Path of Dragons 13 - Chapter 78 - The Crash

The weight of silence was crushing.

In the aftermath of Vhalor’s death, the world stood still.  Even rivers of corruption cutting through the sky seemed frozen in place.  And Elijah knelt beside the man’s corpse, his hand resting on his forehead, staring off into nothing. 

By all rights, Vhalor had been a monster.  A man who’d clung so tightly to power that he had never considered how his actions affected everyone else.  At his order, thousands had died.  Millions, perhaps.  And even more had been imprisoned in an unjust society rife with oppression. 

But at the end, he was just a man, corrupted by his environment and forced to make hard decisions.  That didn’t excuse his actions.  Nor did it justify his choices.  Yet, Elijah could at least empathize with what the man so clearly wanted to be. 

Vhalor had failed.

He had become a monster.

And yet, there was something laudable in the driving force behind his decisions.

Or maybe Elijah preferred to give the dead the benefit of the doubt.  Certainly, those Vhalor had directly harmed would not be so generous. 

Even so, Elijah remained kneeling there for nearly an hour before, with a resigned shake of his head, he pushed himself to his feet.  Looking down on the slain Emerald Tyrant, Elijah saw nothing more than a withered old man, surrounded by rapidly dissipating pieces of emerald armor. 

He watched as that once-mighty suit dissolved into motes of ethera.  There was nothing recoverable about it.  No way to preserve even a piece of that equipment.  And in death, only a man – little more than skin and bones clad in loose clothing – remained.  After a few minutes, even that began to wither away into nothing.

It took nearly an hour for Vhalor’s body to degrade, flesh, bones, and everything else.  Even his clothes dissolved into the atmosphere. 

There were only two things left behind.  The first was a crystal amulet, not dissimilar from those used by the people of Dravkein who’d ventured out into the wilderness.  Such precautions were unnecessary on the continent surrounding Druhmor, where the abyssal corruption no longer held sway.  But it was still a valuable thing, so Elijah picked it up and deposited it into his Arcane Loop.

The second item was a bracelet made of braided threads.  From that bracelet dangled a few charms, each one pulsing with a subtle current of ethera.  When Elijah looked closer, he saw runes engraved on each of the bone charms.  He failed to recognize them.

The bracelet wasn’t a powerful piece of equipment, and he suspected it was nothing more than a keepsake.  So, instead of taking it for himself, Elijah simply buried it in lieu of a body.  Once that was done, he carved a small headstone from a nearby boulder, then engraved it with Vhalor’s name and a simple inscription.

“Here lies the Emerald Tyrant.  He wanted to be better,” Elijah read.

Then, with a final sigh, he placed the stone above the spot where he’d buried the bracelet.  And at last, he turned away. 

The battle had taken him quite a distance from where it had begun, so Elijah had plenty of time to consider everything that had happened.  From the moment he’d killed Ko’rien back in Ithalon, he’d known how his conflict with the Synod would end.  Either he would die at their hands, or he would be forced to kill them.  He’d had no idea when things would come to a head, just that they eventually would.

But now that it had come to pass, he wasn’t certain how he felt about it. 

As an institution, the Synod was evil, and it perpetuated a system of oppression that had victimized the world’s entire population.  But they were also responsible for the survival of their civilization.  Without them, everyone on Gorveth would have long since succumbed to the abyss. 

Did one outweigh the other?

Elijah wasn’t sure, but one thing he did know was that things were far more complex than they might have appeared at first glance.  Further complicating the situation was the presence of corruption.  Vhalor had been riddled with it, and it had obviously affected him negatively.

Perhaps it had driven him to a version of madness.  Or maybe it was more subtle than that.  There was no way to know.

Elijah didn’t hurry on his way back.  Instead, he remained in his human form and on foot.  Lost in thought, he covered the ground slowly, and he didn’t reach the original battlefield for an entire day.  When he arrived, he just shook his head at the death and destruction on display.

The forest that came in the wake of Flames of Renewal had been devastated.  Most of the trees had splintered or been uprooted, and any other vegetation had been torn asunder.  There wasn’t much still clinging to the ground.

And then there were the bodies.  Thousands of them, all charred by Elijah’s ability.  Many more had been turned to ash, which had drifted away. 

Such was the cost of battle.

Elijah hated that he’d had to pay it, but there hadn’t been much of a choice.  The Synod had driven the army across some of the most hostile ground he’d ever encountered, traveling for months to reach the continent.  Even after he’d warned them what would happen, they’d continued with their invasion of his continent. 

Their aggression had tied his hands.  If they’d turned back, they would still be alive.

They had not, which had sealed their fate. 

Elijah wasn’t so naïve as to believe the rank and file ever had much of a choice in the matter.  They were trapped by their cultural loyalty to the Synod, by the orders of near-mythological figures.  Even if they’d escaped the Synod’s grip, they’d lacked the power to truly resist the inevitable march to their deaths.

That did not make Elijah feel any better.

In the distance, he saw a gathering of men and women, most of whom wore all black.  Zek and his hunters.  They had clearly been hard at work while Elijah was gone.

Elijah strode through the fallen forest, reaching the group after only a few minutes of travel.  When he arrived, he saw that they’d gathered the Synod’s corpses.  Each of them had been stripped of armor and valuables, and they lay upon a pyre, naked and vulnerable to every judgmental glance.

Now that they were dead, the corruption was more obvious.  No more illusions.  No more disguises or temporary manipulations of flesh.  They couldn’t cover it with armor or makeup.  It left their natures bare.

Elijah stopped beside Zek, and for a few moments, said nothing. 

Finally, the old hunter stated, “We saw you coming.”

“I know,” Elijah remarked.  He’d felt the scout hours before.

“We waited to burn them.”

Elijah sighed.  “Thanks.”

He’d not known the members of the Synod on an individual level, but he found their existence to be worthy of pity.  They were cruel.  Disconnected.  It was easy to consider them incarnations of evil.  But Elijah knew better than to apply such simple labels.  They were just people who’d made a lot of bad choices.  Each of those decisions had slowly steered them toward a state from which they could never escape. 

And for that accumulation of bad choices, they’d died.

In another life, perhaps they would have been better people.  Maybe they would have stood for something more than cruelty, apathy, hedonism, or self-interest.  There was no way to tell.

“Wasted potential,” he muttered to himself.  Then, to Zek, he said, “Just burn them.”

Zek nodded, which another of the hunters took as a signal.  In moments, the pyre – made of wood gathered from the forest created by Flames of Renewal – caught fire.  The flames spread quickly, soon engulfing the bodies. 

Elijah watched silently, his emotions warring with one another.  On the one hand, he wanted to exult in the victory.  The relief he felt was undeniable, and he couldn’t deny the pride he felt in the wake of battle.

Winning was like that.

But on the other side was an amalgam of regret, sadness, and, most of all, a wave of melancholy that came in the wake of any battle.  Declining adrenaline was responsible for most of it, but the implications of killing comprised a good portion as well.

Regardless, despite the victory, Elijah found himself in an odd mood.

He remained in place well after the pyre had burned down to nothing.  Zek and the other hunters had long since moved on, but Elijah just sat there, staring at the embers.  Lost in thought, he was only vaguely aware when Benedict entered into range of Soul of the Wild.

The Warlock sat beside him.

“I saw you killed the assassin,” Elijah remarked.  “And your summoned creatures worked out well.”

“Yeah,” Benedict agreed, resting his forearms on his knees.  He sounded much like Elijah felt.  “Burned a pretty long cooldown to do it.”

“Worth it, though.”

“I reached two-fifty.”

“Congratulations.  You going to evolve now?  Or are you planning to work on your cultivation first?” Elijah asked, glad for the change in subject.

Benedict gave a subtle shrug.  “Maybe.  I don’t know.  It depends on my available options,” he admitted.  “There aren’t a lot of cultivation resources around here.  M’yakein has a few Alchemists who can make decent potions.  And there’s talk of creating some cultivation chambers.  But –”

“We’re surrounded by cultivation resources, Benedict,” Elijah interrupted, gesturing all around.  “Just step into the ocean.  Or we can arrange a trip across the Restless Sea, if you like.  At your stage, we shouldn’t need any special locations.”

“Elijah.”

“What?”

Benedict sighed.  “You do understand that everyone in the world isn’t as crazy as you are, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.  What you did here…that’s not normal.  People don’t just dive into the most corrosive locations they can find.  Most people wouldn’t survive, even with potions.  And even if they did manage it, I can’t imagine anyone would want to deal with that kind of pain.”

“That’s what cultivation is, Benedict.”

“It doesn’t have to be.  Not like that, at least.  It should be controlled.  Measured.  It should be –”

“Not the way I do it.”

“Because you’re an insane sadist who isn’t happy unless you’re pushing the limits of what’s possible.”

“Is that a compliment?  Or an insult?”

Benedict sighed.  “You know what?  I’m not even sure.”

“I’m going to take it as a compliment.”

“You would.”

They both chuckled at that before lapsing into silence that lasted for a few more minutes.  Finally, Benedict broke it by asking, “What now?”

Elijah shrugged.  “More of the same, I guess.  Treebie’s still a growing boy.  There’s a lot of planet left to terraform.”

Benedict looked away from the dying embers of the pyre.

“What’s wrong?” Elijah asked.

“I don’t know.  I guess I expected something to change.  The Synod is gone.  The world is free.  That should matter, right?”

“It does.  But it doesn’t change what we need to do.  What I need to do.”

“And what’s that?”

“I need to get home.  Back to Earth,” Elijah said.  “Whatever it takes.”

“You may have to accept that it’s not possible,” Benedict pointed out. 

“That’s not happening,” Elijah countered.  “I don’t care if it takes a century.  I don’t care if I have to terraform this entire planet, become a deity, and move on to the next one.  I’ll reclaim a thousand planets if that means getting back to Earth.”

He sighed, then turned to look Benedict in the eye.  “I know it sounds implausible.  I recognize how monumental of a task it is.  But there’s no choice for me.”

Indeed, everything Elijah cared about was back on Earth.  His grove. His family.  Sadie.  All of his friends.  He would move entire galaxies if it meant making his way home.  Everything he’d done on Gorveth had been in service of that singular goal, and he had no intention of stopping now, especially after he had reached such a massive milestone.

“I don’t care about Earth.  Everything I love is here,” Benedict stated.  “But I’ll do whatever I can to help you.  I hope you know that.”

Elijah looked away.  Then, he sighed before reaching out to grip Benedict’s shoulder.  “You’re a good friend.”