Path of Dragons

Purple lightning flashed in the sky as the smell of death filled Elijah’s nostrils. He stumbled toward the fallen Isaak, dread and despair mingling in his heart as he let his guardian form fall away. With each staggering step, pain lanced up his broken leg, but he forced himself to ignore it, and as soon as his transformation completed, he summoned Healing Rain. A storm of soothing precipitation gathered, dumping its rejuvenating payload on Elijah and Isaak alike.

But the young man wasn’t moving, and when Elijah finally reached him, he found that Isaak’s breathing had stalled.

“No…”

He reached out and, as soon as he laid his hand on the boy’s chest, he used Touch of Nature. It pulsed, and Isaak’s body seized at the injection of healing ethera. Yet, Elijah could tell that it hadn’t worked. Forcing life into a corpse wouldn’t do anything. Dead was, after all, dead.

Yet Elijah refused to accept it.

So, he channeled it again. And again after that. Each time, the boy’s body jerked like he’d just been subjected to the electrical current of a defibrillator. However, the moment the flow of ethera ceased, he went limp. Elijah gritted his teeth and continued his efforts. Over and over, he kept going until there were only wisps of ethera left in his core. He pulled on more, flexing his Mind and Soul for all they were worth.

But it wasn’t enough.

Tears traced lines through the dirt and dried blood on Elijahs cheeks as he tilted his head back and screamed.

That didn’t do any good, either.

It just wasn’t fair. Nothing was. The world had become a cruel place where a young man like Isaak had been tasked with becoming a hero. He was just a boy, and yet, he’d marched into danger and answered the call of heroism. And then, he’d died unceremoniously, and for no other reason than that Elijah was incapable of saving him.

Of protecting him.

Ever since he’d killed those hunters, Elijah had felt that something was wrong. That everything was skewed. He’d avenged the bear, killing people that, in his head, he’d pegged as villains.

But were they?

Elijah really had no idea. The reality was that he’d reacted based on frustration and, he could admit to himself, a false sense of companionship. For so long, he’d been alone, and in retrospect, it was easy for him to anthropomorphize the creature. Yet, the bear would probably have tried to kill him if he hadn’t continuously brought it food. The same was true of the panther he remembered far more fondly than reality suggested.

More than once, Elijah had thought himself immune to the stress that came from his traumatic existence. But he wasn’t. Not anymore than anyone else, at least. He’d just processed it differently. And that flawed method had led him down a road that eventually pushed him into killing a group of hunters that may or may not have deserved what he’d done to them.

Did he feel guilty about it?

No. He did not. Not truly. Yet, he knew that, in the future, he needed to think things through, rather than react based on his ultimately flawed feelings. He also needed to be cognizant of his tendency to lose context. Animals were animals, and people were people. And in the changed world, he couldn’t blame humanity – or the various other sapient races – for killing. That was probably the only way anyone was going to survive.

What the hunters had done still didn’t sit well with him, though. He didn’t like it, and he suspected he never would. However, that didn’t mean they had deserved to die.

Thoughts like that flitted through Elijah’s mind as he struggled to absorb enough ethera to fuel more attempts at healing the fallen Isaak. He knew it was useless. But just like with the bear, he had latched onto the young man in a way that probably wasn’t warranted by the situation. They barely knew one another, after all. But in Elijah’s mind, the boy had taken on the role of a little brother.

Or a nephew.

Hopefully, if Miguel was in a similar situation, someone would try just as hard to help him.

So, Elijah kept going well past the point when he should have stopped. Then, after some interminable time, Isaak’s eyes shot open. His hand shot out, and Elijah only recognized the danger at the last second. He dove to the side just in time to avoid taking a ball of soulfire to the face.

He didn’t care, though.

“You’re alive!”

“What?” panted Isaak. “How? Of course I’m alive.”

“What?”

“It’s…um…it’s an ability. A spell. It kind of keeps me alive. It’s called Stored Soul. Think of it like a second life. So long as I cast it before a fight, I can survive fatal damage. I go into a coma for a while, but…yeah. It’s saved my life three times so far. It goes on cooldown after activation, though. It’ll be a month before I can use it again,” Isaak said, the words spilling out all at once.

“You probably shouldn’t tell strangers that,” Elijah pointed out.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“You’re not a stranger, though. You saved me.”

Elijah shrugged. “We’re even, then. You saved me, too.”

“I did, didn’t I?” the young man said, grinning. He tried to get up, but winced. “Oh. I guess I’m not completely healed, huh? How long have been here? It usually takes a week for me to wake up from the coma.”

“It’s been about an hour. Maybe two since the monster died,” Elijah said. It made sense. Likely, the influx of healing had shortened the duration of the coma. He picked himself up, saying, “Don’t move. I want to finish healing you.”

“Uh…I think we should probably get out of here.”

“Why? There aren’t any more monsters.”

Isaak pointed at the sky. Elijah followed the gesture to see that it had broken into a million jagged pieces, revealing an abyssal blackness that did not look good. It was as if they were inside a broken snow globe, except that it was intended to keep something out rather than in.

“Yeah. You’re probably right…”

With that, Elijah reached down and helped Isaak to his feet. Then, they hobbled back to the entrance, where a pair of white crystals floated in the air. Elijah touched one, and Isaak touched the other. That prompted a notification to appear before Elijah’s mind’s eye:

Congratulations! By closing a Minor Dimensional Rift, you have done a great service to your world. Thus, you have earned a reward. Lesser Rejuvenation Potion awarded.

“Whoa,” exclaimed Isaak, looking at the vial in his hand. “This is…this is amazing.”

Elijah was less enthused.

“Yippee,” he muttered to himself. He could already heal himself, so he didn’t see a whole lot of use for a potion that would do the same thing. Others clearly didn’t have that option, so it must have been very valuable. However, he would’ve much preferred an attribute potion like he’d gotten the last time he’d closed a Minor Dimensional Rift. He sighed, pocketing the potion as he said, “Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.”

After that, the pair left the rift behind, and when they stepped back into the world, the rip in reality dissipated, and the black tendrils of corruption dissolved. Elijah was less concerned about that than the giant cat barreling toward him.

He pushed Isaak aside and took the furious feline’s leaping charge right in the chest. It only managed to rake its claws across his unprotected skin a few times before Elijah managed to reposition his hands and shove the thing away. The cat was big, but Elijah’s Strength attribute was well past the peak of humanity. As such, dislodging an eighty-pound cat wasn’t nearly as difficult as it would have been before the world had changed.

The creature went flying away, bounced off the trunk of a tree, then came rocketing back at Elijah. He met it with an overhand swing of his staff that ended with the cat hitting the ground with enough force to leave it stunned. That’s when Elijah dropped his staff and pounced on the cat, wrapping his arms around its torso.

He could feel the corruption pulsing through it.

“Don’t kill her!”

“I’m not!” Elijah growled, struggling to hold the struggling cat still. He hadn’t escaped its initial pounce unscathed, and he was bleeding pretty profusely. Even so, he had the animal at his mercy. “I’m going to heal it. Her. I’m going to try to heal her. Just…just be prepared for if it doesn’t work…”

With that, Elijah cast Healing Rain. It barely cost any ethera, especially considering the sheer volume of healing it could offer. It was especially efficient, considering that the spell was healing him, the cat, and Isaak, all at the same time. But for now, he was mostly concerned with banishing the corruption from Artemis the cat.

He focused as hard as he could, channeling Touch of Nature into the overgrown feline. It went wild, bucking and hissing and raking its claws across his arms. With Elijah holding it off the ground, it couldn’t get any leverage, though.

He cast the spell again, trying his best to guide it toward the corruption. But the moment the two clashed, he knew it wouldn’t do any good. The corruption wasn’t a disease or a virus. Indeed, it didn’t feel like anything else Elijah had ever experienced. Even calling it corruption felt wrong. It was so fundamentally different from anything else he’d ever experienced, as a result, Elijah struggled to even contextualize it.

Alien was the best he came up with, but even that implied that it was of their universe. It wasn’t. It was from somewhere else – whatever was on the other side of that rift. Not the place where they’d fought the Voxxian monsters. No – that was just a bridge. Instead, the corruption was from wherever that bridge led.

Still, he kept trying to heal, but to no effect. The cat wasn’t diseased. It wasn’t unhealthy. It was just different.

Desperate to find something that worked, Elijah shouted, “Isaak! Take the potion from my right pocket. I need you to pour that down Artemis’ throat. Can you do that without getting cut to ribbons?”

He nodded, saying something about his Ethereal Shield. Then, he followed Elijah’s directions, finding the vial and uncorking it. The moment he did so, Elijah felt the power emitting from it. Then, Isaak reached in and awkwardly dragged the cat’s mouth open. It hissed and spit and tried to claw him, but each time it did, it was met with a shimmering blue shield. Eventually, Isaak managed to pour the concoction down Artemis’s throat.

Instantly, he felt the difference. The potion was more than simple healing. It exceeded what Elijah could do by a fair amount, adding some other characteristic that he simply couldn’t identify. However, what he could tell was that the moment the potion went down Artemis’s throat, the corruption had started to retreat.

But it wasn’t enough.

Elijah felt the darkness rally as the effect of the potion started to dissipate. So, he spat, “The other one!”

To his credit, Isaak didn’t hesitate, which told Elijah just how much the young man loved his cat. Isaak yanked his own potion from his pocket and added that to the mix as well. As he did so, Elijah forced as much ethera as he could muster into repeated castings of Touch of Nature.

And finally, it worked.

Slowly.

The cat continued to struggle, but soon, its yowls weakened and its wriggling lost vigor. Elijah continued to pour ethera into his healing spells, and miraculously, the corruption retreated, then began to dissipate. Just as he was about to run out of energy, the last of the otherworldly taint dissolved, leaving only a healthy cat behind.

But it was absolutely exhausted, and the creature immediately went limp, passing out.

Elijah felt like doing the same, but instead, he gave Isaak a tired smile as he said, “She’s going to be okay. I think.”

“I hope so. Do you have any idea what those potions were?” Isaak asked, grinning like a giddy idiot.

“Uh…Rejuvenation Potions is what the notification said. Why? What’s so special about them?”

“They’re kind of like a cure-all. I think I remember someone who had an identification skill saying that the description claimed that ‘No affliction can endure a Rejuvenation Potion’. Those things are priceless,” Isaak stated.

Elijah shrugged and scratched behind the cat’s ear. Even out cold, it let out a contented purr. “Worth it,” he said, and he could tell that Isaak completely agreed.

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