Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 68 - Wyrm (Patreon)

An unintelligible scream erupted from the creature’s mouth, echoing across the battlefield with enough fury to send the storm swirling in the opposite direction.  With it came a wave of pure ethera that made Elijah feel like he was drowning.  He gasped for air, trying all the while to Ride the Wind to less turbulent air.

So distracted, he never saw the blue wyrm coming for him.

The thing disappeared, then reappeared right on top of Elijah.  He attempted to change direction, but he couldn’t stop himself from slamming into the wyrm’s side.  He managed to cling to those blue scales as he tried to make sense of what had just happened. 

The wyrm had no intention of giving him an opening, though.  Instead, it harnessed enough ethera to wipe out a planet, then directed it at Elijah.  Bands of energy wrapped themselves around his writhing body, then yanked.

Elijah resisted.

His soul exploded from his body, ripping through those intractable claws of ethera.  However, for every bit of ground he covered, he lost that much and more.  The bands advanced, weaving past the branches of his soul and finally reaffirming their grip on his entire body.

Once again, they yanked.

This time, Elijah’s resistance meant even less.  And suddenly, his vision went pure grey, and his body felt like it had been dunked in a vat of acid.  He’d been through exactly that back in the Chimeric Forge, so he knew precisely what that felt like.

Moreover, he’d spent enough time in the void to know where he was.

How the creature had dragged him into that inexplicable place between realities, and against his will, Elijah had no idea.  Nor was he in any condition to question it.  Instead, the entirety of his mind was preoccupied by the fact that, for all his power, Shape of Withering simply wasn’t built to withstand the caustic atmosphere – if it even qualified for such a label – within the void.

Thankfully, he had a form for that, too.

He flooded Shape of the World Serpent with ethera from his core, and his body responded.  It elongated, stretching for more than a hundred yards until he’d taken the form of the eponymous reality-hopping reptile.

Relief blanketed him, and he saw hunks of dragon meat floating in the void. 

And with that came a moment to think.  To plan.  To realize just how outmatched he really was.

That wyrm wasn’t just a deity.  It was that, but it was much, much more as well. Elijah had heard people refer to wyrms as living natural disasters, but until he’d seen one in action, he had never really believed the claims.  After all, unless Elijah was mistaken, that was the same wyrm Ok’tarik claimed to have fought and defeated.

And if the orc warchief could do it, then so could Elijah.

However, there was obviously more to the story, because from what Elijah could tell, that creature was well beyond him.  And if that was the case, then Ok’tarik never should have stood a chance.

Was it Orveth Kaal’s well-defined cycles that robbed it of its power?  Elijah couldn’t remember the timing, but that was as good an explanation as any.  There was also the chance that the wyrm had been recovering from another fight.  Or any of a thousand other factors could have contributed to its loss.

But even then, when Ok’tarik had held all the cards, he could only wound the thing.

That said something of its power.

Something terrible and awe-inspiring, in a way that Elijah couldn’t really explain.  As a Druid, he was closer to a wyrm than most other dragons could conceive.  More than once, he’d nearly succumbed to the Call, which would have doomed him to an existence not so unlike the creature who’d just so effortlessly teleported him into the void.

And he knew.

More than anything, he knew that surrendering to that Call would grant him power.  It wouldn’t be nearly as structured as what the system offered.  But intuitively, Elijah recognized it as unlocking his potential.

All it would cost was sapience.

He would remain a thinking creature.  Intelligent and cunning.  But there was a narrow gap between sentience and sapience.  A thin crack that, from certain perspectives, was a gulf as wide as a galaxy.  Would he miss it?  Parts of it, he was certain.  But there were probably just as many parts that he would be glad to see gone.

Elijah would never surrender, though.  Pride drove him to resist.  A sense of self that was terrified of getting lost amongst his true nature, maybe.  Either way, he would never discover what surrendering to wyrmhood truly entailed.

Those thoughts flitted through his mind, all in the space of the couple of seconds it took for him to reclaim control.  As a World Serpent, the void was his domain.  He could remain there nearly indefinitely, so long as he had supplies. 

It was tempting, too.

He could sit the battle out.  He could wait until both sides had killed enough of their enemies that retreat became the only prudent option.  Then, he could head back to Orveth Kaal and reestablish his hold on the ancestral world. 

Doing so would cost him his friends who remained aboard the Vengeance.  People like Kurik.  Family like Miguel.  Palikina.  Gunnar.  And a dozen others with whom he was friendly.  Carmen remained back in Agmar, safe and sound and working in the Star Forge.  Whatever happened, she would be okay.

But the others?

Without him, they would almost assuredly die.

He had to do something.  He needed to confront the wyrm.

Driving that choice was the memory of that uprooted sapling outside the gate to the plane of nature.  It elicited a degree of enmity Elijah had rarely felt – not unlike what he’d experienced in the wake of the pirate attack on the grove.  Or when he discovered Alyssa’s fate. 

It lent him strength of purpose, but it also robbed him of nuance. 

As he used World Coil, his mind – every single leaf – came into utter focus.  So, when he slipped out of the void and back into Orveth Kaal, he only had eyes for one figure. 

The blue wyrm had summoned a swirling mass of gravity that pulled everything toward a black globe at the center.  The Vengeance resisted the pull, using every one of its engines to fight for its freedom.  Some of the dragons had reacted similarly, though quite a few had broken off to attack the summoner.

Elijah even caught sight of Miguel and Trevor streaking across the atmosphere to leave a great slash in the side of one dragon.  They moved so quickly that even Elijah could scarcely see them.  Instead, they became little more than a beam of moonlight cutting through their enemies.

One of the dragons had landed on the Vengeance’s surface, only to find out precisely why no one else had dared.  Kurik’s traps came alive, with vines wrapping around the dragon’s legs while weaponized flowers spat ethera-laced acid at its face.  Other plants exploded into hundreds of razor-sharp petals that cut through the dragon’s softer underbelly.  And in the middle of it all were Kurik and his apprentices, taking the fight to the invader in a more personal and visceral way.

Seeing the comparatively tiny dwarf hacking into a dragon’s acid-damaged eyes was a sight to behold.

Cannons roared and the few Z-14s left in the air force zipped around, taking advantage of the distraction to inflict more wounds upon the enemy.

In short, it was chaos.  A three-sided battle that seemed as multi-faceted as a prism.

Elijah didn’t hesitate to throw his weight into the fight.

He coiled, flexing his every muscle.  At the same time, his soul burst with so much ethera that he practically ignited the air.  The atmosphere vibrated with his potential.  It was like a taut string ready to snap.

Then, he let loose.

In the Shape of the World Serpent, he rocketed across the atmosphere, leaving the speed of sound far behind.  To an outsider, he likely looked like nothing more than a rainbow-colored streak – at least for the fraction of a second it took him to reach his destination.

Curiously, the Shape of the World Serpent was shaped very much like an arrow.  And when he hit that wyrm’s side, his comparatively sharp face knifed between the creature’s ribs.  He burst through its flesh and into its internals.  That was where he came to a stop, with a quarter of his body still dangling outside.

Elijah shook his head, letting his pre-cast Wellspring heal his broken skull.  The second his thoughts cleared, he shifted again.  This time, he took on the Shape of the Primordial Deep.

The innards of a wyrm were not a giant dragon turtle’s natural habitat.  However, with The World is an Ocean, Elijah forced the issue. 

He used Whirlpool.

Predictably, the dragon’s flesh resisted.  Affecting someone’s body against their will was incredibly difficult – another reason why Elijah was so surprised to have been thrown into the void.  But clearly, it wasn’t impossible.

Elijah harnessed that surety to force The World is an Ocean to recognize that flesh, bone, and scales were no different than rock or air.  In moments, the wyrm’s insides began to churn.  Then spin.  The wyrm spasmed and screamed, sending more ethereal bands to teleport Elijah away.

This time, he resisted.

Even so, hunks of his shell ended up in the void.  His blood mingled with the wyrm’s, and his heart began to falter. 

Elijah couldn’t keep it up.

Even with Wellspring sending vitality coursing through him, he could feel himself waning.  He needed more.

He shifted back into the Shape of the Reaver and immediately activated Mycelial Rebirth.  That influx of regeneration coupled with the vitality from Wellspring to rebuild the bits of his body that had been teleported into the void. 

That was when Elijah went to work.

By that point, he was well versed in killing huge monsters from the inside out.  He’d done it with dragons and whales and even corrupted flesh trees.  However, he’d never encountered flesh so tough as when he tried to hack through the wyrm’s innards with Tyrant’s Edge.

Fortunately, he didn’t need to do much.

The wyrm continued to attack him with spatial energy.  Bits of him kept disappearing, presumably to join the other parts that had been teleported into the void.  However, every single time that happened added more spores to the ones already infecting the wyrm’s flesh.

Even so, Elijah knew he couldn’t easily kill the creature.

It would take days or weeks to put it down.

And unfortunately, he didn’t have that kind of time because, after a few minutes, the wyrm wised up and stopped trying to tear him to pieces.  Instead, it forced him out.  Not by sending him to the void, but rather, by teleporting a hunk of its own flesh to that same location.  Suddenly, Elijah had nothing beneath his feet.  Nothing to grab hold of.

He fell.

A quick Cloud Step, and he launched himself back at the wyrm.  However, the creature wasn’t willing to let him get close, and it disappeared from in front of him.  It didn’t teleport far.  Maybe a few miles.  But that put it right over the Vengeance.

Elijah shifted back into the Shape of Withering.

That was when an explosion rocked the atmosphere. 

“Father!” came a primordial scream. 

Elijah’s ear drums burst at the volume, but he managed to pin down the origin.  And he saw another blue dragon beating her wings and trying to fly toward the wyrm.  She wasn’t making any progress, though. 

Because Illska had hold of her tail.

 It should have looked ridiculous.  Even in her humanoid form, Illska was a big woman, with muscles on top of muscles.  But she was still no more than a gnat when compared to a deity dragon’s natural form.

It didn’t look ridiculous, though.  In fact, the desperation on the other dragon’s face was alarming and heartbreaking in equal measure. 

Elijah only had a moment to take note of those emotions before another explosion of ethera erupted from that blue dragon.  Then, the world filled with spatial rifts that broke the atmosphere apart like a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle.  Each edge was only a foot or so across, but through them, Elijah could see the void.

What’s more, he could feel it seeping into Orveth Kaal.

The ancestral world shook. 

And Elijah knew that it was only the beginning.