? ? ?

  Hexabulous trusted his visions. For thousands of years they had guided him true, and he had no cause to doubt them now.

  Yet the star-man’s importance still eluded him, and the mystery gnawed at his patience—a commodity the Great Red Dragon possessed in scant supply.

  There was no time to brood. Umbron Illwing, the Great Shadow Dragon, and Father of Night, pressed them hard.

  Like himself, Illwing was one of the twelve.

  He was there with them in the very beginning, when worlds ended and they were forced to pull this one out screaming from the crucible of the celestial womb.

  His hand, as much as any of them, had shaped the foundations of everything that followed.

  Were they gods? He didn’t think so. But it wasn’t up to him to convince others of that.

  Irritating as those truths were, Hexabulous accepted it. Umbron had not—yet—broken their ancient treaty. The shadow form they fought was only a projection; the Night Father’s true body lay six thousand kilometers away, safe on the far side of the world.

  Thus, technically, Illwing had not trespassed on forbidden ground. The treaty remained intact, ancient magics sealed it; had they been undone he knew he would have felt it.

  Still, it irked him to no end.

  Now, with the Weeping Wyrm awake and adding further calamity to the chaos, Hexabulous’s irritation sharpened into outright fury. The shadow dragon was an obstacle blocking his path forward.

  “Get out of my way, asshole!”

  Hexabulous growled, raged. He drew in a long breath. Crimson scales flared with heat. Then he unleashed a torrent of flame, sweeping his head in a slow circle. Fire corkscrewed outward in an ever-widening bloom so fierce it forced the living darkness back.

  First light crept over the eastern horizon. With sunlight touching the battlefield, Illwing suddenly found fewer shadows to anchor his projection. The mirrored form began to fray, the shadow dragon squirmed with frustration.

  Sensing power and opportunity slipping away, the Father of Darkness—patron of the Temple of Night—launched one final, desperate assault.

  Dark fingers of unbridled fury lanced through the air, racing to outrun the dawn. They wove a shrinking sphere of blackthorn shadow around the combatants—spears twenty feet long, conjured by an ancient, malignant will.

  The trap closed. The first tips brushed past as Hexabulous and RX414 slashed and blasted them aside.

  Then the magic unraveled.

  A dozen stinging wounds flared across Hexabulous’s back—just as a song washed over him. Golden warmth flooded his veins, knitting flesh, banishing fatigue. He felt as though he had slept six undisturbed weeks.

  Illwing was gone, his projection dissolved by the rising sun.

  He could smell the fairy magic at work in that tune. He knew where it came from.

  Grace. What does she think she’s doing.

  If the little Fay expected gratitude, she would wait forever. Hexabulous was already composing the tongue-lashing she deserved for daring to interfere in his fight.

  He had never forgiven her kind. The stink of fairyland still turned his stomach, a memory from his hatchling days when a cruel denizen of that realm had left scars deeper than any claw.

  He shoved the thought aside.

  Together, dragon and machine banked wide, circling the awakened Weeping Wyrm.

  It had been millennia since they last beheld the creature. Gorged on centuries of slumber-feeding, it had swollen far beyond memory—vast, obscene, a living monument of blistered flesh.

  The stench hit him like a wall: rancid fluids, despair made odor. His nostrils flared in disgust.

  Yet beneath that reek, two fainter scents reached him: the star-man and the Fay girl, alive and together atop the monster’s coils.

  He conveyed the news to RX414 without a word. Centuries of partnership had forged a bond deeper than blood; subtle flickers of light, claw gestures, the twitch of a tail spoke volumes.

  RX414 needed no further cue. The machine dove, engines silent, cannons and beam arrays erupting in a prismatic storm. Missiles burst from hidden bays, rocket plumes trailing white like angel wings.

  Hexabulous followed in the barrage’s wake, sword raised for a monstrous blow.

  He struck an invisible wall. The machine did not—breaking a scant millimeter from impact.

  The collision rang through his skull like a hammer on anvil. Bone-jarring, vision-blurring, he rebounded, dazed.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  RX414’s assault had cloaked their charge—but it had also cloaked the Wyrm’s defence. The monster, now fully awake, had turned their own strategy against them.

  He forgot how potent its magic was. The Blanched drew on its power, but that was a pale reflection of the creature’s actual might. He was losing altitude quickly.

  Hexabulous’s temper flared hotter than his breath. His nostrils curled. He could smell the Wyrm’s fluids below as he went down, struggling to control the inevitable landing.

  ? ? ?

  Tarmour’s boots sloshed through caustic pools. He lost his footing and tumbled from the Weeping Wyrm’s bloated body just as the heretic—Mereque, the foreigner from another world—slipped from his grasp.

  He had held the upper hand until his God awoke, shattering the First Temple, and what looked like half the city along with it.

  Its presence had receded from his mind. He remained touched, transformed, steeped in its essence, but the disembodied voice and will had withdrawn, returning to the colossal flesh that now towered over the ruins.

  In the short time since he had been blessed and transformed by the divine excretions of their God, becoming its Anointed, he had unexpectedly been restored a slice of his humanity.

  It was a part of himself he had forgotten, untouched for two centuries. These emotions—rudimentary, painful, laced with scathing shame—stirred within him. For the first time in what felt like eternity, he felt like his old self again, igniting a brewing storm of internal conflict.

  Athur the man was the one he’d left behind, Tarmour the Blanched was the one he’d become.

  Turning a corner, he marched into a pair of knights and without slowing, had them fall in step behind him.

  Why the Weeper returned this part of his humanity to him, he did not fully understand. Was it a necessary part of his transformation, or was it a punishment and constant reminder of who he served? For all he knew, it could be both.

  The Weeping Wyrm knew all his secrets; it had bathed in his erased humanity.

  But the link had flowed both ways during his transformations.

  Through it, revelation had poured into him—secrets of the Wyrm no Blanched had ever known, not even the Priests of Dolor.

  They were his alone to bear; And the truths were bitter.

  Visions from the Wyrm’s dreams: lost worlds, valiant heroes, vile fiends, realities tethered, impossibly alien.

  He understood now. The Forgotten War was meant to end everything. This world should not exist. Yet life endured. Suffering endured—endless, infinite, a cosmic lament without relief or escape.

  What remained was an aberration: a reality warped by clashing desires, a twisted remnant of the Earth that once was, but no longer.

  And those two above—fire and steel—they were to blame.

  A fallen body barred their way, a giant that had no head. He had the two knights cleave it in half. They moved through the open cavity and continued onward into the streets.

  He also knew their God cared nothing for them. In its vast, ancient psyche, the Blanched were no more important to it than shed skin—tolerated at best, ignored at worst, useful only for scraping away the remnants of its endless lamentations.

  For spreading its misery.

  After lifetimes spent believing their divinity shared their pain, understood their tragedy, even cherished them in its own twisted way—that was the animus of its tears, of the taint they carried—he knew it did not.

  The realization struck like a blade to the gut.

  The Weeper felt no more empathy for its worshippers than it would for dust in a cupboard.

  Only Tarmour had been wretched enough to become the Weeper’s earthly avatar. Only he had been pathetic enough for it to notice. For their god required a soul that mirrored its own boundless despair—a mortal vessel capable of containing its essence without shattering.

  His tragic past had marked him perfectly. When he first underwent baptism and became Blanched, that stain had seared itself into his core.

  Now Tarmour stalked the ruined streets of the Shimmering City, drawing more followers to his side with a silent pull of thought. He led them carefully forward, hunting Mereque once more.

  The colossal Weeper thundered above them, while its body shook the streets under their feet. Its tears were flooded through alleys, leaving pools deadly to humans—yet invigorating to Blanched.

  He had to find and kill the spaceman. Mereque’s very presence disrupted the natural order; the Weeper sensed it, and through their connection, so too did its Anointed.

  One by one, Tarmour sent his warriors into the carnage, mindful of their god’s crushing bulk—they had a single task, locate the foreigner.

  With a soul-twisting moan, the Weeping Wyrm retched something from its maw—long and thin, half-lost in the cascading torrent of caustic fluids.

  Tarmour halted, transfixed. A compulsion surged through him, the god’s silent command: Go to it. Take it. This is vital.

  The object tumbled down, caught the foul current, and drifted straight toward him. No accident. Divine will.

  He waded through the ankle-deep brine until it brushed his boots. Then he lifted it with both hands.

  It was a tooth—easily twice his height, pale as bleached bone yet veined with sickly opal luminescence. The surface glistened with the Wyrm’s viscous tears, warm and pulsing faintly, as though still alive. Curved like a scythe, its tip tapered to a needle point that wept slow drops of corrosive ichor; the root end was jagged, torn from living gum. Power thrummed within it, cold and sorrowful, pressing against his mind like the god’s own grief made solid.

  In his grasp it felt both sacred and obscene—an extension of the Weeper itself, offered now to its chosen son.

  Extending his power—an overwhelming arcane force—he shaped a weapon from it: a five-pointed javelin ending in a hooked, curving tail.

  Tarmour admired the results, slowly turning it over. Exquisite. Terrifying. A cold smile curved his lips.

  One of the knights returned, reporting that he had found the heretic. Mereque was now with the Fay girl; Keigael—nowhere in sight.

  Tarmour sneered. Reaching out with his mind, he sensed the Arch-Minister of Sufferance nearby—still caged, tumbled from the god’s back after the Leprechaun’s Daughter had turned his own trap against him.

  Moments later, he had an escort of knights at his side. He led them to the trapped priest. With a casual wave, he dissolved his glowing prison into glittering dust that vanished on the wind.

  Keigael rose, blind hands groping the air until Tarmour commanded two sycophants to emerge from hiding and guide him. The priest straightened at once, confidence restored, as though donning familiar armour.

  A gurgling cackle escaped cracked lips as he bowed low. Spittle flew. “Endless thanks, my King. Your unmatched generosity shines upon this most unworthy servant.”

  “You failed, Keigael.” Tarmour’s tone was surprisingly gentle. “Yet failure is our inheritance. We are the discarded, the lost—our strength drawn not from triumph but from our shared sorrow, from the choking tears of our beloved Weeper.”

  He paused, studying the priest. “Come. I have found our enemies. We will strike when they least expect it, drag them into our misery, make them one with us. Then the world itself will follow.”

  Despite their inhumanity, echoes of lost humanity lingered in the Blanched. In Athur they lay closer to the surface now, stirred by his god’s lingering touch. Yet his gentleness was calculated, a tool chosen over cruelty to secure cooperation.

  He waited for the perfect opening—the moment to punish these heretics who had dared assault their holiest place and lay hands upon the divine flesh of their God.

  Penance was demanded. Punishment a foregone conclusion. Tarmour’s hands clenched the tooth. The time was upon them.