The people poured out of the temple in a bright, panicked rush.
Mass had ended, but whatever peace they had carried inside died the moment they saw me standing there with Elarion’s broken hand still in my grip and the dwarven paladin braced before me with a dented shield.
At first, there was confusion.
Then outrage.
“Unhand him!”
“Monster!”
“Get away from the temple!”
Someone threw a stone.
It struck my shoulder and bounced harmlessly away.
Another followed.
Then another.
The dwarf spun toward the crowd, fury cutting through his discipline. “Enough! Back away, all of you!”
They did not listen.
Mortals rarely do when fear finds a crowd to hide behind.
Elarion whimpered in my grasp, his ruined hand twitching uselessly between us. His arrogance had drained out of him so quickly it might have been funny in another life. The sneering collector of holy symbols was gone. In his place stood an old elf with wet eyes, trembling lips, and the sudden, terrible realization that he had insulted something ancient enough to remember when his gods were young.
The next stone hit my jaw.
My patience ended.
The air tightened around me.
The dwarf saw it first. To his credit, he did not run for himself. He ran into the crowd, grabbing the nearest worshippers and shoving them back with desperate strength.
“Move!” he roared. “Move, you fools!”
Too late.
My eyes lit gold.
The cloak tore across my shoulders. Scales ripped through flesh, armor split under expanding bone, and the street cracked beneath my growing weight. My body surged upward and outward, mortal shape surrendering to draconic truth. Cloth shredded. Steel buckled. Wings unfolded above the temple steps, and my shadow swallowed the courtyard.
Then they screamed.
“A dragon!”
Panic scattered them like kicked ash.
Priests and clerics spilled from the church, some with spells half-formed on their tongues, some clutching holy symbols, some frozen in the doorway because their minds refused to accept the shape of me.
Then the holy pressure rolling from my body reached them.
One by one, they fell to their knees.
Even the wounded and lame tried to prostrate themselves, dragging broken bodies and shaking hands across the stone. Their prayers rose in broken fragments. Fear. Awe. Need.
The dwarf did not kneel.
He stared up at me, shield lowered, face pale beneath his beard. His mouth moved once before sound came.
“Lendys.”
Soft.
Almost swallowed by the bells.
Then a cleric shouted louder.
“Bahamut!”
The name tore through the courtyard.
Others took it up instantly, because mortals will always choose the god they already know over the truth standing right in front of them.
“Bahamut!”
“Platinum Father!”
“He has come!”
The dwarf looked away.
Ashamed.
Not of me.
Of them.
He knew. Somehow, in that battered heart of his, he knew who stood before him. But he did not correct them.
Neither did I.
Their faith rushed toward me, desperate and hot, filling the hollow places Tamara had carved open when she left me alone. It was not mine. It was not clean. It wore another god’s name and still poured into my starving hands like water.
So I took it.
Of course I fucking took it.
I lowered my head, and the courtyard went silent beneath the weight of my attention.
“Bring me everything,” I said, my voice rolling over the stones and through the open temple doors, “that your agents, acolytes, priests, spies, and paladins have gathered on Tiamat and the dragons surrounding her.”
No one moved.
I bared my teeth.
“Now.”
That worked.
Priests scattered. Clerics ran to neighboring temples. Scribes were dragged from offices with ink still wet on their fingers. Paladins from half a dozen faiths gathered beneath me, some kneeling, some standing because their pride or training would not let them bow, all of them looking at me like I had become the answer to a prayer they had not expected to survive.
By sunset, Elturel had begun emptying its secrets into my claws.
By the end of the week, I had a war.
They called the gathering the Synod, because mortals cannot resist naming anything that frightens them until it feels organized. High priests, commanders, paladins, temple scholars, divine messengers, old spies pulled from retirement, and exhausted men with too much parchment and not enough sleep crowded into a hall beneath Lathander’s temple.
I remained in mortal shape there, though not for their comfort.
For practicality.
A dragon filling the chamber made reviewing maps difficult.
The table before me vanished beneath reports. Dragon sightings. Cult movements. Missing caravans. Temple desecrations. Blood rites. Half-dragon attacks. Villages that had vanished overnight. Lists of names, most crossed out. Regional fronts marked in red wax. Rumors of Tiamat’s chosen tearing through defensive lines while her lesser dragons circled like carrion birds.
I stared at the map until the ink seemed to breathe.
“You’re glaring at the paper again,” Mira said from my left.
I did not turn.
She leaned against the table, arms crossed, black hair loose around her shoulders, wearing that sharp little smirk she always used when she wanted to stab worry until it looked like humor.
She was not there.
I knew that.
Mostly.
“You do realize maps don’t confess under pressure, right?” she continued. “You can brood at that river all night. It’s still going to be a river in the morning.”
Across the table, Darian stood with one hand on the pommel of his sword. Solid. Stern. Too steady to be real.
“She has a point,” he said. “You need rest.”
“Don’t encourage her.”
Mira pointed at me. “See? He says that because I’m right and he hates it. That’s practically worship.”
I laughed under my breath.
A young scribe nearby went still, quill hovering above parchment.
No one else had spoken.
Ilyon appeared beside the western campaign markers, pale and elegant in travel-worn robes, his silver eyes narrowed at the reports. “If you strike directly at every dragon sighting, you will exhaust the forces willing to follow you.”
Seraphine stood near him, hands folded, face sadder than memory should have allowed. “And yourself.”
I pressed my fingers to the bridge of my nose.
“Not now.”
The scribe swallowed. “My lord?”
I looked at him.
He flinched.
“Not you.”
He wisely decided not to ask who I meant.
The hallucinations did not leave.
They rarely did by then.
Some days, they flickered at the edges of my sight. Shadows with familiar voices. Echoes of people I had lost without burying. Other days, they sat with me for hours, arguing over tactics, mocking my decisions, reminding me to eat, accusing me when my hands shook over casualty lists.
The Synod thought I was communing with divine counsel.
In a way, perhaps I was.
Just not the kind they imagined.
I gathered the reports into piles.
“Tiamat’s eastern cult cells are spreading faster than the western flights,” I said aloud.
Darian tilted his head. “Then cut the supply lines first.”
Ilyon shook his head. “No. Cut the messengers. The supplies are replaceable. Coordination is not.”
Mira tapped a marked location near the river. Her finger passed through the parchment.
“Or burn that one,” she said.
I looked at her.
She shrugged. “What? It looks smug.”
“Mira,” Seraphine said.
“What? Don’t ‘Mira’ me. You see that little cluster of cult symbols? That is absolutely a smug little cult nest.”
“It is ink,” Ilyon said.
“It is smug ink.”
A breath almost became a smile in me.
Almost.
I pointed to three positions. “Elturel’s paladins move east. Clerics of Lathander and Torm reinforce the roads here and here. Adventuring companies get paid double for confirmed cult kills, triple for dragon collaborators. No one engages Tiamat’s chosen without temple support.”
One of the Synod commanders nodded quickly, writing it down.
“And the emerald dragons?” the dwarf asked.
Brumuth.
That was his name.
The old paladin from the temple steps had become more useful than all the jeweled priests in the chamber. He did not worship me incorrectly. He did not say Bahamut when he looked at me. He had a wife, three sons, and a daughter named Melna with his sharp eyes and his talent for surviving bad ideas. Within a month, I took his family into my confidence.
My informants.
My tether.
My mistake, perhaps.
I looked at the five emerald markers on the map, each one tied to Tiamat’s forces.
“They die,” I said.
No one argued.
Tiamat’s war swallowed decades.
At first, Elturel marched like a holy city given legs. Paladins, clerics, healers, torchbearers, oathbound knights, frightened volunteers, and opportunists dressed in faith because faith paid well when dragons darkened the sky. They moved across Faerûn carrying aid, miracles, and steel. The sick were healed. The cursed were cleansed. Villages were fortified. Cultists were dragged from cellars and hanged from their own symbols.
It should have been glorious.
It was mud, blood, rot, exhaustion, and prayer.
Tiamat walked the world unrestricted.
I did not.
She had hell behind her. Devils, dragons, cults, hoarded sacrifices, worship sharpened by terror. I had stolen prayers and a body strong enough to hold more than it should, but still less than I needed.
So humanity became my weapon.
Their numbers. Their desperation. Their astonishing ability to keep moving when any sane creature would lie down and wait for the fire to take them.
The new war began in earnest.
And in that war, Liliana’s remaining brood made one error.
They thought Tiamat’s shadow would hide them.
Five emerald dragons served openly among her hoard.
It took ten years to kill them.
The last was Vhalaryn.
She flew above a battlefield near a broken stretch of hills where Tiamat’s forces had gathered beneath a sky bruised purple by infernal weather. Around her moved chromatic dragons, cult banners, devils in formation, and mortal soldiers screaming hymns to a goddess who would have eaten them without learning their names.
Vhalaryn was beautiful in the way emerald dragons often are.
Sleek. Arcane. Luminous beneath the storm. Her scales caught the lightning and held it, green fire running over her wings with each turn. She moved among Tiamat’s forces like she belonged there, like all the old crimes had been washed clean by proximity to greater evil.
I watched her from above.
Alone.
Mira would have said something vicious and useful. Darian would have told me not to dive too early. Ilyon would have noticed the wind pattern before I did. Seraphine would have asked if there was any chance Vhalaryn could be taken alive.
None of them were there.
Good, I told myself.
Better.
Cleaner.
No one to plead. No one to soften the strike. No one to look at me afterward and see what I had become.
Below, Vhalaryn banked over a line of Elturel’s forces and released emerald breath. Not acid. Not fire. Something refined. Arcane corrosion that turned shields brittle and flesh luminous before it split apart.
My soldiers screamed.
My soldiers.
The thought came so easily by then.
Too easily.
I folded my wings and dropped.
The sky became speed.
Vhalaryn never saw me until I struck her from above.
We crashed through one of Tiamat’s lesser dragons on the way down, its spine breaking between our bodies before it spiraled away. Vhalaryn twisted beneath me, claws raking my chest, wings beating hard enough to scatter the smoke. I drove Judgment into the root of one wing and tore downward.
She faltered.
Not enough.
Emerald dragons were never stupid. She rolled with the fall, used my weight against me, and slammed us into a ridge hard enough to shear stone from the hillside. Pain flashed through my ribs.
I welcomed it.
Pain meant the body was still mine.
Pain meant I had not yet become only verdict.
I pinned her with one claw and reached for her throat.
For one second, I saw Tamara.
Not physically. Not even as a hallucination.
A thought.
A memory.
Her voice in the alcove.
Curiosities.
Her signature.
Your Better.
I looked at Vhalaryn and felt nothing resembling mercy.
This is your better path? I thought. This is what you hid them for?
The answer, of course, was silence.
Tamara had become very good at leaving me with silence.
Vhalaryn thrashed beneath me, trying to draw breath for another blast. I slammed her head into the stone once. Twice. The ridge cracked under the third impact.
Around us, Tiamat’s horde surged.
I ignored them.
A devil’s spear struck my flank. A dragon’s claws scored my shoulder. Cult magic burst against my back in violet flame. None of it mattered. The battlefield narrowed to emerald scales beneath my claws and the place where her throat pulsed.
I bit down.
Her blood flooded my mouth, hot and bright with old magic.
I tore until the throat opened.
Then kept tearing.
By the time she stopped moving, the forces below had begun chanting Bahamut’s name again.
I stood over Vhalaryn’s corpse, dragon blood dripping from my jaws, while the stolen prayers rose.
I should have corrected them.
I should have hated the name.
Instead, I let it fill me.
Because a lie believed by thousands has weight.
Because isolation makes thieves of men who once called themselves gods.
Because if Tamara wanted me alone, then I would take companionship from worship, even worship aimed at another.
The thought did not frighten me then.
That frightens me now.
Holding Maire’s hand as we walk through this strange forest, surrounded by her companions and the quiet pulse of life around us, I can almost laugh at how absurd it is. Back then, I stood among clerics, paladins, generals, priests, and highborn commanders. The Synod met my gaze with reverence. Armies moved when I spoke. Bells rang for the god they thought I was.
And still, I was lonely.
Exceptionally.
Devastatingly.
Lonely.
The years blurred after Vhalaryn.
Tiamat’s forces endured for forty years before we finally shattered her form and cast her back to her layer of hell. By then, the world had grown used to catastrophe. Children born during the war became soldiers before it ended. Widows opened inns beside battle roads. Priests learned to bless mass graves without losing their voices.
I left the main war before its end.
Liliana was my quarry.
Not Tiamat.
Not really.
The hunt stretched on after the great terror faded. Ten years after Tiamat’s banishment, most mortals had already started turning horror into history. That disturbed me at first. Then, in a strange way, it freed me. Humanity moved on because it had to. Perhaps that was what Tamara had once tried to make me understand.
A village could burn.
A child could die.
A god could fail.
And still the next morning demanded bread.
I hated the truth of that.
The Synod gave me rooms beneath the temple archives in Elturel, private enough for secrecy and public enough for worshippers to whisper that Bahamut’s chosen still guided them. I spread reports over the floor and walls until the chamber looked less like a study and more like the inside of a mind trying not to collapse.
Waterdeep. Baldur’s Gate. Neverwinter. Athkatla. Suzail. Westgate. Calimport. Luskan. Elturel.
Cities where people vanished without shaking the foundations. Cities with enough coin, corruption, charity, scholarship, nobility, and hunger to hide monsters in plain sight.
Liliana’s brood had adapted.
Of course they had.
I stood barefoot in the middle of the map one night, shirt open, scars bright in candlelight, scales glinting faintly at my throat. Brumuth’s latest reports lay beside temple intelligence. Melna’s notes were sharper than most clerics twice her age. Names. Cover identities. Clinics. Orphanages. Noble bloodlines. A pattern beginning to form from absence.
Mira sat on the edge of the table, swinging one leg.
“You look like shit,” she said.
“I’m busy.”
“You’re always busy when you’re avoiding being alive.”
Darian stood near the door, arms folded. “Baldur’s Gate first.”
Ilyon, seated among the papers as if they could bear his weight, lifted a brow. “Knowledge remains the spine of the operation. Follow the scholars, the record-keepers, the stolen books.”
Mira wrinkled her nose. “That was very elegant. Very tragic. Very you. My vote is Waterdeep, because rich people hide bodies better and smile while doing it.”
Seraphine knelt beside a stack of missing-person reports, her expression unreadable. “Waterdeep has children in the records.”
That made me stop.
The candle nearest me guttered.
“Liliana,” I said.
None of them answered.
Because none of them were real.
I crouched and picked up one parchment with shaking fingers. A charity in Waterdeep. A noble patroness. Orphans restored to health. Bloodline records missing. Healers paid in gems. Children moved at night.
My vision blurred.
Mira’s voice softened, losing the knife for once.
“Lendys.”
“Don’t.”
“You need to sleep.”
“I need to find her.”
Darian stepped closer. “You need to know what you’ll do when you do.”
I laughed, and the sound cracked.
“I know exactly what I’ll do.”
“No,” Seraphine said gently. “You know what you want to do.”
I looked at her.
She was wearing pilgrimage clothes in that hallucination, dust on the hem, hair braided for travel. Ilyon stood beside her, equally road-worn, as if they had spent years searching for me.
Sometimes I believed they had.
Sometimes that belief was the only thing that kept me from tearing the archives apart with my hands.
“You’re not here,” I said.
Seraphine’s eyes filled with sadness. “Does that make us wrong?”
Mira gave a small, humorless laugh. “Gods, I hate when the imaginary version of Sera wins an argument. It’s rude as hell.”
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, they were gone.
Only maps remained.
Only names.
Only the hunt.