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Orthos pushed forward, looking into the woods. “Lindon is right. We should be heading for a way home. We will see if the ship is still there.”

Yerin and Mercy did not look forward to the prospect of marching through the woods, but Lindon was strangely excited. Everyone was together, he was Truegold, and he was ready to dive into the woods filled with the unknown.

“Just have to hope the dragons are gone,” Yerin muttered.

“Dragons?” Orthos asked.

Lindon remembered a wounded Truegold dragon passing through the blue flash of a gatestone. Had Ekeri survived?

“Tell us about the dragons,” he said.

~~~

Sophara knelt before the image of her master, cheeks still wet with tears.

“They took so much from us,” she said, her chest tight with pain. “So much.”

The Monarch’s body was built from sand. It was a projection of his will; his true body was halfway across the continent, but this sand took his form. He looked like a human boy of twelve or thirteen wearing a mantle that covered him from neck to ankles.

Sophara was not worthy to look upon him directly. Instead, she studied his bare human feet.

“They took nothing from us,” her divine ancestor corrected her. “You gave it all to them.”

Her throat seized up, but she didn’t dare argue with a Monarch.

“Your sister cornered a mouse and was nibbled to death. She was a shame to my blood.” He spat to one side. “I wasted my words on her.”

Sophara’s claws gouged trenches in the wooden floorboards.

“You set Derianatoth and Nagatonatoth to hunt, and they too were killed by their prey. If their Remnants had not been destroyed already, you should have done it yourself. They do not deserve to be used in death. They were useless in life.”

She could hold her words no longer. “Divine king, whose wisdom spans the ages, please...please have mercy on me. They were my family.”

A finger of hard-packed sand slipped under her chin, tilting her face up. She squeezed her eyes shut so she didn’t accidentally see his face.

“Look upon me,” he commanded.

His face was round and smooth, with no hint of its true nature. Unlimited power, hidden in a frail package. Perfect beauty, as Sophara had always thought.

“Truth does not care for your feelings,” he said. The sand-sculpture was so fine, she could see every nuance of his icy expression. “The truth is, they were stronger. You were weak. And thanks to your weakness, this trip to Northstrider’s laboratory has gained us nothing and cost us much.”

Fresh tears oozed from her eyes. “I will accept my punishment with a glad heart.”

“What do I gain from your punishment? We face the facts. Aside from the Tidewalker sect and the Ninecloud Court delegation, we achieved the least of everyone in Ghostwater. And the Court cares nothing for any of this. Redmoon Hall retrieved what they came for, and the Akura family went to great lengths to hide their child’s fate from me. He must have succeeded.”

He gripped her chin with his whole hand, and she knew that even with the strength of this projection, he could tear her jaw from her head without effort. “I looked weak. The difference between perceived strength and actual strength is smaller than you would believe.”

He released her, folding his hands behind his back. “Hear me, Sopharanatoth. You have begun a hunt. There can be only one outcome: success, overwhelming success. You must bring me glory that overshadows my shame.”

“Tell me how,” she begged. “Tell me and I will.”

“Soon, there will be another competition,” he said. “On a much grander stage. This year, it means more than it ever has before. Even their tiny, insignificant Empire will be forced to compete. You will face their champions, and you will kill them with the world watching.

“Only then will I smile on you.”

~~~

In a distant corner of the world, a dragon’s corpse lay stretched across an icy mountain range, its blood flowing in swiftly freezing rivers. Blood aura boiled up, covering the horizon like a cloud bank, rising from miles of sapphire scales. The sacred beast had died only minutes before. Its Remnant—the size of a city—was already dispersing back into aura.

On that corpse sat Northstrider, Monarch on the Path of the Hungry Deep. He sat cross-legged, in a cycling position, as the blood aura rose around him.

With a breath, he cycled it into his core. The vitality of dragons seeped into him, strengthening his body and his spirit. A spark within his soul carried the image of a dragon, majestic and roaring; it fed upon the imprint of the dragon’s life that remained in this aura. Every part of him was nourished by this creature’s power.

And now there was one fewer dragon in the world.

This moment of cycling after the kill was the closest to content that he ever came. That satisfaction was suddenly interrupted by an irritation in his spirit.

He opened his perception, stretching it across the planet to the source of that irritation.

It was the anchor he’d planted to keep Ghostwater tied to this world. It had failed. Ghostwater was seconds from destruction.

He spent a moment weighing whether recovering the information remaining in his pocket world was worth breaking away from his cycling, but that only irritated him further. If the Ghostwater project had succeeded in the way he’d wanted, he wouldn’t have had to think about the question at all. A Presence would have told him the answer.

Mood broken, Northstrider rose to his feet. He might as well go salvage what he could.

With a brief effort, he stepped out of space.

The irresistible blue currents surrounded him, buffeting him and trying to push him back to the world, but this was a battle of wills he’d fought many times. He kept his focus locked on his destination, and in seconds he reached it. There was no change in his surroundings, just the sensation of being carried in overpowering currents and then a certainty that he had arrived.

Relaxing his will, he allowed himself to be carried back into Cradle. Or, as he preferred to think of it: into the miniature world he’d tacked onto Cradle like a spare room onto a house.

The prime chamber of the Ghostwater facility was much as he’d left it decades before. It was a cave he’d hollowed out with one scoop of his hand, with an exit on one wall, his oracle tree on the other, and not much else of note.

It had splintered like glass on the edge of shattering. Some of the cracks in space were so wide that he could see the void through them; endless black like the depths of space, speckled with lights like spinning, colored stars.

Reaching out, Northstrider extended his will to every corner of the pocket world.

“Hold,” he commanded.

The spatial cracks froze.

Compelled by his presence, space slowly stabilized, knitting back together. Reality reasserted itself, and Northstrider paced across the stone floor.

As he walked, part of him noted the boy on the ground. It was a Gold, a battered young man with an empty core on a Path that felt like shadow and swords. Bits of violet crystal armor clung to him, as though he expected armor to protect him from spatial cracks. One of Malice’s brood, then.

There were only two things worth noticing about the boy. First was that he had managed to drink two drops of ghostwater. Northstrider could feel their weight between the boy’s spirit and his mind.

Second: he was still alive.

The boy gasped as the cracks that had pressed against his neck vanished. He caught sight of Northstrider and his purple eyes widened. Without another sound, he bowed until his forehead pressed against the floor.

Northstrider reached the oracle tree, the collective where his Eyes of the Deep compiled and compared memories. Out of four thousand and ninety-six possible Eyes, two thousand, four hundred and thirteen had been returned.