurelia’s great military forces maintain their own generals, traditions, fleets, armies and command structures. Tiberio does not erase those identities.

He is the man responsible for bringing them together.

When forces from distant regions must fight as one, when fleets numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands have to move toward the same battlefield, when several generals are committed to the same campaign and the strength of Aurelia must answer a threat together, the High Marshal coordinates the response.

Even without the armies and fleets beneath his command, Tiberio is a one-man army.

As a master of Bastion, he possesses overwhelming physical strength, durability and force. Tiberio can enter the heart of a battlefield personally, breaking defensive lines, crushing heavily protected enemies and meeting enormous impacts with the raw physical power expected of one of Aurelia’s greatest Bastion warriors.

Kingdom Breaker

Tiberio releases his Bastion Arc Energy across the battlefield and gives it form.

Towering golden knights begin to rise.

Then more.

And more.

Until thousands of enormous Bastion warriors stand beneath the High Marshal’s command.

They move like an army.

Ranks form. Weapons rise. Entire sections advance together beneath Tiberio’s direction, turning his Resonance into a vast extension of the same command instinct that allows him to coordinate Aurelia’s military forces across a war.

Each knight possesses immense physical strength and durability.

An individual Kingdom Breaker knight is powerful enough to kill a dragon alone.

Their enormous weapons strike with devastating force, sending golden shockwaves through enemy formations, breaking fortified positions and tearing apart anything caught in the path of their advance.

And Tiberio does not need them to survive.

When greater destruction is required, individual knights can detonate completely, their enormous bodies collapsing into catastrophic eruptions of golden Bastion Energy capable of devastating everything around them.

Thousands can fight.

Thousands can advance.

And any one of them can become the explosion that breaks open the battlefield ahead.

Tiberio can fight an army himself.

Kingdom Breaker lets him bring another one.

Arc: Specter

Resonance: Skybreaker

Salvatore looks like the storm Aurelia placed in uniform.

Thick white hair sweeps back from a hard, handsome face, while a short white beard sharpens the line of his jaw. His eyes are brilliant white, unmistakably Specter, burning beneath heavy brows with an intensity that becomes considerably harder to ignore once lightning begins moving around him.

His military dress is immaculate.

A long white coat falls over a black uniform worked in silver, broad across the shoulders and severe through the high collar. Ornate clasps and insignia cross his chest, while a heavy white mantle moves behind him when he walks the decks of the galleons beneath his command.

Salvatore commands the Arc Storm, one of Aurelia’s great military forces.

When the Arc Storm enters a battlefield, the sky changes.

White lightning spreads across the clouds.

Galleons emerge through it in enormous formations with rune sails burning against the storm. White-armored knights line their decks while rune cannons prepare along the hulls. Great white dragons move between the ships in disciplined aerial formations, their wings crossing through lightning that fills the sky around them.

When the Arc Storm comes, the whole horizon belongs to it.

Thousands of galleons can move beneath Salvatore’s command, supported by vast numbers of knights, riders, dragons and aerial formations capable of turning entire horizons white when they arrive.

Salvatore stands at the center of it.

And he does not require the fleet to be dangerous.

As a master of Specter, Salvatore generates extraordinary quantities of white lightning directly from his own Arc. He can gather that power through his body, compress it through an open palm and release attacks capable of destroying colossal targets across enormous distances.

His physical power is equally extreme.

Salvatore can enter close combat personally, break heavily protected enemies apart with his bare hands and drive overwhelming Specter force through anything that survives the first impact.

Against Salvatore, a dragon’s size does little more than make it easier to hit.

Salvatore can kill one with physical force alone. White lightning makes the distinction even less important. Scale, armor, bone and size do not turn a dragon into a serious obstacle when the man hitting it possesses enough strength to tear the creature apart himself.

The same applies to far larger targets.

Salvatore can stand aboard a galleon, raise one hand and generate enough Specter power to destroy a Behemoth through its crystalline face.

That is simply what his Arc can do.

Skybreaker

Skybreaker changes what happens when Salvatore’s lightning reaches physical matter.

His white current no longer merely shocks, burns or tears through whatever it strikes.

It disintegrates it.

Where Skybreaker passes, matter begins to disappear.

Armor vanishes beneath the current.

Stone loses its structure.

Crystal comes apart.

Flesh and bone disintegrate behind the lightning until whatever occupied that space is simply no longer there.

The effect can continue through connected matter as Salvatore drives more power into the strike. A sufficiently large discharge can tear through enormous bodies, fortified structures and armored vessels in seconds, reducing whole sections of them to drifting particulate before the attack has finished passing through.

Nothing stops it.

Shields, wards, barriers and armor make no difference. Neither does whether a protection is physical, magical or divine. If something stands in Skybreaker’s path, it comes apart.

Only one thing has ever held against it. An Aurelian Veil.

Skybreaker is Arc Energy, and only Arc Energy can stand in its way. Even then, the Veil must be extraordinarily strong, and Salvatore only needs to break it once.

When he does, the nature of the fight changes.

Salvatore is no longer trying to wound what stands in front of him.

He is removing it.

Most battles never require that distinction.

His ordinary Specter Arc already carries enough destructive power to break colossal creatures, punch through heavily fortified positions and turn enormous sections of a battlefield white with a single attack.

Skybreaker is what happens when Salvatore decides the target should no longer remain.

If his lightning reaches you, being made of matter becomes the problem.

Arc: Bastion

Resonance: Unbroken

Emilio Wavebreaker carries command with an elegance that sits strangely well on a man capable of breaking a battlefield apart with his bare hands.

Dark-brown hair falls loosely around a handsome, composed face, while brilliant golden eyes reveal the Bastion Arc burning beneath him. His black-and-white uniform is richly worked in gold, refined without appearing ceremonial, and a divided cloak falls from broad shoulders over the dense, powerful frame of a lifelong Bastion warrior.

There is very little wasted movement in Emilio.

He listens before he speaks. He rarely needs to demand attention. The authority is already there.

Emilio is General of the Aurelian Vanguard, the oldest great military tradition still serving Aurelia.

Its history reaches back beyond the kingdom itself.

The first Vanguard travelled beside Aurelian and Maximus during the years after the Fracture, crossing a broken continent to reach settlements that could not survive alone. As their victories spread, the force came to carry Aurelian’s name.

The Aurelian Vanguard.

Eventually, even the people they protected began calling themselves Aurelians.

The military force remained.

And it grew with the civilisation whose name it helped create.

By Emilio’s age, the Vanguard numbers in the millions, with immense armies spread throughout Aurelia and vast formations of dragons, skyships and galleons capable of answering wars across the continent.

Emilio stands at their head.

He does not command them from somewhere safely removed from battle.

As a master Bastion warrior, Emilio possesses tremendous physical strength, resilience and force. He can enter close combat personally, shatter defensive positions, endure devastating impacts and meet powerful enemies with the brutal physicality of Bastion.

But the power that defines Emilio reaches far beyond his own body.

Unbroken

Emilio creates a brilliant sheath of golden Bastion Energy around a chosen target.

He can wrap it around himself.

Another warrior.

A dragon.

A skyship.

A galleon.

Or extend the same protection across countless members of the Aurelian Vanguard at once.

Entire formations become enclosed within his gold.

Then something attacks them.

And Unbroken answers.

When a weapon, creature or Arc attack crashes against the protection, the Bastion erupts outward in response. Golden force detonates from the point of impact, throwing attackers backward and turning every assault against the protected target into something dangerous for the attacker as well.

A sword can strike a Vanguard soldier and be answered by enough Bastion force to hurl the attacker away.

A monster can crash into a protected formation and have the violence of its charge explode back through it.

Dragons can enter aerial combat beneath Unbroken while enemy attacks burst away from their scales in eruptions of gold.

Skyships and galleons can cross into heavy bombardment while their hulls answer incoming strikes with violent Bastion force.

Emilio can carry the same protection personally.

In close combat, gold settles across his body as he advances.

An opponent strikes him.

The attack lands.

The Bastion answers.

And Emilio keeps coming.

Across a war, Unbroken becomes something far greater.

A formation beginning to buckle can suddenly ignite gold.

A fleet entering the worst part of an aerial engagement can become wrapped in Bastion.

Dragons forcing their way through concentrated enemy fire can carry Emilio’s protection with them.

Vanguard soldiers preparing to receive a devastating charge can hold their ground and let the enemy discover what happens when all that violence comes back.

The Aurelian Vanguard was born from warriors crossing a broken continent because somebody needed them on the other side.

Centuries later, millions still carry that name.

And when Emilio Wavebreaker leads them into battle, breaking the Vanguard becomes a dangerous proposition in itself.

Unbroken.

Arc: Hollow

Resonance: Worldfall

Adriana carries herself with the quiet severity of someone who rarely needs to raise her voice.

Dark hair is woven back from a striking face, broken by a pale white streak that runs through the braids above one side of her brow. Her eyes are almost completely black, the unmistakable mark of Hollow beneath an expression that tends toward stillness rather than warmth. Black military dress fits closely beneath a heavy cloak, its silver detailing restrained compared with the brighter uniforms carried by many of Aurelia’s other great commands.

She is beautiful.

She is also one of the more unsettling generals to stand across from.

Adriana commands The Falling Dark, one of Aurelia’s great military forces.

Her loyalty to Aurelia is absolute.

Her compassion is considerably more selective.

Adriana loves the kingdom, its people and the civilisation that raised her. She will commit extraordinary force to protecting Aurelian lives and has little patience for anyone who mistakes that devotion for softness. Where some commanders will search for the least destructive answer available, Adriana is far more willing to end a threat completely once she believes Aurelia is endangered.

She does not particularly care whether the enemy considers that excessive.

They should have stayed away from her kingdom.

As a master of Hollow, Adriana generates immense quantities of dark Arc Energy and uses it with brutal control. Her power can spread across wide areas, strike with crushing force and dominate the space around her before an enemy has reached conventional fighting distance.

That alone makes fighting Adriana difficult.

Then she uses Worldfall.

Worldfall

Adriana releases Hollow Arc Energy across an enormous section of the battlefield.

The darkness spreads.

Then everything inside it begins moving down.

Not gradually.

Not gently.

Adriana drives the entire field toward the ground with overwhelming force.

Soldiers are crushed beneath their own formations.

Charging lines collapse together.

Warriors attempting to leap or fly are ripped back toward the earth.

Dragons are dragged out of the sky.

Sky-skiffs lose altitude.

Galleons begin descending whether their crews intended them to or not.

Entire aerial formations can be broken apart in seconds as vessels, riders and creatures are forced downward simultaneously.

Worldfall is not a projectile.

There is nothing to dodge after it has been fired.

It is not a creature that can be killed or a construct that can simply be struck apart.

It is Adriana imposing Hollow force across the battlefield itself.

The greater the area she claims, the more terrifying the effect becomes.

A dragon caught high above an army can be driven through the formations beneath it.

A galleon can be pulled from the sky and smashed into whatever happens to be below.

Flying enemies that rely upon altitude for safety can suddenly discover that the sky no longer belongs to them.

Ground forces fare little better.

Once Worldfall settles over them, standing becomes difficult.

Then painful.

Then impossible.

Armor becomes weight.

Shields become weight.

Weapons become weight.

The battlefield presses downward until knees strike earth, structures begin to fail and military formations cease to resemble formations at all.

Adriana can control enormous areas simultaneously, deciding where the pressure intensifies and where the Falling Dark is allowed to advance.

That makes her particularly dangerous in large wars.

An enemy does not need to defeat Adriana alone.

They need to keep fighting while their army, their dragons and their ships are being forced into the ground around them.

And when Adriana fully commits Worldfall, there is a much simpler way to understand what has happened.

Everything above her starts coming down.

Arc: Bastion

Resonance: Dawnscale

Vittorio Wavebreaker carries the unmistakable presence of a veteran Aurelian general.

Short dark-brown hair frames a strong, handsome face marked by close stubble, while brilliant golden eyes reveal the Bastion Arc beneath him. His black-and-white military attire is worked extensively in gold, combining the refinement expected of one of Aurelia’s great commanders with the practical bearing of a man who has spent much of his life aboard warships and command decks.

Vittorio is the twin brother of Emilio Wavebreaker and General of the Radiant Tide, one of Aurelia’s greatest military forces.

The Radiant Tide numbers in the millions, with immense formations of soldiers, Knights, dragons, skyships, skiffs and galleons spread across its fleets.

It is particularly renowned for rapid military response and large-scale fleet warfare.

When distant regions come under attack, Radiant Tide formations can cross enormous stretches of Aurelia to reinforce them. When several fleets enter the same battle, they move beneath disciplined command structures capable of coordinating thousands of vessels, dragons and warriors across the sky at once.

The Radiant Tide is also one of Aurelia’s most recognised military forces beyond the kingdom.

Its fleets have crossed the seas to assist other nations during catastrophic attacks, carrying Aurelian soldiers, dragons and warships into conflicts far from home when another people require help. That history has earned both the Radiant Tide and Vittorio considerable respect across Aurelia and beyond its borders.

Vittorio is exceptionally skilled at commanding forces on that scale.

He can read a developing battle, redirect fleets as conditions change, concentrate overwhelming force where it is needed and maintain disciplined formations even while enormous threats are tearing through the battlefield around them.

But Vittorio is not limited to commanding the battle from a deck.

As a master Bastion warrior, he possesses tremendous physical strength, durability and destructive force. He can enter combat personally, withstand enormous impacts and meet powerful enemies with concentrated golden Arc Energy behind every strike.

Then comes Dawnscale

Dawnscale

Vittorio gives his Bastion Arc Energy the form of a colossal golden dragon.

The construct is enormous.

Golden wings spread across the sky as a vast body of concentrated Bastion Energy forms around them, creating a creature capable of entering the largest aerial engagements directly.

The Golden Dragon possesses tremendous physical strength.

Its claws can tear through heavily protected targets.

Its body can crash through enemy formations with devastating force.

Its jaws release enormous blasts of concentrated Bastion Energy capable of destroying multiple hostile dragons and tearing through aerial forces around them.

And its sheer size allows it to physically engage creatures that ordinary soldiers and vessels could never confront directly.

The dragon does not replace Vittorio.

While it fights above the battlefield, Vittorio remains below it, directing the Radiant Tide or entering combat himself.

One general.

Millions of soldiers.

Vast fleets crossing Aurelia and the seas beyond it.

And above them, a colossal golden dragon powerful enough to tear its own path through the sky.

The Radiant Tide carries Vittorio Wavebreaker wherever Aurelia needs him.

Dawnscale makes certain he arrives with something worth fearing.

Arc: Blaze

Resonance: Cinder Rain

Ashen is one of the hardest men ever given command of an Aurelian army.

Short black hair falls untidily above a hard, striking face, while brilliant red eyes burn beneath heavy brows. An old scar cuts beneath one eye. His black military uniform is worked heavily in gold and deep red, fitted across the powerful frame of a lifelong Blaze warrior, while a broad dark cloak falls from his shoulders.

He commands the Ember Guard.

And among Aurelia’s great generals, Ashen is perhaps the least forgiving.

The Ember Guard exists to destroy active threats.

When war begins, its fleets do not slow because the battlefield has become inconvenient. Its knights do not abandon an assault because the enemy has surrounded itself with things worth preserving. Its commanders do not mistake hesitation for mercy.

The threat is identified.

The Ember Guard removes it.

Ashen has carried that philosophy farther than most Aurelians ever would.

He is fiercely loyal to Aurelia, deeply protective of its people and almost completely indifferent to whether foreign powers approve of the manner in which he protects them.

One of his youngest daughters once travelled beyond Aurelia alongside other young Aurelians intending to help a foreign kingdom.

They were betrayed.

His daughter was killed.

Ashen went after the kingdom responsible.

The Ember Guard followed.

When he eventually returned to Aurelia, Ashen carried his daughter's body in his arms.

Nothing living remained in the kingdom behind him.

The response across the surrounding nations was immediate.

Foreign rulers condemned the scale of the retaliation. Courts that had once regarded the Ember Guard as simply another Aurelian military force began openly questioning whether any general should possess the authority to answer one atrocity with the destruction of an entire kingdom.

Ashen heard them.

Then he made the location of his command known.

If any of them believed he had gone too far, they knew exactly where to find him.

Nobody came.

That is Ashen.

As a master of Blaze, Ashen possesses enormous destructive power even before his Resonance enters the battlefield. Red flame can pour directly from his hands in torrents capable of overwhelming fortified positions, consuming enormous creatures and turning defensive lines into burning ground.

He is equally dangerous at close range.

Ashen is powerfully built, brutally experienced and perfectly comfortable entering the destruction himself. Flame follows his strikes. Concentrated Blaze can be driven through armor and Veils at point-blank range, and anything capable of surviving his physical assault still has to survive the fire attached to it.

But Ashen's reputation was not built upon killing one opponent at a time.

Cinder Rain

Ashen fills the sky with fire.

At first, only a few burning masses appear.

Then hundreds.

Then thousands.

Each is formed entirely from Blaze Arc Energy generated by Ashen and compressed high above the battlefield until enormous spheres of red flame hang across the sky.

The light beneath them changes.

Then they fall.

Cinder Rain is mass annihilation.

Thousands of burning impacts descend across the battlefield in overlapping waves, each one detonating with enough force to tear apart soldiers, defensive positions, creatures and structures caught beneath it.

Military formations disappear inside fire.

Fortifications are hammered apart.

Dragons are struck from the sky.

Skyships and galleons can be engulfed before damaged crews recover from the first impact.

And the first wave is rarely the last.

More fire gathers above while the previous bombardment is still falling.

Another thousand form.

Then another.

Ashen can spread Cinder Rain across enormous sections of a battlefield until there is nowhere beneath the burning sky untouched by the bombardment.

Or he can concentrate it.

Thousands of burning masses can be directed toward the same fortress, army, creature or section of terrain until repeated impacts have destroyed everything occupying it.

The Ember Guard knows what Cinder Rain means.

Ashen has stopped asking the battlefield to surrender.

He has stopped asking it to break.

He has decided that whatever stands before him has lasted long enough.

When Cinder Rain begins, Ashen is no longer fighting for control of the battlefield.

He is deciding what will still exist when the fire stops.

Arc: Terran

Resonance: Undying

Annina is one of Aurelia’s most beautiful generals.

Long chestnut-brown hair is usually gathered into a thick braid over one shoulder, framing a graceful face and brilliant emerald-green eyes. Her white-and-green military uniform is worked in gold beneath the sweeping cloak of the Everwing, elegant enough to match the woman wearing it without ever disguising the strength beneath.

Annina commands the Everwing, one of Aurelia’s great military forces.

It is an army of Terran women.

And dragons.

An extraordinary number of dragons.

When the Everwing enters a major battle, the sky can disappear beneath wings. Dragons of every Arc move between enormous formations of skyships and galleons, riders crossing above and beneath the fleet while emerald-cloaked women fill the decks.

The Everwing loves dragons.

It has raised them, fought beside them and carried them across Aurelia for generations, building one of the largest concentrations of aerial creatures found anywhere within the kingdom’s military forces.

But the women riding among them are considerably more dangerous than their reputation as healers sometimes suggests.

Terran gives them extraordinary restorative ability.

It also gives them extraordinary physical strength.

An Everwing warrior can close wounds that should have ended a battle, repair catastrophic damage to her own body and immediately return to the fighting.

Drive a greatsword through one and the problem is not necessarily solved.

She may simply pull herself free, heal the wound and hit back with enough force to put her fist through whatever believed the sword had finished the argument.

Terrans can break armored enemies apart at close range.

They can strike with enough force to stagger enormous creatures.

Powerful Everwing warriors can punch through dragons, tear wings from their bodies and then turn around to heal the woman fighting beside them.

That combination defines the force.

They are extremely difficult to put down.

And remarkably good at making sure nobody around them stays down either.

The Everwing has consequently earned one of the warmest reputations carried by any Aurelian military force beyond the kingdom.

Its fleets are regularly sent to foreign nations after earthquakes, storms, Fractures, collapsed cities and other enormous disasters.

Everwing Terrans can arrive among devastation that would overwhelm ordinary healers and begin restoring people immediately.

Wounds close.

Crushed survivors are pulled from ruins.

Dragons carry supplies across destroyed regions.

Galleons become temporary hospitals.

Entire formations of Terrans spread through devastated towns while their ships fill the sky above them.

Annina herself remains fiercely devoted to Aurelia, but she has never believed that compassion becomes less valuable because the person bleeding was born somewhere else.

There are kingdoms far beyond Aurelia where generations of families know the Everwing not because they ever fought against it.

But because it arrived when everything else had fallen apart.

And then there is Undying.

Undying

Annina releases her Terran Arc Energy across the battlefield and gives it form.

Women begin appearing among the fighting.

Emerald and translucent, almost ethereal beneath the surrounding violence, they move independently through armies, across shattered fortifications and between fallen soldiers.

They search for the critically wounded.

Then they run.

An Undying figure reaches its target and passes directly into them.

The woman disappears in a burst of emerald light.

The wound closes.

Broken bodies restore themselves.

A soldier moments from death draws breath again.

A dragon bleeding out beneath shattered wings feels torn flesh begin knitting together.

An Everwing warrior whose body has finally taken more damage than even her own Terran can immediately repair is restored before the enemy has finished celebrating.

Then she gets back up.

Annina can create enormous numbers of these figures across a battlefield, allowing Undying to move through entire formations while the Everwing continues fighting.

The effect becomes particularly brutal when combined with an army already made almost entirely from Terrans.

The women of the Everwing heal themselves.

They heal one another.

Annina’s Undying restores those even they cannot reach quickly enough.

And all the while, the same women are hitting with enough physical force to tear apart the things trying to kill them.

The Everwing does not become invincible.

It becomes extraordinarily difficult to convince that somebody has actually died.

There are battles where enemies have watched an Aurelian woman fall, watched the emerald figure reach her, and watched that same woman rise again seconds later.

Then another.

Then another.

Across Annina’s battlefield, the wounded rise faster than the enemy can put them down.

Every Everwing warrior returned by Undying becomes somebody the enemy has already failed to kill once.

Annina gives her the opportunity to return the favor.

Arc: Bastion

Resonance: Sun Razor

General Elena Wavebreaker carries herself like a woman who has never once needed to hurry.

She is tall and beautiful, built with the effortless strength of someone who has spent most of her life in armor. Gold hair falls behind her shoulders, broken by striking white streaks near her temples, while brilliant golden eyes reveal the Bastion Arc burning beneath. Fitted golden plate covers her from throat to boot. It is magnificent to look at, but nothing about it is ornamental. 

Every line was made for war.

When Elena crosses a deck, people move out of her path without being asked. It simply seems sensible.

She commands the Brightwing, one of Aurelia’s great military forces.

When the Brightwing arrives, the sky turns gold.

Portals open across the horizon. One becomes ten, then dozens, enormous circles of radiant light spreading between towers and clouds. Golden dragons pour through them in disciplined formations, thousands of bodies turning together so precisely that the whole sky seems to bend around them. Golden galleons follow in ordered lanes, rune cannons gathering light along their armored flanks, while Brightwing knights of enormous size wait on their decks.

Beneath the Brightwing, an entire city can look as though it is standing in a second dawn.

Elena directs it with very few words. Officers come to her command table, receive their orders and leave knowing exactly where they are needed. The next steps forward without having to be called. Her judgment is fast, her instructions are short, and the fleet around her moves like a single living thing.

She is also the mother of the Wavebreakers.

Tiberio, High Marshal of Aurelia, is her eldest son. Emilio leads the Aurelian Vanguard. Vittorio commands the Radiant Tide. Cassandra is her daughter.

So was Livia.

Elena’s younger daughter was a brown-haired Bastion girl who, as a child, could fill a terrace with little golden wolf pups and wanted her mother to be the first to see them. Livia was lost to the war against the broken sky, and Elena has carried her ever since.

She still counts five children. She always will.

A great deal of the strength Aurelia trusts began with her.

For all her severity, Elena is remarkably gentle with little ones. Children who meet her tend to discover that the general will greet their toys with complete seriousness.

Her enemies discover something else.

As a master Bastion warrior, Elena possesses tremendous strength and endurance. She enters battle personally, riding a sky-chaser straight into the worst of it, and she is brutal at close range. A knee or an open palm from Elena can shatter a Veil and throw the warrior behind it across a courtyard, while concentrated Bastion blasts from her hands break whatever she aims them at.

But the Brightwing’s enemies fear her for something far more precise.

Sun Razor

Elena forms a disc of golden Bastion Energy above her palm.

It is broad as a shield and thin enough to vanish when it turns edge-on.

Then five more open around her shoulders.

The discs circle her and go wherever she sends them. They pass through crystalline faces without slowing, divide the bodies behind them and curve back to her before the pieces have finished falling. Winged Zethra diving toward her deck simply come apart in the air.

Size does not protect anything from Sun Razor.

Elena can widen a disc until its light stretches across an avenue from wall to wall. She has sent two through a Behemoth’s knees at once, severing both legs and dropping the colossal body onto the Zethra crowding beneath it.

When that is not enough, she feeds a single Sun Razor until it grows wider than a Behemoth’s neck.

Then she sweeps it through.

Stone columns slide apart. Hollow constructs fall away in long dark streams. A Tyrant’s face splits down the center with the skull behind it. Bone, hide and crystal offer no more resistance than air.

And when Elena needs precision rather than scale, she can draw a disc narrow and fiercely bright, aimed at one target with nothing wasted.

Most commanders measure a monster by how hard it will be to kill.

Elena measures it by where to cut.

She has her own way of putting it.

There is nothing beneath this sky her Resonance cannot sever.