The Patriarch must have been confused, but he kept his expression blank as he slid the halfsilver rings over Ziel’s wrists.

Ziel grunted in discomfort as the scripts in the rings activated, restricting his madra.

They weren’t cuffs. He could throw them off if he wanted. They were surely designed to be tied in place somehow, but the gesture was what was important, not the actual effect on his spirit.

“This is not necessary,” the Kazan Patriarch said. “I intend to hear you out in good faith.”

“Yeah, well, I skipped a step. We’re not here to hurt you or take anything. I’m going to lay out the situation for you, and if you don’t like what I have to say, we’ll turn around and leave.”

The Patriarch’s eyes flicked to the Akura Truegold, who looked like she was having trouble keeping her hand away from the long knife at her belt. “Your people said you came to warn us.”

Ziel jerked his head toward the stone wall. “You can feel it yourself. There’s a monster coming.” These people were earth artists; they would have sensed the Titan coming, even if they didn’t know what caused it.

“It’s called a Dreadgod, and we expect it to arrive in a matter of days. When it gets here, everybody in the valley is dead. We have cloudships to take you all to safety, but if you want to take your chances, that’s up to you.”

Ziel stopped to take another swig from his bottle. “That’s it. If you don’t trust us, you should still leave on your own.”

He sensed another presence coming closer, creeping along the edges of the wall. It was only at the Foundation stage, so he ignored it.

“Our defenses are strong,” the Kazan Patriarch said, and he didn’t sound overly proud. He was simply stating a fact. “We had planned to retreat into our strongholds and withstand the coming storm.”

“These strongholds. They’re underground, aren’t they?”

The Patriarch didn’t say anything, but his wife twitched.

“This Dreadgod can eat entire mountains,” Ziel said. “Hope you’ve got some good scripts.”

With that, he looked down to his side, where the Foundation presence had reappeared. Dark, glittering eyes regarded his cloud in awe.

It was a child. A little boy.

The Patriarch’s wife took in a breath. “Maret! Forgiveness, please, I’ll take him!”

She rushed over as the boy grabbed onto Ziel’s Thousand-Mile Cloud, pulling his tiny body up. Ziel dismissed him.

“He’s fine. He won’t hurt himself.”

The boy’s mother froze. She seemed to be holding herself back from snatching up her son. Ziel understood that; you never knew what would set off strange, possibly hostile sacred artists. If she expressed a lack of trust in him, then as far as she knew, he might become enraged at the disrespect and attack.

He let out a sigh. “I would never lower myself to harm a child. But if it would put you at ease, by all means take him.”

The cloud bobbed beneath him as Maret jumped up and down, giggling at the springy cloud madra.

She looked somewhat relieved and bowed. “This one is…certain that he can come to no harm under your watch, so long as he is not giving offense.”

Ziel had actually been hoping she would take the child back, but it was too much effort to clarify. He just pretended not to notice the boy jumping up and down behind him.

The Patriarch cleared his throat. “Pardon us. Our littlest one is a…curious child. I should have scanned for him when the others left the room.”

Judging by the clumsiness Ziel had seen from the Jades here, his scan would have been slightly less useful than just glancing around with his eyes.

Tiny fists grabbed handfuls of Ziel’s hair, but it would take hundreds of pounds more weight to free even one of Ziel’s hairs. He pushed the boy to the back of his mind and continued.

“If you come with us, we can help you evacuate. We hope that you will be able to return soon, and that your homes will be intact. But if not…well, there is no replacing human lives.”

“Forgiveness, but if you don’t know how much destruction this Dreadgod will cause, then how much danger are we in?”

That slipped in through the cracks in Ziel’s heart, finding an unexpectedly tender place.

He had spoken those words, or ones very similar, years ago upon finding out that the Weeping Dragon was approaching. He’d known all about the Dreadgods, of course, but their sect was ancient. Well-defended. Protected by scripts and constructs.

How much danger could they be in?

As it turned out, they had survived the Dreadgod itself. But not the scavengers that fed in its wake.

When Ziel spoke, his voice was dead. “I used to lead a sect of my own. We decided that we could survive a Dreadgod. I decided. First, we felt the aura tremble, like footsteps shaking the ground. What you’re feeling now.”

He nodded to the walls. “Next, the sky changed color. It’s a change that accompanies each of the Dreadgods, as their power overwhelms all aspects of vital aura. We hunkered down inside defenses, layers of scripts that had stood for centuries.”

Ziel trailed off for a moment as he remembered the sky, raining lightning.

No one else spoke.

“One by one, it stripped away our defenses. Tore off the roof. Toppled buildings. Our techniques were only food for it. And the Dreadgod never stopped, it never saw us, it simply flew on by. We were stripped to the bone by its footsteps, by the wind from its passage. To it, we were only ants.”

Silence still reigned in the room.

Until Ziel felt a child giggle.

He realized that there was a weight on his head, and craned his eyes upward. While he’d been speaking, Maret had climbed up his hair and come to rest on top of his skull, and was now holding onto his horns, rocking back and forth as though riding a bull.

The horrified looks on the faces of the boy’s parents now took on a whole new dimension.

The Patriarch tore his gaze down and cleared his throat. “My sympathies. If your home was destroyed by this Dreadgod as well, then you above all have reason to warn us.”

“Not this Dreadgod,” Ziel said. He reached up and peeled away the child from his head, holding him out to his mother.

She was only too glad to take him.

“There are three others,” Ziel continued. “And what we survived was merely its passing. In front of an attack, there is no survival. There is escape, or there is death.”

Slowly, with no sudden movements that might signal an attack, Ziel pulled off the halfsilver rings restricting his madra and placed them onto the table.

“It is your decision to make. But I wish I had taken this chance myself.”

He turned and urged his Thousand-Mile Cloud to slide toward the door.

“We need time,” the Patriarch called.

“You don’t have it,” Ziel responded.

“It will take at least a day for the clan to respond to our emergency beacon!” the Patriarch’s wife protested.

Ziel stopped and slowly turned around. “You’re going to call your clan to evacuate?”

The Patriarch nodded. “As soon as we leave this room. But our territory is large. One day is already the fastest we can gather, and that’s if we use all our alarms of war and our swiftest riders.”