Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 15 - Hollow Trophies (Patreon)

Compromise was often hailed as an unequivocally good thing. 

And in most cases, that was true.  As a negotiation strategy, it was responsible for saving countless lives, both directly and indirectly.  It had preserved even more personal relationships. 

But when Elijah considered the word, he couldn’t help but look down on it with no small degree of disdain. 

Because it had another definition that had nothing to do with two sides finding common ground.  Rather, it represented a lessening of one’s values.  And in that regard, Elijah knew he was guilty.

He was no stranger to killing.  He’d slaughtered countless enemies, for good reasons and otherwise.  But he’d always eschewed the idea of ending lives just for the sake of earning rewards.

It didn’t matter if it was experience or something more tangible on offer.  He rejected the idea.

Until now.

Sure, he had gone through all the reasoning.  He’d established his logic.  And it was sound enough.  He needed the orcs.  The orcs required him to present a trophy.  So, he’d chosen an invasive species to exterminate, pretending all the while that he was doing something necessary.

It was a lie.

His categorization of the termite colony as invasive stood on incredibly shaky ground, and even if it hadn’t, why was it his right to end the threat they represented? 

The reality was that Elijah had compromised his values.

And doing so predictably left him angry, depressed, and more than a little resentful of his own morals.  Of the situation, as well.  He’d been backed into a corner, and what was really frustrating was that he hadn’t hesitated to abandon his principles.

He’d barely even considered the implications before attacking the termites.  After, he’d experienced a little regret, but not nearly enough to force him to break away. 

Had he simply gotten caught up in the task?  In the idea of his new alliance?  Or were his values more flexible than he’d once considered?  If it was the latter, then his frequent excuse – that he was just following his instincts – became far less viable as either a reason or a guide.

But what was done was done.

Elijah couldn’t change his actions, recent or in the distant past.  He could only move forward and vow to do better in the future.  The real question on his mind concerned exactly what that entailed. 

It would take a while for him to come to a realistic answer.

In the meantime, he needed to ensure that the termite colony hadn’t died in vain.  Their sacrifice – putting it generously – couldn’t go to waste.  So, with that in mind, Elijah approached the termite queen’s corpse. 

Even in death, she was a monument of a specimen.  Hundreds of yards long and at least two hundred feet wide, she seemed too large to exist.  Even with Elijah in his dragon form, her body was imposing.

It also remained disgusting, with rolls of fat, drooping flesh, and glistening white skin.  Her legs were comically small, meaning that even if she’d wanted to move, she was entirely incapable of locomotion. 

Her head was comparatively tiny as well.  No bigger than Elijah’s own, in fact.  Her mandibles were about the size of his arms, but they were dull and brittle.  She had not used them for longer than he’d been alive.

All in all, her life seemed almost sad.  She had been reduced to nothing more than a breeder, laying eggs while the rest of the colony saw to her needs.  When Elijah looked at her body, he didn’t see a magnificent center of what amounted to a superorganism.  Instead, he saw nothing but wasted potential.

A creature trapped by her own purpose.

Perhaps killing her had been a mercy.

Or maybe he was once again attempting to rationalize something he knew was wrong. 

Either way, Elijah had no interest in considering it further.  Not now.  Maybe someday soon, he would find enough distance to look at it more rationally.  However, for now, he had a job to do. 

So, without further ado, he approached the corpse, probing it with Soul of the Wild.  It didn’t take him long to establish two things.  There was very little about the creature’s atrophied body that he would consider valuable.  Based on everything he sensed, only two exceptions existed.  One had been his secondary target all along, while the other came as something of a surprise.

The former was the fat on the insect’s corpulent body.  It was larger even than the River King, from which he’d made his last big batch of soap.  And the amount of fat was even more copious.  Judging by the creature’s inflated level, it would be quite a powerful base as well.

But for now, he was more interested in the latter exception.

At first, Elijah thought what he felt stemmed from the insect’s tiny head.  And in a roundabout way, he was right.  However, it wasn’t the head itself that emitted the energy signature he sensed, but rather something inside of it. 

When he approached the head, he discovered that it was covered in incredibly dense chitin.  Prying it open proved to be quite a job, but after turning to Shape of the Reaver and using Tyrant’s Edge as a pry bar, Elijah managed it well enough.  If the insect had still been living, the task would have been all but impossible.

Cracking the head open revealed something he didn’t expect.  Instead of a squishy brain, he found a solid crystal unlike anything he’d ever seen before.  Not only was the deep, milky white of the material unique, but the shape was as well.  It didn’t look like a normal, faceted gem.  Instead, it was made of thousands of intertwined strands, some of which extended two or three inches from the main structure.  The end result made it look like someone had taken a ball of worms and frozen them solid.

Not the most appealing of sights.

But the power within was something Elijah had never felt before.  Or rather, the intensity set it apart from what he’d sensed from the colony as a whole.  He’d characterized it as a superorganism, not quite a hive mind, but with some characteristics of one.  Now, Elijah had traced that trait to the source.

Was it a natural organ?

Or was it the result of some fortuitous evolution?

Elijah wasn’t sure, but the thing was endlessly fascinating.  It was also just about the only viable trophy he could find on the termite queen’s body.  So, after some difficulty, he managed to wrench it free.  Then, he stored it in his Arcane Loop.

That cleared him for his other task.

One was his reason for targeting the queen in the first place.  There were many powerful creatures that would satisfy the terms of the hunt, but the termite queen offered him a chance to replenish his soap stores.  Even though his last step forward in body cultivation had just occurred, Elijah knew that he could never stop improving.  That meant stronger tools, including the soap that had helped to ease his transition across his body’s path of evolution.

But soap needed fat.

And that fat needed to come from a powerful creature.

The termite queen was perfect for that.  However, harvesting said fat was no easy feat.  Elijah had watched it done often enough to know what was required, but at the end of the day, he was just one man. 

Briefly, he considered going to get some help.  Doubtless, some of the people from the Vengeance would jump at the chance.  In the end, he decided to engage the task alone, largely because he didn’t want to endanger anyone else.  Or that was what he told himself.  In the back of his mind, he acknowledged that shame played a role as well.

Those feelings accompanied him as he got to work.

He didn’t use the tools of the trade.  No giant blades.  No fancy equipment.  Instead, he shifted into his various forms and used his natural weapons.  For the detail work – like peeing the skin away – he used Shape of Embers.  For brute force, he employed his dragon form.  For the bits in between, there was Shape of the Reaver.

Elijah even used Avatar of Swarms to lower the temperature to just above freezing so he could avoid natural decay. 

Gradually, he made progress, and within a week, he’d separated the blue-ish yellow fat from the rest of the body.  However, that announced a new problem.  All in all, the queen had been hundreds of yards long, which meant that it contained enough fat to fill an oil tanker. 

Elijah estimated that it was close to fifty thousand tons.

It was a truly astronomical amount of fat that made a small mountain in the center of the near-freezing cavern.  As such, Elijah had no way of carrying it.  Nor did he have the means to get it out of the cavern.

Yet.

Over the next week, Elijah used the Avatar of Storms to build something akin to an icebox made out of pure rock.  It was enormous as well, but he didn’t need to worry about it beginning to melt and losing its shape.  Once that was done, he began the laborious process of digging a tunnel to the outside.

And he couldn’t be satisfied with something normal-sized.  Instead, it had to be large enough to accommodate a small mountain.  Thankfully, Avatar of Storms was more than capable of manipulating that much earth.  Despite the evolution focusing on storm creation, it maintained the same level of control possessed by its predecessor. 

That was enough, especially considering that Elijah had developed quite a bit more control since the spell’s transformation. The result was that he had become noticeably more efficient since he’d carved Fungee’s cave, which was the last time he’d attempted such an ambitious earth-moving project.

In the end, the process was both cathartic and time consuming.  The former, probably because of the latter.  It gave him time to think and a little distance from the horror he’d committed.

Yet, the constant presence of the termites’ dead bodies, scattered as they were throughout the complex, served as a grim reminder of what he was capable of.  Odd that he would harbor such feelings after killing a bunch of insects, when he’d felt nothing of the sort in the wake of destroying Bloodrock Bay and Meridian Lux.

That distinction was evidence that he was a long way from overcoming the stereotypes about Druids, that was for sure. 

Once he’d dug the tunnel, he spent a little while wrapping various ropes and chains around the mountain.  He’d had them made what felt like a lifetime ago, back when he was dragging Fungee’s landmass around.  So, he had plenty of experience with that kind of thing.

The result was that it didn’t take him long before he was on his way.

Of course, the trip back to the Vengeance wasn’t quick.  Nor was it easy.  The first complication came when he realized that the temperature inside the mountain had begun to drop.  That necessitated a stopover on a mostly deserted landmass, where he spent days adjusting the temperature and building more insulation into the structure.

As it turned out, sealing it was the best thing he could do, both to keep the fat sterile and to maintain the temperature.

It wasn’t long after he resumed his journey that he experienced his first attack.  The creatures must’ve smelled the fat, because they swarmed the mass, barely paying attention to Elijah at all.  The inattention gave him a chance to land and shift out of the Shape of the World Serpent so he could deal with the flock of carrion birds.

That took more effort than he’d expected, largely because the beasts enjoyed a connection that enhanced their collective attributes.  So, when he first attacked, they responded with unexpected fury that nearly spelled Elijah’s doom.  However, the more he killed, the weaker they became.  By the time the flock’s numbers had dropped below a hundred, they were little better than high demigods in terms of power.

Tiring of the slaughter, Elijah let them escape.

Unfortunately, they weren’t the last opportunistic creatures to target Elijah’s burden.  At times, it felt as if he could barely go a mile without being attacked.  So, the trip that should’ve been over in a few weeks ended up lasting the better part of two months.

When he finally caught sight of the mountainous ship, Elijah let out a sigh of relief.

It wasn’t home.

He knew that.

But it was close enough that it didn’t matter to his weary spirit.