She stepped into the chamber wearing the aura of a queen and none of the guilt.
That was Tamara’s gift. She could enter a room already drenched in betrayal and still make herself look like the wounded saint at the center of it. Platinum hair falling soft over her shoulders. Silver eyes clear. Hands calm. Face composed into that infuriating mask of sorrow, as if every catastrophe around her had simply happened nearby instead of beneath her fucking hands.
“I would never beg for your forgiveness, Lendys,” she said. “I do not deserve such an honor.”
Careful.
So godsdamned careful.
The sentence sounded humble. Penitent, even. But I heard the machinery beneath it. She had not denied anything. She had not admitted enough. She gave the council just enough softness to gather around, especially those who still did not know the full rot of what she had allowed on Faerûn.
Mercy’s martyr, bleeding dignity in front of an audience.
I moved to the edge of the shattered table and leaned against it, arms crossed, waiting for the next blade hidden inside her gentleness.
“No,” I said. “You deserve something shoved down that holy little throat just to stop the sermons, and every perfect inch of you handed over to the same demons you and Liliana unleashed on Faerûn for the last century. Let them make a ruin of your mercy. Let them find out whether the goddess of compassion can still preach while choking on her own consequences.”
The room went still.
Tamara’s face tightened.
There it was.
Not much. A fracture at the corner of her mouth. A flicker in the eyes. The smallest recoil from being spoken to like something less than sacred.
A few councilors shifted. One of Bahamut’s golden consorts made a sharp sound, half outrage, half warning. Somewhere behind me, someone almost laughed and buried it badly.
Tamara raised one hand.
The room obeyed her.
Of course it did.
Her irises narrowed, and when she spoke again, the poison came wrapped in silk. Almost invisible. Almost tasteful. The kind of venom a person drinks because the cup is pretty.
“I understand you are upset,” she said softly, “that I showed Liliana and her children mercy.”
There.
She let it enter the whole room.
Not a rumor or an accusation.
Truth.
“I did what my domain required,” Tamara continued. “I am the one who governs mercy among our kind, Lendys. I could not deny it simply because your judgment demanded blood.”
She paused.
A perfect pause.
Long enough for the words to settle. Long enough for the council to hear her not as a conspirator, but as a goddess bound to sacred duty. She had owned it. All of it. The warnings. The delay. The bodies gifted to the council. The century of suffering. My exile. My isolation. Liliana’s survival.
And somehow, by naming it as mercy, she made it sound lawful.
Holy.
Necessary.
I looked around the chamber and saw the shift happen.
Not all at once. Not openly.
But enough.
A softened mouth. A lowered gaze. A dragon who had been afraid of me now remembering why they loved her. Even Kereska’s eyes moved, measuring not whether Tamara was guilty, but whether guilt mattered when it wore divine authority.
That was when I knew.
I was fucked.
She controlled them. Maybe not with chains or spells. Nothing so crude.
She had something better.
A domain.
A law.
A virtue so beloved that no one wanted to ask how many bodies were buried beneath it.
Mercy.
My expression darkened.
For a moment, I let my head hang and stared at the broken table beneath me, because if I looked at Tamara any longer, I was going to do exactly what everyone in that room feared.
The voices around me blurred.
Councilors pleading. Dragons whispering. Bahamut breathing hard behind me. All of it sank beneath the ringing in my skull, beneath every scream I had carried since the first light crested the hills of the Greenfields, since the first dragons split the sky on newborn wings, since I believed judgment could still mean something clean.
I had known fury.
Wars had taught me fury. Betrayal had sharpened it. Exile had fed it until it grew teeth.
But this was different.
This was old.
I pushed away from the table.
The palace shook.
Not trembled. Shook.
Starlight-stone groaned beneath the pressure rolling off me, and the energy inside my body changed. It was no longer holy radiance. No clean white-gold verdict. No sacred fire polished enough for temples and prayers.
Something buried deeper answered.
Something primordial.
Something I had not touched in so long that even I was shocked by the rush of it.
Rubble began to fall from the high ceiling. Councilors threw up barriers in panicked bursts of silver, bronze, and sapphire light. Their wards flickered against the weight of my presence. Some held. Some cracked immediately.
I kept walking toward her.
“You forget, Tamara,” I said. “All of you forget.”
My scales spread over my skin, slow and deliberate, crawling up my arms, over my throat, across my chest. Silver darkened. Platinum blackened. Obsidian plates formed under the palace light, each one smoking at the edges as if my body had become the first breath before a star died.
“I was the first dragon.”
No one interrupted me now.
Wise of them.
“You were given your domains by my judgment. By my decision. I allowed you to sit where you sit. I gave shape to the order you hide behind.”
I stopped in front of her.
“And yet…”
My voice lowered.
“And yet you still believe you have power over me?”
Tamara did not flinch.
That irritated me more than fear would have.
Her face remained composed, almost doll-like, a porcelain imitation of serenity. But her eyes betrayed her. Not to the council. Not to Bahamut. Only to me, because I had once known every shade of her silence.
Fear.
And rage.
Genuine. Unbound. Equal to mine.
I leaned close enough that my words were meant for her alone.
“When I scatter you across the void,” I whispered, letting the palace roar beneath the surge of my power, “I will smile knowing you will not return while I remain primordial.”
I turned my face slightly, brushing my cheek against hers.
A cruel little intimacy.
Still, her expression did not crack.
But her eyes burned.
Something in me snapped at the sight of it.
My jaw opened.
Teeth lengthened into jagged daggers, and I sank them into her neck.
The bliss of wounding her hit me like wine after starvation.
Tamara screamed.
The sound tore through the chamber, and for half a breath, every councilor forgot how to breathe. She twisted out of my bite, ripping skin from that pretty shell as she threw herself backward. Blood ran down her neck and into the white of her robes.
Her sword appeared in one hand.
Her other palm pressed to the wound, healing light sealing torn flesh with practiced grace, but the blood loss had already stolen some of her balance. Her retreat was clean, but not perfect.
I wiped her blood from my mouth with my forearm.
“What?” I asked. “Can’t handle a little hard-earned skinship, dear?”
I unfastened my robe and let it fall to the floor.
The chamber went very still.
I stepped toward her, scaled, bare, and grinning.
“Come here, my silver-throated whore,” I said. “We have such a long talk to finish.”
Tamara’s blade came up.
Mine had not yet formed.
I did not need it.
She backed away one measured step at a time, drawing me from the council chamber and into the hall. I followed, slowly at first, then faster as my body shifted further from mortal shape. Scales armored my limbs. My hands lengthened into claws. Smoke bled from the seams of me.
She turned and bolted.
Wings of radiant platinum light burst from her back, carrying her farther down the corridor.
I dropped to all fours and chased.
“Why run, Tamara?” I called after her, my claws gouging the palace floor. “Afraid of the end?”
The air shifted.
Arcane pressure sang against my teeth.
I barely dodged the blast.
It tore past my shoulder and exploded through the wall beside me in a bloom of violet-white magic.
Kereska stood behind me, one hand raised, eyes bright with terror and calculation.
“Run, my queen!”
I planted my claws in the ground, pivoted, and launched myself at her.
Two blinks of black smoke and rage.
Then I was in front of the Wonderbringer.
My hand speared through her chest.
Kereska’s mouth opened. Blood spilled over her lips. Her eyes widened, not with surprise, but with comprehension—as if some final equation had solved itself at the worst possible moment.
Even dying, she was clever.
Her fingers traced a sigil in the air.
The explosive blast took me full in the chest and hurled me into the wall hard enough to bury me in starlight-stone.
A cackling laugh tore out of me.
The other council members prepared themselves.
Good.
Vorrak, bronze fool that he was, charged first.
Aurelion flared behind him, fire billowing from his back as he poured power into Vorrak’s speed, turning the old warlord into a thunderbolt wrapped around a hammer. Vorrak brought the weapon down toward my skull with enough force to crack a mountain altar.
I freed my left hand from the wall.
Caught the hammer’s face.
Vorrak’s eyes widened.
I crushed it in my grip.
The metal folded like wet clay.
Then I tore my right hand free and swung downward, driving him through the floor. His skull broke beneath the blow in one clean motion.
Aurelion was already drawing breath.
Not fire.
Something worse.
A world-ending furnace built inside a gold dragon’s chest.
I caught the broken haft of Vorrak’s hammer, pushed my power through it, and listened as it began to scream. The sound reverberated down the hall, ugly and divine.
Then I threw it.
The shattered weapon punched through Aurelion’s throat before his breath could be born.
He fell with the fire still trapped inside him.
Three councilors dead in seconds.
The rest backed away.
At the far end of the hall, Tamara stood before the throne room doors. She tapped the point of her sword against the floor.
Once.
A clear, ringing sound.
“Lendys.”
My head turned.
The thrill of the hunt had returned fully now, slick and bright beneath my skin.
I lowered into a crouch.
Then launched.
The air boomed around me.
The corridor collapsed behind my speed as I hit her, one hand closing around her throat. We burst through the throne room doors together and slammed into the dais.
Tamara struggled in my grasp.
But she was cunning.
Always had been.
Her blade drove into my abdomen.
Blood flooded my mouth.
My grip loosened from the shock, and in that instant she pressed both hands against the sword buried in me and released a detonation of holy radiant energy.
The blast launched me upward.
I struck the ceiling and stuck there for a moment, pinned by force and pain, before gravity remembered me and dragged me down. I hit the floor hard enough to crack the stone beneath my back.
Tamara stood on the dais, breathing hard.
Her sword answered her will.
It ripped itself out of my abdomen and flew back to her hand, opening the wound wider as it went.
I snarled and forced healing energy into myself, knitting flesh enough that my organs stayed where they belonged.
Tamara looked down at me.
“You absolute fool,” she said.
There was no softness left now.
Good.
“You couldn’t just stay exiled. You couldn’t die by Liliana’s hand. Hells, even when we allowed Tiamat to roam Faerûn—”
Allowed.
They allowed Tiamat to roam Faerûn.
The word landed like a nail through my skull.
Tamara kept pacing while I pushed myself upright, one hand pressed against my closing wound.
“You were so clever, stealing Bahamut’s worship. Using his name to sustain yourself during exile. Using his power to fight battles you had no right to enter.”
My blood dripped onto the floor.
She smiled.
“And taking away Seraphine and Ilyon was almost easy. Poisoning Ilyon just enough, keep him occupied, keep him grieving, keep him distant. He could never join you and see what you had become.”
I stared at her.
She was not done.
“Using Kereska to charm Mira and Darian away from you took more finesse,” she said. “But you deserved it.”
The room seemed to narrow.
Mira.
Darian.
Her hand in that too.
Tamara laughed at the look on my face.
“But somehow, somehow, your luck brought you back to those two. And you ruined their little family so beautifully. One child stolen. One parent dead. And poor Caedrel…”
She pointed at me.
“Crippled now. Your lifeforce wasn’t enough to fully restore him, was it? He’ll live, yes. But broken. A constant reminder for poor Mira that you shattered her family.”
I stood slowly.
The wound in my abdomen sealed.
My body did not stop shaking.
She laughed again, and every sound of it scraped something raw inside me.
“Do not worry, dear. You killed all of Liliana’s brood except the fucking mother. The best part of your whole pathetic hunt is that your own son brought you back here and restored you. Do you know why?”
She paused, staring at me with shining hatred.
“Because he thought you were redeemed. Sacrificing yourself for the child.” Her mouth curled. “The gall of that little pest you made with me. The best of both worlds, you said. What a load of shit.”
I had despised what Bahamut had become.
I had resented him. Raged at him. Seen Tamara’s hand in every mercy he mistook for wisdom.
But even he did not deserve that.
Not from her.
“You really mean that,” I said quietly.
Tamara’s eyes sharpened.
I straightened fully, giving her one last chance to dig the final nail into the coffin she had spent a century building.
“I mean everything I have said, Lendys.” Her voice was cold now. Bare. Honest at last. “You are weak. Worthless. And the mercy I showed you on the day you began your hunt for Liliana was the last I will ever give you.”
There it was.
Everything out in the open.
The small voice at the back of my mind finally went silent.
The Tamara I had loved was gone.
Maybe she had been gone long before this.
Maybe I had loved an idea wearing silver eyes.
It did not matter anymore.
The creature standing before me was ready to be slain.
“Then prepare yourself,” I said, “because you must be judged.”
I stretched out my right hand.
Light gathered in my palm.
Judgment formed slowly, violently, screaming as it took shape. The sound split through the throne room, high and agonized, as if the blade itself resisted my hand.
Tamara smiled.
“Even your sword disagrees with you.”
I flicked my wrist and forced primordial power into the weapon.
The scream stopped.
Judgment darkened from radiant white to the same black as my scales. Not dead. Not corrupted.
Convinced.
“It only needed reminding,” I said, “that you were worth judging more than me.”
Tamara scoffed and settled into her stance.
Then we launched at each other.
Our blades met in the center of the throne room, and the world fell away.
There was no council. No palace. No Bahamut bleeding somewhere behind the rubble. No memory of softer nights or gentler vows.
Only her.
Only me.
Only hate.
Each strike threw booming waves of power through the chamber. The dais cracked. Pillars split. The throne behind us fractured down the middle. Our blades grazed flesh, opened shallow wounds, missed throats by inches. She was better than I remembered. Perhaps she had always been this good and had simply never needed me to know it.
Her bladework was graceful at first.
Then efficient.
Then desperate.
My strength wore her down one exchange at a time.
I knocked the sword from her right hand. She conjured it into her left before it hit the floor. I struck wide, catching her side and sending her skidding several feet across broken stone.
Good.
Almost done.
She rose unsteadily, sweat and blood running down from her brow. Her breath came hard. Mine did too. Her tenacity impressed me in some distant, ruined corner of myself.
But the hatred in her eyes impressed me more.
“Let’s finish this, Tamara.”
I brought Judgment into a thrusting position, both hands on the hilt, blade parallel to the ground. I lowered my stance and pushed power into my legs, into my spine, into every remaining piece of the first dragon.
Then I moved.
Judgment shattered her blade on impact.
A heartbeat later, it pierced her chest.
Tamara hit the ground beneath me, Judgment pinning her through the heart.
The rubble blocking the throne room entrance burst apart.
Bahamut forced his way in with three council elders behind him—Seryndra, Caelvorran, and Thamior. Dust coated them. Blood marked them. Horror froze them where they stood.
“STOP!” Bahamut screamed.
Tamara did not look at him.
Not once.
Her eyes remained on mine.
The same hatred stared back from both of us.
The councilors rushed forward and fell to their knees at my feet.
“Please,” Seryndra begged. “Let her go.”
Caelvorran bowed his head until it nearly touched the floor. “My lord, please.”
Thamior searched my face for something that might still be reached. “Do not make this the final word.”
I looked down at them, then back at Tamara.
Blood ran over my hand from a wound in my shoulder. I barely felt it.
“It is already past that.”
“Father,” Bahamut said.
His voice was ragged with pain.
I did not look at him.
“Do not call me that.”
I did not deserve it.
The hurt on his face landed despite everything. He had not heard what she thought of him. He did not know that in the grand design of this disaster, he had been a victim too.
Seryndra tried again. “She was your consort.”
Caelvorran added, “She is the mother of your child.”
Thamior’s voice broke around the words. “You loved her.”
I had.
Once.
Not now.
Not after what she had done.
“Then she should have remembered her place.”
The silence that followed was fucking horrible.
Then Bahamut spoke.
“She said she was trying to save you.”
Poor fool.
He still did not know.
“No, son,” I said. “She defied me.”
“She chose mercy.”
There it was again.
Mercy.
“No,” I said. “She chose weakness.”
Bahamut’s breath shook.
“No. She taught me what you taught us justice was supposed to be.”
Another lie.
Another pretty poison fed to a child until he called it wisdom.
“Do not preach to me, Bahamut.”
He gathered what courage he had left and stood straighter.
“I would not have to preach if you had not abandoned it, Father.”
Thamior took a step forward. “My lord… if any part of the god we used to follow remains, let her live.”
Seryndra clasped her hands together. “And if any part of the man who loved her is still there, please stop.”
I looked at their pleading faces.
At Bahamut, broken and desperate.
Then back to Tamara.
There was no fear in her.
Only hate.
I closed my eyes for a single moment and felt the power swell inside me again.
“No.”
Judgment pulsed.
Tamara’s form scattered beneath the blade.
She did not scream.
She did not beg.
Even as the power of Judgment rippled through her, even as her divine body unraveled into silver-white fragments, that hateful stare lingered until it covered her eyes and vanished with the rest of her.
Her essence scattered into the Astral void.
Bahamut wailed.
Not cried.
Wailed.
A sound so raw that for one instant the throne room seemed too small to hold it.
But it was not over.
The ceiling broke open.
Starlight, black sky, and impossible cold poured in as my brothers descended into the palace.
Null and Tast.
The council had never truly known them. Not like I did. Not the silence around Null that smelled of death, endings, fate sealed before breath could form. Not the covetous heat around Tast, greed made divine and cruel enough to smile at any catastrophe he did not own.
Tast moved first.
Of course he did.
He crossed the ruined room in one swift motion and seized me by the throat.
“Get off me,” I snarled.
Tast laughed.
“Still making demands? Look at you. Gods, Lendys. You always did know how to make a mess the second someone told you no.”
“Say another word and I will tear your throat out with my teeth.”
“You are welcome to try,” Tast said. “Though I think this is the part where you finally learn that being at the top of the pantheon and being untouchable were never the same thing.”
Then Null spoke.
“Enough.”
He did not raise his voice.
He did not need to.
The word landed like a door slamming shut at the end of all possible roads.
Tast released me.
I turned toward Null and, for the first time in an age, felt something colder than rage move through me.
His eyes were fixed on me with unbearable calm. The calm of something that had already watched this ending long before the rest of us stumbled into it.
“You were given time,” Null said. “Warning. Chance after chance to stop.”
“She defied me constantly,” I spat.
“No,” he replied. “She told you the truth.”
My jaw locked hard enough to hurt.
Tast folded his arms, amusement curling at one corner of his mouth. “And look where your truth got you. Palace wrecked. Consort dead. Son bleeding on the floor. So very you.”
“Shut up, Tast.”
He grinned. “Make me, monster.”
I strained against the invisible pressure gathering around me, power flaring through what remained of my body.
“You would end me for this?” I demanded. “For her?”
Null stepped closer.
“For murder.”
The word struck harder than Tast’s hand ever could.
“For killing another god,” Null continued. “For treason against the balance of Faerûn. For trying to place your will above fate itself.”
His gaze dipped to where Tamara had vanished.
Then returned to me.
“And because if I let you take one more step, there will be nothing left of this age worth saving.”
I bared my teeth.
“I was saving it.”
“No,” Null said. “You were feeding yourself and calling it justice.”
The silence after that was worse than any shout.
Tast looked me over with open contempt and just enough delight to make me want to gut him.
“You know the funny part?” he said. “I like greed. I like selfishness. I like wanting too much and taking more.”
His lip curled.
“But this? This is pathetic. You burned down your whole palace because you could not stand being told to stop.”
“Careful,” I growled. “You are speaking to your better.”
“No,” Tast said softly, all humor gone. “I am speaking to a monster.”
Null’s grip tightened around the shape of me.
Time buckled.
Not slowed.
Worse.
It tightened, as if every future I might have reached for was being sealed shut one by one beneath his hand.
“You are done, Lendys.”
For the first time, I believed him.
Power like dead stars crushed the body I wore.
The same force I had used to unmake Tamara turned on me, magnified through primordial fury until every scale, every bone, every proud certainty shattered beneath it.
And even then, the last thing I saw was not my own ruin.
It was Bahamut on the floor beside the place where his mother’s blood had been, broken and grieving, looking at me.
Not with hatred.
That would have been kinder.
Sorrow.
As if some part of him had begun mourning me before Null ever passed sentence.
Then nothing.