Chapter 151: Born Between Worlds
The night was thick with violence. Screams, roars, and concussive blasts folded into one another, grinding into a single din that pressed against the skull. The elf king's host was locked in open combat, facing something that clawed terror out of the lone human watching.
She didn't know much, but she knew these shapes the instant she saw them. The Dragon tribe. Among the beastmen there were countless serpent-blooded clans, but only one ever claimed the top rung without challenge, and this was it. Back during the Convergence, they'd earned their reputation the hard way. Cities burned in their wake. Lines broke. Survivors learned to run or die. Arrogant, brutal, and overwhelmingly strong, they were a force most learned to fear by instinct alone.
Which made the sight in front of her hard to reconcile. Fear was still there, but it was being drowned out by disbelief as she watched them fall with disturbing ease.
The killing hadn't started with blades. Before either side closed, one of the elves was sent forward under the cover of night, convulsed just outside their walls, and a massive flower tore its way out through its mouth. The elf and bloom exhaled, and with it came a cloud, a dense breath of drifting spores that rolled through the dragon camp before any understood what had happened.
By the time alarms were raised and ranks began to form, the air was already thick with it. The fight began with the outcome decided.
Blotches of purple surfaced across draconic skin, first small, then swelling, spreading, until flesh could no longer contain them. Skin split. Wet ruptures burst outward, spraying violet filth that crawled and clung, carrying the sickness to anything it touched as the night filled with a different kind of screaming.
Kept out of the fighting, she lingered at the edge of the slaughter, shadowed by an elf she'd come to hate. He was leaner than the rest, all sharp angles and sinew, with thorned vines coiled from his palms. He enjoyed those vines. Too much. Whenever he could, he made sure she felt the bite of them.
The Dragon tribe's territory looked exactly as the stories promised. Nestled against the mountain's base, the land was burned down to memory. Soil baked hard and dead. Trees reduced to brittle cinders. What remained were massive stone blocks, stacked and carved into crude shelters, the only structures that fire hadn't erased.
Pressed flat against one of those stones, she felt a dull heat seeping through it, steady and wrong. The sensation barely registered before a dragonkin's gaze locked onto her and froze the thought in her head.
It stood well over eight feet, scales a deep, smoke-dark blue that caught the flicker of nearby flames. Its arms were thick as trunks, wings stunted and useless jutting from its back as it turned toward her. Its jaw split wide, heat swelling in its throat, fire about to be born.
She threw her arms up and shut her eyes, bracing for the end...and nothing came.
When she dared to look again, relief slammed into horror. Most of the creature's face was gone, skin stripped away in ragged sheets. Her escort struck again, vines snapping tight around its skull, twisting hard until what remained collapsed into pulp.
She barely managed a breath before a deep sound rolled through the camp, a roar so vast it rattled her bones, followed by the sight of something immense forcing itself up from the center of the ruins, a colossal red dragon rising into the chaos.
What caught her off guard next was the sudden retreat. Every surviving member of the Dragon tribe broke contact at once, tearing themselves free from the fight even if it meant leaving pieces behind. Limbs were abandoned, bodies dragged, blood streaked across stone as they fled. In moments, the field was stripped bare of them, leaving only imps, elves, and her.
She knew what came next. Her body folded without thought, knees striking the ground as she braced for it.
The voice she despised more than the anything detonated over the dragon's roar.
"Lun-kar keth, zhalun-reth ul-zha, zul tok ul!"
The challenge rippled outward, not as inspiration, but as command. Magic tore through the ranks. Elves collapsed where they stood. Imps convulsed and sank into the dirt. Even she was crushed down, her strength ripped free and dragged toward the king. Everything they had bled into him.
The dragon didn't wait. Its massive neck arched high, jaws yawning wide as a point of light condensed just beyond its teeth, bright enough to burn the air itself.
She couldn't see the king directly, but his presence climbed anyway, a pale-white, smoking aura swelling like a fire fed with oil.
Watching that power rise, she felt the end settle in her chest. She'd seen this too many times. Once he finished siphoning his army dry, the king's strength would spike, forcefully tearing him into A-Rank territory.
If the dragon tribe had known that, maybe its leader wouldn't have burned away what years it had left trying to evolve in answer. But pride had always ruled them. This had only one ending.
Light detonated.
The dragon's attack finally loosed, fire erupting from that gathered point and washing outward in a tide meant to erase everything beneath it.
She didn't lift her arms. She didn't tense. She already knew who would still be standing.
A wall of poison met the incoming fire.
It swelled outward with equal force before folding over the flames and smothering them. The dragon didn't have time to react. The coating took it whole, scales sloughing away in sheets as muscle unraveled beneath, the body sagging and collapsing into itself. By the time the haze thinned, there was nothing left standing. It was already dead.
The flood of venom and liquefied flesh rolled toward her, and she watched it come, a small part of her wishing that it wouldn't stop this time. It did. The mass locked in place a few steps short of her, frozen, then reversed course in an instant, tearing back toward its source and dragging the remains of the dragon with it.
After a handful of breaths, strength bled back into her limbs, followed immediately by the king's guttural order, his voice grinding through the air.
"Zul-tok keth! Lun-esh tok!"
Elves answered with harsh shouts. Imps screamed and surged forward, spilling out of the camp in pursuit. The enemy had fled expecting annihilation; watching their strongest erased in seconds had shattered that hope. What followed wasn't a counterattack, only a brief, panicked delay.
It couldn't have been more than half an hour. Standing now amid the aftermath, the human's body trembled.
'Impossible.'
Seeing it again, fresh and undeniable. Watching the way her captor erased opposition so completely crushed what little hope had managed to survive. Whoever was coming wouldn't matter. No one strong enough to challenge this would be wandering the freelands.
"Zha-ith. Follow."
Her new name. One more mark of ownership.
"I just need a moment, I can't recover as fa—ah!"
Fire raked across her back as thorns struck flesh.
"Follow!"
She should have known better. Dragging herself upright, she stumbled after her guard, already aware of where they were headed.
Moving through the wreckage, she watched every step, careful to avoid the purple runoff slicking the ground. She had learned that lesson once already. After letting the decay crawl through her long enough to nearly kill her, her captors had finally tired of laughing and healed what remained.
When her escort stopped ahead, she hurried to catch up...and gagged.
The elf king stood waiting, skin flushed and webbed with pulsing veins. His stance was wide, knees bent, posture strained as though bearing a crushing load. In truth, he was. Every elf was bonded at birth to a carnivorous plant, a seed fused to flesh that grew alongside them. The forms varied, but the king's bond was unique. A feeder. One that evolved by consumption.
From his back swelled a massive bulb, crowned by a fanged mouth. It was in the process of devouring what remained of the dragon, molten flesh still steaming as it was forced inside. The plant hissed as it worked, stretching its wet maw wide enough to swallow the entire chunk, jaws distending to an obscene degree.
The final piece vanished with a violent gulp. The bulb shuddered, then collapsed inward, shrinking as it crawled back beneath the king's skin. His body warped to accommodate it. Muscle knotted, bone shifted, flesh bulged as the thing burrowed deep, settling into him like a parasite finding its nest.
His head snapped back, breath fogging the air as the transformation finished. When he lowered his gaze, the eyes that stalked her sleep fixed on her again, the grin he wore draining into open contempt.
"Words came true. Three times. No lies. Three proofs. This time, Zha-ith fang in hunt honored. Claim trophy. Eat."
He gestured toward the field of corpses around them. A few of the elves, her guard included, didn't bother hiding their disgust, but none dared speak as she stepped forward, forced to sift through the dead.
'This is horrible. But if I refuse, I insult him. Get it together, Teal. Just choose something.'
She stopped beside a severed tail, mostly intact save for the torn end. Setting her foot on it, she forced something close to a smile.
"This one."
The king didn't look back. He turned away and barked an order, already done with her.
At her flank, her escort drifted closer, his presence a cold pressure against her side.
"Zha-ith always. Forever remember."
Her gaze stayed on the twitching tail. She didn't look at him. All her effort went into forcing herself through what came next.
"Yeah, Zha-ith. Like I'd forget."
She lowered herself to one knee and drew in a slow breath. Her face tightened, a brief spasm rippling through her jaw, then bone shifted as her teeth pushed forward, reshaping into fangs. She leaned in and bit down.
The guard watched her chew, lips curling. The scars along the tops of her ears made his fingers twitch, the urge to strike flaring before he turned his attention back to his king.
Zha-ith. In elvish, it meant Broken Blood. Their word for a half-breed. An elf had forced himself on her mother, leaving behind a reminder neither side wanted. Orphaned, she'd grown up under human hands that never stopped hurting her, her ears and teeth openly marking her for what she was.
One assault took more than what little she had left. Besides her purity, her attacker carved away the tips of her ears, cutting off what elves would die to protect. That moment broke something open. From that damage, her power surfaced. Because of her elven blood, she manifested two abilities she'd come to despise.
Naming them Future Sight and Rank Up.
She hated them both. They marked her again, separating her from what remained of her human side. Not granted by a shard, her abilities were treated as corruption. Unnatural and dangerous.
She tried to keep it quiet at first, but once the wrong ears caught her name, whatever freedom she had left vanished overnight. Her foresight let her see fragments tied to a person or situation, but only after she knew enough to anchor the vision. A name alone meant nothing. She had to get close. She had to learn habits, patterns, context. Then, only with focus, and only by burning part of her own life away, could she force a glimpse of what was coming.
But close never meant safe. Victims learned their abusers faster than friends ever could.
By the time she clawed her way out of the cult that owned her, she calculated she'd lost more than twenty years of her lifespan.
If foresight had been all she carried, she might have slipped away sooner. Paranoia would have eased. Restraints would have loosened. But Rank Up made her irreplaceable, and so she lived under the cult's deepest locks.
Rank Up let her empower another person while she remained within a hundred yards of them. Skills, abilities, even stats could be advanced. Items could also be forced toward their next tier of potential, so long as she stayed close enough. It's only other limit being it could only affect one thing at a time.
A blessing to those who owned her.
But to her, these gifts were shackles. A sentence handed down without trial. She couldn't turn them inward. She couldn't save herself. Worse still, her blood made shard ownership impossible, sealing the imbalance permanently.
She learned early what she was meant for.
So when she had a vision of her captor's life end to an elf blade while crossing the freelands, she chose to gamble everything on escape. She lied cleanly, claimed she'd foreseen an ambush and for some reason was there to intervene at the critical second, then layered the lie with a promise of elven treasure that didn't exist. That final thread bound her fate to her gamble.
As they traveled, she fed herself stories about her people, turning over everything she'd learned from humans and rejecting it as cowardice masquerading as truth. The cruelty she'd known had to be a flaw in humanity, not something the elves shared. They had to be better. They had to see what was done to her and answer it with justice.
She imagined welcome. Shelter. Belonging. What met her instead was fact, stripped bare.
At the moment her lies were meant to save him, she withdrew her blessing instead, watching the thread snap and her tormentor follow without hesitation.
She met the elf king that same night. Knowing what she knew now, she would have cut her own throat the instant their eyes met.
They knew her immediately. Some scent she carried. Some wrongness she couldn't scrub away. She saw it in their stares, the understanding that her dream of family had never been more than a story she told herself.
Once again, only her curse kept her breathing. Both abilities. Both useful. Both fascinating to the king.
Two months, by her count. Her self appointed birthday had likely passed. Nineteen now, she spent every waking hour proving herself, grinding value into her bones, showing she would bleed for them if that was the price of staying alive.
So when the copper burn filled her mouth, she wished she could feel anything other than revulsion...at the trophy forced between her teeth, at the elves she'd wanted as kin, and most of all at herself.
'I should have ended this years ago.'
Not knowing why anymore, she ate to survive. Forced it down. She let the dragon's blood pool hot in her gut and dull the edges of her thoughts. She clung to that heat, to the brief illusion that this act, this single moment, was something she chose for herself. In that narrow focus, she never noticed the presence beside her. Not that it would have mattered. Even whole, she would never have felt the eyes on her.
No one there could.
No elf. No imp.
None of them could see the dead.