Chapter 355: Xol and The Dragon_Changling: The Child From The Woods.

Xol’s plans did not begin on the day of Harlan’s birth, nor on the day of his conception, but rather when the first Fomorian was drafted.

They were to hold a spark, but it was not one from Aarde, because they did not want these Fomorians to breed with the Golden and make a greater race.

So they decided to add a second spark, one which could complete the Golden, but with a contingency that if they were ever to be mixed, the new life would fail to take hold.

Xol could extract the spark from the Golden, because they were made in a time when another race holding the second half wasn’t intended, and thus their defenses were far lesser.

Yet in an ironic twist, he couldn’t pull that other half from his own creations, in part because of his additions to their creation which The Darkness saw.

Whether she really had any idea of his plan, or it was just a normal distrust between her and everyone else, she had used the work Xol did on the Fomorians as a base, then remade them from the ground up with her new information.

Xol’s magic was still in them, each and every one, but incorporated with magic from The Darkness.

Call it the ego of a man, the pride of a craftsman, or just a sense of fairness, but he could hardly hide his anger at having his work stolen and changed.

He was not a puppet, he was not someone who would be taken advantage of again.

Yet he didn’t know exactly how to correct this.

With his help to depose the Fae, he had handed the entire monopoly of force to the gods.

He considered those gods of Reino to be the worse of the two, who played with humans like toys, killing them with monsters which they themselves made, then raising paladins to fight back these monsters in a cycle.

The new hero would always be greater than the hero before them, and because the average person was helpless, they upheld the faith that protected them until their last breath.

He had tried to warn them of this, to tell the truth, yet not once had it worked.

Either the Fae gods killed entire towns to prevent the spread, blaming it on a lack of faith, or the people rebuked Xol for trying to spread such lies.

Yet he considered the real gods of Aarde little better.

They could’ve destroyed the creatures made by the Fae, they could’ve made life so much easier, better, but they twiddled their thumbs.

They cared more about removing an outside force than actually changing anything themselves.

Despite what the Fae had done, in a sense, life was better in Reino than anywhere else, and the cost was just a few hundred people now and then.

How many on Earth did he know that died from disease? It was certainly less than those in Reino.

Yet the perfect was the enemy of the good, and Xol did not consider that a bad thing.

The Fae could make perfect, but decided to make good.

The gods could do the same.

So why, why were they deciding on this?

Xol understood the reasons he was told, that conflict strengthened people, but he rejected it.

The scale of suffering was too great to really accept as just part of life, that billions of people were living just to die horrible deaths for the sake of making others grow stronger.

Xol reformed back into Fomoria’s shape, but he changed very little.

His body was now Godtouched, yet that was not the goal, the physical changes meant very little.

Xol stole the spark of divinity from Seraphallen, and mixed it with the Fomorian spark.

The remaining spark was from the Golden, and he had stolen it long ago, and it had remained inside of him despite the swapping of souls through paradox.

This was one such feature that was why they had the spark granted to them in the first place.

Dealing with Fae was hard, but the spark gave a certain level of immunity.

Some Fae might turn someone into a gnat to remove their ability to fight, yet such heavy transmutation would be rejected by the spark; they were also unable to be fully controlled by the Fae.

Minor control, illusions, delusions, hallucinations, they were still vulnerable to these, yet the mental senses of Golden and Fomorians would counter these more often than not, letting them handle lesser Fae by themselves.

The first thing that he noticed was that Roland was nearly through Derg-Druimnech, the second was the panic in his Other.

His first act was to kill the Other, the second was to ready himself.

He could see what was going to happen before it did, the threads scattered before him and his vision fractured to three sights.

In each of them, the resulting energy surge would destroy them both, atomizing their bodies and sundering their souls.

The issue was the size of the shield, the cube being only 8x8, enough room for Seraphallen’s body, Fomoria, and the Xol.

This meant the energy was compressed, and the solution was to spread the cube far and wide, so the resulting explosion would occur over such a distance that the force would be too diffused to be harmful to him; though Roland was likely to die.

Xol struck each wall with a simple palm strike, and it began to move outward at blistering speed, catching fire as the air was forced out of place.

Then Durandal pierced it, and in an attempt to seal the wound, the shield grew smaller, collapsing.

Xol saw the flow of the energy which now felt unnatural, since he was no longer of Earth, where the Derg-Druimnech had been originally forged by the Gaelic pantheon, yet his mind was the same as before, and his knowledge of his own modified version told him the solution.

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Xol didn’t see exactly what happened to Roland, but he was no longer atop the cube, and neither was Durandal blocking the slit.

He moved out of the opening as wide as a hair by turning to void, much like Coronach could do, and he grabbed the Derg-Druimnech, reduced to dust, but still holding the energy of the collapse for a short time, for he would need it.

A second sun descended on the lands, and white gold wings spread 5000 feet across.

He hooked them inward, concentrating the winds into the hole in the ground, clearing all clouds overhead, and killing any creatures from beneath Aarde that tried to crawl out and make problems.

From the hole a purple red beam, the captured energy from the collapsing cube, pierced Wyrmwood’s chest.

Yet it was only sized as the original cube, and 8x8 to a Dragon with a body 600 feet wide, a neck of 500 feet, and another 1500 from the base of his neck which was thinner like a wyvern rather the stocky crocodile-like drakes to his tail that ended in a half circle bone blade.

Wyrmwood’s seven golden eyes focused on the horned man that fired the beam, and he understood the scent of a god.

“As do I, lizard.”

Despite much distance between them, Wyrmwood heard Xol’s words clearly, and laughed in reply.

Then he reared his head up, readying his fire.

Xol had tried to pierce his lung, to cause a back blast, yet he knew very little of Wyrmwood, who rarely entered Aarde’s atmosphere, and the wound had healed before the beam had even finished passing through his body.

To prepare for the soul and body swap, Xol had put in a way to quickly send out a signal which granted him access to his full arsenal which was spread across multiple small worlds that he hadn’t shown to anyone.

Before the fire could reach him, he covered himself with another of the thought lost artifacts he stole from the Fae.

Xol knew that they would wake Wyrmwood, and he knew that the only answer was to slay the dragon, so he prepared everything as best he could, gathering anything related to dragon slaying or otherwise just powerful artifacts.

The Aegis, stolen from Zeus, to deal with physical attacks.

The Babr-e Bayan, stolen from Ifrit, who had in turn taken it from its original owner after his death, to deal with the fire.

Yet he did not trust any single artifact to block Wyrmwood’s breath, and also wore a cloak of fire rat hide under the Babr-e Bayan.

Fire Rats existed in both words, but magic outside of the rules of other worlds was naturally resistant, hence him stealing it from Sun Wukong, who among the Chinese gods held artifacts greedily.

For weapons, he had fewer choices than he would like, since he was trying to mostly focus on those known to have killed dragons or been made from dragons like the Babr-e Bayan.

Ascalon, which slew an unnamed dragon on Earth, and which he stole from Oberon who hoarded many magical artifacts whose owners died natural deaths and which the Fae wanted to remain hidden from all sides.

Balmung, which changed hands many times after Sigurd, but finally ended up with Tyr, who held many other lost artifacts, and whose soul was taken during the void war.

Lastly, for a ranged option, he stole the Bow of Apollo, which slew Python, which wasn’t a dragon, but a snake. Naturally, it was stolen from Apollo after his soul was severed from his body.

Unfortunately not every artifact from the old legends was brought to Aarde, some were lost back on Earth or the realms that overlapped with the world.

The other part was that he had no idea which myths had any truths behind them.

Ascalon had power, and when used against dragonoids, it was able to slice them with ease, yet the blade was of Christian myth.

Xol never met Micheal, Gabriel, any of them, but the Fae feared artifacts of such origins, and though they were of myriad pantheons, they considered the artifacts to be unnatural, heretical even.

Ironically, they still stole and mixed their own myths with the Biblical ones, which they found recruited people more easily than their own in many cases.

The defensive artifacts blocked the fire, yet the hair of his armor was singed, and the Aegis became white hot.

Wyrmwood was unimpressed by his attack being blocked.

He hadn’t been awake in a very long time, it wasn’t his best breath.

Xol did not seem to cast any spells in the downtime between flames, rather, he pulled a horn from thin air, Gjallarhorn to be specific.

His lungs filled to bursting before he blew it, the noise so loud that it broke apart the ground around him and made Wyrmwood clutch his head, yet Xol was entirely unaffected.

Yet aside from being loud, nothing happened.

Jormungand was still sleeping peacefully inside of The Veil, and the magic bound to the horn could not breach it.

Even had he summoned the world serpent, Wyrmwood would’ve made short work of it.

“Ha. Says the Titan. Your god can’t even fight their own battles.”

The Dragon reared up once more, and built energy for longer.

Xol had never seen the next attack before, but from the beating hearts of Wyrmwood came a golden light that spread across his body.

A blanket of dark fell across a hundred miles, and as if it was the only thing in this void, those near enough saw the condensed beam of light cut forward until it was blocked by a shield, where it shot in all directions, splitting the entire stripe in two.

Xol was slowly regaining feeling in his arms, and the Aegis wouldn’t take another attack like that, and his armor would stand no chance.

Every mote of mana in the around was devoured, sucked into the mouth of the beast, not even giving him the chance to cast anything to help defend himself.

Yet despite the prideful face of Wyrmwood, that attack hadn’t been good for him either.

He spread his wings wide to restore himself, soaking up Sol’s rays and converting them to mana to offset the now temporarily deadened lands.

Wyrmwood knew that Xol certainly had more artifacts, and they were self-contained and powered.