Without Dross, Lindon might not have noticed. The object she’d buried wasn’t easy to sense; it felt entirely mundane, with only lingering traces of spiritual power, so it was probably some scripted tool.
But around it, the world felt…thin. Like the invisible indentation Lindon had pressed on to create a portal.
“What was—” he began, but Mercy cut him off.
“The Li clan wasn’t as bad as you said they’d be,” she reported. “They wouldn’t listen to me at first, but once I impressed them a little, they did whatever I said.”
Dross materialized onto Lindon’s shoulder, frowning at Mercy’s foot. [You’ll have to do better than that to hide something from me. If you’re hiding something. If you’re not, stop acting like you are.]
Lindon sent his thoughts silently to the spirit. I don’t think we’re the ones she’s hiding from. Stop drawing attention.
Mercy gave him a wide-eyed plea, and Lindon nodded. He understood. Yerin looked between them, glanced at the ground, and then stretched out her arms. “Sounds like we’ve got more people to load. No time to stand around flapping our lips.”
Dross was still staring obviously at the spot under Mercy’s foot. His one eye couldn’t be open any wider, and he was slowly drifting closer to the ground.
“Dross,” Lindon said aloud.
[Yes?]
“We need to get back to work.”
[Okay, yes, of course, let’s go.]
He didn’t hide his staring at all.
With his Remnant arm, Lindon seized the spirit and spun him to face another direction. Dross’ eye swiveled to stay where it was.
You’ve got to stop.
[To stifle my intellectual curiosity would be to deny who I am.]
I suspect we both know what it is.
[That’s why I’m so curious! Are we right? Are you wrong? We must confirm.]
Get back in my head.
In a huff, Dross vanished.
Mercy was acting as casually as she could while kicking dirt over the spot where she’d just been standing. “Looks like you’ve got a full load here. I can stay here, keep the peace.”
“I’d feel steadier if you rode with us,” Yerin said. “If we have to bolt, we want to stay together.”
That brought up something Lindon had wondered about for a while. “Speaking of which, have you seen Ziel?”
Mercy sighed and shook her head. “If anyone’s heard from him, I thought it would be you and Dross. I could stay back and wait for him! It might be…inconvenient…having me aboard. Under these circumstances.”
From the other side of Sacred Valley, a tongue of shadow madra leaped into the air like a burst of flame from a bonfire.
Lindon had wondered why Malice hadn’t taken Mercy back already. Maybe she hadn’t noticed her daughter’s presence in Sacred Valley…or maybe she had been waiting for Mercy to leave on her own.
“We’re more than happy to have you aboard,” Lindon said, hopping onto the cloud himself. “I would feel better if you were with us too.”
Mercy scratched her nose, glanced around as though looking for another opinion, then sighed and joined them.
They lifted off for the second time, Samara’s ring now bright. The golden sky had dulled to bronze, and the Titan’s influence had thinned so that stars even peeked through here and there.
As they drifted higher, past the curving light of Samara’s ring, they caught sight of the Monarch’s fight once again.
Malice stood almost as tall as the Dreadgod now, though the Titan still loomed over her. Its back was to Sacred Valley, and thus to Lindon, and its tail flattened trees as it lashed back and forth.
The Monarch looked like a tamer working with a dangerous creature. She leaned close, provoking the Dreadgod to swipe at her, and then stepped backwards to loose an arrow of Forged blue madra.
Weakened by the field around Sacred Valley, the arrow only splashed against the Wandering Titan’s rocky skin, but it still enraged the Dreadgod.
The creature roared, bringing its hands together. Loose stones rose from the earth for miles, gathering in the air between its palms. Golden light formed a ball around them, until the Titan held a sphere of deadly madra, aura, and actual physical stones in its hands.
Lindon had seen Abyssal Palace priests use a similar technique, though of course never on this scale. And the Titan was still within Sacred Valley’s restrictions. How could it use sacred arts of that level with its advancement suppressed?
The technique blasted out, but Malice simply let it crash onto her breastplate. The amethyst armor stood firm, rocks and chunks of yellow madra spraying out over the landscape for miles behind her.
The Dreadgod gave one more frustrated roar, throwing its head back to scream into the sky…
…then it marched out of Sacred Valley.
Its black, serpentine tail carved a canyon in the soil as it followed Malice, furious. Lindon could feel its power recovering with every breath, and so of course could Malice; she created space by leaping backwards, readying an arrow on her bow.
She needed to keep the Titan on the hook, so she couldn’t move too far away, lest it turn back again. At the same time, she didn’t want to fully engage and risk starting a full-scale fight here.
Malice still needed to tease the enemy away, but as far as Lindon was concerned, she’d won. She had pulled the Dreadgod away from Sacred Valley.
Granted, the Valley wasn’t in pristine shape anymore, but it was mostly intact. He could see Elder Whisper’s tall tower from here, and the purple slopes of Yoma Mountain. They could rebuild.
Yerin gripped Lindon’s forearm. “Lindon.”
He leaned toward her, giving her some of his attention, but didn’t take his eyes from the battle.
“Lindon.”
His bones were starting to hurt under her grip. He looked up to her…and her red eyes were shining. Literally. They lit up like scripts, and he could feel blood aura slowly strengthening all around her.
But not just around her.
Outside the windows, the burnished bronze of the sky began to swirl with another, brighter color. The moon, a dim secondary light to Samara’s ring, slowly melted from a cool and soothing blue to a bright pink-tinged red.
[Uh, Lindon…]
No, Lindon prayed. Please no.
He held Suriel’s marble in a tight fist. Maybe his wishes could reach Suriel, and she could turn back time or rewrite the truth. Anything to undo what he felt now.
One of the refugees in the room began to scream. She wore a stained bandage around one arm, and the blood had begun to writhe under the wrappings.
From beneath the red moon, there came the searing cry of a great phoenix.
16
Northstrider drove his boot down on a skull bigger than he was. With the slightest flex of blood and force aura, the power carried throughout the creature’s body.
Every bone in the dreadbeast shattered at once. Its heart burst.
The twisted, corrupted lizard—the size of a large house—had only been a Lord-level beast. But you never knew what abominations would crawl out of a Dreadgod’s wake. It was always best to wipe pests out when you had the chance.
The important thing was that he stay where he was.
He stood in the center of a wide swath of devastation that the Wandering Titan had cut across the landscape as it marched eastward from Sky’s Edge. It had ruined many of the squat towers that Abyssal Palace had left for it, but the cult wouldn’t mind. The towers were meant to be destroyed.
The towers would collect the Dreadgod’s power and store it in scripts in the foundation, waiting to be harvested by Abyssal Palace members later. It was one of the many ways in which the cultists benefited from the destruction the Dreadgod brought.