A few hours after our last stop, we came upon a narrow creek cutting through the forest like a vein of silver.
The others gathered near the bank, arguing over which direction would take us toward Harkwood, the village our new “pet” claimed as home. I let them debate. Krunk pointed with entirely too much confidence for a man who had gotten himself captured, Raesh clung to him like a judgmental hostage, and Maire watched the exchange with that sharp little look she gets when she is deciding whether to laugh or start correcting people.
I leaned against a tree and watched them.
For a moment, all of it felt almost harmless.
The creek. The damp moss. The low murmur of voices. Maire’s black hair shifting in the forest light.
Then memory found me again.
Seeing them uncertain on the road, choosing paths by argument and instinct, dragged me back to the years after Elturel—when I had wandered Faerûn with no company but ghosts, no plan but the hunt, and no faith left in anything except the next possible trace of Liliana’s bloodline.
After Elturel, I flew until my wings failed.
There was no noble descent. No planned landing. No godlike exit from the city I had drenched in blood. I simply flew until exhaustion took me, until rage hollowed itself out and left nothing behind but weight. Then I fell.
I struck the Chionthar hard enough to split the river around me.
The current carried me west.
By the time I drifted near Baldur’s Gate, I was barely aware of the sky above me. Two fishermen hauled me out with hooks and rope, muttering about armor, jewels, ransom, and whatever quick payday they thought the gods had floated into their net.
They were unlucky bastards.
When they tried to strip the armor from my body, I opened my eyes.
One had time to gasp.
I crushed both their skulls with my bare hands and pushed their bodies into the river.
Then I took their boat.
Baldur’s Gate accepted me the way it accepts everything—suspiciously, greedily, and without caring too much where the blood came from as long as coin followed.
I took stock of what I had brought from Elturel. A few surviving documents. A handful of gold coins. Judgment. Ishavelle’s amulet, stolen from her corpse before I left the abbey behind me.
That amulet became the first useful thing I had held in months.
When I pried into its enchantment, I found the shape of its purpose. Detection. Blood recognition. Draconic resonance. It had been built to identify what Ishavelle needed hidden, moved, selected, or avoided. With enough work, it could find traces of dragon blood.
Unfortunately, that meant it reacted to me constantly.
So I found a mage in the Lower City and convinced her to alter it.
Convince is a generous word.
She objected. I objected harder.
By dawn, the amulet no longer screamed every time I touched it. It would ignore my blood and pull toward others. Emerald. Chromatic. Half-dragon. Anything close enough to Liliana’s line to matter.
I thought that would be enough.
Gods, I was stupid.
The years after Elturel were not a hunt so much as a slow unraveling dressed as purpose. I moved from city to city, road to road, following rumors, old cult trails, missing-person patterns, and the occasional tremble from the stolen bauble. I camped beside highways. Slept in ditches. Killed bandits because they were easy and because the world kept putting violent men in front of me like offerings.
Behind me came the rumor.
A dragon in Elturel.
A false Bahamut.
A slaughter in the heart of a holy city.
Thousands dead, they said.
Clergymen gutted in their own temples. Paladins butchered in the square. An abbey painted red. A god’s imposter fleeing into the sky.
The story grew teeth as it traveled.
So did the hunters.
Religious zealots from Elturel set out across Faerûn looking for the dragon who had impersonated Bahamut. They carried drawings of my mortal form, old descriptions of my armor, sketches of my face made by trembling hands and vengeful priests. At first, I avoided them. Later, I stopped needing to.
Because after ten years, the man they searched for no longer existed.
I had let myself go in every possible way.
My hair grew wild. My beard came in thick and ragged. I sold my armor piece by piece for food, clothing, information, and passage when walking became too slow. Then I sold the replacement clothes when I needed coin more than dignity. What remained became torn, stained, and sour with rain, sweat, smoke, and blood.
I stopped looking like a fallen god.
I looked like a mad beggar with bright eyes and a stolen trinket.
Which, by then, was not far from the truth.
I would stop strangers in the streets and shove the amulet toward them, waiting for it to ring. Merchants. Priests. whores. guards. children. old women carrying bread. Anyone. Everyone.
“Hold still,” I would mutter.
Most recoiled. Some cursed me. Others gave me coins just to make me leave.
Mira hated that.
The hallucination of her, at least.
She would walk beside me with her arms folded, younger than she should have been, mouth sharp as ever.
“This is a new low, Lendys. Very impressive. Didn’t know you had the range.”
Ilyon would appear near market stalls, cool and elegant, watching me frighten people with the amulet.
“You understand this is not an investigation anymore. This is compulsion wearing a poor disguise.”
Darian said nothing.
He would stand at street corners with that grim look, the one that meant he had decided I was wrong and was disappointed I had not figured it out yet.
Seraphine tried to be kind.
Even the imaginary version of her.
“Eat something,” she would say. “Sleep. Please.”
“Not real,” I would mutter back.
People heard me.
Of course they did.
They saw a filthy man talking to empty air, laughing at jokes no one made, snapping back at voices only he could hear. They crossed streets to avoid me. They called me cursed, drunk, haunted, touched by the gods.
Touched by the gods.
That one almost made me laugh.
The delusions eventually became self-aware.
That was the worst of it.
They knew what they were. Or I knew, and gave them enough cruelty to say it aloud.
“We’re just what’s left because you couldn’t stand to be alone,” Mira told me once, sitting on a milestone outside Scornubel while I chewed stale bread too hard to deserve the name.
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
I threw a stone at her.
It passed through.
She grinned. “Still an idiot.”
Years passed like that.
I could not tell you how many with confidence. Time became a road, then a blur, then a wound I kept picking at because stopping would mean feeling it. I followed nothing. Found nothing. Lost more.
Tamara’s punishment continued working exactly as intended.
Isolation and reflection.
What sanctimonious words for a fucking cage.
Eventually, the road took me south to Calimport.
I barely remember arriving.
Heat. Sand. Spices. Voices layered in a dozen languages. Coin everywhere. Perfume thick enough to choke on. Bodies moving through streets so crowded that a person could disappear between one breath and the next.
A perfect city for Saelrith’s line.
I did not know that yet.
All I knew was hunger.
I had not eaten in nearly a fortnight when I found her.
Brandilyn, she called herself.
Velithra, in truth.
Saelrith’s firstborn.
She stood in a bright market square beneath silk awnings, black hair hidden beneath an elegant veil, green eyes softened by glamour, hands painted gold at the fingertips. She was opening a cosmetic shop under the guise of charity, smiling at wealthy women and poor girls alike, promising beauty, restoration, dignity, transformation.
Transformation.
The word nearly made me spit.
She saw me at the edge of her little performance and smiled with practiced pity. Then she tossed a copper coin and a wrapped sliver of soap at my feet.
“For your dignity, friend,” she said sweetly.
The crowd chuckled.
Then the amulet rang beneath my ruined clothes.
Loud.
Violent.
A bell in my ribs.
Velithra’s smile faltered for less than a second.
But I saw it.
Her hired help moved fast. Not dragons. Not even half-dragons. Just men paid well enough to be stupid and strong enough to be useful. They grabbed me under the arms, hauled me off the square, and dragged me into an alley while the crowd politely pretended not to notice.
Mira cackled in my ear.
“Oh, this is humiliating.”
Ilyon sighed. “You might consider standing up.”
“I am trying.”
“Poorly.”
They beat me in the alley.
Boots. fists. a club to the ribs. Another to the mouth.
I let them.
Not because I wanted to. Not because I was performing some clever trick.
Because I was weak.
My body had eaten itself down to sinew and spite. My magic had gone quiet years before, either abandoned from disuse or hidden so deeply beneath exhaustion that I could no longer reach it. I was a husk in the shape of a man, carrying a god’s sword and none of the strength that should have made that matter.
Seraphine appeared crouched beside me after the men left.
“Lendys,” she whispered.
Her hands hovered over my wounds.
Even my broken mind knew better than to let her touch me.
The imaginary could not heal the physical.
So I lay there.
Hours passed. Maybe a day. The alley moved around me. Rats investigated and decided I was not dead enough. Flies disagreed. The stink began to rise from me, sour and rotten, until locals finally took pity.
Not enough pity to help me.
Enough to call the mortician.
I was still breathing when they tossed me onto the corpse cart.
Barely.
Bodies pressed around me, stiff and soft in different stages of surrender. Someone’s cold hand rested against my cheek. Someone else’s foot lay across my ribs. The cart lurched into motion, wheels clattering over uneven stone as the mortician and his men took the alleys to avoid offending respectable citizens with the sight of the dead.
By decree of some local lord, I heard them say.
Oriel.
I stared up at the night sky between the silhouettes of buildings and asked myself the question I had been avoiding for years.
Why am I still here?
Not alive. That was instinct. Stubbornness. divine residue. punishment.
Here.
This weak.
This pathetic.
This forgotten.
The answers came in the voices of my dead and absent friends.
“Because you chose this,” Ilyon said from somewhere near the cart’s rear.
“Because you kept cutting away everyone who might have helped,” Seraphine added.
“Because you’re a stubborn ass who thinks suffering counts as atonement if you do it long enough,” Mira snapped.
Darian said nothing for a long time.
Then, quietly, “Because you left.”
That one hurt.
I started to believe them.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe some part of me had been waiting for the delusions to stop comforting me and start sentencing me properly.
Then fate, petty bitch that she is, opened a second-story window.
A bucket came out first.
Then a woman.
Bronzed skin. Dark hair. Older than the Mira in my mind. Lines at her eyes I had never seen before. A body changed by years, motherhood, survival, peace. Not the sharp, young warrior I kept hallucinating on roadsides, but something fuller.
Realer.
For one impossible second, I thought my madness had gotten more inventive.
Then instinct tore her name out of me.
“MIRA!”
The bucket’s contents hit me full in the face.
Piss.
Of course.
Because fate has no sense of reverence.
Mira froze in the window, eyes going wide.
Below, one of the mortician’s men cracked me across the face with a knotted rope. “Shut it before you wake the citizens, beggar.”
I sucked in what little breath I had left.
“MIRA!”
The second strike never landed.
She was out of the house and in the alley faster than any mortal woman should have been, skirts gathered in one hand, fury already turning her face into something glorious. Darian came behind her half a heartbeat later, older too. Broader somehow. Bronze threaded through his hair. No less dangerous.
Tears blurred my vision before I could stop them.
Not dignified.
Not controlled.
I wept like a ruined thing dragged out of a gutter because, for the first time in years, something impossible was real.
The amulet began to hum against my chest.
Then ring.
Not hallucinations.
Not ghosts.
Them.
I remember Mira shouting. Darian breaking someone’s wrist. The cart tipping hard enough to spill the dead. A mortician screaming about property. Mira saying something so vile that even I, half-conscious and covered in piss, nearly laughed.
Then darkness took me.
I woke up in a tub.
Warm water. Soap. Hands scrubbing hard enough to peel a lesser man.
Mira was swearing.
That was how I knew I was safe.
“Do you have any idea how long this is going to take?” she snapped, dragging a brush through the filth matted in my hair. “Gods, Lendys, did you bathe in alleys recreationally?”
Darian stood nearby with a bowl of broth, expression tight in that controlled way he used when feeling too much.
“Careful,” he said.
“I am being careful.”
“You are using a bristle brush on his scalp.”
“He needs it.”
“I am alive,” I rasped.
Mira leaned over me, eyes bright and furious. “Barely. Don’t get smug.”
I was too weak to argue.
That might have been the first miracle.
They washed years off me in layers. Grime. blood. road dust. rot. shame. None of it came away easily. Some of it never did. Darian fed me broth a spoonful at a time because too much too quickly would have sent my body into shock. Mira hovered, pretending not to hover. When I slept, I woke to find one of them still in the room.
Always.
For days, I drifted between fever and hunger and disbelief.
Their home was small by dragon standards and warm by any that mattered. Low tables. woven rugs. polished wood. a cooking hearth that smelled of spices and bread. Children’s toys in corners. Little shoes by the door. Proof everywhere of a life I had not been there to witness.
Proof that Tamara’s spell had worked.
Proof that Mira and Darian had survived me.
I did not know whether to be grateful or furious.
Then I met the children.
Caedrel came first.
A boy with Darian’s steadiness around the eyes and Mira’s mouth already preparing for trouble. He stared at me from behind his mother’s leg like I was a stray dog she had brought home and might foolishly decide to keep.
I knew his name before anyone said it.
That nearly broke me.
My delusions had carried him. Named him. Shown him to me in Ishavelle’s abbey, cradled in Mira’s arms like a reason for slaughter.
His birthday was the day of the abbey.
The day I killed Ishavelle.
The day I butchered Helm’s faithful.
The day I told myself I was making the world safer for children like him.
When Darian said it, something clicked into place inside me with such brutal clarity that I almost vomited.
I had lost everything that day.
They had gained him.
The world is cruel in ways even gods struggle to admire.
Maeril was younger. A newborn by dragon standards, though already four by mortal counting. Darian kept a constant polymorph over her, not because they needed to hide from the world for survival, but because peace had become something they guarded like treasure. She had Mira’s eyes and Darian’s solemn little frown, which made Mira laugh every time the girl used it on me.
“You see?” Mira said once, pointing at Maeril’s tiny scowl. “That’s his fault. Completely his.”
Darian looked offended. “She has your temper.”
“She has my passion.”
“She threw a cup at me yesterday.”
“Passion.”
I sat wrapped in a blanket by their hearth, too thin, too weak, too full of something that felt dangerously close to happiness.
They did not ask questions at first.
Darian made that call.
I saw it in the way Mira kept looking at him, vibrating with restraint while he shook his head no. Again and again. Not yet. Let him eat. Let him sleep. Let him remember how to be a person before you skin him alive with curiosity.
Eventually, he gave her permission.
Then the questions came like arrows.
Where had I been? What happened after Elturel? Why did I look like death left in the sun? Why had I never found them? Why had I not tried harder? Why had I vanished into the world like a curse ashamed of itself?
I answered what I could.
Lied about less than I expected.
Broke down more than I wanted.
Mira held my hand through part of it and called me an idiot through the rest.
Darian listened without interrupting, which was worse.
I realized slowly that I had ruined their peace by arriving.
Not intentionally. Not maliciously. But I had dragged the hunt, my madness, my enemies, and my rot to their door. Darian never said that. Not once. He was too good a man for that, and too happy to see Mira happy.
Because she was.
Gods, she was.
Even looking at me in that disheveled, half-starved state, even after all the years and all the blood, Mira smiled like some missing part of the world had stumbled back into place covered in piss and corpse-cart stink.
And for the first time since the waterfall took them from me, I was happy again.
Truly happy.