Everyone on the planet could probably feel Lindon at that moment. He was surrounded by enough power to shake the fabric of the world.
“Contact Yerin and Ziel,” Mercy told Dross. “We’re leaving.”
[Where do I tell them we’re going?]
“We have to see my mother.”
Lindon hadn’t been torn through space so violently since the Uncrowned King tournament. He slammed back into reality, bracing himself before he fell to the sand. Then he took stock of his situation.
He was in the center of a vast wasteland. Besides himself and Dross, there were only three living things for miles.
The ground was rocky, the terrain mountainous. And the sky a crackling, chaotic swirl of gold and red.
Lindon’s spiritual sense burned with the power around him. He suspected everyone could sense this gathering, because no one had bothered to veil themselves.
A titanic egg made from the Bleeding Phoenix sat in the distance like a dormant building, cracks suggesting it was about to hatch. A red-winged human avatar of the Dreadgod had been formed from blood madra and stood nearby. She gave him a wave and a smile when he arrived.
The Wandering Titan loomed over them both. It glared down with its eyes above the clouds, and the weight of its attention caused the grains of sand to shimmy and dance in panicked circles.
Reigan Shen lowered the binding of Subject One, which had been worked into what appeared to be some kind of horn.
Lindon could feel its influence. That horn had brought him here. Combined with King’s Key madra and the wills of a Monarch and two Dreadgods, the horn had established enough authority over him to haul him through space. Despite his metaphysical weight.
Wary, Lindon wondered what else that Dreadgod weapon could do.
Reigan Shen was visibly struggling in this company, and while he shot Lindon a smug look, Lindon suspected he’d rather be anywhere else.
“Brother,” the Bleeding Phoenix said. “Let’s talk.”
Lindon’s right arm lurched, but he forced it back down. “Why?”
“I should have thought that would be obvious,” Shen said. “We went through great difficulty to bring you here. If you’re not willing to talk, we’ll have to turn to a more violent course of action.”
Time slowed as Lindon consulted with Dross.
He should have been afraid, but the hunger was so strong he could no longer hold it back. The three enemies in front of him looked like delicious meals to a starving man.
A burden slid off Lindon’s back.
He wanted to bring the others along with him. He had never dreamed of becoming the strongest alone.
But helping them along meant being responsible for them, and he was sick of worry. Now, the enemies had cornered him and forced him to fight. He almost welcomed it.
The only one he had to worry about was himself.
[And me!] Dross pointed out. [But don’t worry, I have plenty of worry to go around.]
Fueled by hunger, Lindon’s rage returned. Reigan Shen had locked the others away in a pocket dimension. He had tried to kill them, more than once. And now he was right there.
Not a blink had passed since Shen stopped talking when Lindon lunged for him.
The Titan was the first to respond, summoning spires of stone from the ground beneath Lindon’s feet, but Lindon crashed through the cage without slowing down. He clawed for Shen with his right hand, and Shen’s automated defenses were too late. Constructs projected shields, but they only slowed Lindon.
White fingers had almost seized Shen around the throat, but blood madra lunged up like an attacking shark to take a bite out of Lindon’s middle.
He blasted the Bleeding Phoenix’s attack away with an Empty Palm that projected a blue-white handprint bigger than his body. But that distraction gave Shen enough space to fly away, spitting half-formed words that Lindon suspected were Rosegold curses.
“He’s not to be eaten,” the Phoenix’s human body admonished Lindon. A flock of Blood Shadows in the shapes of birds screeched from high overhead.
The Wandering Titan redoubled its pressure, pushing Lindon down, but Lindon matched his will to the Titan’s. The air between them shivered and trembled, even starting to crack.
“And why not?” Lindon asked politely.
“He can’t be touched,” the Phoenix said, as though it were obvious.
“Ah. The binding gives him authority over you.” Lindon’s right hand flexed at the thought of Consuming Subject One’s core binding.
He and Dross had thought the Horn might be used to control Dreadgods—it could already pull him through space—but they hadn’t been sure how much effort it would take Lindon to resist.
Lindon himself had part of his body made from the Slumbering Wraith, and he controlled the labyrinth. It would have been surprising for such a leash to work on him at all, but there was nothing like a field test.
“Kill him!” Shen ordered, but there was no authority behind the word. It seemed he wasn’t strong enough to perform a working on two Dreadgods at once.
So, rather than a leash, it seemed his ‘control’ was more like a gentle suggestion.
The Phoenix’s human form glanced at him, but she smiled at Lindon instead. “He’s irritating, I know. Why fight him when there’s plenty of prey for all of us?”
She raised a hand, and projected light in the image of five land masses, each with a different symbol. Iceflower, Rosegold, Everwood, Ninecloud, and Ashwind.
“You know how hard it is to keep the hunger under control,” she said. “Trust me, it’s worse when you have no sense of self. You just want to eat, and eat, and eat…but then what would be left? It would be far better to manage the herd.”
The continents all turned different colors. Iceflower turned yellow, Rosegold turned blue, Everwood turned white, Ninecloud turned red, and Ashwind turned black.
“How about we share?” the Phoenix suggested.
The Wandering Titan’s pressure lessened, and Lindon got the impression that it agreed. This was advantageous for the Titan, after all; it was the slowest of the Dreadgods and thus couldn’t cover as much territory.
The red-winged woman leaned toward Lindon, radiating honesty. “We’ll keep the human population stable. Just enough Monarchs to sustain us, but each restrained not to threaten us. The mortals can be bent to producing food for us, and in return, we can remain docile. Content. Rather than monsters, we can be guardians.”
[It’s not that it couldn’t work,] Dross allowed.
Lindon saw the logic. If they continued this way, the Silent King and the Slumbering Wraith would be reborn. Lindon would lose his bow but would replace Subject One permanently.
If the intelligent population of the world worked together, they could keep the Dreadgods fed with minimal loss of life. Excess dream energy could be funneled to the Silent King, livestock for the Bleeding Phoenix, unintelligent spirits and extra madra for the Weeping Dragon. Even aura could be funneled more efficiently to create rich natural treasures to feed the Wandering Titan.
The Phoenix moved the image of Ashwind forward, waving a hand to its black expanse. “You could have your home continent all to yourself. Rule it as you wish. If you can keep your hunger under control, you don’t need to tax the people at all. Though you would need to feed a certain amount to stay conscious, of course.”
Lindon could already see the systems and rules that would need to be put into place. “You’ve put quite a bit of thought into this. Although…I don’t mean to be rude, but isn’t ‘offering tribute to our guardians’ just a nicer way to say, ‘feeding immortal monsters so they don’t kill us all’?”
The Wandering Titan rumbled with anger, which was much more intimidating when it physically shook the ground. Cracks opened in the stone.
In contrast, the Bleeding Phoenix smiled wider. “How is that worse than what the Monarchs have already done? If we can expend less energy, just rest and stay conscious, I would say we’d make better rulers than they ever did.”