It was a disturbingly vulnerable feeling, as though they could flex their fist and crush her, but something else around her was unraveling. She couldn’t even tell what. Her fate, maybe?

Many voices spoke in unison, and it was as though the world itself spoke.

“Be healed.”

Yerin’s senses blanked out.

She came to herself an unknown time later, standing on the bough of the giant tree, staring down into the ruined valley of the gold dragons. Smoke and clouds of dust still rose.

Malice stood at her side, wearing a mysterious smile. “How do you feel?”

“If I’m any sturdier than I was two seconds ago, I couldn’t prove it.” Yerin felt cheated. She had only the Monarchs’ word for it that anything about her had changed at all.

“You will feel the effect of your request once you return to the boundary formation, but the true value you should hopefully never feel. We have removed problems that you would have faced, so if we have done our job, then you will never see them at all.” She ran hands down her bowstring and looked into the distance. “Now, shall we go greet the Wandering Titan?”

Yerin had thought she was following along, but now her thoughts scraped to a halt.

“…you played me like a flute.”

“The others will feel my power when I engage the Titan, but the more misinformation I spread about my intentions, the better.” She shot Yerin a wink. “Also, you called me petty earlier, so I thought I would prove you right.”

“Never said that.”

“That’s what you meant. Of course I was always going to help you. You killed Seshethkunaaz, may his name be forgotten by all who walk the earth. At the moment, you’re my favorite.”

Yerin was thoroughly sick of Monarchs. “What was all that about losing cities?”

Malice shrugged. “What’s a city or two compared to the favor of the Uncrowned Queen?”

Reigan Shen emerged from a tear in the world, striding out onto the blighted rock of the Wastelands.

He had gone to absurd lengths to disguise his actions from the other Monarchs. Usually, they would be able to track him the moment he stepped through the Way. Especially if they were watching him, and Malice had kept purple eyes trained on him for days.

He couldn’t imagine why.

Now, not only had he covered his tracks with false trails, dummy portals, and truly delicate manipulation of spatial authority, but Malice had finally taken her attention off him.

It would take her too long to realize her protections had been breached. By then, it would be too late.

Reigan Shen clasped hands behind his back and surveyed the round crimson shapes sticking onto the landscape. There were millions of them, like seed pods clutching anything they could reach all the way out to the horizon, each the size of his head. Some clung to crystal arches, others shone from within caves, and still others stuck to one another and hung from petrified trees like clusters of grapes.

Eggs of the Bleeding Phoenix.

When they felt the power in his blood, the eggs began to roll toward him or stretch out hair-thin feelers. He kept them away with an effortless use of aura.

The eggs couldn’t be destroyed, not really. They could be broken apart, but they would only re-form. Any attack capable of removing them conceptually would prompt the Dreadgod to reintegrate. Or, as with a lethal attack on any Dreadgod, would awaken the other three of its kind.

The previous generation of Monarchs had learned that the hard way.

The only realistic way to slow the Bleeding Phoenix’s recovery was to give its eggs nothing to feed on. Malice had quarantined this entire area, sealed it with scripts, troops, and constructs, and thereby kept as much prey away as possible.

Even so, every creature with blood running through its veins that had once lived in this section of the Wastelands was now part of the Dreadgod.

If someone else managed to break through the layers of security, they would only become Phoenix food. Even another Monarch wouldn’t be able to do much except potentially antagonize a deadly foe.

They didn’t have the key.

From one of his isolated pocket spaces, Reigan Shen pulled an oblong rectangular box. To the eye, it seemed to be made of seamless, unblemished steel polished to a mirror’s shine.

No force in Cradle could break this container. It was an Abidan artifact, one of the few in Shen’s possession.

It responded to his will as its rightful owner, unfolding like a flower into a square platter presenting its contents. The key to the western labyrinth, which Tiberian had once shown him.

A shriveled, mummified, chalk-white right hand.

Hunger of every kind passed through Shen. Hunger for food, yes, but also for recognition, for respect, for love, for attention, for success, for safety, for power. Greed flowed through him, and bloodlust, and plain old classic lust.

He relished the sensations as, around him, the stone shook. Pebbles lifted into the air, drifting closer to the hand as its hunger warped even gravity.

The Way stirred around him, affected by an artifact of such incredible significance. If he held the hand exposed long enough, it might manifest an Icon.

He wouldn’t need that long.

With shocking speed, eggs tumbled into one another, sticking together, forming a shapeless clump. Soon, living creatures infested by the eggs would come running to donate themselves to the Dreadgod. Nine out of ten victims of these Phoenix fragments became mindless husks controlled by their parasite, and the tenth gained the dubious honor of a Blood Shadow.

The balls of blood and hunger madra began to melt like wax, taking on a more familiar form.

The Bleeding Phoenix congealed in front of him, its eyes blazing scarlet. It was small enough to fit in a barn, for now, but with every second more eggs hurled themselves into its body, adding to its mass.

Shen’s heart pounded. He couldn’t show weakness in front of the greatest predator in this world, but even before it was fully formed, the Phoenix radiated a pressure that gripped his spirit painfully tight.

When it lowered its beak and let out a shrieking cry, it was all he could do not to retreat back through space.

Instead, with deliberately casual movements, he snapped off a fingertip of the mummified hand. The last joint of the pinky.

Then he flicked the treat to the Dreadgod.

A beak snapped, and the Phoenix swallowed the tiny piece of power whole.

Reigan Shen spoke as he tucked the rest of the hand back into the box. “That should be enough for you. Now you know the way home.”

The Abidan container melded shut, cutting off all power from the hand. The Phoenix bobbed its head around him, trying to sense—or perhaps smell—any other trace.

The Emperor of the Rosegold continent very much did not sweat as the Dreadgod’s beak brushed by his mane. He remained icy and cool, both mentally and physically, and he would annihilate anyone who implied otherwise.

He would be able to defend himself from a Phoenix of this level, of course. In a body this small, it posed only a little threat to him.

But it would re-form soon, and if it remembered him in its complete form, his life could be in danger.

Fortunately, the Phoenix’s attention left him. It looked west.

Where it now knew its goal waited. The being that some called the fifth Dreadgod, and others called the father of the Dreadgods. Their progenitor, the original, from which they were all formed. Subject One.