Suiteonem Prime, Sea of Shattered Teeth, Bathalas, 213923

  Clad in an aura of gold shot through with flowing streams of crimson, Suiteonem cut through the blade-shaped island.

  Itak Island was the fifth largest in the entire sea by area but the largest by population for they had spent millennia cultivating a system of concentric coral reefs that extended out beneath the waves across a gently-sloping seafloor all the way into the shallow trench to their east.

  Kinabukasan City was the capital city. With its gleaming buildings that dared to touch the sky it struck against the negative stereotypes perpetuated by the surrounding drylander nations with spears of progress.

  Suiteonem broke those buildings like they were rotted spear hafts.

  People screamed as all they built crashed down on their heads.

  “Why?” A young warrior dared to stand up to the towering God. Skin and scales bulged but remained under control for the moment. “We worshiped you according to the scriptures.”

  Suiteonem stayed his golden hand for a moment to muse.

  “Rage-type class. Low level, but good control. You may be useful to me.” He waved a hand, shoving the young warrior into a golden portal. “She will have a chance to rise in my service.”

  Miss Karagatan flew in with a splash of water, freezing Suiteonem inside a hill of ice.

  He shattered it the next instant. He gestured at the relatively empty city center surrounded by gleaming towers no longer gleaming. Blackened ruins filled the once-clear skies with darker smoke and debris.

  “Your kind has gotten better at evacuating.” He didn’t deign to look at the tiny, insignificant champion gathering her power. “The only ones left are the foolish and the walking dead.” He waved a hand, disintegrating a group of city soldiers firing down from a half-broken tower.

  It became clear that they had been providing covering fire for a second group of soldiers to escort a motley group out of the building.

  Children and the elderly.

  The slowest of them all.

  They never made it to the emergency water tunnel.

  Miss Karagatan blocked the first blast of golden light with a hard water shield. The second struck too fast.

  She wasn’t alone. Even now.

  A handful of old adventurers, judging by their gear, emerged from the water ways.

  High level, long-retired to enjoy the spoils of their careers.

  The rarest of the rare.

  Those that were wise enough to walk away.

  So, why were they here when they were the most likely to escape the cull?

  Miss Karagatan didn’t doubt that others of their kind had done just that.

  She hoped they were taking to the underground rivers and that they were taking the weaker ones with them.

  The ones before her were dead.

  She fought with them regardless.

  Hard water shields blocked Suiteonem’s golden gaze long enough for an old man clad in dark kraken leathers that even in the light of the day cast a pitch-black shadow across the entire city center. He blipped in and out of existence, dancing around Suiteonem’s golden lights. Behind the towering mass of bulging muscles. Then in front, low as Suiteonem swung with a backhand to topple a tower. Twin swords made from twin sea unicorns’ horns stabbed. One for the heart and one for beneath the chin.

  Level 60 gear wielded by a Level 70.

  Even Miss Karagatan would’ve been wary facing this adventurer.

  Wide-eyed Suiteonem roared in the old man’s masked face.

  Divine rage pulsed visibly in waves that made the ocean’s largest feel like ripples in a pond.

  Sea unicorn horn swords melted like candle wax.

  Kraken leathers ignited like resin-soaked tinder.

  Miss Karagatan’s hard water constructs turned into steam before they got close.

  One moment the adventurer stood before the God. The next he was ash swirling in the wind.

  “Karagatan.” A wizened old man appeared next to her with a splash of sweet-smelling brine.

  “Mage.”

  “This is not a fight to be won.”

  There was a question in the old man’s tone, but one he already knew the answer to by the resignation in his large, black eyes.

  “It is to lessen the culling,” she agreed.

  He cast a small light over the north side of the center.

  “There is one ready but she needs to get close. She won’t kill the God but she will hurt him and that will keep his interest here for just that much longer.”

  “I see and understand. It will be done.”

  “Sinaya be with you, Karagatan.”

  “She is with all of us.”

  The old mage dived into a pool that appeared and disappeared with two blinks of her eyes.

  He reappeared in the ruined building to Suiteonem’s left. Then again in the opposite building. Then again and again and again in different buildings until dozens of him surrounded the God.

  Glowing tentacles lashed out from all of the mage’s copies. Red and black and writhing with unrestrained malice.

  Crisis always made for strange homepartners.

  At any other time she’d be hunting down this evil mage.

  Tentacles lashed Suiteonem’s limbs, pulling taut.

  Gold and crimson warred with black and red.

  She saw the one that needed protection swimming down the open-topped water way to the north, behind Suiteonem. She willed a hard water construct around the shelled deep ocean warrior.

  Suiteonem’s divine rage pulsed up the old mage’s magic tentacles, destroying all but one mage.

  Golden light blasted up at the true mage only to be swallowed by a red and black monstrosity with a gaping mouth fringed by a ring of wriggling tentacles.

  A second blast destroyed the monstrosity but the old mage had already vanished into a pool at his feet.

  Suiteonem turned to a translucent blue deep singer swimming through the air.

  The construct lasted just long enough against his aura to deliver the passenger carried in its stomach.

  The warrior woman’s shell was a faded mix of blues, reds and violets, covering parts of her body.

  She had a small crustacean’s tail and two sets of arms. One just like Miss Karagatan’s and one tucked into her chest. These two were shaped like bludgeons.

  They snapped out so fast that the very air around them ignited.

  Everything in the city center spontaneously combusted.

  Suiteonem rocked back from twin punches that made his nose leak gold.

  He laughed, roaring in the much smaller woman’s shell-covered face.

  She struck again but this time he caught the shelled arms.

  Gold and crimson pulsed in quicker waves as he held her there.

  Her once vibrant, colorful shell parts turned bright red before Miss Karagatan’s eyes.

  Just like last time, her hard water constructs failed to reach the brave old warrior.

  Suiteonem hurled the cooked corpse with a contemptuous flick.

  Hard water caught her and funneled her into the nearest water way.

  It wouldn’t matter in the end but Miss Karagatan thought it better that the sacrifice be honored by allowing the shelled warrior to be in Sinaya’s water rather than on dry land.

  More old warriors emerged out of pools that hadn’t been there before.

  An ancient behemoth that reminded her of Sings Too Loud charged on lumbering stumpy feet until Miss Karagatan filled the city center with sea water, pulling it in from the water ways and by extension the sea.

  On dry land the behemoth lumbered on creaking knees that struggled to support his mass.

  In the water he swam with speed and grace only diminished slightly by the passage of time.

  He struck with soundwaves, rattling Suiteonem’s core.

  Hard water constructs protected him from sizzling beams of gold until he drew close. Upon which he pulled a massive coral club twice his height from thin water.

  The blow shattered even the water, clearing a bubble of space that almost reached the boundaries.

  The behemoth hit the ground.

  Suiteonem simply floated in the air.

  The water rushed back to fill the space.

  Fists and club clashed repeatedly, setting off thunder-like explosions in the mass of water.

  Hard water constructs willed to life struck in the gaps.

  More warriors emerged from the water.

  Black and red spells empowered them or shielded them.

  Miss Karagatan fought the instinct to lash out at the evil slithering its way into the very essence of her water.

  Suiteonem laughed and pulsed. Then blurred.

  It was like watching pictures in motion for Miss Karagatan.

  As if she could only catch the God in brief moments of motion.

  A shattered coral club twice his height on his upraised arm. A fist punched through a behemoth of a warrior’s relic-class armor to scatter crimson viscera out the back. A storm of spines from an automatic spine shooter. A greater storm of golden bolts from a hand. Broken spines floating in the blue with a tattered corpse of blackened armor and flesh behind. A blade of golden light parrying a thin blade forged deep beneath the ocean floor. A blade of golden light thrust through a chest thinly armored in glittering scales that would’ve turned dry lander ship cannon fire aside.

  Death dealt until only two remained.

  Suiteonem suddenly loomed over Miss Karagatan.

  “That old mage fled. He won’t escape my cull.”

  She stabbed with her bident.

  He slapped it aside, grabbed it and used it to fling her like a spear.

  The ruined building completely collapsed in the wake of her passage.

  Out the other side and into a massive tank of oil.

  Gifts from willing deep singers.

  The oil was used for everything from cooking to heating to lighting for those that preferred older ways.

  Itak Island cared about freedom for the individual. Thus, they made allowances. Efficiency in all things was not their priority.

  Was.

  There was no more Itak Island.

  Survivors would be pursued according to Suiteonem’s whims.

  Miss Karagatan remembered.

  Not her memories but her memories.

  Golden light ignited the tank and her.

  The explosion cannoned her into another ruined building. Flames lined the skin-thin layer of hard water she had willed into existence at the last moment.

  She stopped her flight, twirling her bident to gather the upper half of the building, some kind of vehicle storage structure, in a tentacled hand of hard water.

  Vehicles fell like bread crumbs as she hurled it all into Suiteonem.

  The God stopped in midair and clapped, sending out a shockwave that blew away the building-sized missile and sent her flying.

  In her flight she saw a distant building and the big, round eyes in the windows.

  It was the hope in those eyes that hurt her the most. For she knew that her people had none. Not in her.

  Golden light blinded her a moment.

  When her vision cleared the building and the people hiding within flew up into the dark cloud above the city to join the rest of the ashes.

  Thunder destroyed her hard water shield.

  Then again and again.

  Suiteonem chased her higher into the thick smoke clouds one punch at a time.

  He grabbed her head in the palm of his hand and hurled her down to smite her against the side of another gleaming tower.

  A different city on the other end of Itak Island.

  Her connection to the Heart of Sinaya told her that there were less than a hundred of her people left to hide in their homes or shelters.

  That was good.

  Out of twenty-thousand.

  Those hundred died in the smoking ruins of their homes as Suiteonem battered Miss Karagatan from one end of the city to the other.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  He controlled the battle, forcing her to fight in every single settlement, no matter how large or small. Any that had chosen to hide rather than flee were killed in their wake.

  “Do you give thought to the microscopic life you destroy with a single scratch on your skin and scales?”

  She didn’t deign to reply.

  Hard water sea life and monsters attacked the glowing God.

  He blasted them away and sent her flying out into the sea.

  The underwater towns and cities were even less populated than those above.

  The last holdouts had been encouraged to flee by the broadcast of the destruction.

  She could see the last of them swimming away or in vehicles at the edge of her vision.

  On the waves or under them, it didn’t matter.

  Suiteonem destroyed them with a golden wave of his hand.

  He destroyed everything under the water and down into the small trench.

  She fought but only to keep his attention.

  Structures didn’t matter.

  It was the people that lay in Sinaya’s Heart.

  His work done he turned back to her.

  She swam, hoping to lead him away from people.

  A hand darkened her vision.

  Water surged around her. Faster than she had ever managed to do in the fastest currents.

  A different area in the Sea of Shattered Teeth.

  Different underwater settlements.

  Different people.

  More of them.

  She didn’t have time to ponder why more hadn’t fled.

  Perhaps they had thought there was still time?

  Suiteonem cruelly disabused them of that naive hope by hurling her within a wide beam of searing gold light into the crowd gathering to board underwater transports.

  Those in the path of the beam or even within a dozen meters or more had no chance.

  They were instantly disintegrated.

  As for those further away?

  Only the strongest or those with the right Skills managed to survive the water temperatures spiking to a boil in that instant.

  Tens of thousands gone. Tens of thousands sent on the journey to Sinaya on a childish whim.

  Divine rage bubbled around Miss Karagatan like her skin and scales bubbled from the heat.

  She felt it, remember it. Remembered how he took her own rage and made it his own.

  Only a God could be so arrogant as to take something fundamentally belonging to an individual as though he had the only right to it.

  “False god. There is only one true God on Sinaya and she is Sinaya!”

  The rage slipped away, which was good.

  To turn her thoughts into physical form required will and control.

  She pointed her bident at the oncoming flare of golden light in the depths and gathered her thoughts, shaping them into reality. Memories of all those that had fought at the Karagatan’s side across millennia.

  …

  “I didn’t know she was capable of that,” Aunty Bilaya said with a questioning glance at Ragay. Just a moment of tearing her gaze away from the orb projection.

  “Neither did I,” he managed.

  People emerged from Miss Karagatan’s Heart of Sinaya.

  Hard water constructs, but people.

  With faces and eyes that seemed to hold the spark of life.

  Was this was the height of the Karagatan’s power?

  Ragay and the other potentials had only been ever able of willing simple shapes into existence. Objects. Nothing more complicated than weapons or basic tools.

  Gossamare could replicate simple music boxes but those where still basic shapes and a gear or two.

  He had thought that Miss Karagatan creating constructs of creatures had been the upper limit.

  But this?

  This was something else.

  He lost track at a hundred unique hard water constructs of people.

  “Are those…”

  He pointed at constructs whose lower halves weren’t legs and feet like his but were tails. Fish, deep singers, seals, sea serpents and eels. Even shelled tails. Not tiny, vestigial ones like that one shelled warrior, but fully functional ones that sent them streaking through the water to clash with Suiteonem.

  “People of the sea, like all of us. But, long extinct,” Aunty Bilaya spoke into the stunned silence. “The histories are unclear. Just like this… culling.”

  His eyes widened.

  “Yeah! We were never taught about that.”

  “Neither was I, if I remember my own lessons accurately. I was never interested in the ancient past, but to not even have the slightest mention of this genocide… it feels purposeful. War is, in part, the struggle over information. But how can there be no mention at all? It strains credulity. Unless the God intends to cull all of us.”

  “But why would Suiteonem do this?” Ragay understood the God’s scriptures or he thought he did.

  Conflict to strengthen.

  So, he understood why the empyreal guards had been forcing conflict even if his heart hurt for his fellow people caught up in it.

  But this?

  This felt too far.

  Further thoughts on the matter were flushed out by the action on the projection.

  He had lost count at around a hundred but that wasn’t Miss Karagatan’s limit.

  He watched the God destroy constructs with every move, yet the number didn’t seem to lessen.

  He wondered how much of the original person was in the construct.

  They appeared to be using their spells and Skills or at least hard water copies.

  Even hard water flames burned in the depths.

  A fish-tailed woman, naked from the waist up, swam up and sang a song. The tiny eels hiding in her voluminous kelp-like hair provided harmony in the background such that the song from one mouth sounded like an entire choir.

  Suiteonem slowed, eyes drooping.

  A hard-shelled man caught the God around the chest and arms with one giant claw-hand.

  Other constructs swam in to land their best attacks. From thousands of stinging nematocysts on diaphanous tendrils to a giant bite from a head transformed into the seven-eyed prehistoric precursor of a great blue death to spells from all branches. They struck and landed.

  Gold filled cerulean.

  Gold blinded.

  …

  Miss Karagatan lurked on the fringes of the battle.

  Her heart beat in time with Sinaya’s. Both in her bident and back in Sonombera.

  She refused to allow the confusion in her head play out on her face.

  The memories, hers and of all Karagatans before her pulled her in thousands of different directions.

  The constructs of her— their… well… everything.

  Friends, allies, enemies and even many lovers and family.

  Pieces of them were there in the hard water constructs.

  Copies to be sure but not the mindless, soulless ones she had been creating out of all the creatures of the ocean.

  The Oath sang a soothing song in her thoughts.

  Of course…

  “All are one in Sinaya. We are one in Sinaya.”

  The memories streamed out of the Heart of Sinaya, replacing the ones Suiteonem destroyed just as quickly.

  A faint one returned to prominence.

  Of working with a set of identical brothers and sisters, two of each, for a time.

  The best adventuring team in the world of fifteen thousand years ago.

  The Karagatan and the Fierce Four had carved a swathe through all drylander nations as revenge for a culling.

  Suiteonem had devastated a small underwater kingdom. The most powerful and most advanced of Sinaya’s people at the time. And so they, in turn, devastated the drylanders that tried to pick over its corpse like carrion swimmers.

  Millions for thousands until they were brought down and slain.

  It had not been an equal exchange for the loss of the kingdom and its people.

  Miss Karagatan swam with the brothers and sisters almost like it was just yesterday.

  The formation was crisp.

  The coordination perfect.

  They struck Suiteonem in multiple, inter-locking three dimensional waves weaved within the other attacks.

  Like ripper fish taking chunks of flesh from a great blue death’s fins until the greater beast could no longer swim, leaving it to drown as it floated in the water.

  Skills, spells and weapons carved at the pale, gold-streaked flesh.

  Miss Karagatan could almost hear the viciously playful banter between the siblings. The words were almost on her tongue, but she couldn’t say them when they didn’t belong to her.

  Suiteonem laughed inside his golden bloom.

  He struck like an ocean viper.

  Her eyes widened, her mouth opened in a wordless scream as he crushed her leg from ankle to knee.

  Thin armor strong enough to take cannon fire crumpled like paper.

  He squeezed repeatedly turning everything into ground meat.

  Alarm filled her constructs’ eyes.

  They rushed to her aid.

  Only to be destroyed with gold light and crushing fists.

  He whipped her like a seatiger does a fish.

  Miss Karagatan tumbled through the water, trailing crimson from her torn knee.

  She thought blue thoughts.

  Will silenced agony.

  A hard water lower leg and foot complete with fins emerged to join the hard water hand and arm.

  She righted herself and burst back the way she had come.

  The Heart of Sinaya in her bident swirled.

  She struck Suiteonem with the weight of all the oceans in the world.

  The coral shattered, but not before the tips touched his heart.

  She let go of the shaft and thrust again with the coral trident in her hands.

  Empty one moment, armed the next.

  The God blocked the blurring thrust with a sudden armor of gold light.

  Hard water memories yanked her out of the way of a gold axe that boiled the water. Hard water memories swarmed him, turning the sea into a roiling mess of destruction that carved a deep trench across the once flat ocean floor.

  She swam away in a blur, listening to the song in her head.

  To the largest island in the Sea of Shattered Teeth.

  A long dormant caldera that had collapsed all the way down to sea level hundreds of thousands of years ago. A time that predated even Sinaya’s rise to Godhood.

  She swam up to the beach and took a moment to gaze up the fertile slopes of the massive volcano.

  “Apologies old one. I must disturb your long slumber.”

  She spared no apologies for the people of Sinaya living in the many settlements on the island and in the surrounding waters.

  They had, she was pleased to notice, all fled.

  “Sinaya, grant them long lives.”

  The faces of her potentials flashed across her mind.

  “May—”

  No.

  Each potential would live as long a life as he or she chose.

  The duty was as honorable and worthy as it was inescapable.

  They were all one in Sinaya.

  One sacrifice for the many was always worth it.

  A sudden pain filled her as she flew up the beach and into the watery caldera several thousand meters up and down the black-rocked slopes.

  The Karagatan’s memories had all been returned to where they belonged in Sinaya.

  “Thank you for the gift,” she whispered. “It is an honor to learn that I was worthy of it.”

  The mountain exploded behind her.

  Suiteonem flew, grasping greedily with a mad smile-snarl fixed on his face.

  She let him have her rage to keep her calm as she lashed out with hard water weapons appearing and disappearing out of her hard water limbs.

  He blocked and parried, unable to counter against her blurring quickness.

  She spun her trident.

  Hard water streamed out, encasing him in a complicated prison cell the size of one of Kinabukasan’s gleaming towers. Hard water gears turned, tightening hard water cables of varying lengths and thickness. Stronger than even enchanted mythril. Hard water blocks of myriad shapes slammed together into a seamless, complicated puzzle with no weak points. Followed by water with the consistency of sludge to seep into the small open spaces.

  She strained as sweat dripped from her entire body.

  To hold such a complicated contraption in her imagination and reality required the greatest will.

  Greater than any other Karagatan in history.

  That had always been her true strength.

  Her imagination.

  When had she forgotten the joy of it?

  An island in the distance shimmered in haze, growing larger with each breath.

  The last gambit.

  She knew it would fail but they had to try.

  Every second Suiteonem fought her was one more second for the survivors to flee and seek hiding places.

  The watery caldera far beneath her bubbled as white steam began to cloud the air.

  She plunged Suiteonem within her hard water prison deep into the caldera.

  The distant island wasn’t so distant as the minutes passed.

  The water it would displace would wreak havoc on the drylander settlements located on the coasts.

  She found not a drop of regret for those people.

  All were invaders brought by Suiteonem over the millennia.

  The original drylanders were long gone.

  Made extinct in his countless wars and Calamities or taken to his other worlds at his whims.

  Undoubtedly used up like all his servants in even more wars.

  It was a fish bone in her gums that out of all Sinaya’s children she was the only one that knew the full truth of their existence. To die without being able to share the burden with another would be her one true regret.

  The heat rose astronomically as the magma bubbled out of the bulging caldera floor.

  Water vaporized into steam as glowing red peeked through like a many eyed monster in the deep.

  Needles stabbed into every bit of her being from the strain of maintaining her perfect prison within the impossible heat.

  She floated up and away, giving the island crab that had emerged from the sea her due respect.

  She was a nameless creature.

  Impossibly old.

  Old in the days before Sinaya attained Godhood.

  The venerable creature slept the millennia away, sustained and growing by Sinaya’s magic.

  There were perhaps three of her kind left sleeping in the deepest parts of the oceans.

  Soon to be two.

  She scuttled up the beach.

  Walls of water radiated in her wake.

  She was the size of a small island after all.

  “Thank you for your sacrifice.”

  Miss Karagatan transmitted her feelings through the Heart of Sinaya.

  If the ancient creature heard, she gave no indication.

  She simply continued her ascent up the slopes and over the bubbling caldera to sit herself over it like a cork in a bottle.

  Lava bubbled, escaping out from the edges of her shell until she pressed down harder, sending an avalanche of rocks sliding down in every direction to utterly demolish everything in their path down. The villages, towns and cities weren’t spared.

  She raised a claw the size of a drylander warship to Miss Karagatan then tucked it over eye stalks the size of tall trees.

  Miss Karagatan watched her slowly die, cooked within her own shell, over the next three hours.

  She wept for the venerable creature as the dark blue shell turned red.

  Yet all she could do was keep her will and imagination as firm as enchanted metal.

  Three hours was three more than the people of the Sea of Shattered Teeth had three hours ago.

  But, it came at a high cost as the strain of it continuously drained every bit of her mind, body and soul.

  The dead island crab’s red shell cracked, erupting in a shower of white meat as a pillar of golden light burned into the sky and beyond.

  Suiteonem, pale skin caked in smoldering black and red lava, was on her in a blink.

  He broke her flesh and blood arm. Then punched her in the chest with a fist almost the size of her torso.

  Armor caved with her scales and skin and bones.

  She crashed into a beach on a distant island.

  Suiteonem landed, sending her crashing down the shore on a wave of sand.

  She would’ve struggled to breathe with the sand in her mouth if only she could’ve breathed with her broken ribs.

  Crimson poured with every hacking cough as her vision darkened around the edges.

  “I will need time to reflect on our duel,” Suiteonem mused. “To properly rank it with all my duels with the Karagatans over the years and to rank it with all my duels regardless of species, class, type and so on. You understand? I shall, in my benevolence reward you. Though you failed to push me to my true state, you did entertain. Only thirteen other Karagatans have been able to call on the spirits of the fallen and none as many, nor as close to life as you. Take heart. You failed to stop my culling, but you did buy my subjects more time then I had planned to give them.” He gazed to the western horizon. “And you’ve struck quite the dying blow on your enemies. The drylanders, as you call them, will seek revenge and when I turn these now empty islands over to them, your kind will seek revenge. I foresee many years of war and deep cultural enmities forged. The perfect backdrop for a Calamity or two in the generations to come. Perhaps for my next break from my duties elsewhere? You’ll never understand that part of a true God’s existence, Karagatan. You and that upstart, Sinaya. To know it one must walk many worlds beyond that which they were born to.” He laughed. “And so, your reward. Know this, Karagatan. You are at least top five in the most powerful and worthy of all the Karagatans I have slain in personal combat. It’s not all Karagatans for there are those that didn’t fall by my hand, which automatically disqualifies them from consideration. Weaklings one and all.”

  Miss Karagatan tried to rise and call her trident.

  The only answer that came was from Suiteonem’s foot as he kicked her down the beach.

  The waves lapped at her, embracing her in the comforting cool, filling her nose slits with that sweat brine.

  She reached out, digging her fingers in the wet sand.

  Instinct and will.

  To close her eyes in that cold, comforting darkness at the end.

  “No.” Suiteonem sneered down at her as he used his foot to flip her out of the water and up the beach to bake in the bright sun.

  She reached out and tried to crawl back but he stepped on her back, keeping her in place just an arm’s reach away from the gently lapping water.

  “You are all the same, Karagatan. Every one of you. So desperate to die in the ocean. Rage for me!” he snarled. “Rage at me! Rage as you die knowing you’ll never reach it! Rage, knowing that it is I keeping you from your home at your end! Hear me, Sinaya!” he roared to the sea. “Another one of your children dead under my feet! Twenty thousand years and nothing has changed! Unto eternity, Sinaya! Do you hear me? An eternity! You and your people, no matter what form they take are mine! You are mine forever!” His deep voice boomed across the world for everyone to hear.

  Many wept.

  More cheered.