Sixty years on Faerûn.
Forty years of war.
Ten years since Tiamat's banishment.
The world had finally settled into something resembling peace.
Then Brumuth and Melna came to me in a panic.
They arrived before dawn, soaked from rain, cloaks drawn tight, faces pale beneath road grime. Brumuth looked older than he had the day he first said my name outside Lathander’s temple. Melna had grown into a hard-eyed woman with her father’s stubborn mouth and none of his hesitation.
She did not kneel.
Good.
I had grown tired of kneeling.
“My lord,” Brumuth said, breathing rough.
Melna pushed past him and dropped a bloodstained ledger onto my table.
“We found one,” she said.
I stared at the book.
She swallowed. “Here. In Elturel.”
The room went very quiet.
Right under their noses.
Right under mine.
Something inside me smiled before my face did.
And somewhere in the darkened corner of the archive, Mira’s voice whispered, not real and not gone:
“Well, shit.”
This time, I answered her aloud.
“Yes,” I said, opening the ledger. “Exactly.”
Joy moved through me before reason could stop it.
Not relief. Not justice. Joy.
It had been ten years since I had last found one of Liliana’s brood, ten years since Vhalaryn’s blood had soaked my teeth and the battlefield had screamed Bahamut’s name at the wrong god. Ten years of scraps, false trails, dead informants, fading rumors, and silence so deep it started speaking back.
Now one of them had surfaced.
Here.
In Elturel.
Right beneath my borrowed throne of prayers.
I looked up from the ledger, and whatever Brumuth saw on my face made him recoil.
That should have mattered.
It didn’t.
“My lord?” he said carefully.
Melna’s hand went to the hilt of her sword. She did not draw it. Smart girl. Brave girl. Far too much like her father for her own good.
I turned away from them and started strapping on my armor.
“Where was she found, Brumuth?”
My voice sounded calm enough. Almost normal.
That was the frightening part.
Brumuth opened his mouth, but Melna stepped in before him. “It’s only one. A woman. She’s been living as a nun at the Abbey of Helm.”
I stilled.
“A nun?”
Melna nodded. “Sister Isolde. Human, by all appearances. Quiet. Devout. Helps with the children. Keeps vigil for wounded paladins. No one suspected her until we found the ledger.”
A nun.
Acting normal.
Living inside a holy city. Wearing duty like a veil. Passing through temple halls while I stood over Elturel pretending I was the only liar with divine blood on his hands.
For one sick second, a thought came sharp enough to cut.
Did Tamara actually do it?
Had she reached one? Turned one? Taken an emerald dragon from Liliana’s line and shaped her into something good?
Impossible.
The word came too fast.
Too desperate.
I buckled a strap over my forearm and felt my smile return. Wider this time. Worse.
Because I did not want the answer to be yes.
I wanted the hunt.
I wanted the proof.
I wanted Tamara to be wrong so badly that every part of me leaned toward violence like a starving man toward bread.
Melna stared at me as if she could finally see the thing her father had only ever warned her about.
“Sir,” she asked quietly, “are you all right?”
There it was.
The question everyone learned to ask too late.
Brumuth put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head. Not warning her away from me. Not exactly. More like mourning the fact that she had needed to ask at all.
Then he whispered, as if age and faith had made him forget what I was.
“Listen, my child. He has done this before. The scribes only tell pieces of it because of the state of the world after the last time he joined the fray.”
The words hit me wrong.
Not because of their meaning.
Because of their shape.
The cadence. The phrasing. The careful, wounded certainty.
Tamara.
My fingers stopped on the buckle.
I turned slowly.
Brumuth’s face changed the moment he realized I had heard him. Recognition passed over him, and fear followed close behind.
In the corner of the archive, Mira leaned against Brumuth’s head like he was furniture, round-bellied and smug.
“Look at him, Lendy,” she said. “Scared shitless.”
Darian walked up behind her in plain clothes, one hand settling at the small of her back like the father-to-be he should have been by then. “They should be scared. They should have known better than to listen to Tamara.”
I stared at them.
For one impossible second, the room warmed. The grief split open and something bright stepped through. Mira. Darian. Alive. Close. Familiar. A reunion my mind offered me because the truth was too cruel to hold by itself.
A smile pulled at my mouth.
Then Melna said, “Sir?”
Her voice shook.
The vision flickered.
Mira and Darian faded into candle smoke and empty air.
I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’m tired.”
It was a lie.
It was also the closest thing to mercy I had left.
I looked at Melna. “Leave us.”
She glanced at her father.
Brumuth nodded.
She hesitated, then stepped out, shutting the door behind her with careful hands.
The moment we were alone, I gestured toward the chair across from my desk. “Sit.”
Brumuth sat.
I continued dressing for war.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked.
He did not pretend to misunderstand. That was one of the things I had liked about him once.
“She came to me in dreams,” he said. “Years ago.”
My chest tightened.
“Who?”
He swallowed.
I already knew.
I needed him to say it anyway.
“Say her name.”
His hands curled on his knees. “Tamara.”
The room went colder.
He kept going, damn him.
“She told me what she knew of you. Not everything, I think. But enough.”
Enough.
A laugh almost came out of me. It would have been ugly.
“And you believed her?”
“She was your better half,” he said softly.
The words landed like poison poured straight into my throat.
Better half.
For a moment, I thought I might vomit.
Then Ilyon’s voice cut through the chamber from beside my desk.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, sorting through papers with calm, elegant hands. “And I agree.”
I looked at him.
Too late, some remaining rational shard of me understood the problem.
If he knew what I was thinking, he was not Ilyon.
He was me.
Or whatever loneliness had carved out of me and taught to wear my friends’ faces.
My hand found Judgment.
The blade answered like it had been waiting.
Before I could draw it fully, a warm hand closed around my wrist.
Seraphine.
She stood beside me, eyes wide, her grip gentle but frantic. “Lendys, you don’t have to do this.”
For one breath, I believed she was real.
I wanted her to be real so badly it hurt.
Then her face blurred.
Seraphine became Melna, who had come back into the room without me noticing, both hands wrapped around my wrist as she tried to hold the sword down.
“Please,” she said. “Lower it. Just lower it.”
Her voice rose with every word.
Behind her, the door shook as guards slammed into it from the hall.
Brumuth stood.
He did not reach for his weapon.
He closed his eyes.
“Because at one point,” he said, “she tempered you.”
The world narrowed.
She tempered me.
The fucking audacity of it.
Tamara’s voice bloomed in my skull, layered over Brumuth’s, layered over the glowing letters in the alcove I had shattered years before.
Your Better.
Your better half.
Your Better.
Again.
Again.
Again.
By the time the echo stopped, the room was already red.
Judgment moved before thought could catch it.
Brumuth’s head left his shoulders.
Melna screamed my name.
I turned with the strike and drove the blade through her and into the first guard breaking through the door behind her.
The sound she made stayed with me for years.
I told myself then that it was nothing.
I know better now.
I kicked the bodies off the blade and moved into the doorway. A guard raised his sword. I smashed the hilt into his mouth hard enough to fold the lower half of his face inward. Another came from the left. I cut him open before he finished shouting. The next tried to subdue me with a spell. I took his hand, then his throat.
They came in waves.
Temple guards. Paladins. Clerics with shaking hands and bright eyes. Men and women who had eaten at my table, carried my orders, prayed beneath my shadow, and called me savior because I had let them.
I killed them in the hall.
Then in the stairwell.
Then at the archive doors.
All the while, that phrase kept moving through me like a blade dragged along bone.
Better half.
Better half.
Better half.
When the last one fell, I stood in the temple corridor covered in blood, Judgment hanging from my hand.
I looked down at myself.
At the blade.
At my fingers clenched too tightly around the grip.
There should have been horror.
There should have been a breaking point.
There wasn’t.
Only a terrible, steady certainty.
They had deserved it.
That was what I told myself as I walked through the temple and out the front entrance.
The mass bells rang over Elturel.
People gathered in the square, confused at first. Then they saw the blood trail behind me, saw the way it dried almost black across the stones, saw the expression on the faces of the paladins guarding the entrance as they froze instead of stopping me.
Fear passed through the crowd.
Good.
I understood fear. Fear was honest.
By the time I reached the main square, an entire battalion of Torm’s paladins stood waiting.
Shields locked. Swords drawn. Prayers on their lips.
They looked magnificent.
I hated them for it.
The battle lasted all day.
I remember flashes more than sequence.
A shield cracking against my ribs. A spear piercing my side. Holy chains wrapping my arms before I tore them apart. A woman in blue-and-silver armor shouting for me to surrender until Judgment took her voice. Rain beginning sometime near dusk, thinning blood across the stone until the whole square looked like a butcher’s floor.
They fought well.
They died anyway.
By the end, Elturel’s square was a lake of red, and the screams of its citizens followed me as I turned toward the Abbey of Helm.
I reached it at twilight.
The doors were wide and heavy, carved with watching eyes and vows of vigilance. I put both hands against them and pushed.
They slammed open hard enough to crack stone.
Inside, every nun went still.
I was covered in the blood of Elturel’s righteous. It streaked my armor, my face, my hair, my hands. It dripped from Judgment onto the abbey floor in slow, patient taps.
No one moved.
No one breathed loudly.
I did not have to search for Ishavelle.
I felt her the instant I entered.
Sister Isolde stood near the children’s benches, younger-looking than I expected. Brown hair. Hazel eyes. Soft face. Human enough to fool anyone who wanted to be fooled.
The glamour was good.
Not good enough.
Beneath it waited black hair, green eyes, emerald scale, and old blood.
I crossed the room.
A few paladins of Helm moved to flank me. Too slow. Too afraid.
Isolde backed away only once.
“Please,” she whispered.
I caught her by the throat and lifted her off the floor.
The children began crying.
The nuns screamed for Helm.
Healing words flew toward Ishavelle the moment my grip tightened, holy magic knitting breath back into her even as I crushed it from her. She clawed at my wrist, eyes wide, feet kicking uselessly.
I heard Mira behind a nun not ten feet away.
Not real.
Not gone.
She bounced a baby in her arms.
A son, maybe. Hers and Darian’s. Dark hair. Soft bronze skin. A face I had no right to imagine and did anyway.
“Why let the sympathizers walk?” Mira asked. Her voice was gentle, which made it worse. “They protected the lie she built. They’ll keep protecting it when you leave.”
She stepped closer and turned the baby slightly, showing him to me like an offering.
“His name is Caedrel,” she whispered. “He deserves a peaceful Faerûn. So do what needs to be done, Lendys.”
Darian appeared beside her.
Steady. Good. The best of us, even in delusion.
“You know it’s right,” he said. “When have I ever led you wrong?”
Never.
That was the answer my broken mind gave me.
Never.
A smile formed on my face.
The paladins charged.
Four swords drove into my torso at once.
I did not flinch.
Pain existed somewhere far away, a message meant for someone still interested in being a body. Blood poured from the wounds and filled my mouth. The abbey froze in horror when I smiled through it.
I looked up at Ishavelle.
“I judge thee,” I said, voice thick with blood and divinity, “guilty.”
For one second, the mask fell from her face.
Not the glamour.
The faith.
Acceptance flickered there. Not repentance. Not remorse. Just the mortal animal knowledge that death had finally closed its hand around her.
Then she fought like anything else would.
Clawing. Kicking. Trying to live.
I tightened my grip on Judgment and swung in a wide, brutal arc.
The paladins fell.
Ishavelle fell with them.
The abbey became noise after that.
I pulled the swords from my body one by one and let the wounds close. Nuns ran. Clerics shouted prayers. A few tried to shield the children with their bodies. Others dragged the young ones behind pews, behind curtains, beneath tables, anywhere they thought my judgment might not reach.
I followed the ones who had aided Sister Isolde.
That was the rule I gave myself.
Only those who helped.
Only those who protected the lie.
Only those who had to know.
But madness is very good at making rules that widen with each step.
A nun blocked a doorway with three children behind her. I cut her down and the children screamed as blood splashed across their robes.
One little girl cried louder than the rest.
Too loud.
High. Broken. Human.
I knelt in front of her while her caretaker’s body slid down the wall beside us.
“Shhh,” I said, as gently as I could remember how. “It’s all right, little one. You’re safe now.”
She wet herself.
I took a blanket from a nearby cot and placed it in her shaking hands.
“Go to the corner,” I said. “Cover yourself. Do not speak until you hear the afternoon bells. Do you understand?”
She nodded so hard I thought her neck might give.
“Good girl.”
She crawled away and curled into the corner, blanket over her head.
I left her there.
I dragged the nun’s body into the hall behind me.
It took nearly an hour to finish the abbey.
By then, the screaming had reached every street around it.
When I emerged, Elturel had gathered itself into lines. Clergy. Paladins. Guards. Citizens with improvised weapons and terrified eyes. The city that had worshipped me now waited for me like a wound waiting for the knife to return.
I carried Ishavelle’s half-dragon corpse behind me.
The satisfaction on my face must have been obscene.
The first man who saw me clearly vomited onto the stones.
Darian and Ilyon laughed from somewhere nearby.
“Can you believe them?” Darian asked, wiping tears from his eyes.
Ilyon shook his head, amused and elegant and not there. “Mortals have never handled revelation well.”
I did not understand the people staring at me.
Not then.
They had begged for a god. They had prayed for wrath. They had filled me with stolen worship and pointed me at monsters until I became the thing they needed.
Now they looked horrified because I had not stopped being that thing when it became inconvenient.
I stood before all of Elturel, blood drying over my skin, Ishavelle dead at my feet, and let my mortal shape tear apart.
My draconic form ripped free.
The crowd broke.
I launched into the air before the first spell reached me.
Wings snapped open above the city, scattering smoke and screams beneath me. I climbed hard and fast, leaving the abbey, the square, the temple, and every accusing face behind.
Mira and Seraphine were on my back.
They leaned close to my ears as the wind screamed around us.
“You made the world safer for them,” Mira said.
“You did what had to be done,” Seraphine whispered.
I believed them then.
Gods help me.
I believed them then.
But I don’t now.