Path of Dragons

Book 7: Chapter 82: The Final Stretch

Elijah returned to the courtyard expecting to find that Sadie and Dat had already wrapped things up. But to his surprise, the Corrupted remained among the living. The demonic woman was standing in the center of the plaza, surrounded by an ethereal shield. Sadie aimed one blow after another at the barrier, eliciting ripples of dense energy, but her efforts fell short of the obvious goal – which was to shatter the shield and slay the demon within.

The Corrupted Healer, meanwhile, was on her last leg. Literally. One of her limbs had been lopped off at the hip, and though the bleeding from the stump had ceased, the leg showed no signs of regrowth. More, that wasn’t the only sign that she’d gotten the worst of the battle. She was covered in other wounds, with a huge gash splitting her shoulder, traveling up her neck, and marring her jaw.

But she seemed entirely unconcerned, with her eyes closed and ethera swirling all around her.

“What’s happening?” he asked, skidding to a stop.

“We can’t get through,” Sadie growled, slamming her sword into the shield between each word. She was clearly frustrated, and her attacks lacked any of the grace she normally infused into her technique. But she made up for it with sheer power.

“Where are the others?” asked Dat, squatting nearby and staring at the shield like he was trying to find gaps in the Healer’s defenses.

“Uh,” Elijah muttered, running his hand over his bald head. No matter how many times he lost his hair, he would never get used to it. Maybe Biggle could offer a solution. That was the sort of thing Alchemists were supposed to be good at, right?

“You killed them, didn’t you?” Dat sighed. When Elijah didn’t immediately answer, the Witch Hunter continued, “Bro. You’re making the rest of us look bad.”

“So…um…what’s the plan here?” Elijah asked, glancing around. The others had killed the members of the undead horde who’d stuck around, but they’d obviously hit a wall when it came to the Healer herself.

He didn’t give voice to the obvious. If he used his Miracle now, then it wouldn’t be available for the inevitable fight against the Queen of Desolation. And given the power displayed by what amounted to lieutenants – the shield-bearing demon they’d encountered in front of the Wall, the Bladesinger, the Chainspeaker, and the Corrupted – it stood to good reason that, going forward, they would need every spell and ability they could muster.

“I don’t think that’s an option,” Elijah stated.

“I don’t either. So, the only other choice is to just wear her down, and when she runs out of ethera, kill her,” Dat replied.

Elijah understood what was going through Dat’s mind. Killing was easy enough when it came in the heat of battle, but what he’d described was a systematic execution. That would feel much different, and not in a good way.

But it had to be done.

“Do you think it’s like towers?” Elijah asked.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. They deserve what they get,” Dat answered, his voice taking on a hard edge. “If the world was fair, they’d be forced to endure what they put the rest of us through. That over there – she’s not innocent. That monster is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

Elijah wasn’t so sure. He knew that, in towers, people were forced to act according to their roles. Was it the same for Primal Realms? Maybe. The evidence suggested that it was subtly different, but Elijah wasn’t certain what constituted those differences. All he knew was that he didn’t blame them for the things they did. There was an element of inevitability to it that he knew was out of their control.

Dat clearly didn’t feel the same, and rightly so. He’d lost a lot of people he cared about, and he took his frustration out on the Healer’s shield. Sadie did the same, and slowly, they whittled it down. When it began to waver, the Corrupted opened her eyes and said, “She will destroy you all. Know that killing me will not help you. I welcome the death you so generously offer, but my pain will not cease. My suffering will continue, and we shall meet again.”

That only served to send Sadie into a more ferocious rage. Part of it was obviously born of frustration, but Elijah also knew that Sadie reacted poorly to demons. The two elder races were sworn enemies, and it seemed that enmity had been passed along to those granted their cores.

For his part, Elijah remained where he’d planted himself, watching in case the situation changed. As it turned out, his attention was unnecessary. When the shield finally shattered, the Corrupted fell, entirely exhausted. Sadie executed her after only a moment. Elijah didn’t even get any experience for the kill.

But that didn’t mean that the fight hadn’t pushed him forward, and he’d made it to one-forty-four. One more level, and he’d get yet another ability or an evolution of an existing spell. It was a truly remarkable pace of advancement, and Elijah couldn’t help but notice that Primal Realms were great for leveling.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

The fact that they’d already lost two people – three, if he counted the Summoner who’d been killed before they even got to the Desolate Reach – was concerning, though. People hungry for power would doubtless challenge any Primal Realm they found, and many would perish in the attempt. Even if they knew the dangers, there was a thirst for ongoing progression that would push them ahead.

Elijah saw a future where such places would need to be regulated, lest people end up dying unnecessarily.

But then again, that wasn’t a concern he could focus on at the moment. Instead, he and the others gathered what loot they could find – there wasn’t much, aside from the Bladesinger’s blades – and headed back to let the refugees know of their success. Once that was done, the group decided to take a short rest before moving on to what they hoped would be the final challenge.

Dat had already scouted the way, and he’d returned to tell them that the rest of the fortress was clear all the way to what he referred to as the throne room. “That’s probably not a good description, though. There’s a throne there, but it’s more of a platform than a room,” he had explained.

It didn’t matter, because he was quick to add that the Queen of Desolation was there patiently waiting upon their arrival. As they recovered their strength and ethera, Elijah noticed that Dat had sequestered himself away from the others. Meanwhile, Sadie and Nico stared daggers at one another, with Elijah stuck between them. If there was ever a dysfunctional family dynamic, Elijah had stumbled into it.

So, he didn’t hesitate to extricate himself from their midst and head over to Dat. After settling down beside his friend, Elijah asked, “How are you doing?”

Dat looked up, saying, “I don’t know why I thought she’d be one of the prisoners.”

“What?”

“Lisa. I carried her body back myself. I knew she hadn’t been captured. She’s gone for good,” he sighed. “But when you told us there were captives, I let myself hope again. I kept telling myself it was stupid, that it wouldn’t have made sense. But none of this makes sense, right? Who knows what the system can do? Maybe it can bring people back. Maybe resurrection is possible.”

“I…I don’t think it works that way,” Elijah breathed.

“Me neither,” he admitted. “But sometimes, hope doesn’t care about reason.”

He trailed off, letting a pregnant silence stretch between them. Then, Elijah revealed, “I thought the same thing. About my sister, I mean. She died in a tower, and I thought that maybe she was still in there. But dead is dead. There are some spells that can bring people back, but…”

“But what?” asked Dat, hope blooming in his eyes.

“But some people say it’s not really them that come back. It’s just a copy,” Elijah answered. “There’s no way to tell for sure, though, and the longer it’s been since they died, the more power it takes.”

“Some of the necromancers say they can bring people back. That’s how I met Ke Ming. After Lisa died, I started visiting their enclaves, looking for anyone who could…I don’t know…resurrect her, I guess. None of them could help, though,” he went on. “There was no body, you see? She was cremated as soon as we got back to Heaven’s Bastion. Her grandfather’s orders.”

“It wouldn’t have been her.”

“I know.”

“And even if it was…I’ve read a few guides that deal with that kind of thing…”

“And?”

“I read a few accounts of people who were successfully brought back. To the people who resurrected them, only a few minutes had passed, but they were gone. Their spirits had departed. When they dragged them back, it was agonizing for those people. They begged for death. The wanted so badly to return to whatever was on the other side.”

“What was it?” Dat asked. “On the other side, I mean.”

Elijah shrugged. “None of them could remember. They just knew they didn’t belong here. Not anymore. Most of them went insane or killed themselves soon after,” he explained. And those accounts were limited to those people who’d almost immediately been resurrected. For someone like Lisa, who’d been gone for years, it would assuredly be much worse.

Dat hung his head. “So, she’s in a better place? Is that it?”

“I don’t know, Dat.”

After a few more moments, he said, “She was nice to me from the very beginning. Most people in Heaven’s Bastion weren’t. I’d dumped a bunch of problems on their lap when I brought back all those refugees, and I was a foreigner. That made me easy to hate. But not Lisa. She was too good of a person for this kind of a world.”

Elijah nodded along. Then, he asked the question that had been on his mind ever since the they’d received the blessing from the Temple of Tin Hua Temple. “What happened to her?”

“Her brother happened.”

“What did he do?”

Dat took a deep breath, and for a moment, Elijah thought he was going to refuse to answer. Then, he said, “We were supposed to interrupt a ritual. Back then, they weren’t that uncommon. A few demons would appear, and they’d sacrifice some people to open a portal. We didn’t know where those portals led, but they let undead monsters through. Death-attuned ethera, too. Since then, we’ve discovered that they were kind of like terraforming. They’re unnecessary now. What’s happened to Hong Kong is permanent.”

That supported what Elijah had felt while traveling in and around the city. The death-attuned ethera had twisted life to such a degree that it was self-perpetuating. Separating the two – vitality and death – would almost assuredly require killing everything off and re-seeding the entire region.

“Anyway,” Dat continued. “She was with the main group, while I was off scouting. Something changed, and they were forced to act sooner than they normally would have. Lisa toppled the ritual, but not before hundreds of undead spilled out. She was wounded in the battle, but our so-called Healer refused to treat her wound.” He glared across the room at Nico. “He said he wanted to conserve ethera. He claimed that she would heal on her own. She didn’t, and when we were attacked again, he used the ethera he had left. He saved a bunch of people, but Lisa got worse. By the time we realized how close she was to dying…it was too late.”

He wiped a tear from his cheek. “She didn’t feel anything. One second, she was alive, and I was telling myself that she would be better when we got back to Heaven’s Bastion,” he explained. “Then, she was gone. I…I attacked him. I would have killed him if Sadie hadn’t stopped me.

“It wasn’t long after that that we all got our angel cores. I hate that I’m tied to him by that,” Dat said. “Sadie knew I needed to get away, and…well, she asked me to go with her to search for help. That helped.”

“But now you’re back, and you realize that all the issues are still there.”

Dat nodded.

“I wasn’t kidding when I offered to take you back to the grove once this is all over,” Elijah said, reaching out to grip the other man’s shoulder. Then, he pulled him into a hug. At first, Dat seemed like he didn’t know what to do with the gesture, but then, he just leaned into it.

“Thank you,” he said.

“That’s what friends are for,” Elijah answered, patting the man on his back.