“Well, fuck it, I’ll take both these missions on. But one thing at a time, huh? Before I can think about resurrecting dragons and robbing the vaults of Luminescent Spires, I need to finish this thing with my uncle, rip him into a thousand pieces, and eat the motherfucker’s soul. Then, with the immediate threat taken care of, we can take all necessary steps to get rid of the Blood God root and branch.”
“Indeed,” Friya said with a sultry smile.
I noticed the way she was looking at me, and it brought a special kind of heat between my thighs.
“You like it when I talk about kicking ass, huh?” I said with a grin.
“It makes me… excited,” she whispered, stepping closer to me. “Your immense power and physical strength, your ferocity as a warrior… greatly excite me indeed.”
“Well, if this body of yours has limited time left to enjoy this world as only it can...” I watched her nipples press with urgency through her robe. “Then we’d best have as much fun with it as we can, don’t you agree? I think we can do our best to reassign the climax of your human life you mentioned before to an honorable second place.”
“I completely agree.” Friya sank to her knees, took out my stiffening cock, and wrapped her lips around it with all the passion of a last opportunity.
Chapter Fifteen
We set off later that morning. My balls were drained from all the “ceremonies” I’d had with Friya, but my mind was full of ideas, thoughts, worries. I was confident I’d be able to defeat my uncle, especially if I gained some new powers and skills from the Hothgrumian warriors’ upcoming battle. By carrying my enchanted coins, every soul they took would go to me. However, the fact that I’d be able to kick my uncle’s ass wouldn’t matter much if I didn’t get to him before he sacrificed Lucielle to the Blood God. This was a race against time more than anything else.
We were now truly heading into the unknown, and anything could happen. Friya hadn’t seen Aith or the Arachne herself, so everything she told me relied on second-hand reports from the few Hothgrumian warriors who had been there and lived to tell the tale.
After a few days, we’d left the ice and snow behind. Once we’d made our way through the Wastes, we swung in a southwesterly direction, into a mostly unmapped part of Prand that was only accessible on foot. Now that I had Rami-Xayon back with my party, I was able to use my harpy, Talon, for scouting ahead again, which proved tremendously useful.
The current terrain was all steep slopes, deep ravines, and impassable valleys with sheer drops into them, cliff walls over a mile high. The forests were thick here, and the tall, tightly packed trees made everything dark and gloomy. Monsters or unknown creatures might be lurking in the shadows here, and the others were certainly nervous—even Drok and Rollar, and Friya, who claimed to have been here before. Rami-Xayon, however, was not afraid, and neither was Isu. Although Isu did seem increasingly nervous and agitated the closer we came to Aith. She would hover around and swoop in on me and Rami-Xayon whenever the two of us began talking about the Purge.
To say that there was no love lost between the two of them would be putting it very mildly. Rami-Xayon became so angry when Isu was around that she could barely speak. She was exercising immense restraint to avoid unleashing her wrath on the former Goddess of Death. As for Isu, while she would goad Rami-Xayon into these rages with incisive comments and biting sarcasm, and for all her attitude, she was losing some of the brash confidence that had once defined her. Especially when we were alone. On the rare occasions she managed to get me alone, she seemed to be revealing a more vulnerable side. There was something both intriguing and sad about it. I’d always felt a small measure of guilt for having taken her divinity, though to be fair, she had basically offered it up to me on a plate. Part of me suspected that she had made it so easy for me to snatch away her divinity because she had grown weary of being a goddess, almost as though she’d wanted a way out of it. Now, I figured I’d begun to understand why she had been feeling this way. She’d been carrying a burden for years—centuries even—a burden of soul-crushing guilt. For days, it had seemed things were about to come to a head with Rami-Xayon and Isu. All I had to do to get the truth about Isu’s role in the disappearance of the Old Gods was wait.
Grave Oath’s frequent buzzing against my hip signaled that the Hothgrumian warriors had been successful in both defeating their enemies and stealing souls for me. The Gray Tree called out to me with increasing insistency, promising new powers waiting to be plucked from its branches like ripe fruit. So, one night, when the others had gone to sleep, I walked out into the thick woods and closed my eyes to travel to the Black Plane, where the tree grew. I walked across the black, glassy floor toward the enormous sentinel and saw that some of the fog from the branches halfway up the tree had cleared, revealing not one but two skills.
The first was a glowing image of a zombie human, but while the zombie was obviously dead, the corpse looked fresh and was not rotting or foul. I clenched my hand into a triumphant fist.
This was a skill I’d been waiting to obtain for quite some time.
No longer would
