Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 69 - Fractured Reality (Patreon)

Orveth Kaal broke into a billion disconnected pieces, each one separated by a tiny rift that led directly to the caustic void.  Alien power came in a steady trickle, like water dripping through a cloth.  Each drop contributed to that pending flood that threatened to overwhelm the entire world.

Elijah had no idea how widespread the phenomenon was.  Miles, at the least.  The entire planet, at the worst.  Already, reality had begun to unravel, and to the point where he wasn’t sure if, even after dealing with the source, the planet would be recoverable.

Bits and pieces of the islands had already begun to break away, sucked into the void to be devoured by that untenable realm.  Everything shook with low and ominous vibrations, filling the air with a hum that overcame even the buzzing of Elijah’s summoned hornets. 

When Elijah looked out at the planetscape, it was like looking at the world through shattered glass.

And it was just the beginning.

The source – Masasha – pulsed with ever-increasing potency as she screamed for her father.  Illska held her back, refusing to allow the other dragon to reach her destination, which was obviously the blue wyrm.

For its part, the creature barely even noticed her.  Instead, it kept its attention on the pest that had caused it so much pain.

Elijah.

He barely dodged a sphere of roiling ethera, only to have it burst only a few feet away from him.  It exploded into a gravity well that pulled against him so strongly that he was forced to shift into the Shape of the World Serpent just to escape its influence.  Others weren’t so lucky, and a few orcish ships who’d ventured to close were swallowed by the event horizon.  When the well faded, only a tiny sphere of compacted wood, iron, and orc remained.

It fell towards the core.

Meanwhile, Elijah slithered forward, snaking his way between the spatial rifts.  However, his focus was no longer the blue wyrm.  Instead, he aimed straight for Masasha, who’d proven herself the more serious threat.

The blue wyrm was dangerous.  It could kill them all if left unchecked.  But Masasha seemed capable of destroying the entirety of Orveth Kaal.  Elijah didn’t think for a second that she could do so all at once, but the instability caused by her spatial explosion was more than capable of destabilizing the ancestral world.  At the very least, her destructive influence could foul the connection slowly dragging Orveth Kaal back to the Empire of Scale. 

At worst?

A few broken pieces could easily cause an avalanche of damage that saw the entire world shattering and scattering to the void.  Next to that, the threat posed by the blue wyrm seemed almost quaint.

Unfortunately, relativity didn’t make the creature any less personally dangerous.  Elijah discovered that when he found the blue wyrm suddenly in his path.  He contorted his serpentine body into a slithering dodge, but he couldn’t avoid the fallen dragon’s next attack.

The wyrm’s talons came in, a much larger set of energy-based claws superimposed over them.  They were so large that Elijah had no choice but to hunker down and trust Scales of Eternity to protect him.

And the ability did just that, at least partially.  Even then, Elijah was almost ripped into multiple pieces.  His body remained intact, but only by a few strands of flesh and scale. 

Thankfully, the World Serpent was almost entirely magical by nature.  As such, the loss of so much muscle and quite a bit of connective tissue didn’t have much of an effect on his ability to fly.  In only a second, he was past the wyrm and barreling through a thousand spatial rifts.

Each one cut him like so many razors, scoring his body and leaving him crisscrossed with bloody wounds.  Elijah tried to avoid them, but that was entirely impossible.  Especially because Masasha’s panic drove more power into the unformed spell.  The result was that the rifts continued to multiply.  One became two, two became four – the deployment was both uncontrolled and exponential. 

That put Elijah – and everyone else – on a timer. 

With a bit of focused concentration, Elijah yanked his phone from his spatial storage.  In the Shape of the World Serpent, he lacked arms, legs, or hands, so the phone ended up in his mouth.  Thankfully, he didn’t need to press any buttons to activate it.  That wasn’t a typical feature, but rather, one the Engineers had created just for him.

It came in clutch.

“Aim everything at Masasha!” he shouted, his voice strained.

To their credit, the people aboard the Vengeance didn’t hesitate to follow his orders.  Maybe that was due to the respect they held for him.  Or perhaps they recognized the situation as well as him.  Either way, by the time Elijah reached the halfway point to his destination, every single cannon aboard the Vengeance had shifted their aim to Masasha.

The salvo should have been deafening.

But in the rift-shattered atmosphere, it was oddly muted, as if the sound had been sucked into the void.

Surprisingly, the orcs got the message as well.  Tens of thousands of ships shifted their attention to that lone dragon and let loose.  Millions of cannons fired as the smaller ships raced across the intervening distance.  They tried to dodge the rifts, but most of the ships were too large.  Instead, they barreled right through them, and they were all the worse for it.  Huge gashes ripped their way across the hulls, spilling orcs into the open air. 

But orcs were nothing if not focused, at least when it came to violence, and they would not be deterred.

The first wave reached the blue dragon before Elijah.

They were shredded.

Literally.  Wood.  Flesh.  Iron.  It didn’t matter.  Matter simply unraveled when they came too close to Masasha. 

When Elijah drew closer, he saw that the air around her was entirely distorted.  Her body writhed in pain as dense flows of ethera raced through her.  However, Elijah was most taken aback by her expression.

It wasn’t twisted by agony.

Rather, it was distorted by longing.  Need.  By pain of a different sort.  She cried out, her words twisted into incomprehension by the spatial distortions.  She didn’t fight Illska.  Nor did she try to avoid the oncoming cannon strikes.  Instead, she strained against Illska’s grip, only trying to escape. 

Then, Elijah saw it.

It wasn’t really a change in expression.  Rather, it was something behind her eyes.  Something subtle about the ethera pulsing out of her.  Something wild and entirely unconstrained. 

Elijah barely had a chance to mark the change before a rift erupted inside his body, cutting through him as easily as if he was a mortal.

                          *

A wyrm.

Masasha’s mind roiled with the realization of what her father had become.  Every dragon had been taught to fear becoming a wyrm.  And just as surely, every single one of them believed themselves immune to such a transformation of character, purpose, and motivation. 

But there he was, the dragon who’d taught her so much.  Her father.  The person she’d looked up to her entire life.  The dragon she’d spent centuries seeking. 

And he didn’t even recognize her.

Her father was gone, descended into base animal instincts.  But the most galling part of it wasn’t his fall.  If Masasha truly examined her feelings, she would have admitted that what really broke her was his lack of power.

Growing up, he had been a mountain.  Insurmountable.  Undefeatable.  Now?  He was so depressingly mundane.  It was enough to cement a grim reality in her mind – as a dragon, he had been unremarkable.  Run-of-the-mill.  A deity, certainly, but one that would never sniff transcendence.

As a wyrm, he was stronger, but still disappointingly weak compared to her memory-driven expectations. 

The combined result of her disappointment and the warring emotions of relief and horror melded into something wholly different.  Her sense of control waned even as she drifted closer to the one thing that had always made sense to her.  The piece that always fit into the puzzle.

Space.

She had been a prodigy from a young age, and one with bright future.  Some of that came from her parentage – both her father and mother had massive potential that they’d clearly squandered.  Her mother, because she lost the drive to climb the ladder of progression and chose to settle into a more mundane life of managing some distant branch of the clan.  Meanwhile, her father’s fate loomed in the distance.  A dragon who’d given in to wyrmhood and, gallingly, hadn’t even become all-powerful.

Either way, Masasha had proven time and again that she was different.  The fact that she’d fought Illska to a stalemate was evidence enough of that.  Throughout that fight, she had drifted closer and closer to her attunement.

To space.

She could feel it all around her, waiting for her command.  And when the battle culminated in the bitter truth about her father’s fate, she had given in to it in a way she had never thought possible.

Even now, with spatial rifts exploding into existence all around her, she barely paid it any heed.  Instead, her power ran unchecked as she struggled to reach her father.  To complete the task she had long ago adopted, to reach the goal she’d worked toward for most of her adult life.

Disappointment couldn’t stand against her resolution to rescue her father. 

The only problem was that Illska refused to let her go. 

“Control yourself!” shouted the Warrior, both hands digging into Masasha’s tail.

In any other state, she might have simply adopted her humanoid form.  However, that never even crossed her mind.  In fact, very few thoughts occurred to her.  There just wasn’t enough room in her mind for that sort of thing. 

Not with so many powerful emotions warring with reason while being overwhelmed by the surging ethera all around her.  After the exhausting fight with Illska, which had repeatedly pushed her to the limits of her ability, she couldn’t summon the strength to resist the call of space.

And if she was honest or had room for introspection, she might have admitted that she didn’t want to.

She surrendered.

Suddenly, a hunk of her tail disappeared, freeing her from Illska’s iron grip.  She surged forward, finally free to go to her father.  He reared back, took a breath, then let loose with his breath.

Space distorted, and rifts spiderwebbed into smaller, thinner strands.  That spatial net hit Masasha, grating her flesh and sheering her scales away.  She disappeared without ever casting a spell, then reappeared right on top of her father.

Behind her, Illska roared.

Masasha paid the other dragon no mind.

Nor did she split her focus to the cannon fire suddenly descending upon her.  She didn’t even care about the world shaking as rifts continued to spread for hundreds of miles in every direction.  The void beckoned threateningly.  Seductively.  In there, she would be free. 

In there, she could meet her potential.  The draw was enthralling enough to distract her from the obvious.  So, she never even saw when her father – the dragon she’d searched for so studiously – attacked her. 

Only as his claws – encased in dense spatial energy – swiped across her exposed neck did she accept what should have been apparent.  He didn’t recognize her.  He didn’t love her.  He was lost.  Gone.  And there was nothing left of him to rescue.

That broke what remained of Masasha’s mind.

She surrendered to space in a way that she never had before.  Completely and without reservation.  Her power surged, and bands of spatial energy snapped out to wrap around the flesh torn free of her throat.  In a display of expertise she’d never possessed, she created a net and dragged everything back into place.  Then, without thought, she sealed the wounds with sutures of pure spatial energy.

It happened in the space of an instant – so quickly that the wounds only existed for the twitch of her brow.  Masasha never even noticed.

She had descended too far.  She had drawn from her nature too deeply.  And more than anything, the trauma of finding her father lost to her completely overwhelmed all rational thought. 

If reason had remained within her mind, she might have recognized her descent into wyrmdom.  But her thoughts were just as shattered as Orveth Kaal, and her primitive drive told her that the only solution was to attack her attacker. 

That was when she stopped seeing her father, fallen and broken.  Instead, he was replaced by another wyrm.  A rival.  An enemy who could no longer be tolerated.

She attacked, heedless of the world falling apart all around her.