The Dragon Heir

Interlude 3.31 [Nal-Dorrusk]

Nal-Dorrusk the Great had, once again, claimed first blood. Best kill of the opening too — spear straight through the heart of a high-value vrathi before she'd even processed that something had gone wrong. Clean and decisive.He would have enjoyed it considerably more if she hadn't looked down at him while dying.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The woman had looked at him, from her considerable and frankly unnecessary height, with an expression that managed to convey something deeply unflattering in the half-second she had left to convey anything at all. He was short, yes. There was still absolutely no rub it in.

He hated tall vrathi. The word itself didn't translate cleanly into their crude tongue — "slave" was the nearest equivalent, though it shed most of the actual meaning in the process. Close enough.

Nal-Dorrusk was a Kovrath. He had infiltrated this city alongside the Seventh Elder’s cavalry, part of the opening strike — hit fast in the assigned area, hit the valuable ones, be gone before anyone could organize a response. Thirty-seventh attack of his career. First kill, again, same as always, something that should have put him in an excellent mood if the surrounding circumstances weren't so relentlessly committed to ruining it.

The vrathi had gotten slippery. He despised admitting it but there it was. They carried these wards now— the things stopped dark magic on contact and bounced blunt force off entirely, which gutted two of the Kovrath's most reliable tools in one move. Charging anything heavy enough to break through would blow their stealth before the attack landed. So they were left with neither.

But that wasn't the real problem.

The real problem was the sky.

Every time they attacked the city, fire rained down from above from the sky itself, unprompted, announcing the raid to everyone inside the walls before the Kovrath had finished their first strike. They'd tried everything to stop it. This time they'd sat on every trace of hostile intent until the last possible second, held it so tight the ambush should have landed clean. Didn't matter. Sky lit up the same as always.

Some among the Kovrath had initially decided this was a blessing. A sort of sign. The world itself cheering them on as they cleansed outsiders from land that wasn't theirs. That interpretation had not survived contact with the seventeenth or eighteenth attack, Nal-Dorrusk couldn't remember exactly which, and nobody brought it up anymore.

It was not a blessing.

All Kovrath were born with perfect infiltration. It was sacred and absolute. A gift from She who made them, the Divine Dragon Varreth-Yne, who had shaped them specifically for this purpose — to be unseen, unsensed and uncounterable. The weapon that was supposed to end the vrathi question permanently and efficiently.

In her presence, the gift had been everything it was meant to be.

In her absence, apparently, the world had developed opinions.

He looked down at the body of the vrathi he'd killed. The satisfaction was still there, underneath everything else. Bitter but present. He hoped the pain was lingering. He hoped whatever passed for an afterlife in her belief system was uncomfortable. And in some distant cycle of rebirth, if the divine saw fit to grant her the mercy of being reborn Kovrath, then perhaps her existence would finally amount to something worthwhile.

Until then she could rot, ideally while reconsidering the choices she'd made in her final moments.

Specifically the looking down part.

Nal-Dorrusk now looked around, pleased and manipulated his magic. The vrathi women who looked down on him was enveloped in a thick sheet of dark magic and as he closed his fist, crushed to a pinpoint, if she wasn't dead by being piered by dozens of massive spears, she now certainly was.

Nal-Dorrusk turned his attention to the second occupant in the room.

This one he recognized.

He'd seen him before. Fought him before. A slippery, irritating vrathi who refused to die properly when struck and always seemed to have exactly the right tool available at exactly the wrong time. Marked as high-value for a while now, and for good reason, the defensive wards, the ones stopping their dark mana and bouncing their strikes, those came from this one. He was the source of the growing inconvenience. The thorn that kept not being removed.

Curse him.

Nal-Dorrusk had come here specifically for that, to end him cleanly and claim the glory before any of his brethren could catch up. Not that they were unworthy — they were Kovrath, which put them above most things that existed by default — but he deserved it more. He, who was the shortest among them and entirely at peace with that fact, deserved the most recognition. This was simply fair.

And yet he had found him here with that woman.

Unfortunate.

The moment fire started falling the vrathi had already reacted, mana flaring, defenses snapping into place with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd done it enough times that it no longer required thought. Annoying, but expected. Nal-Dorrusk had been ready to punch through it anyway.

But then there was the woman.

Something about her had been wrong from the start. A sense of danger that didn't fit the shape of her, something that made his instincts register a objection he didn't appreciate receiving. So he'd adjusted. Eliminate the unknown variable first, then return to the original target.

She hadn't even raised her defenses.

What a fool. What a completely useless vrathi!

Better yet, her defensive trinket had been handed to her at the exact moment Nal-Dorrusk committed to the strike, too late to matter. For once, the mistress of luck had seen reason and sided with him. The spear went through clean.

As it should.

Now the only question was the enchanter.

Shocked, yes, but already recovering, already bracing himself with that particular vrathi stubbornness that made them such poor prey. They never broke properly. Didn't even taste particularly good. The whole process was less rewarding than it had any right to be, and yet here he was again, doing it anyway.

Still. They kept hunting the sacred treasures of this land, and for that alone they deserved to bleed.

Nal-Dorrusk felt his kin gathering behind him just as he finished with the woman. One by one they dropped their concealment and rippled back into visibility.

"Dorru, you impatient little fool!" The voice belonged to senior brother Vespa. "I told you not to rush ahead! The fire started early because of you. The elder will hear of this."

Nal-Dorrusk clicked his tongue.

The group stood behind him, each bearing metallic scales in different shades. His own golden sheen was, objectively, the most refined among them. Superior, even. The fact that he was shorter than all of them by a noticeable margin was, once again, entirely beside the point and not worth discussing.

"Senior brother Vespa," Nal-Dorrusk said, gesturing casually toward the dead woman in front of him, "I secured one of the more dangerous targets, did I not? That woman crushed a falling fire mass without moving. If anything, I acted with remarkable foresight."

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He pointed at the enchanter.

"And now that you are all here, eliminating this one should be simple."

That was the priority. Remove the source. End the inconvenience.

He shifted his stance, prepared to move —

And then he felt it.

His eyes snapped to the vrathi's hand.

Something was coiled around it.

A sacred artefact.

The recognition landed like a stone dropped into still water. Every Kovrath knew what they were. The objects the outsiders hunted, the keys that, if gathered together, threatened to bring about something far worse than any single raid. Stopping that from happening was half the reason they fought this war at all.

And one of them was sitting right there in this man's hand.

The artefact of fog…

Dorrusk felt his head crawl.

If they had it, that meant the guardian of depth was dead. There was no other way it moved hands. The thing didn't get stolen, didn't get lost, didn't get passed along through some chain of misfortune. The guardian died and someone took it off the body.

He'd smelled it on the way here and hadn't put it together. Azure silver scales scattered in carts outside, the scent of deep water hanging in the open air where it had no business being. He'd walked past it. Registered it as something strange and kept moving.

Those had been pieces of the guardian.

Before he could finish that thought, Vespa had already started screaming.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, VRATHI!" Not directed at Dorrusk but at the enchanter. Vespa's voice had gone somewhere past anger into something worse. "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT HAVING THAT ARTEFACT HERE MEANS! YOU HAVE DOOMED US ALL!!"

Dorrusk felt the chill move through him and said nothing, because Vespa was right.

The artefact of fog was sacred enough on its own. But the depth dwellers who protected it, the ones who worshipped the guardian like a deity and had built their entire existence around that devotion, those were not people Dorrusk wanted arriving aboveground. They didn't discriminate and they didn't negotiate. If they found out their guardian had been killed for its treasure, they would come, and they would kill everything that moved until the feeling passed. Kovrath included. The distinction between invader and defender meant nothing to something that grieving and that angry.

His head was starting to ache in a way that had nothing to do with the fight.

"I literally have no idea," the enchanter said, "but I can definitely give you all a taste of it."

Mana surged through the room in a way that made the air feel wrong before anything visible happened. Dorrusk didn't wait to see what followed. He burned his magic and dropped out of the material plane entirely, phasing into the shadow realm where wraiths drifted with half-existence and no weight.

It wasn't enough.

A breath of frost exploded outward through the building as azure silver vapour rolling through walls and floor like they weren't there, enveloping everything, detonating outward into the street. It hit him anyway. Even phased, even standing in a plane the attack technically hadn't been aimed at, the cold found him.

Crept through the gap between worlds and jammed itself into his bones like it was looking for somewhere permanent to stay.

He had to reach deeper. Into the sacred power stored in his heart, it was the power that buried him from worldly perception entirely.

Yet it too had no defensive properties.

The frost didn't care.

He felt his wings seize. The cold had gotten into the joints, into whatever mechanism let them move, and suddenly they were just weight attached to his back. He dropped and crashed into the alleyway below and lay there for a moment doing an inventory of what still worked.

Not much, immediately.

He groaned and pressed himself against the wall, wings locked solid, every attempt to shift them sending a jolt through them that felt like they'd shatter if he pushed it. Above and around him he could hear his kin engaging, senior brother Vespa leading the charge, the sounds of a fight that was costing them considerable effort just to keep contained. As it would.

A sacred artefact in the hands of someone willing to use it was not a contained problem.

He caught a glimpse of the enchanter through a gap between buildings. Already drinking one of those mana potions they carried, gulping it down like the body burning through power that fast was something a person could just fix with a bottle.

Hmph.

Frail vrathi bodies, never built to channel sacred power, never meant to hold any of it, and yet here they were again, finding another way to make it work anyway. Adapting. Always adapting. Dorrusk hated that about them genuinely and specifically.

He turned his attention back to his wings and the more immediate problem of being encased in frost in an alleyway while his brothers handled something that was very much also his problem.

First those defenses that dulled most of their attacks, and now this artefact that could reach them even while they were hidden, it was starting to feel like the vrathi had been handed a perfect counter to everything the Kovrath were meant to excel at. Still, not everyone was fortunate enough to stand under the protection of a sacred artefact.

Across the city, the same pattern repeated itself. Some ambushes failed outright, some landed cleanly, and in those moments the Kovrath proved why they were feared. Their bodies, layered in draconic scales gifted by their creator, turned aside blows that would have shattered lesser beings, and the sacred energy housed in their hearts allowed them to fight far beyond what their cores should have permitted.

Nal-Dorrusk had been keeping track of the highest priority targets as well, especially the vrathi known as Markus and the shadow-clad woman who followed him like a second existence. He had attempted to kill that man eight times and failed every single one. Even now, he could not sense him anywhere nearby, and the absence brought a quiet sense of relief. Perhaps Markus was occupied elsewhere. The city had been divided into regions, each group assigned its own targets, so there was no telling which of his kin had drawn that particular burden today. Even his own reassignment this time had not ended well.

Still.

The city was in chaos.

That alone was enough.

Somewhere out there, someone had to be draining themselves dry just to keep those barriers standing, and that meant openings would follow. All he had to do was strike before they realized where to look.

But first, his wings and joints.

He drew upon the sacred energy within his heart, letting it circulate through his body before shaping it into a healing construct. Ordinary regeneration would not suffice here, his natural recovery was already superior to most, so he fed the spell directly with sacred energy and directed it into his frozen parts. The effect was immediate. The frost receded, shrinking under the influence of power that did not care for natural laws.

In the terms the vrathi liked to use, he estimated he had spent roughly two percent of his heart’s capacity in healing. Another eight percent had already been burned maintaining his infiltration. That left him with ninety percent remaining, a comfortable margin, but not one he could afford to squander. Once depleted, it would not recover until he returned to the shrine.

He would need to be careful. But careful did not mean passive.

It was time to hunt.

He spread his wings and was just about to slip back into the shadow plane when something struck him from behind, a translucent golden whip with a bladed edge that cut through him, filling him with an invasive energy and forced his phasing to snap back violently, throwing him straight into the material plane before he could even react properly. He crashed down hard, coughing up blood and bile as his thoughts scattered for a moment, his body not quite catching up to what had just happened.

What had just happened to him?

His vision steadied just enough for him to notice movement in front of him, and then a pair of familiar legs stepped into view. She wore the same dark skirt the vrathi favored, with that robe of writhing shadows draped over her, the same one he had already pierced through with his spears, the same one he had reduced to nothing with his magic not moments ago.

And yet she stood there.

Looking down at him in the exact same way she had before, like nothing had happened, like she had never been at death’s door to begin with.

That alone would have been enough to unsettle him, but then he noticed something else.

There was another one standing behind her.

The same face, the same build, the same presence down to the smallest detail, but sharper somehow, like the first one was a reflection and this one was the thing casting it.

“Told you he was using divinity.”

“Yes. The physical demonstration confirms its usage. The effect was not a mere enhancement. It directly violated the rule of stasis, which should remain intact even under amplified healing. This introduces a new variable and necessitates further testing, main body. The subject’s physiology is… promising.”

“Do you think I’ll get the divinity out of him if I eat him?” First one tilted her head slightly, watching Dorrusk struggle. “Something similar happened when the Colosseum’s barrier interfered with me the first time. My fire gland absorbed some of it. I think the same principle might apply here.”

“That remains unverified. However, the current population density of similar specimens provides sufficient opportunities to test that hypothesis. Their primary power appears to be phased traversal into a shadow dimension, analogous to ours, but augmented through divinity. This augmentation renders them undetectable through conventional and enhanced perception.”

Nal-Dorrusk tried to move, tried to slip away again, but his body refused to cooperate as multiple whip-like appendages lashed around him, each one ending in a bladed edge that dug into his flesh and flooded him with that same invasive energy. His thoughts scrambled again, phasing collapsing before it could even begin.

“Which can be prevented,” she continued without pause, “by interrupting the transition state prior to phase completion.”

She then leaned in slightly, eyes fixed on him with open interest.

“Main body,” she said, licking her lips in a way that was entirely unnecessary, “I volunteer to take the first bite. Purely as a precaution, in case something… unexpected happens.”

“Fine. But not here. Let’s move him somewhere quieter first.”

The sharp one gave him one last hungry look before disappearing, and the next moment Nal-Dorrusk felt himself being dragged, not by his own will this time but by someone else's entirely, forced into that shadowed layer he usually controlled so easily.

This time, he had no control over it.

He looked ahead—

—and froze.

Two dark, draconic silhouettes were dragging him deeper into the dark layer like abyssal monsters, their forms barely defined and yet far too real, pulling him somewhere far below.

Nal-Dorrusk felt something cold settle in his chest.

He might have made a very serious mistake.