“And I cannot wait to see and feel a living, breathing dragon again,” Yumo-Rezu said. She was just as eager as Friya was. “For too long has this world been without the presence of these majestic, regal beings. Ever since you resurrected me, I have felt … incomplete. As if one of my limbs had been amputated, without the presence of dragons around me. But no longer. Soon, I will be whole again.”
“And I can’t wait to ride one and use it to blow the Demogorgon all the way back to whatever hellish pit the Blood God dredged it up from,” I growled. “So let’s not waste any more time. Mount up, everyone.”
We climbed onto Fang and set off.
“I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve been to Prand,” Yumo-Rezu said after a while.
“Is that you speaking, Yumo, or did you never get the chance to see this continent while you were alive, Rezu?” I asked. Sometimes it really was difficult telling which part of the goddess’s personality was talking.
“I came here long ago,” she answered, and now I knew that it was the Dragon Goddess speaking, “but since my ancient memories have been merged with those of this mortal’s body, they have become much hazier. I came here many hundreds of years ago, I know that much, but I can’t remember any of it.”
“You’ll have plenty of chances to do some sightseeing when this is all over,” I said, “so don’t be too disappointed.”
She laughed drily and humorlessly. “If we make it out of this war alive,” she said. “Of all the deities, I remember most clearly just how powerful the Blood God was at his peak.”
“I thought you said you could barely remember anything from back then?”
“Most things, yes … but some things are not so easily forgotten. The world almost ended back then, Vance. All life would have been consumed by the Blood God’s insatiable appetite for blood had it not been for your ancestor Uger, this mortal’s ancestor Kemji, and my dragons. And even so, it was the most difficult battle ever fought in all the history of the world. We only barely managed to achieve victory, and only by the slimmest of margins, and with immense sacrifice and loss of life. This one will be harder.”
These words caught me by surprise, I had to admit. Rarely had I ever heard Yumo-Rezu mention anything other than how nearly invincible her dragons were, yet now she was talking about being cautious. She had come to defeat last time she and her dragons had fought the Blood God. I knew that the Blood God was powerful, having faced his servants in various guises on a number of occasions, but did he have a greater chance of victory than I did?
It didn’t matter. I didn’t fear him, no matter how strong he was, and I was about to hurl the full might of my armies at him. If it took the destruction of every last one of my undead troops to destroy him—even down to my beloved killer lizard, Fang—then that was a sacrifice I was fully prepared to make.
“Hard, maybe, but not impossible.”
I wondered if I should say anything about the bone crown that would make me ruler over all the other gods. Something told me that, of the deities I knew, Yumo-Rezu would probably be the least happy to hear about this, so I decided to hold my tongue for the moment. She would submit to me, of course—they all would—but her knees would bend with a lot more reluctance than those of other deities. Except for the Lord of Light. But if I gave that pompous ass the choice between bending the knee to me or having his severed head sit alongside Elandriel’s on the spikes above the gates of Brakith, I was pretty sure I knew which one he would choose.
Since the Lord of Light was now in my thoughts, I found myself wondering just what the hell he was doing at this point. Because of the Purge, he’d found himself elevated to the position of the most powerful of the living gods—what few gods remained alive after the Purge, at any rate—and had certainly been the most powerful deity in Prand up until very recently. How far up his own ass did his head have to be to not see what was going on? How could he have allowed things with his own High Priest, the Seraphim Elandriel, to have gone this far? I could see how, for example, someone in an out-of-the-way bishopric like Bishop Nabu could have worshipped the Blood God in secret, but with Elandriel doing it in Luminescent Spires, this was right under the Lord of Light’s nose. Either he himself was in on it, or … damn, was he dead?
This was a possibility I hadn’t even considered up until now. Yet it did, alarmingly, make sense. How else could Elandriel have become so powerful so quickly, and how else could he have gotten away with everything he’d done unless he’d already killed the Lord of Light and drunk his blood?
“Shit,” I whispered, shaking my head.
“What’s wrong?” Friya asked.
I didn’t really want to share my suspicions about the Lord of Light’s possible fate with Friya and Yumo-Rezu, not yet. They had enough on their plates already.
“Nothing, don’t worry about it,” I said.
“You seem worried, though,” Friya said.
“It’s nothing, really.” I wanted to change the subject before these questions turned into an interrogation. “Look, over there,” I said. “That’s quite the sight.” I pointed to my right as we came out of a thickly wooded section of the night forest to the edge of a mountain lake. The still, dark water mirrored the night sky above, and it was a shimmering sea of stars, broken occasionally by the ripple of a jumping fish.
“It’s beautiful,” Friya murmured.
“A stunning scene indeed,”
