A veil had been dropped to allow that technique, so Orthos sensed his attacker before he saw it. The black dragon erupted from the darkness, snarling, its eyes blazing red circles. Its spiritual pressure drowned Orthos.
This was no ordinary guard, but a member of the nobility. Orthos didn’t recognize him, but it was easy enough to tell. The dragon was an Archlord.
His gaze passed over Orthos and settled on Ziel, and more dragon’s breath kindled in his jaws.
Ziel gripped his hammer, and—almost a thousand years after the fall of Shatterspine Castle—another battle between human and dragon began.
Iteration 074: Verge
Other Judges moved to check the Vroshir advance in other Sectors, and Suriel had been given the opportunity to move on. With Ozriel under her command, she could intervene in virtually any conflict and make a difference.
But there were just as many reasons to stay in place.
Most of the damage to the cosmos wasn’t coming from the Vroshir directly, but from the indirect effects of chaos unchecked. Even many of the Judges weren’t capable of repairing the worlds they saved after the fact.
That was Suriel’s job.
So she stayed in Iteration Zero-Seven-Four, Verge, and stitched together what pieces of reality remained.
The Way knitted planets back into one piece, and lives reappeared. That was the easy part; it was the brute-force work of restoration. The real healing, the part that required her unleashed Razor and her full concentration, was far more complicated.
She felt the wounds the Silverlord invasion had done to the destiny of this world. It was in a similar situation to Cradle, in a way; removing the memories of those who experienced the battle would cause more deviations than it solved.
However, leaving those memories would mean that everyone in the Iteration would make drastically different decisions than they would have before this event. They were aware of the outside world now.
There was only one change Suriel could make to the future that would line Verge up with its original destination.
She had to accelerate it.
Ozriel reappeared beside her with a monster in one hand that resembled a man-sized leech made entirely of abstract geometric shapes. He crushed it and the Class Three Fiend dissolved into nothing before her eyes.
“That should be the last of them. You could check with the Spider to be sure, since my eyes have been cruelly blinkered…but anything that can hide from me with six-star sight should be too deadly for this world.”
Should be, Suriel thought. That sounded like Ozriel was making dangerous assumptions, given that he could hardly see the future at the moment.
But her Presence concurred with his assessment, and Telariel the Spider was currently the busiest of all seven Judges. Suriel nodded while she made delicate cuts all over the world with her Razor.
The weapon blazed in her hand like a tree made of sharp light, and Ozriel examined it curiously.
“A subtle operation,” he observed. “You wouldn’t be removing their memories, or we’d be correcting deviations here for another month, so…speeding them on the way to apocalypse, are we?”
“I don’t know if you remember Verge, but it had a shorter lifespan than most Iterations to begin with,” Suriel responded. “It was always destined to end when their Highest Kings began binding Fiends to serve their purposes.”
“What a pity that someone couldn’t descend and warn them about the dangers of what they are destined to do.”
“They’re summoning monstrous beings from beyond reality. They know it isn’t safe. But in every branch of Fate, they choose to do it anyway.”
She found a prince and a rogue researcher who were supposed to meet several decades later. Their relationship was a faint line in Fate, and she empowered that connection so that destiny would draw them together sooner rather than later.
Ozriel put manacled hands on his hips. “Sure would be a great time to have some Executors. Toss ‘em in, wait until the Fiend summoners are destroyed, and haul ‘em back. It’s like fishing!”
“You know how that always turns out.”
On the other side of the world, Suriel touched up the ruins of an ancient temple, restoring it enough that it would be discovered years sooner than otherwise. In its depths were insights into the Void that would lead to the summoning of Fiends.
Ozriel observed the world, watching her work. “It must hurt you to heal them so that they can destroy themselves.”
“It used to,” she said. “Now, I’ve seen how bad it can get. I won’t risk this world deviating from Fate and dissolving into corruption.”