“If you’re what you’re saying is true,” Aurelian said quietly, “then all of Sanctuary, the last bastion of Elysea, is… what? Godsworn?”

“No!” Zylara shouted. “No! We can’t be—I can’t be… it’s not possible… I…”

“There must be some mistake. That is the Mantle we have sworn for thousands of years. It’s been part of the core of our culture, it… why wouldn’t Charlemagne have…?”

“It is very likely that he simply doesn’t realise the change,” Tarixi said with a hint of pity tempering her equalled rage and disgust. “Echoes, no matter how well-preserved, do not fully encapsulate the totality of a Soulforce. It is not unreasonable to think that the Mantle changed over time, and Charlemagne’s perception of it changed with it. The man was many things, but a traitor? Never that. He loathed the gods. Called them ‘pagan pretenders’.”

Aurelian snorted. “That checks out. Charlemagne was famous for his fervent catholicism.”

“But what of Sanctuary? Are we… does this mean the gods have known everything…? All our efforts to prepare, to ready for the coming of the Nephilim, why let us live?” Zylara’s voice was strong despite the shock, fear, and blatant denial within it. Even after Aurelian had told her and Karsys about his ability to see divine tethers, they had been sceptical. It had taken Bael’tharax reinforcing his point to make them see reason, and even then it was difficult.

Realising your entire life was a lie wasn’t exactly something people rationalised within minutes, or even days. It took time.

“IT IS VERY LIKELY THAT SOLARIUS SAW NO NEED TO CONCERN HIMSELF WITH THE TASK OF WIPING YOU ALL OUT, NOT WHEN YOU SERVED A PURPOSE. VERY LIKELY HE THOUGHT THAT AURELIAN—THE NEPHILIM—MIGHT ARRIVE IN THE LAST BASTION OF ELYSEA. YOU WERE A CONVENIENT TRAP, ONE HE NOW NO LONGER REQUIRES.”

“The army.” Aurelian said grimly. “I take it Bahamut did fill you in then?”

I did. My Sire and Tarixi were most aghast at the idea of it all. She was excited about Sanctuary, Aurelian. She downplayed that. I think the revelations of its truths might have dampened her spirit more than she will let on.

“Tarixi,” Aurelian said after Bahamut was finished, “what did you mean by them not being true Elysean? Are you referring to—?”

“Yes.” She said simply. “The lack of Nephilic influence in their genealogy. It is the blood of Nephilim, proliferated throughout the Empire, that made Elyseans so potent. So powerful. Without that saturation, even at the time of our Fall, we were losing potency. That was a scant thousand years since the last Calling. I can only begin to imagine how comparatively diminished our so-called descendents are.”

“Hence the System classifying them as humans and elves and not Elyseans.”

Karsys and Zylara, listening to the conversation, looked both shocked and crestfallen. It seemed that the words of the Goblin were finally starting to drill into them, and Aurelian couldn’t help but feel sympathy. Their entire worldview was being obliterated with every sentence, and every moment spent within the company of the two ancients. It was one thing to dismiss Tarixi, for all that it was still a difficult task, but to gainsay the dragon king that had lived alongside their most revered Imperator?

No, neither human nor elf could justify such willful ignorance. That only left the inevitable conclusion that, just as Tarixi said and Bael’tharax reinforced, they were not true Elyseans but instead peoples clinging to an identity they technically had no right to any longer. Especially not with the perverted version of the Mantle they had been reciting for generations.

It was like being punched repeatedly, and then kicked for good measure.

Once again, he felt a surge of sympathy. They were handling it well, all things considered.

“Before anything else, I think we should sever your tethers to Solarius.” Aurelian said abruptly. “I’ve been sitting on the thought because I wanted to hear opinions, but honestly the memory of them is making me feel angry and sick all at once. It’s like seeing golden manacles wrapped around your cores. The sooner they’re gone, the better.”

“Will it hurt?” Zylara asked in a respectably determined voice.

“I honestly can’t say.” Aurelian said with an apologetic shrug. “I only did it once before, but Lycinius’ tie to Absolum made yours look like micro splinters in comparison.”

She bit her lip at his response, but said nothing and instead stared at the ground.

“Perhaps it is what is necessary then, for us to truly process what you are implying.” Karsys said with a swallow and glance at Zylara. “For all that I respect the words of the dragon king, the Reclaimer, and an Elysean Archmagus…” He shook his head, fists clenched at his sides. “It all feels like a bad dream. Like I will wake up at any moment and realise it was a sudden bout of delirium.”

“YOUR RESISTANCE TO THE IDEA IS NOT ILLOGICAL, HUMAN. I WOULD EXPECT THE SAME HORROR AND DENIAL FROM ANY ENEMY OF THE GODS THAT FOUND THEMSELVES SO FULLY DUPED.” The dragon king tilted his head and widened his eye intently. Aurelian knew first hand how intimidating the massive dragon’s full attention could be, but Karsys weathered it admirably. “BUT SEE THAT YOUR SHOCK DOES NOT TRANSFORM INTO RECKLESSNESS. AURELIAN WILL NEED RELIABLE ALLIES. AT PRESENT, AND ASIDE FROM MY HEIR, THE PAIR OF YOU ARE ALL HE HAS.”

“We understand.” Karsys said with a visible swallow. “We may be… well, whatever we may be, we are truly dedicated to the war against the Nine. To think that we were puppets of Solarius… that the God of Light might be seeing through our eyes even now…”

Tarixi snorted at his words. “No, child. That is not how fealty works. You are neither Avatars nor Exalted. The gods cannot simply inhabit you or glean your knowledge at will. Your connection gives them power and strength by way of Faith, but it does not give them access to your minds. Free will must be willingly, consciously, and knowingly surrendered. It is an absolute law of the System. You are to Solarius what a grain of wheat in a full granary is to a gluttonous man: irrelevant.”

“Then we have not compromised the Neph—Aurelian?” Zylara asked with a widening of her blue eyes.

They would be already dead if they had. Bahamut said coldly through the bond.

It was oddly reassuring.

“No. You would know if the God of Light chose to look through your eyes, I assure you. Solarius may have run his hooks in you, and thus created a means by which to expend Influence with you as Anchors for the Intent, but you are very much still your own people… and soon the Second Calamity shall see to it that you are fully released from your bonds.”

“That also explains the army they’re sending against Sanctuary…” Aurelian said thoughtfully. “If the tethers alone guarantee nothing in the way of control, then Solarius can’t just order them all to not hate him, or commit mass suicide or something else equally horrible. He has to wipe them out. All he’s done is corrupt their ideals, but that isn’t enough to actually break the seed of what it is they represent.”

“Precisely.” Tarixi said with a nod. “The God of Light is a devious opponent. He has suborned our greatest oaths and manipulated matters, likely over millennia, to mitigate the threat as best as he can… but he knows it is not enough to merely have hooks in these people, he must truly break them now that the Calamity has shown itself. Very likely he thought he’d be able to claim you, Aurelian, prior to you realising your potential.”

“Well that backfired horribly.” Aurelian snorted.

“It did indeed, and thus he has enacted this plan. I would hypothesise that he put the development of this force into action as one of many precautionary measures to ensure a new Calamity could not find easy support in their fight against the Nine. Solarius knows you can liberate the people of Sanctuary. He will not suffer that to pass, and has levied his contingency to make sure of it.”

“Can’t say he isn’t smart.” Aurelian admitted grudgingly.

“ONLY A TRUE FOOL WOULD UNDERESTIMATE SOLARIUS’ CUNNING.” Bael’tharax said with a growl of anger, grudging respect, and warning all at once. “THE ATROCITIES HE ORCHESTRATED THROUGH HIS FOLLOWERS ARE INNUMERABLE. THERE IS A REASON HE AND HIS COMPATRIOTS ARE THE ONES THAT EMERGED VICTORIOUS IN THE GODSWAR. HUNDREDS FOUGHT TO CLAIM THE SUPREME AUTHORITY, BUT HIS WAS THE FACTION THAT TRIUMPHED.”

“He needs to die.” Aurelian said quietly. “It all comes back to that. The First Calamity didn’t go far enough. The gods have to be killed, or else there’ll never be true peace in the Realms. Even if Bahamut extends my lifespan by thousands of years — which is nuts to consider, by the way! — it won’t matter if Solarius can just wait until I’m distracted or let my guard down. If he managed to find a way to kill me when I’m not expecting it…”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Then the dragon king would die as well.” Tarixi agreed grimly. “It is only by providence that the same didn’t happen to us. It was—”

Bael’tharax growled in warning, and Tarixi fell silent.

Aurelian didn’t press the question that immediately arose and instead turned to Zylara and Karsys. “How do you both feel, after hearing everything?”

“Overwhelmed. Confused. Angry… but what’s worse, you tell me of these bonds and yet I cannot even feel them…” Zylara admitted. “These supposed chains. I feel no pressure, no… presence. It is difficult to even understand what it is you speak of, Aurelian.”

“Yeah, well, they’re there.” He assured her with a frown while remembering the image he’d seen. “And they’re gaudy. Really gaudy. Like something you’d see in a—” he hesitated “—really ostentatious noble’s mansion.” He finished a little lamely. He had been going to mention a specific person who loved golden plated toilets from Earth, but he realised the reference would have been moot.

“Then let us be about it.” Karsys said with grim resolution. “I want this godstain off of me as soon as possible.”

“I as well.” Zylara said in unified agreement, and pulled herself up proudly with a flash of her blue eyes. “I may not be Elysean in the ways of old, but I am proud to call myself a daughter of that heritage, and I will not suffer godstaint if it can yet be purged. Do as you must, Aurelian. I am prepared.”

Aurelian looked between them and nodded. There was no more to be said. He accepted and approved of their sentiment, and all that was needed was for him to do his part. With a deep inhale he reactivated Dragon’s Gaze and locked his eyes on both his new companions, filtering past the motes of mana flitting through the space around them and pushing deeper past the veil to what lay beyond its immediate skein.

There you are.

His awareness latched onto the golden-white chains of power woven like barbed manacles around the burn of their cores, and he drew upon his Soulforce with gusto. Calamity’s Blade activated with a thrum of power, and Aurelian started feeding mana into it.

It would not need to be as strong as when he’d cut through Lycinius’ cable, but given that Solarius was the god to whom they were tethered, Aurelian didn't want to take any chances. He poured two fifths of his available mana into the blade, and then reached out to imbue it with motes of ambient magic from within the area.

Even though the process of controlling the mana in such a way still drained him, he’d found quickly that it was far more efficient to use the ambient mana than it was to use what was within his channels. Something about the interaction to guide the motes was less stressful than using his own power for the same task. It hadn’t seemed that way at first, but he’d discovered it while fighting Lycinius.

Dragon’s Gaze is now Level 15!

Aurelian fed the construct of Soulforce-shaped-mana until the massive claymore shape of Calamity’s Blade burned in his vision, crackling with the prismatic power of the mana ensconced within it and flickering red on the edges where the Sanguinated essence of his Soulforce maintained its shape. Crackles of scarlet aetheric lightning leapt from the construct, and he heard Bael’tharax draw in a deep breath behind him.

“CALAMITY’S BLADE.” The ancient dragon king said with what Aurelian almost thought was reverence. “BY THE ETERNALS, YOU TRULY HAVE REDISCOVERED IT. IN ONLY FIVE DAYS, NO LESS. YOU HAVE EXCEEDED ALL CALCULATED EXPECTATIONS, AURELIAN.”

“I had help,” he admitted with a smile while Tarixi simply hovered in stunned silence, and watched while Aurelian inhaled and focused on Karsys and Zylara. “Just take a deep breath and get ready for, well, whatever is going to happen.” He said to them bracingly. He tried to soften the words with a smile, and the pair attempted to return it, though in Karsys’ case it looked forced and in Zylara’s it was just an awkward grimace.

The pair nodded back to him to signal their readiness.

“Sever.” Aurelian said simply. It sounded right.

Calamity’s Blade swung through the metaphysical chains like a hot knife through butter, and each one exploded into motes of light mana. This time he could watch the entire process, and he stared while the chains quite literally detonated along their entire length at a speed that was almost impossible to track. Very likely that detonation would continue all the way to their origin point far above, and that was… exciting, interesting, exhilarating, and concerning all at the same time.

The reaction from Karsys and Zylara was more visceral as both human and elf cried out in agony and dropped to all fours. They lasted all of two seconds before opening their mouths and vomiting noisily onto the cavern floor, limbs trembling like they’d run their bodies to the limit.

“It… it feels like… like the world is spinning.” Zylara gasped out in a breathless voice. “I feel as though my very soul has been… cleaved. Like a poison I never knew was there has been excised. It is not unlike having an infected wound cauterised.”

“By the Mantle,” Karsys said while gripping the stone beneath his fists. “By all the Eternals. I can’t… I can barely focus, it… Imperator help me, it feels like you inverted my core and tore out a chunk of it I never knew was there. It aches down to the centre of my being.”

“That is the nature of the godstaint,” Tarixi said while moving closer to examine them, “and why it is so insidious. It latches onto the fundamental core of who you are, and worms its way within until it is so much a part of you that you could not turn away if you tried. That is why Calamity’s Blade is so unique, and so important. It is the only weapon we have that can truly sever a god’s connection even when that connection has gone beyond all hope of natural amelioration.”

Aurelian paid only half a mind to the conversation, and was instead focusing on their cores and Soulforces, and looking for any remnant of the golden chains. It was difficult to parse given the sheer amount of radiant Light mana floating in the air following the chains’ destruction, and separating what was aftershock from what might be tether remnants was… difficult.

In the end it took him five minutes and at least three careful circles around the retching pair to be satisfied he truly had destroyed the tether utterly. Calamity’s Blade was a one-hit, one-kill ability against such things it seemed. Though… he had to wonder how it would fare against the truly devout. Lycinius had been a slave, not a truly devout follower, and had been tied to Absolum by force, not true desire.

Zylara and Karsys were definitely not willing pawns. Their reactions proved that.

So how would a person who had chosen to serve the gods, and one whom was potentially in full awareness of their tether deal with the ability? Would their tether be severed as simply and easily as Karsys and Zylara’s, or would their desperate faith make the process less of a liberation and more of a brutalistic repetition of savage hacking to break the chain. Furthermore, how could he keep it broken? What was to stop them simply re-establishing the connection?

Aurelian turned to Bael’tharax to ask the question, and found the dragon staring right at him in consideration.

“YOUR FEELINGS REMAIN LOUD AND OBVIOUS, AURELIAN. YOU WISH TO KNOW WHAT STOPS A SEVERED CORD FROM BEING RETHREADED, I PRESUME?”

“Cheater.” He said without heat. “Yes, please. I need to know why this isn’t just going to be negated by the first godsworn with a Solarian boner.”

“IGNORING YOUR PHRASING, IT IS SIMPLY PUT A MATTER OF SCARRING. THE AREA WITHIN WHICH A TETHER CONNECTS IS ALWAYS, TO MY UNDERSTANDING, THE SAME. MUCH LIKE MAGICAL WOUNDS THAT ARE UNABLE TO FULLY HEAL, A SEVERED CORD CANNOT RECONNECT WITHOUT GREAT AND PERILOUS EFFORT.”

“But it could?” Aurelian pressed insistently. “Reconnect, I mean?”

“Yes.” Tarixi interjected. “But not nearly as powerfully as before, and not a third time if the second was severed as well. Rejoining with one’s god after Calamity’s Blade has severed the connection is… extremely improbable at best. It would take a truly devoted individual many months to attain a reconnection, and even then it would never be as strong as it once was.”

“So for the majority of people, it won’t matter because they’ll never have the faith or need to be so intensely devoted.” Aurelian rubbed his chin while thinking, and ignored the texture of his glove while he did. “Okay that makes sense. I wondered about that. It was a point of serious concern for me.”

“I admit I only know this based on what I’ve read and been told,” Tarixi said slowly. “But Bael’tharax has genetic memories from the other dragon kings, just as Bahamut eventually will. I would wager he has memories of observing and seeing the first Calamity personally.”

“INDEED. SHE WAS A FORCE OF NATURE IN HER OWN WAY, AND FIERCELY INDEPENDENT. EVEN AFTER THE LUNARI SUMMONED HER, SHE REFUSED TO ADHERE TO THEIR STRICTURES. A WOMAN OF GREAT CONVICTION, AND A PERSONAL HATRED FOR AUTOCRATS. SHE WAS THE PERFECT ENEMY TO CALL AGAINST SOLARIUS AND HIS ILK. HER USE OF THE SELFSAME BLADE WAS ALWAYS DECISIVE.”

“Alright that’s good to know, at least. Now all I have to do is beat an army forty thousand or more strong to a secret city I know nothing about, and convince a bunch of people that I’m the Reclaimer while rooting out the godsworn poisoning everything. No biggie.” He turned to Tarixi. “Oh, and I’m going to need an explanation of the Mantle. A proper one. A real one. No more obfuscation.”

“I…”

“And a proper retelling of the oath, too! I can’t fix it if I don’t know it.” He grumbled.

“HE IS CORRECT, TARIXI. IT IS HIS NOW TO INHERIT. TO RECLAIM.”

“Very well…” The goblin acceeded. “Is that all, Aurelian?”

“Well no, actually. There’s one thing that you’ve never answered.” He said to both dragon and goblin, while Zylara and Karsys slowly managed to pull themselves into something resembling a more relaxed posture. They appeared to be listening as well, albeit doing so between careful catching of their breath and cleaning of their mouths. They both still appeared pale and shaken, and had odd twitches on occasion.

Aurelian didn’t envy them.

“You always refer to her, to my predecessor, as the ‘First Calamity’, or ‘The Calamity’. Didn’t she have a name? A real name?”

Tarixi blinked at him for a moment, and then abruptly grinned. “Well of course she did.”

“Okay.” Aurelian said with a hint of annoyance. “So what was it?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Aurelian?” The goblin asked with a laugh. “I thought it truly was.”

“No.” He said with another flare of annoyance. “So tell me, please.”

“Elysea, Aurelian.” Tarixi answered with another quiet laugh. “The First Calamity’s name was Elysea.”