Path of Dragons

The city bustled with manic energy. To Elijah, it felt like the prelude to an explosion. Everywhere he looked, he half expected to see an eruption of violence. But the Seat of Benediction remained peaceful, though with a barely contained atmosphere of electricity. To call it disconcerting would have been an understatement.

Elijah traversed the city, and he was continuously surprised at what he saw. For one, his impressions of the architecture were spot-on – it was a mixture of Mesoamerican and, oddly enough, Gothic style that he found quite interesting – but aside from those characteristics, there were plenty of unique features.

Like the rippling strips of cloth that reminded him of Tibetan prayer flags. Or the sculptures – free-standing and relief – depicting demonic creatures. The people themselves were just as singular, existing in harmony with one another that Elijah rarely saw.

But underlying it all was a simmering tension that suggested a battle was imminent.

After spending hours in the city, Elijah finally saw an eruption. Two fighters squared off at an intersection. Both were armed with obsidian-edged clubs – macuahuitl, the Aztecs called them – but wore no armor. Instead, they were clad only in brief loincloths. One fighter had a headdress resembling a bird of prey, while the other's was fashioned from a leopard's head.

And between them stood an oni.

The thing was huge – at least ten feet tall and built like a tank, with thick limbs, broad shoulders, and a thick waist – but Elijah was more interested in its overall look. At first, he'd thought the thing was wearing a mask, but it only took him a few moments to recognize that it was the thing's face.

Its features were exaggerated, and its mouth perpetually stretched into a grimace. Its eyes bulged, and horns sprouted from its head.

The thing was also plainly demonic in nature.

However, one thing Elijah found incredibly fascinating was that it so closely resembled the demonic ogres from Japanese mythology. There were differences – chiefly in its armor, which was more jagged than usually depicted in those tales – but the overall aesthetic was close enough that he couldn't help but wonder if the myths had originated from off-world.

But that was true of many races and creatures that had come with the World Tree's touch. There was obviously more to it than coincidence, though he had no idea how far it went.

The oni slammed its own club – which was more like a Japanese tetsubo, though spiked instead of knobbed – into the brick ground. The gathered people went silent, though the two angry men paced back and forth like caged animals.

"Is a peaceful resolution possible?" the oni asked, its voice grating across the square like a calving glacier.

"No!" the two men said as one.

"The duel is approved. It only ends when one party is dead. Begin!" the oni shouted.

The two men rocketed toward one another. There were no skills in use. Just raw attributes. And given they were both somewhere between seventy-five and ninety, at least by Elijah's reckoning, they had enough attributes to push them to superhuman feats.

They clashed. One fighter went high. The other went low. Neither managed to land their intended blows, but the battle didn't end there. The obsidian-edged clubs whistled as the combatants whipped them around, controlled but also wild. Elijah knew just how deadly the macuahuitl could be. According to legend, an Aztec warrior could behead a horse with a single blow from one of those clubs.

So, it was less a battle of endurance and more one of brutal risk. Whoever managed to land the first blow would almost assuredly win. But the men were quick and skilled, and at first, they only caught air with their intended attacks.

Then, after a furious thirty seconds of acrobatic dodges and vicious attacks, one connected.

Blood sprayed across the square, but to Elijah's surprise, both men remained upright. It was only a flesh would, though the victim's shoulder looked like it had been chewed up by a meat grinder.

Such was the power they both faced.

It was the beginning of the end. With one arm impaired, the wounded fighter couldn't move quite as quickly. He still put up a good fight, but only twenty seconds later, he caught a blow to the side that very nearly bisected him at the waist. The loser fell to the ground with a wet splat while the winner raised his arms in victory.

"Finish it," ordered the oni, who still hadn't moved.

The winning fighter nodded, then stepped forward. Then, with a massive overhand swing, he crushed his opponent's head. Otherwise, the man would have taken hours to die. At least this way, it was quick, even if it was incredibly brutal.

For a moment, the victor stood over the man, his chest heaving. Then, he just shook his head and walked away. The crowd dispersed soon after. Meanwhile, the oni remained in place. Wanting to see what was happening, Elijah stuck around. He maintained Guise of the Unseen, hoping that he wouldn't encounter one of those green eyes. They were rare within the city itself, so he felt good about his chances of remaining undetected.

His patience was rewarded only a couple of minutes later when a couple of men arrived. What was left of the crowd gave them a wide berth, and they quickly gathered the fallen duelist's remains, making certain to collect the blood as well. To do so, they used pristine white cloths that soon turned red before they were neatly folded and placed into a crate.

In all, the process only took a few moments. After, the men headed toward the pyramid. Elijah was tempted to follow, but the smell of cooking meat drew his attention. He'd check that out first before investigating the most important building in the city. Instead, he wanted to see if the claims of cannibalism were accurate.

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Because that would definitely make a difference in how he looked at the residents.

So, Elijah soon found his way to the origin of that savory aroma, where he discovered two things that alarmed him. First – they definitely weren't shy about eating human flesh, which Elijah identified via Soul of the Wild. It wasn't in every dish the restaurant served, but it was common enough that it confirmed the tales he'd heard.

But as horrifying – and undeniably interesting – as that was, Elijah was far more concerned with what seemed to be a staple. He couldn't fit into the restaurant in his scourgedrake form, so he remained without as he used his other senses to get an idea what was going on in there. At first, he only felt normal food – aside from the human flesh, which he tried his best to ignore – but his attention quickly diverted to a specific type of meat.

It blazed with powerful ethera that rivaled that of his grove fruits. And it was so ubiquitous that Elijah found himself questioning its source. So, he cast his awareness out, hunting for some answers.

He found them in a subterranean meat locker nearby. It was isolated enough that Elijah chanced slipping back into his human form before entering. Once inside, he found himself confronted by a horrific scene.

Humanoid corpses, each one with indigo flesh, hung from hooks in the ceiling. Boxes of that same meat lined the shelves, and in amounts that confirmed his suspicions that it was a staple within the nearby restaurant.

The few intact corpses were a revelation. They clearly weren't human. Instead, each one was between seven and nine feet tall, with four muscular arms apiece and a third eye on their forehead. Most were bald, though there were a few with long, black hair that had been tied into bunched queues.

Pointedly, they all appeared agender, completely without reproductive organs. In fact, they lacked most of the features Elijah normally associated with biological life. They had no ears. No noses. They lacked rectums or genitals.

But more importantly, each one blazed with enough ethera to increase the atmospheric density of the meat locker by a not insignificant degree.

Were they settlers from another world? Beasts? Monsters? Elijah couldn't quite pin them down, largely because whatever thread of nature existed within them was so thin that he could scarcely feel it. Part of that was due to the fact that they were dead, but even if they'd been alive, Elijah suspected it would have still lacked clarity. Each corpse bore a single silvery bracelet around one of its wrists, though Elijah couldn't discern the purpose.

He spent a few more minutes in the meat locker, but it soon became clear that he wouldn't learn anything new by sticking around longer. So, it was with even more questions that he left the same way he'd come.

It was just in time, too, because only a few seconds after he'd shifted back into Shape of the Scourge and cloaked himself in Guise of the Unseen, one of the restaurant workers crossed the yard and headed toward the subterranean room. A few moments later, she emerged carrying one of the crates – like it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Elijah remained in place for a few more moments as he attempted to make sense of it all. He failed, largely because he simply lacked the information necessary to come to any proper conclusions.

The cure for that was more investigation.

He left the restaurant behind and continued to explore the city. Unlike New York or, indeed, any other city he'd found, the residents seemed roughly equal. Sure, they had individual levels of power, but most fell within a very specific range. What's more, there were no grand palaces, save for those temple-like structures populated by those red-robed men and women he assumed were priests of some sort. Each one of those was armed with a sickle and treated with a degree of respect that suggested reverence.

They were also slightly higher level than most.

Aside from their temples, which were scattered throughout the city, the layout was roughly egalitarian. There were businesses, but Elijah never saw ethereum change hands.

Eventually, as the sun began to set, Elijah decided that he'd discovered everything there was to discover about the city. So, the only place he would get more answers was the huge pyramid at its center.

As he approached it, he found that it differed significantly from the others he'd seen on the lead-up to the Seat of Benediction. For one, it featured dozens of entrances that led inside. That was a departure from what Elijah had seen from the other pyramids, which only featured a couple of rooms within. This one was large enough that the area within was comparable to a mid-sized settlement.

And it certainly housed enough people to qualify for that classification. Elijah saw red-robed priests passing in and out, though there were plenty of fighters as well. When he entered the pyramid, he found that much of its interior was dedicated to mundane tasks necessary for running a city. In that way, it was little different from any city center.

Yet, there were plenty of altars in there as well. None were currently in use, but each room featured a dense runic circle as well. What's more, it didn't take long for Elijah to figure out that the layout of the interior rooms was reminiscent of a larger, even more complex circle as well.

Eventually, he found his way to another meat locker. This one contained hundreds of human corpses, each in various states of butchery. Suddenly, Elijah saw the reason why the priests' robes were red. He also saw how deftly they could maneuver their sickles, which they used to dismember the corpses.

The resultant flesh was parceled into boxes and sent away, presumably to the city's various eateries. That the priests could so casually hack human remains apart was both shocking and appalling, so Elijah didn't spend long in those rooms.

Indeed, if he stuck around, he would probably go on a rampage.

He told himself that they were just dead hunks of flesh. That, aside from the health issues, which probably weren't a problem with so many attributes, eating human flesh wasn't all that different from eating any other sort of meat. But he didn't believe it for a second. He'd have rather starved than gone down that route.

He did make a point to himself that those priests weren't actually killing anyone – not that he'd seen, at least – which was the only reason he didn't violently react to what he saw.

But he very much wanted to.

After leaving that area of the pyramid behind, Elijah continued his exploration, seeing more mundanity. He found sleeping quarters for the priests, a lot of storage areas, and a few other rooms with purposes he couldn't figure out.

Finally, he discovered a door to a staircase leading downward into the plateau. The stench of foreign ethera hung heavy in the air, and after descending those steps, he found himself in what he recognized as a dungeon. More distressingly, he saw troops of small imps – tiny creatures like the ones he'd seen back in the Trial of Primacy – bouncing along the corridors.

There were oni down there, too. Dozens of them, and each far stronger than the ones he'd seen in the city above. Clearly, these were elite guards.

And the reason for their presence was immediately apparent.

In the cells were hundreds of living versions of the blue-skinned creatures. They were obviously impaired, either by the cells themselves or the shackles on their arms and legs, because they could scarcely move. What's more, they felt like pure ethera in a way Elijah had never experienced before.

Barely a thread of vitality ran through them. Just enough to call them alive.

Elijah had only just begun to inspect the cells when he felt a surge of ethera from far above. Something was happening up there, and he needed to check it out. Indeed, it seemed like the only way he was going to get some answers without resorting to kidnap or torture.

Normally, he refrained from such tactics, but given everything he'd seen, it didn't seem like such a bad idea. Whatever the case, he soon found himself heading topside and hoping whatever he found up there would be the key to understanding what was going on.