Watching the group I travel with now does not exactly fill me with confidence.
That comparison is what drags me back to Othalyss: not because Maire’s companions are monsters, but because I know too well how silence, guilt, and good intentions can rot a group from the inside before anyone names the infection.
That is the polite version.
The less polite version is that half of them could not protect a child from a summer drizzle without turning it into a moral crisis, a sexual metaphor, or a fucking side quest, and somehow we are still expected to trust them with our lives. Maire does, I think. Or at least she chooses to. I have not decided whether that makes her kinder than me or simply braver.
Probably both.
Raesh and Alba are in the middle of some absurdly earnest conversation with Faye about a sexual position that, from the tone alone, sounds both anatomically ambitious and spiritually unnecessary. Perona drifts nearby wrapped in her usual air of wounded fragility, that particular kind of sorrow which does not merely exist in a room but colonizes it. Zeref and Crimm, as ever, have wandered off into their own strange little orbit, detached from the rest of us in a way that would be endearing if it were not so consistent.
And through all of it, I walk beside Maire with my fingers threaded through hers.
That part feels real.
That part feels easy.
Every so often I slip something soft and indecent into her mind just to hear the quiet laugh that escapes her when it lands. A sweet nothing. A filthy promise. A private joke. It doesn’t matter much which. The reward is always the same—that little shift in her expression, the one that belongs to me because I put it there.
It should be enough to keep me in the present.
It isn’t.
Because looking at this chaos of mortals and almost-mortals, these disaster-prone fucking romantics jokingly called god fuckers, makes it impossible not to think of the company I once kept. Darian. Mira. Ilyon. Seraphine. Dependable in ways that mattered. Ancient metallic dragons wearing human faces not for vanity, but for caution—so as not to disturb the already precarious balance of Faerûn any more than my presence alone did. I assembled that flight to stop horrors before they metastasized. To end things like Othalyss and the desecrated trophy-house she dared call a temple.
Even now I do not like to think too clearly about what we found there.
Some memories resist language. Others merely make language feel insufficiently cruel.
Othalyss had taken discipline and skinned it alive. What she built near Ravens Bluff was not simply a lair, nor even a laboratory in the cold Caelovar sense. It was doctrine. Ritualized suffering given architecture. Bells, sigils, response chambers, kneeling lines worn into stone by bodies taught to obey pain before they even understood command. A theology of anguish. A liturgy written directly into flesh.
I would like to say I left that place behind me.
I didn’t.
Because when I later saw Maire’s home using shadows of those same methods—smaller in scale, less refined, less monstrous in execution but born of the same diseased instinct—I felt my blood go cold in a way battle has rarely managed. Recognition is its own kind of horror.
The obsession with endurance. The treatment of pain as instruction. The quiet belief that a child could be broken into something useful if the breaking was called preparation. Othalyss had written the theory in blood; Maire’s home had inherited the handwriting.
Not the shock of something new, but the stomach-turning realization that evil has spread, adapted, translated itself into other tongues and hands.
Liliana’s legacy was still alive.
Not just in dragons.
That was the part that unsteadied me.
Watching Maire from the Ethereal all those months, I kept waiting to see a dragon’s claw behind the cruelty. A scaled mastermind. A chromatic hand. Some obvious continuation of the old bloodline. Instead I saw humans. Mortals. Ordinary, graceless little creatures inventing their own methods for breaking each other with no draconic guidance required.
That knowledge sat badly in me.
Still does.
It made me wonder, more than once, whether this world deserved saving at all. Whether all our effort—the hunting, the judgment, the blood, the endless fucking penance—amounted to anything if mortals were just going to rediscover every atrocity on their own like it was some inevitable law of nature. That thought was not new to me, but it was sharper then. Meaner. More persuasive. It had teeth during those years with Darian, Mira, Ilyon, and Seraphine at my side.
Back then, bitterness came easier.
Hope required effort.
And memory—memory is a treacherous thing. One look at the people beside me now, one laugh from Maire, one flash of old anger dressed in new clothing, and I am there again, walking toward another ruin with blood already gathering under my skin and judgment waiting impatiently in my chest.
We reached the foothills above Ravens Bluff under a sky already going the color of old steel.
The first things we found were warning signs nailed into rotting posts—crude notices for pilgrims, hunters, or fools with too much curiosity and too little sense. Dangerous climb. Unstable pass. Turn back. As if the mountain itself were the threat. As if stone and altitude were the worst things waiting for anyone who kept going.
They weren’t.
The road into the higher trail was lined with ruined markers from the old pilgrimage route, each one desecrated with such intimate malice that even now I can remember the exact shape of my disgust. These had once guided monks to the House of the Silver Chimes, Hlal’s temple, a place of story, song, and bright foolish joy before Othalyss got her claws into it and turned reverence into a theatre of pain.
Ilyon was the first to say it aloud.
“This was the route,” he murmured as we passed the first broken marker, his voice going strangely thin around the edges. “To the House of the Silver Chimes. Hlal’s temple.” He stared at the defaced stone for a beat too long. “I cannot believe they did this to it.”
Believe it, I thought.
That was the problem with men like Ilyon, even then. For all his age, all his polish, some part of him still wanted the world to retain the courtesy of making sense.
The path answered him with entrails.
They hung from the statues in glistening loops, draped over the carved images of Hlal and attendant silver dragons like festival garlands designed by a lunatic. The smell hit next—rot, blood, incense gone sour in the mountain air. Not enough to sicken us. We had all seen battle. We had walked through slaughterfields, through cities after dragonfire, through the steaming aftermath of judgment and called it duty.
This was different.
This was not something born of war.
This was composition.
Every few yards higher, the bodies became more frequent. Pilgrims. Monks. Wanderers. Maybe a few would-be heroes who had seen warning signs and mistaken them for challenge. Some had been nailed to prayer posts. Others were folded into grotesque postures along the trail, their bones burned with sigils I recognized all too well by then—pain marks, trigger glyphs, response scripts. Faces fixed in the final architecture of agony. Mouths warped open. Eyes cracked wide. The sort of expression no corpse should still be wearing once the soul has fled.
Even with me beside them, even with Seraphine’s calm and Darian’s iron and Mira’s fierce irreverence, a certain dread settled over us as the climb wore on. It was not fear, not exactly. More a slow, malignant pressure. The understanding that whatever waited above had made an art of suffering and had been given far too much time to practice.
Ilyon took it the worst.
Or perhaps most visibly.
The further we climbed, the more his restraint frayed. Every defiled statue, every carved silver face stained with blood and marked by symbols of torment, struck something devout and furious in him. His jaw stayed clenched so hard I thought he might crack a tooth. He started cursing under his breath—at first in common, then in draconic, then in the old tongue he only slipped into when anger had gone beyond elegance and became something more primitive.
By the time we reached the third bend, he was shaking.
Not with fear.
With rage.
I moved closer and tried, gods help me, to offer comfort. Some measured sentences about focus. Necessity. Patience. All the barren little things commanders say when they know violence is coming and want it shaped instead of squandered.
He rounded on me so fast I nearly put a hand to my sword from instinct alone.
“When we find her,” he said, every word sharpened to a bright, lethal edge, “I want her to understand what she has done before she dies.”
There was no softness left in him at all. Just a silver dragon in borrowed flesh looking at the ruin of one of his sacred places and deciding that obliteration was too merciful to be interesting.
“Ilyon—” I began.
“No.” He pointed up the trail with a hand that did not quite tremble. “No restraint. Not for justice’s sake. No lesson either.” His eyes flashed like polished metal in stormlight. “We make her suffer. We make all of them suffer. And the ones aiding them watch.”
That silenced the path between us.
Darian answered first, of course.
“Gladly.”
There was no hesitation in him. Not even a performative pause. His anger had been simmering since Mirefen. Since Caelovar. Since the first child we found hanging open on iron hooks. He did not need persuading.
Mira cracked her knuckles and gave a humorless smile that looked almost feral in the failing light. “Honestly? Took us long enough to say it out loud.”
Then Seraphine spoke, and that was what truly unsettled me.
Because Darian’s fury made sense. Mira’s savagery had always come quickly when innocence was involved. Even Ilyon, for all his refinement, had limits I knew well enough by then. But Seraphine—warm, luminous, eternally trying to find the last salvable thread in people—lifted her eyes to the blood-strung statues and said, with quiet and astonishing finality:
“When we find her, we make an example of her.”
The mountain seemed to hush around that.
Even the wind.
Seraphine folded her hands in front of her, composed as prayer, and went on, “Not only for her. For every creature in this brood, and every coward still helping them. Let them see what becomes of those who turn sanctuaries into slaughterhouses.”
I looked at her then, properly looked, and saw that whatever gentleness usually lived in her face had gone elsewhere. Withdrawn. As if mercy itself had stepped back and said: Not here. Not for this.
That should have steadied me.
Instead it disturbed me more than the corpses.
Because once Seraphine reached that point, there was no moral ambiguity left to hide behind. No balancing voice to pretend we were still walking toward punishment rather than vengeance.
And the worst part?
I agreed with them.
Completely.
The old temple bells were still hanging somewhere above us. We could hear them now and then when the wind turned—thin, broken notes drifting down the trail like ghosts of worship. But by then they did not sound holy. They sounded strangled. Warped. Like the mountain itself was trying to remember how prayer used to work before Othalyss defiled it into command, pain, and obedience.
So we kept climbing.
Faster now.
Past the ruined shrines, the mauled dead and every warning she had left nailed into the path for pilgrims and dragons alike. The fire in us had changed shape by then. No longer clean. It was cold, harsher and famished.
By the time the House of the Silver Chimes came into view, none of us were speaking about justice anymore.
We were speaking, very quietly, about what kind of death would suffice.
When we finally reached the temple steps, the silence returned—not from hesitation, but because every one of us knew the next words spoken would be inside, with steel drawn.