Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 65 - Apocalypse (Patreon)

Appropriately, it started with a storm.

At first, the weather event wasn’t much different than the normal storms that occasionally swept through Orveth Kaal.  Rain, wind and lightning.  Those would’ve been catastrophic typhoons back on Earth, even in its current state.  But in the ancestral world, they were no more abnormal than a sunny day.

Over the years, Elijah had spent quite a lot of time studying those storms, both as a storm frog and in his natural form.  Both gave him insight into what made them work the way they did.  Part of the explanation was as simple as ethera, which augmented any phenomena in unpredictable ways. 

But there was much more to it than that.  Those storms harnessed the local atmosphere in ways Elijah had never even considered.  The complexity of the process was mind-boggling, and to the extent that he still didn’t completely understand it. 

Perhaps if he’d been trained as a meteorologist, he might’ve been better prepared to comprehend it.  As it stood, he was reliant on a couple of classes he’d taken as an undergraduate, which made him little better informed than a layman.  Or at best, a weather hobbyist.

Sure, that understanding was augmented by the instincts of the storm frog, but that contribution was so innate that Elijah struggled to truly comprehend it at an academic level.  It was like the difference between taking a breath and understanding how the lungs worked.

In any case, his study, limited as it was, helped make everything clearer.

And nestled within a familiar cavern inside the Vengeance, Elijah used that knowledge to copy the earliest phases inherent to the formation of an Orveth Kaal storm.  In his amphibious shape, Elijah mimicked those conditions.  Somewhat predictably, the first part was moisture.  Lots and lots of moisture gathered in a single location.  It happened to be just above the Vengeance, where a cloud formed almost immediately.

The next step was pressure, which he manipulated through thermal gradients and wind.

After that came ethera, raw and undiluted, straight from Elijah’s core.  Over the course of the next hour or so, Elijah continued to build upon that foundation, layering more and more manipulation onto the cloud until it finally started to rain.  Soon enough, that became a deluge.

Elijah chose not to keep going.

Instead, after ensuring that it would keep going for a while on its own, Elijah shifted forms.  This time, he adopted the Shape of the Reaver, specifically because it gave him the best control over fungi.  In seconds, he had completely shifted into the new form and embraced Bracken Crown.

This time, he didn’t focus on the stroma that came so naturally to the form. Rather, he sought out Fungee’s spores, which had been deposited throughout the island.  Partly due to Kurik’s efforts, but mostly because Elijah had spent years building tiny fungal colonies beneath the surface.  They weren’t as mature as Fungee, but they still functioned as something like repeaters. 

Mostly, Elijah used Thorn, though. 

He spewed spores from the tip of that spear, manipulating  them through Bracken Crown to seep into the rock and through the network of tiny crevices that led to the surface.  Those spores soon joined with the rain and wind, which took them higher and higher until they floated amidst the clouds.

For the entire duration of his ability, Elijah pushed as many spores as possible into the air, and the results exceeded his wildest expectations.  After a while, the clouds themselves began to change color – from grey to a slightly ocher hue that cast the entire area in shades of yellow.

That was when the dragon besiegers took notice.  However, there was obviously no real solution.  They seemed to believe that none was needed, either.  So far, it was just a storm, albeit one a little stranger than most.  Elijah reasoned that they probably believed it to be a natural phenomenon, and not the result of careful manipulation.

As soon as Bracken Crown ran its course, Elijah shifted back into the Avatar of Storms and continued to stoke the fires of his creation.  He didn’t build outward, and he didn’t allow it to reach a tipping point beyond which it would explode with power.  Instead, he kept it contained, building pressure with every second.

One advantage of the Avatar of Storms – or rather, the Way of Storms – was that it very loosely defined what constituted a storm.  To most people, the idea was pretty constant.  However, Elijah had already demonstrated an ability to categorize many unrelated events as storms. 

And in this case, it was easy to integrate fungi into the concept.

It swirled and multiplied, feeding off the moisture and ethera until those spores transformed into something else.  There were still elements of Fungee in there, but these spores were never meant to take root and become a colony.  Instead, they were much more destructive. 

They wanted to conquer.

Not on a global scale, but individually. 

Elijah didn’t allow it. Not yet.  Instead, he continued to build until the storm felt ready to burst.  Once he was certain that he’d created a nearly self-perpetuating cycle, he shifted once again.  This time, he took on his dragon form.

Immediately upon assuming that shape, he cast two spells.  The first was Grove Conduit, letting him tap into the Hartwood Grove’s dense ethera and augmenting both his natural ethera regeneration.  Even as he did so, he also used False Grove, which tapped into another, separate pool of energy.  And finally, he cast Eternal Plague.

He didn’t release it, though.

Not immediately.  Instead, he held it, letting the spell build and build until he could no longer contain it.  Only then did he open his mouth and spew literally millions of conjured hornets into the chamber.  They were bigger and more venomous than any he’d ever manifested, courtesy of his much higher attributes and more advanced cultivation.

Elijah kept that going, continuing until the entire chamber was crawling with the things.  Normally, the conjured insects had a mind of their own, albeit a simple one.  He could direct them, after a fashion.  He’d done so back on Gorveth when he’d used conjured insects to pollinate the region surrounding Treebie, but he couldn’t control them well enough to hold them in place.

Not until he’d advanced his mind the last time.  It had given him unprecedented control, which he stretched to its limits.  Eventually, he was forced to let them loose, though. 

That was when the orcs attacked.

Elijah could sense them, albeit vaguely.  The attack was three-pronged – two from either side of the besieging dragons and one from below.  At the same time, Jessup ordered every cannon boasted by the Vengeance to let loose with a rolling volley that wouldn’t cease until the cannons themselves overheated into uselessness.

The idea behind the assault was a simple one.  Desperation drove it, but it was valid all the same.  One big push.  One big attack that would harness the orcs’ numbers, their ships, and the Vengeance’s attack capabilities.  And of course, Elijah’s storm, which still hadn’t fully reached its zenith.

Even as the ships pincered the dragons, Elijah directed his hornets into the storm.  There were billions of them by that point, and when they joined the clouds, they once again changed its nature.

If fungi could be a storm, then so could a swarm of conjured hornets.

Elijah shifted back into the Avatar of Storms and took hold of that multitude of loose threads.  Tying them together taxed even his concept of what a storm could be, but he managed to keep them knotted until, at last, they coalesced.  The spores attached themselves to the conjured hornets, then infected them, changing their very nature.

To Elijah, it resembled a cordyceps infection common amongst insects back on Earth.  However, the integration was so seamless that the conjured hornets seemed to have retained most of their motor functions.  What’s more, they became even more of a part of the storm.

Lightning arced down, slamming into the surface of the Vengeance.

Elijah knew he needed something stronger, though.  It wasn’t ready.  It wasn’t quite apocalyptic.

So, without further ado, Elijah once again shifted, this time into his human form, and crawled through the narrow tunnel to the surface.  Once there, he shifted into the Shape of Withering and took to the skies.

The winds had picked up quite a bit, but with Ride the Wind, he managed to harness their power to quickly take him above the storm.  That was when he let loose with Cloud of Decay, blanketing the entire storm in that caustic stuff. 

He kept at it for more than an hour, which would not have been possible without the distraction of the orcs’ arrival to the battlefield.  Unfortunately, they weren’t really capable of downing the force of dragons alone.  They just weren’t strong enough.  For all their advancements, they still lacked the power of dragons.

Elijah tried not to notice how many died.  Tens of thousands, mostly as their ships were destroyed.  And that was just in the first few minutes.  They threw themselves at the dragons with reckless abandon, clearly hoping to use numbers to down the much more powerful prey.

It didn’t work.

Not if victory was their goal.  But as distractions?  They were perfectly suited to the task, which allowed Elijah to work unmolested.  Soon enough, the ocher-tinted clouds once again shifted color, with green bits of lightning arcing through them. 

Once Elijah could spew Cloud of Decay no more, he once again changed back into the Storm Frog.  Thankfully, even without stealth, he was small enough to evade notice, and he continued to stoke the storm into a frenzy of melded aspects until it finally became something else altogether.

An amalgamation of insect, fungi, rain, and lightning – it was unstable and unpredictable.  But Elijah hoped it would be enough to tip the battle.

Once everything was tied together as tightly as he could manage, Elijah took the final step and shifted back into his dragon form.

That was when the enemy noticed him.

Elijah ignored them, flying directly into the storm.  As he did so, he gathered the Breath of Life into his chest.  It had never been meant as a weapon.  Elijah knew that.  But that wasn’t the purpose.

Instead, he wanted from it exactly what it was good at.  He wanted life. 

But the breath wouldn’t be enough.  He needed more power.  More control.  He needed the potency of his soul.

He reached out with the branches of his soul, wrapping it around the budding Breath of Life.  He squeezed, and so hard that the two powers began to meld.  After a few moments, they integrated.  That wasn’t the end, though.  Instead, Elijah continued to weave the two together until it was almost impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

Even as he worked, the battle raged below.  Orcs died, and by the thousands with every passing minute.  He felt Ok’tarik down there, too, fighting with every ounce of power at his disposal.  It wasn’t enough.

He had already taken a beating, and the only reason he’d managed to survive was by harnessing the dense vitality in the atmosphere and using it to augment his own natural healing. 

Elijah couldn’t concern himself with any of that, though.  Not with the gliders being swatted from the sky.  Not with the steady roll of thunder that announced the constant discharge of thousands upon thousands of cannons.  Not the ships ramming into half-mile long dragons, barely doing any damage at all. 

He couldn’t even spare a thought for the Vyrin dragons – what remained of them, at least – joining the attack.  They held their own, especially with the support of the orcs.  The same could not be said of the few Z-14s that took to the skies.  Or the demigods from the Earth expedition. 

Elijah even sensed Palikina down there, stabbing dragons in vulnerable spots before disappearing altogether.  Somewhere far away, Gunnar continued his steady work as well.  Bogoni and the rest of the team that remained in Orveth Kaal contributed, too.

It was an all-encompassing battle, and one that Elijah desperately wanted to participate in.  However, his own work would do more good than throwing himself into a more physical confrontation. 

Slowly, the combination of the Breath of Life and his soul melded together.  Only then did Elijah release it.

It came free as a green cloud wove through with tendrils of white light, and it quickly enveloped the entire cloud.  Suddenly, the conjured hornets grew, mutating along with the fungi inside of them.  At first, only a few thousand, but as the augmented Breath of Life spread, more joined the newly mutated swarm.

The storm itself changed as well.  It became a living thing of water, fire, earth, and fungi.  The lightning turned a dense shade of green, while the clouds suddenly merged with the spores. 

Finally, Elijah’s Breath of Life petered out, and for a second, he marveled at his creation.

Then, the urgency of battle called to him.  With that, he finally shifted back into the Avatar of Storms and readied himself to unleash the apocalypse he had created.