The tower officiants began openly weaving in the stands. Blades of suppression light dropped over the arena to cage the human.
The human caught them. Every stray blast, every suppression blade, every ricochet that should have torn into the packed tiers, he plucked out of the air or stepped in front of, absorbing them into his domain, and the crowd watched him protect them from their own officiants in real time, and the crowd did the thing crowds do with that information. It filed it away. Every elf in that canopy personally watched the human save elven lives from elven treachery while under assault by a stolen god.
The champion spent his strength like the thief he was. He burned the tree's stolen power in vast wasteful surges, sand melting to glass, air cracking, and the human let him spend it. Let the crowd count every acre of forest the prince's faction had bled out of their dying queen to build this one puppet.
And then Faelor made the call that ended his own house.
