Only seconds later, the green ring faded. The waves of power slowly died, and he lowered his hammer. Then the man.
A Remnant was climbing out of the corpse.
Orthos eyed Ziel carefully. Clearly, he had seen something upsetting in the tablet, but Orthos didn’t know what would prompt that reaction. “Ziel? Are you all right?”
Wordlessly, Ziel tossed him the tablet.
Orthos caught it on the back of his head, then activated it.
He’s in a human body, and he’s running in terror as a massive form blocks out the sun. A black dragon. Its shadow stretches over their entire town, and its spiritual pressure crushes them all, even the Overlord that was meant to be their protector.
Its scales shimmer red, and he recognizes this dragon: Noroloth, son of the emperor. He was never supposed to come this far east.
For that, everyone the human knows is going to die.
He casts one terrified glance back at the people he’s known his entire life fleeing in all directions. Clouds of black-and-red fire gather overhead, slowly spinning. The sky is the color of blood and charcoal.
Why were the dragons coming for them? What had they done?
When the sky rains fire, he screams.
Orthos emerged from the dream tablet, but he wasn’t as easily riled as Ziel had been. He had lived long enough to know that matters were rarely as simple as they seemed on the surface.
For one thing, the man in the memory had been convinced he was about to die, but clearly he had survived to leave that dream tablet behind. Probably he had been one of those who died in this attack of vengeance on the castle.
For another, Orthos knew that to simply butcher a village of humans went against everything the black dragons stood for. They would have considered it shameful.
Noroloth had gone mad.
He recognized the symptoms of madra corruption from the Path of Black Flame. It wasn’t as common in dragons as in other species who practiced their sacred arts, and he wouldn’t have expected Heralds to have such weaknesses, but he would bet that was the case.
If that were true, Noroloth was as much to be pitied as anyone else. Orthos had spent decades of his life in such a state.
It could just as easily have been him killing those humans.
Ziel was breathing heavily in the hallway, leaning on his hammer and cycling his madra. The Remnant was nothing but shining dust, drifting upward. Orthos joined Ziel in the hall.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Orthos rumbled. “If it helps you, I’m certain the dragon was as much a victim as the humans. Spiritual corruption turns you into…an animal.”
“The dragon who burned my home was blue,” Ziel said.
Orthos stayed silent. The Weeping Dragon had attacked Ziel’s sect, but it had been the Storm Sage who destroyed the people. Along with torturing Ziel himself.
It must have been the emotions layered in the dream tablet that had really provoked Ziel. The fear. The despair. The pain.
Orthos had some of those memories too. He stayed quiet, offering nothing but his presence as Ziel gathered himself.
“He learned the wrong lesson,” Ziel said at last. “He kept drinking in the pain. Should have cut himself off.”
Orthos pushed the door shut with his head. “If you cut off a tree, it withers. It needs the rain to grow.”
Ziel sighed. “Sure.”
As weary as Ziel was, sometimes Orthos forgot that in the end, he was still a young human. With his body and spirit repaired, he had a long life ahead of him. He would learn.
They marched on through the unbroken hallway, each in their own thoughts. They weren’t as careful as perhaps they should have been, which Orthos would freely admit.
But they were paying enough attention that, when the ground crumbled under Orthos’ feet, they both reacted.
Orthos leaped, but he couldn’t get good footing, so he only flew a few feet to the side. The ground there had fallen too, into a black abyss.
He would certainly survive the fall. It wasn’t the impact he was wary of.
It was whatever was down there.
But Ziel had reacted at the same time, Forging a script-circle over the hole. A plane of force appeared between the symbols, and Orthos landed on that.
He huffed out smoke. “I could have grown wings when advancing to Underlord. I thought a shell would be more useful. If we find the spirits to get me to Overlord quickly, maybe I’ll try for both.”
Green light lit the hallway as Ziel ignited more scripts around his hammer. “Move,” he said.
Orthos hopped off the platform a second before a bar of black dragon’s breath pierced it from below and continued into the ceiling.