When the Midnight Matriarch let out her first agonized roar, Triss, who was symbolically connected to her, wasn't the only one to hear the ripples of turbulence that originated in the Warp. The vampires wandering around various parts of the continent in the dead of night felt it too.
The sensation was much like the instinctive panic that came when your heart suddenly skipped several beats while you were sound asleep at midnight. Or like hearing a ghost's terrifying question suddenly ring out from behind you while walking alone at night.
The emotional fluctuations originating from the vampires' racial symbol transformed into waves of phantasmal visions that lingered in every vampire's mind. Ordinary lower-ranked vampires could only sense the terror brought on by this supernatural force, but the higher-ranked vampires and dukes whose bloodlines were closer to the source could clearly see the Midnight Matriarch struggling in the Void Sea within the visions flickering before their eyes.
She was being set alight!
The terrifying being formed from the malice of midnight was like a torch burning in the Void Sea, ignited from within its very existence. Light radiated from within, illuminating her being, while the light of order streamed out from every blood-red eye across her body.
It even illuminated a sliver of the chaotic, disordered Warp.
This was clearly a direct infusion of energy. A power from above the gods was changing this god-scar, and it went without saying how painful the process must be. Yet the vampires who knew the truth had already understood the significance of this scene.
In an underground prayer room in the Maginot Line at the southernmost tip of Transia, General Maxim, dressed in a blood-red robe, was no longer the formidable figure he had once been. Now, like a classic priest or pastor,