Dreadgod (Cradle Book 11) (29)

Ziel tilted his head as he looked at it. “That doesn’t look like an even bigger pile of scales.”

“It’s a formation array,” Lindon said. “One of the most sophisticated ever made.”

Ziel stretched his neck to examine the image from different sides, and Lindon stopped Dross from explaining what it was. Lindon wanted to see what Ziel would determine from it.

A moment later, and Ziel let out a sound of amazement. “This is beyond me. The technique is familiar, but I’ve never seen half these runes before.”

“I’ll get to that in a second,” Lindon said. He turned to Orthos, and—reading his thoughts—Dross shifted attention to the turtle.

A serpentine black dragon Remnant roared over Orthos’ head, but Orthos hardly reacted. His spirit felt…content.

Dangerously so.

“I fought a Dreadgod already,” Orthos rumbled. “As an Underlord. I’m satisfied for a lifetime.”

“I told you, I’m not,” Lindon said quietly. He knelt by the turtle and looked into the black-and-red eyes, speaking as though no one else was in the room. “I can take you with me even if you never advance another step. But will you be happy with that?”

Orthos shifted. His eyes flicked to the rest of the room, looking at the others. “Dragons live longer, you know. As do turtles. We don’t sprint through the ranks as human children do.” Orthos lowered his voice, and Lindon could feel his embarrassment as he spoke. “What if…I can’t?”

Everyone in the room heard him, and Yerin even started to speak before she cut herself off, but Lindon stayed focused on Orthos. “You can,” Lindon said, with absolute certainty. “And if you can’t, we can.”

Dross popped through the illusionary image of the dragon-Remnant. [Behold the souls of the ancient black dragons! You could inherit their power, the echoes of their continent-spanning might, and advance as quickly as any sacred beast dares. But if you inherit their memories and their titanic willpower, will you still be yourself? Or will you only be their vessel…]

Dross made his words hang in the air as he slowly sank back into the projection of the Remnant and vanished.

Orthos shook himself, shedding his embarrassment and rumbling as loudly as usual. “Ridiculous. I come from Serpent’s Grave. If any Remnants of the royal black dragons remained, they would be found there.”

Lindon didn’t answer, and the glowing projection faded…only for another to appear over Little Blue. This time, it was a hunger spear—a white spear like the one that Lindon had originally made into his arm—but scripted differently and reinforced with an extra frame.

Little Blue cheered like tinkling bells.

“Spirits advance as fast as they can digest power,” Lindon said. “I have scales for you, and Eithan left some behind. The only thing that can make you more powerful than that is to consume spirits with a higher level of existence than you and purify their madra. Are you up for it?”

She ran around in circles, excited to be included.

Lindon knelt next to her and addressed her directly, as he had Orthos. She froze mid-step to look up at him. “It will be hard,” he said softly. “It will be scary. You don’t have to grow anymore if you don’t want to.”

Only if you want to help, Lindon thought, but he didn’t say as much out loud.

He didn’t have to. Little Blue already knew.

She trembled with uncertainty for a second, which sounded like leaves in a breeze. Then she firmed herself, looked him in the eye and gave a single, resolved chime.

“So we know what we need,” Ziel said. “All we have left is to find these things. And then get them.”

Dross giggled softly.

“No,” Lindon said, “we’ve already found them.”

He waved his hand, and new images appeared over everyone’s head. Over Yerin, a towering cloudship bearing red banners. Over Ziel, a new circle of shining silver runes. Over Orthos, a city of black stone. Over Little Blue, a shifting mass of scarlet ooze.

“Ziel, we had several possibilities for you, but I know you spent time in the Wastelands. There’s a fortified citadel there that was frozen in time by a Monarch using the formation array I mentioned earlier.”

Ziel’s brow furrowed. “That was in the Wastelands? How has nobody taken it?”

“We have reason to believe that the Rune Queen Emala, before dying in the Dread War, left pieces of her Grand Oath Array behind in this city. If you can find those pieces and learn what you can about its operation, I can reconstruct it.”

“I don’t even know what it does,” Ziel said.

“It controls time.”

That silenced the room for a moment.

“No, what does it really do?” Ziel asked impatiently.

Dross waved one arm and a larger image appeared above Ziel. This was a woman with a shimmering river that wrapped around her like a sort of living scarf. She was surrounded by a sphere of power that danced with silver runes.

She stood against the Wandering Titan. A fist that dwarfed her body moved toward her, but she manipulated several runes, and the strike slowed noticeably as she drifted out of the way.

[Time can be slowed, accelerated, or temporarily frozen in a local radius,] Dross explained. [Truly an unrivaled power…if it can be recreated. But the riddle of time has baffled Monarchs since Emala, and of course, it has been overcome once before.]