My hunt began before the echoes of the collapsed lair finished settling.
I did not wait. I did not mourn. I did not give Liliana’s brood the mercy of time.
I drove my hand into the sack of scales, fingers closing around the severed remnants of whatever shape one of those bastards had carved away from themselves to pass more easily among mortals. Then I cast the spell.
Locate creature was a simple thing in lesser hands. Useful, but limited. A thread cast into the dark, hoping the prey stood close enough to tug back.
I was not lesser hands.
I poured power into the magic until the spell shuddered under the weight of me. It spread outward through stone, soil, root, river, and road, widening far beyond what the design was ever meant to bear. I felt it move like a pulse through Faerûn, searching for the signature hidden in the scales.
For a moment, nothing answered.
Then—
A pull.
Faint. Distant.
One of them.
I smiled.
If Tamara wanted to hinder my justice, then I would stop hiding. If she wanted me isolated, then I would make the world my witness. No more slipping through alleys. No more traveling beneath cloaks and borrowed names. No more pretending I was anything less than the consequence Liliana’s line had earned.
My wings unfurled.
I launched into the sky, shedding restraint as I climbed. My body tore into its draconic shape mid-flight, scales catching the sun, wings beating hard enough to scatter clouds beneath me. The world shrank to rivers, roads, fields, smoke, and the bright line of the spell pulling me onward.
Within hours, I was over Candlekeep.
I dove straight into the town.
By the time I struck the street, I had shifted back into my half-dragon mortal form, boots cracking stone beneath me. The crowd recoiled. Some screamed. Others shouted. A few fools threw rocks, because mortals have a remarkable talent for mistaking incomprehension for courage.
One stone hit my shoulder.
I turned.
Before I could decide whether the offender deserved a warning or a grave, a group of Bahamut’s faithful surged forward from the crowd and fell on the rock-throwers like rabid dogs wrapped in prayer.
“Idiot!” one of them shouted, striking a man across the mouth. “Do you not see him?”
“Our god has descended!” another cried. “Bahamut comes to save us from Tiamat!”
Chaos broke open around me.
A brawl erupted in the street—believers against skeptics, zealots against frightened neighbors, devotion sharpened into fists. I watched for one cold breath as they beat sense, or something close enough to it, into the men who had struck me.
They thought I was Bahamut.
That should have disturbed me more quickly.
Instead, I let them believe it.
Their prayers gathered around me, thin at first, then warmer. Useful. Necessary, I told myself. If I was to do this alone—if Tamara, Kereska, and the rest of those sanctimonious cowards had decided isolation was my medicine—then I would need power wherever I could take it.
Even stolen power.
Especially stolen power.
I followed the pull to a small apothecary tucked between a scribe’s shop and a baker’s stall. Neat windows. Polished shelves. Fresh herbs drying in bundles above the door. The sort of place that made sickness look manageable and death seem negotiable.
Inside, a man who appeared to be in his late fifties stood behind the counter. His black hair was threaded with silver at the temples, his green eyes mild behind spectacles. Beside him, a young woman tidied shelves, setting out fresh vials filled with green liquid that sloshed too thickly to be medicine.
“Good afternoon,” the man said calmly. “Can I help you?”
He even offered his hand.
The spell screamed inside my skull.
Not a tug now.
A bell.
A whole temple of bells ringing at once.
I drew Judgment.
The man’s expression changed, but not fast enough.
The blade came free from my back in one smooth motion, and I brought it down through the young woman from shoulder to hip. Her body opened around the light. Before she finished falling, I reversed my grip, pivoted, and took her head off in the same sweep.
It rolled to her father’s feet.
For one impossible second, the shop was silent except for the wet sound of her body hitting the floor.
Then Eryndor screamed.
Not in grief alone.
In rage.
“You fucking animal!” he snarled, glamour shattering around the edges of his face. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
“Yes,” I said.
Two boys burst through the rear door, both too young-looking to carry the malice burning in their eyes. Teenagers in mortal shape, with black hair, green eyes, and emerald scale already breaking through the skin at their throats and wrists. Their hands lengthened into claws as they charged, short swords flashing in tandem.
I stepped back.
One breath.
Then I threw Judgment.
The blade punched through the younger boy’s chest and carried him across the room, pinning him to the wall hard enough to crack the plaster behind him.
The older one screamed and brought his sword down at my head.
I turned aside without effort.
His blade struck empty air.
My hand slid beneath his chin.
I pulled.
His neck snapped with a soft, final sound that had no business being so quiet.
Eryndor broke.
His body surged outward, mortal shape tearing apart as emerald scales erupted through skin and cloth. Shelves exploded. Glass burst. Vials shattered across the floor, spreading alchemical green over blood and broken wood. In the span of a heartbeat, the apothecary no longer held a man.
It held an emerald dragon.
I shifted with him.
We hit each other hard enough to obliterate the front of the building.
The street vanished beneath claws, wings, and collapsing stone. Eryndor drove into me shoulder-first, and we rolled through the next structure, then another, roofs caving beneath our combined weight. Mortals scattered in every direction, their screams tangled with the roar of splintering beams.
Every turn, I struck him.
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Claws into scale. Horns across his jaw. Teeth at his shoulder. Judgment answered my call and returned to me in a streak of white-gold light, sliding into my grip just as Eryndor reared back.
His maw opened.
Pink-purple energy poured from him in a violent torrent.
It struck the houses behind me, ripping them from their foundations and hurling them into the air. Stone, timber, bodies, furniture—all of it rose in a terrible, weightless instant before crashing down over nearby buildings.
The screams grew louder.
So did the prayers.
“Bahamut!”
“Kill it!”
“Platinum Father, strike him down!”
“Save us!”
I could feel their belief pouring toward me. Crude. Desperate. Misnamed.
Mine anyway.
Eryndor stumbled backward through rubble, blood spilling between his teeth. “You think they love you?” he rasped. “They love the shape they can understand.”
I lunged.
The full weight of my draconic body drove into him, pinning him to the street in a crater of shattered stone. He tried to speak again. Mercy, perhaps. A bargain. A warning about Liliana. I do not know.
I closed my jaws around his throat.
Then I ripped his head from his body.
The cheering began before the blood finished falling.
I threw Eryndor’s head before the gathered faithful, and they wept as if salvation had landed at their feet. Some dropped to their knees. Others reached their hands toward me. Their prayers named me Bahamut again and again.
I knew it was wrong.
I knew I should stop them.
I did not.
I stood there, soaked in dragon blood and stolen worship, and let their faith feed the cracks Tamara had left in me.
Afterward, I returned to the ruined apothecary and searched what remained. Eryndor’s work was everywhere if one knew how to read horror without flinching. Failed grafts. Breath-organ notes. diagrams of mortal skeletons reinforced beyond sanity. Children’s measurements. Vials of altered blood. Charts tracking pain tolerance and rejection thresholds.
His “patients” were beneath the shop.
Some still breathed.
Most wished they didn’t.
I dealt with the remnants of his testing as cleanly as I could. That is what I told myself, at least. But there were no fresh leads. No correspondence. No lair map. No active channels to Liliana’s remaining brood.
They had gone fully to ground.
Separated.
Cut communication.
Hidden like vermin under stone.
So I left Candlekeep in mortal form, wearing the face of a man and the prayer-weight of a god I was not.
My next thought was Elturel.
If the faithful in Candlekeep believed I was Bahamut descended, perhaps the holiest city in Faerûn could be made to believe the same. Tiamat was loose. Chosen of every god were fighting on a dozen fronts. Temples were desperate. Orders were mobilizing. Priests were searching for signs so hard they would see one in smoke if it curled properly.
The opportunity was ripe.
All I had to do was be blasphemous enough to take it.
A month passed on the road.
I fought as I traveled. Cultists in roadside shrines. Half-transformed mortals haunting abandoned farms. Dragons passing overhead in colors that made villagers bolt their doors and mothers hide children under floorboards. By the time Elturel rose before me, my cloak hid armor caked in dried blood, mud, bile, ash, and fluids I had stopped trying to identify.
The city itself was stunning.
I hated that it moved me.
Stonework rose clean and proud, shaped by masons with reverence in their hands. Scripture lined archways and walls. Monks moved in ordered lines. Paladins stood at checkpoints like living vows. Holy energy saturated the place so deeply that each breath through the gate felt like drinking sunlight.
It invigorated me.
Fed me.
Welcomed me, in its ignorance.
I passed through the streets without being stopped. Guards looked at me, certainly. A few frowned at the state of my cloak. None barred my path. Whatever I carried beneath the grime still resonated enough with divinity that mortal authority hesitated to put itself in my way.
Until I reached the temple of Lathander.
The shrine to Bahamut was there, modest compared to the Dawn Father’s grandeur, but present. The main doors were closed for mid-day mass, and two paladins stood before them.
One was an elder dwarf with a broad shield and a beard braided in rings of gold.
The other was an elven man well into his later years, narrow-faced, sharp-eyed, and dressed in the kind of polished devotional finery that made piety look expensive.
The dwarf lifted a hand.
“Halt.”
He even tried to push me back by pressing a firm palm against my thigh.
I looked down at him.
Then at his hand.
“I won’t be stopped.”
The elf’s gaze dragged over me with naked disgust. “Clearly you have already been stopped by soap.”
I stared at him.
He smiled thinly.
“You smell like a battlefield’s privy pit. Beggars use the side entrance, assuming they are sober enough to find it.”
The dwarf grimaced. “Elarion.”
“What?” the elf said. “Look at him. Mud on the cloak, stains on the boots, gods know what on the armor beneath. This is a house of holy light, not a gutter for wandering butchers.”
My patience tightened.
“I need access to the shrine.”
“You need a bath,” Elarion replied. “And perhaps a lesson in humility before standing before gods who can actually hear you.”
The dwarf cleared his throat, more controlled. “Mass is underway. No one enters until it ends. That is the rule.”
“I do not care about your rule.”
“Then wait despite not caring.”
That much, at least, I could respect.
So I waited.
For nearly an hour.
The dwarf stood in silence, dutiful and unyielding. The elf, however, seemed determined to test whether sanctified ground could become a murder scene.
He circled verbally, never physically. Smart enough for that.
“Tell me,” Elarion said after several minutes, fingering the charms strung across his chest, “do all roadside fanatics dress as if dragged from a dragon’s bowel?”
I said nothing.
He tapped one symbol, then another. “Lathander. Torm. Ilmater. Bahamut. Tamara.” His mouth curved. “I have served more shrines than you have likely robbed.”
The world slowed.
There, beside Bahamut’s symbol and Tamara’s, hung mine.
My mark.
Small. Polished. Decorative.
A trinket on the chest of a sneering little priestling who had no idea he was flaunting my own sign in front of me like a trophy.
Something in me went still.
Elarion noticed my stare and mistook it for shame.
“Oh, that one?” He lifted the charm bearing my symbol. “A harsher god, if the old writings are to be believed. Justice. Balance. Judgment. I doubt he would care much for your condition either.”
The fire that rose in me was not sudden.
It was ancient.
“I said,” he continued, leaning closer, “you are not fit to stand here.”
I moved.
One hand clamped over his mouth, crushing the words before they could leave him.
The other seized his right hand—the one holding my symbol—and began to close.
Bone cracked.
His eyes went wide.
The dwarf shouted, “Release him!”
Elarion tried to jump back, but I held on. His muffled scream vibrated against my palm as I crushed the bones in his hand one by one, grinding sanctimonious fingers and holy trinkets together beneath the pressure of my grip.
When I finally let his mouth go, he wailed.
The dwarf drew his sword and shield in the same motion and charged.
Brave and foolish.
He slammed into my thigh with all the force his old body and trained devotion could muster.
He bounced off.
His shield dented inward from the impact.
For a heartbeat, he stared at it.
Then he looked up.
Sunlight caught the faint scales along my neck beneath the edge of my cloak, silver-white and unmistakable. My eyes burned with holy power. Recognition—or something close to it—opened across his face.
Awe and fear.
The temple bells rang.
The great doors opened behind him.