Path of Dragons

Thick columns of black smoke reached for the sky as the city burned in the distance. Even from miles away, Elijah could smell the acrid stench. He could even taste it. Using Eyes of the Eagle, he studied the destroyed settlement. It was no small village, and if he'd had to guess, it had once held upwards of ten or fifteen thousand people.

Not anymore.

Elijah glanced toward the depression only a few hundred yards from the outskirts of the city and forced himself to acknowledge the bodies he saw piled within. Thousands at the very least. All relatively fresh, too. Old enough that decomposition had set in, but not so old that it had advanced significantly.

Did it matter that they clearly weren't human?

Not to Elijah.

Even with the decay, blood, and accumulating ash, he could see a half dozen skin colors. Some were deep red, while others were blue. Yellows and greens. Even a few purples, though Elijah suspected that was due to the damage the bodies had endured.

Then, he shifted his focus to the south of the city. Nearly ten miles away, nestled in the shadow of the mountain range was a camp. Or a mobile city, rather. There were thousands of blood red tents, each arranged in a noticeable spiral pattern, with a huge palace-like tent at the center. At least a hundred thousand people milled around those tents, and even though they were too far away for Elijah to see the details of their appearance, he knew what they were.

War elves.

His lone experience with the race had come from two meetings with one of their kind during the Trial of Primacy. He'd forgotten the man's name, but he certainly remembered his face. Angular and haughty – fitting for one who'd gotten a bunch of innocent people killed just because he craved the experience.

Thankfully, he was now dead. But clearly, he'd left a lot of likeminded fools behind.

Elijah let out a low sigh, wondering what he should do. His past experiences told him to kill the war elves. Over the last few days, he'd found plenty of other settlements just like the one in the distance. Burned or otherwise destroyed. Populations destroyed. This was the largest of them, but not by much. The death toll was staggering.

Yet, he questioned that line of thinking. Was he there to fight mundane wars? If he let himself get caught up in things like that, he'd never be free to concentrate on what really mattered. After all, no one would survive excisement. His attention was better focused on the Primal Realms.

Still, he found it difficult to simply ignore the evidence of carnage he'd witnessed. Hundreds of thousands of dead. Some were off-worlders, like the ones in the mass grave only a few miles away, but there had been a few human villages as well. Did he have a responsibility to protect them?

Perhaps.

Morbid curiosity drove Elijah forward, and he descended the low hill, dodging between scrubby bushes as he closed in on the burning settlement. The trip through the town was exactly what he'd expected it to be. Most of the bodies been gathered into the mass grave, but not all of them. And many more were within the buildings, charred beyond recognition. Elijah recognized quite a few smaller figures, and he assumed the worst.

He dared to hope they were just gnomes or other smaller races rather than children, even if he knew that was a callous way of looking at things. Still, he could see the truth as well as anyone. Maybe better, given that what he felt via Soul of the Wild.

From what was left of the settlement, he supposed that his estimate of the population was fairly accurate. What's more, they didn't seem particularly war-like. There were no walls. No engines of war. Just people who'd been living their lives. Elijah even found a mostly intact tavern that the flames had yet to claim. Inside was what he might have expected – crude furnishings, pewter mugs, and what would have been a cozy atmosphere if it weren't for all the bodies.

Elijah remained in his scourgedrake form, cloaked in Guise of the Unseen, so he knew he didn't need to fear discovery. Because of that, he had the freedom to truly take in the carnage.

And it was sickening.

He was no stranger to killing. He'd killed whole populations without blinking. But this – it seemed so senseless. Was this what people thought when they saw him throw those bodies on Isaiah's doorstep? Was this what people saw when they looked at him? Corpses contorted into unnatural positions, blood congealed beneath them, bones broken and twisted.

He wanted to vomit.

But he forced himself to see it all. To bear witness. Perhaps even to grieve, though Elijah was a little too disconnected from the people to truly experience that emotion. If he'd known them in life, maybe that would have been different.

Still, as much as he believed that death was part of life, he couldn't completely separate himself from the natural human distaste for wanton killing. Even when he'd done it, he'd found the act disgusting. Necessary, but regrettable all the same, at least when he moved past the simmering rage that prompted it.

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Elijah forced himself to see the remnants of the settlement for what they represented, and he remained among the charred husks of those buildings falonger than he'd originally intended. However, after a couple of hours, he moved on. He didn't go straight to the camp, though. Rather, he stopped by the mass grave, and it was much as he'd first expected.

Like those in the settlement, the people were all hill goblins. Taller than people like Ramik. Stronger and more athletic. Some wore broken armor or carried shattered weapons, suggesting that the bodies in the pit belonged to the city's defenders. There were even a few ogres in there, which reminded Elijah of Grod.

He paced the circumference of the mass grave, his anger mounting. He didn't know the motivation behind the razing of the settlement, but his personal experiences colored his assumptions.

So it was with no small degree of simmering anger that he finally approached the war elves' camp.

The first thing he noticed when he drew nearer was that it was even more expansive than his first impression suggested. His mistake was mostly a trick of perception, because the tents were far larger than normal. Aside from the one at the center, they were all identical – at least twenty feet tall and twice that in diameter – which meant that they could house at least forty soldiers each. Maybe even more if they were anything like the golem summoner's tent.

From afar, Elijah had counted twenty rings, all contained within a quarter mile diameter, which suggested that the number of soldiers likely exceeded six digits.

When he drew within a two hundred feet, Elijah sensed something odd. He kept going until he reached what looked like a small stake that had been driven into the ground. He could feel the ethera wafting off of it as well as twin streams of energy jetting off to the right and left. He followed one – without crossing those beams – until he reached another identical stake.

Continuing on, he found that they circled the entire encampment. But the question remained – were they simply an early-warning system meant to detect potential infiltrators? Or were they something much more dangerous?

Elijah decided to test things out.

His first step was to station himself at the edge of his effective range, then use his Mantle of Authority. The second the branches of his soul stretched across the beam, the stake went dark.

And only a moment later, a squad of a hundred war elves rushed out of the camp. Each one was armored in red enameled plate and identically armed with swords at their hips, crescent-shaped shields, and golden-tipped spears, marking them as a cohesive group.

One knelt beside the inactive stake, saying, "I don't know what happened. It just deactivated."

"They do that sometimes," said another. This one was wearing slightly more elaborate armor, marking him as a leader. "Replace it so we can go back inside. I loathe this desolate world."

Elijah noted that the other stakes were still active.

The others stood guard while the first elf followed the leader's instructions, and after only a couple of minutes, during which the local ethera swirled with no small degree of power, they returned to the camp. Elijah felt that the circle was once again complete.

Settling down, he continued to study the camp, but over the next hour or so, he found nothing else of note. More importantly, the sun began to set, and before long, night had truly fallen. The overcast sky meant that neither the moon nor the stars were visible, casting the encampment's surroundings in dense darkness.

Elijah felt comforted by the gloom. It didn't really make much difference with Guise of the Unseen, but there was something about the darkness that made clandestine actions feel safer.

Still, he waited a further few hours – until the activity in the camp started to die down – before he decided to once again test the encircling thread of energy. He followed the circumference until he was on the other side of the encampment, then took a deep breath before sprinting forward.

He leaped over the thread, landing on the other side. However, before his feet even hit the ground, he knew something was wrong. A second later, he felt the ethera draining out of him in great torrents. It was like a levy had broken in the middle of a flood. He activated his Mantle of Authority, but that only exacerbated the problem.

After all, it required ethera coursing through those branches in order to work.

He opened the apertures in his mind, but only a trickle came through.

Panic set in.

And that was before he landed. When his feet hit the ground, he immediately shoved his claws into the turf and reversed course. He had no idea what was happening, but he had no interest in investigating it further.

Before he could go another step, something hit him in the back. That was followed by a shout of, "Beast!"

Another attack landed, ripping into his scales and confirming that his attributes were much reduced. It was like he'd stepped inside a powerful domain, though the mechanism was very different from what he'd experienced in the past. And given the power, there was something else going on that he very much did not understand.

Finally, the obvious dawned on him. Guise of the Unseen had been deactivated.

In fact, it felt as if all of his abilities were just out of reach. With his ethera rapidly draining and his attributes feeling much diminished, he sprinted to the boundary over which he'd just leaped. When he reached the gap between stakes, it felt as if he'd run into a wall. Thankfully, with his mass in the scourgedrake form and the speed he'd managed to build, he crashed through it.

Stumbling slightly, he narrowly avoided another attack before regaining his balance. His attributes were still diminished, but they were slowly recovering as he ran away.

The response team followed doggedly, clearly unaffected by that pseudo-domain. Because of that, they managed to keep pace as Elijah sprinted toward the closest cover he could find.

The ruined city beckoned, many of the fires still glowing, casting the charred husks of the buildings in flickering light. Elijah crashed through one wall, then ducked into an alley.

The war elves followed, making no attempts at stealth.

Elijah panted, his breath misting in the cold night. Looking at his status, he saw that his attributes were still barely half their normal totals. Climbing slowly – a couple of points with every thirty seconds – but it would be a while before he was back to full strength.

That didn't matter, though. Even diminished, he felt like he was more than a match for the troop of elves. Unfortunately, he still didn't have access to his abilities, which he suspected would last until the affliction – if that was what it was – wore off. That meant it would be as much as an hour or two before he could use them.

By all rights, he should have just flee. Even with his lowered attributes, he could outpace the elves and sprint away into the night.

But surrounded by the evidence of the carnage they'd visited upon the city, Elijah was not in the mood to run away. He would just have to be careful.

So, without further hesitation, he crouched low and crept forward, ready to kill the war elves who were stupid enough to think they could hunt him.