Chapter 53
Bomb Bondage
"Fish! Fish! Is that smoke?"
It was smoke. It rose from a set of buildings wedged at the base of the valley. Maybe twenty dark wooden buildings in total, and wrapped between a large wooden fence.
My legs burned. We'd been dropping down the mountain for the better part of the morning. Zo looked fine, because Zo always looked fine, but I caught her flexing her right hand open and closed at her side. The nerve damage. She stopped when she caught me looking.
I saw small figures moving between the buildings, carrying bundles and tending to something near the gateway.
They looked like ordinary people doing ordinary things.
No armor. No weapons beyond what a hunter might carry.
And more importantly, nothing in my gut reacted to them.
The worms under my skin were unbothered.
That was the thing about the worms now. Since the dragon, since the core formed inside of me, they'd become a better early warning system than they had been on the front.
The worms tasted the power of others before I could think about it.
These people put off nothing. They were normal humans, all of them.
"No Dragoons," I said. "Nobody with a Sacred Origin, either, far as I can tell."
"So just… normal folk."
"Yeah."
The gateway was open, and there was just an old man sitting on a stool, whittling a piece of wood with his knife. He looked up when we broke from the treeline, and his knife hand froze. I watched his face go through a cycle of shock, awe, and panic as he watched us come down from the mountains.
The old man stood up and backed away from the stool. His shoulders fell forward, and his eyes dropped from our faces to the ground in submission.
"Morning, sir, we're looking for a place to rest our feet. A room, fill our bellies. We've got coin."
The old man's eyes flicked to Zo, then back to me. I could see him swallowing hard as his throat worked.
"...You lot, dragoons?"
"We’re just travelers… just passing through."
I could tell he didn't believe me. I could see it in his eyes. But he nodded anyway, slowly, and stepped aside from the gate.
The village didn't have a name posted anywhere that I could see. Or if it did, I missed it. What it had was a single dirt road running through it, and buildings on either side built close enough that you could reach out from one doorway and damn near touch the wall of the building across from it.
And all of the village people. Watching us.
We made our way to the inn, which sat near the village's center. I could tell by the sign hanging from a bracket over the door. It was a simple two-story building made of wood and stone.
I pushed open the rough-looking wooden door and was greeted with the smell of stale beer and bacon.
The main room was mostly empty, with a long bar at the back.
It had a handful of tables with mismatched chairs and a lit fireplace.
There was a wholesome-looking woman standing behind the bar; she must have been in her mid-forties, her hair pulled back under a cloth wrap.
She'd been wiping down the bartop with a rag, and she stopped when we walked in.
"We need a room… one night, food, and hot water if you've got it."
The woman looked at the coin purse I’d dropped onto the bar, then looked at the two of us.
"Two coppers for the room, meals another copper each… hot water’ll take time."
I pulled out the coins and slid them across the bar.
She took the coins and made them disappear into her apron. "Up the stairs, second door on the left. There's a bolt on the inside."
"Thank you."
She responded with a grunt and went back to wiping the bar.
Zo waited until we were on the stairs before leaning in close.
"Not the warmest welcomes."
"They're just scared."
"I'm saying it's a shitty feeling being the thing people are scared of."
It was a small room with a single bed and a tub, and a window with actual glass. I sat on the bed.
Zo closed the door and threw the bolt. Leaned against it.
"So," she said. "This is civilization… not as advanced as I’d hoped for…"
◆◆◆
I waited until Zo went downstairs to eat before I closed my eyes.
The transition into my Sacred Soul was faster now. Used to be like the world falling away. Now it was more like blinking. One moment, I was sitting on a mattress in a village inn, and the next, I was standing on the cold marble of my throne room.
The marble floor stretched out in every direction, white and veined with grey, and the walls—if you could call them walls—were packed masses of worms, bone-white, moving in slow currents that gave the whole place the feel of standing inside a living creature.
Which I was, technically. Standing inside myself.
The throne sat at the far end. The worms that formed it were thick as my leg, coiling around each other and maintaining shape through constant motion.
Faces pressed out from the surface—goblins, Gnolls, the frost wyrm, Cedric's slack expression frozen mid-thought, and Emilia with her jaw locked open, screaming.
And crowning it all, the dragon's skull.
I didn't sit in it. Hadn't yet. Something about that felt like a commitment I wasn't ready to make.
The core pulsed, steady, feeding power to the worms that orbited it in slow spirals. I could feel every one of them. A network of living tissue that extended from this place into my physical body and back again.
But that wasn't why I was here.
LadyBomb…
The Regalia sat there in the same space the troll had once sat, near the base of the throne—a small red-and-black bug sending out puffs of red smoke that rotated above its head. It was Emilia's Regalia. It was rated Fleeting… the lowest tier of Regalia, disposable.
I reached out my hands and called the worms to me… one of the fragments came forward.
It pulled itself from the wall. It was a darker worm that had crimson veins.
It was a piece of me that had developed its own will during my first trial, its own hunger.
The last time I'd tried this—with the Ice Troll's Regalia—the fragment had been torn apart.
I'd felt it die. A ripping sensation in my soul, like someone had reached into my chest and pulled out a fistful of it.
This one was different… it was smaller. The fragment could win. It slithered on the marble floor in front of me and waited, its crimson-veined body vibrating with so much hunger that I could taste it in the back of my throat.
"Go ahead," I said.
“Eat.”