Ozyaranthes observed the confrontation with detached interest.

  The human—the professor, they'd called him—had barely managed to complete his fire spell before Sael ended it. He did not use overwhelming force or dramatic counterspells. The barrier went up, the flames dispersed, and Sael's hand shot out to catch the fleeing man by the ankle. It was methodical and efficient. The way one might swat a particularly slow fly.

  Then the entire exchange—if it could be called that— had lasted perhaps two seconds.

  Now the professor lay half dead on the scorched ground, Sael crouched beside him with one hand pressed against the man's chest. Whatever spell he'd cast next wasn't visible—no light show, no dramatic incantation—but Ozyaranthes could sense the magic at work. Something invasive and precise, threading through the professor's body.

  The human started convulsing.

  His back arched off the ground, muscles seizing in rhythmic spasms that looked decidedly unpleasant. His mouth opened in what might have been a scream, but no sound emerged, whether because Sael had silenced him or because his lungs couldn't coordinate themselves enough to produce noise was unclear.

  Foam gathered at the corners of his lips.

  Ozyaranthes tilted his head, watching with curiosity. This was, he supposed, what "almost killing someone to save them" looked like in practice. The Duke had gone pale and taken several steps back. His guards looked like they were reconsidering their career choices.

  The convulsions intensified for a moment, then began to change character.

  The professor's chest started to bulge. It wasn't in an evenly manner, or even from swelling or injury, but in a specific location just below his sternum. The flesh pushed outward as if something beneath was trying to force its way through, creating a visible lump that shifted and moved.

  The lump traveled upward. Slowly at first, then with increasing urgency, it moved from the professor's chest toward his throat. The man's convulsions had stopped now, replaced by a different kind of distress: his hands clawed at his neck, eyes bulging, face turning an unhealthy shade of purple as whatever was inside him pressed against his windpipe.

  Sael maintained his position, hand still on the professor's chest, expression perfectly calm.

  The lump reached the man's jaw.

  His mouth stretched open wider than seemed anatomically reasonable, jaw distending. A wet, choking sound emerged, followed by what could only be described as the most undignified exit Ozyaranthes had ever witnessed.

  The professor vomited.

  And it wasn't food or bile, but something else entirely. A wisp of purple light spilled from his mouth, translucent and writhing, about the size of a human fist. It glowed with its own internal radiance and seemed to have no fixed shape, constantly shifting and reforming.

  The purple wisp hovered for perhaps half a second, as if disoriented.

  Then it bolted.

  The thing moved with startling speed, shooting away from the professor's prone form. It wove through the air in an erratic pattern, zigging and zagging, heading for the treeline with obvious desperation.

  Sael didn't stand. Didn't chase. Didn't even appear particularly concerned. No, he simply raised his free hand, fingers spread, and spoke a single word.

  "[Purification]."

  Lightning didn't fall from the sky—Ozyaranthes would have noticed storm clouds gathering—but that's what the spell resembled. A bolt of brilliant white light materialized above the fleeing wisp and struck downward with the speed and violence of a natural lightning strike.

  The purple entity had no chance to dodge.

  The light consumed it entirely, and for a brief instant, the wisp was visible inside the radiance. Then it simply wasn't. No explosion, no dramatic dissipation, just there one moment and gone the next.

  The spell faded eventually, and silence settled over the clearing, broken only by the professor's ragged breathing as he lay on the ground, alive but unconscious.

  Ozyaranthes examined his wing feathers with affected disinterest, preening at a few that had gotten slightly disheveled during the cart ride. The display of magical prowess had been adequate, he supposed. Certainly efficient. But it hardly warranted commentary from him.

  Sael remained crouched beside the unconscious professor, his hand still pressed against the man's chest. He closed his eyes briefly, and the air around them shifted as white and green lights emerged from whatever spell was being cast, and soon enough, the professor's body began to change.

  The bruises that mottled his skin, purple, black and angry red, started to fade. Not all at once, but in a gradual progression that reminded Ozyaranthes of watching ink dissolve in water. The discoloration lightened, shifted through shades of green and yellow, then simply disappeared as healthy color returned to the man's flesh.

  More striking was what happened to the blood.

  A pool of it had spread across the scorched ground beneath the professor, seeping from half a dozen wounds where the Corruption had torn through skin and muscle. The blood began to move. It crept back toward its source, defying gravity and logic both, flowing upward in thin rivulets that sought out the cuts and gashes they'd escaped from.

  The wounds themselves closed behind the returning blood.

  Flesh knitted together as torn muscle reunited and split skin sealed itself, leaving behind nothing but faint pink lines that faded even as Ozyaranthes watched. Within moments, there was no evidence the professor had been bleeding at all.

  The man's breathing, which had been shallow and erratic, steadied into something deeper and more regular. His chest rose and fell with the rhythm of genuine sleep rather than unconsciousness brought on by trauma and color returned to his face.

  Sael lifted his hand from the professor's chest and stood.

  The Duke approached slowly, staring down at the now-peaceful form.

  "Is he..." the Duke started, then seemed to realize he wasn't sure how to finish that question. "Will he recover?"

  "He'll wake in a few minutes," Sael said, brushing dirt from his robes. "The Corruption is gone. His mana core took some damage during the extraction, but it will heal naturally over the next few days. He'll be tired, possibly disoriented, but otherwise fine." He glanced down at the professor. "Better than fine, actually. I had to repair quite a bit of existing damage while I was in there. Old injuries, poorly healed fractures, some organ scarring. He's probably in better physical condition now than he's been in years."

  "I see," said the Duke..

  Ozyaranthes turned his head away from the scene, directing his gaze toward a particularly uninteresting section of treeline. He preened at his wing feathers with exaggerated concentration, as if the state of his plumage was the single most important matter currently demanding his attention.

  He had heard of Sael the Great, of course.

  The first time had been in the Court of Scales, when Ozyaranthes was barely ten years old—a hatchling by dragon reckoning, though already possessed of more power and intelligence than most human mages would achieve in their entire brief lifetimes. The remaining dragon elders had gathered in those ancient halls carved from obsidian and starlight, their massive forms coiled in the spaces designed for beings of true magnificence, to discuss whether their kind would join the Battle of Yrsult.

  The Corruption had come again, and the world of man and elf and dwarf and all those other lesser beings stood on the precipice of annihilation. And the dragons, survivors of the First Descent of the Primordial when Corruption had nearly wiped their entire species from existence, weighed the cost of involvement.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Ozyaranthes had listened, silent and attentive as befitted a young dragon in the presence of his elders, as they debated.

  And he had heard that name.

  Sael the Great.

  Over and over, spoken by dragons whose scales bore the scars of countless battles, whose voices carried the weight of millennia. They discussed him as they might discuss a particularly noteworthy storm or an unusually powerful magical artifact. Not quite as an equal—dragons did not have equals among the lesser races—but with something that approximated respect.

  But it had been the first time in Ozyaranthes's young life that he had heard dragon elders speak of a lesser being and use the word "Great."

  He had not believed it, of course.

  A human, no matter how magically gifted, no matter how many battles won or spells mastered, could never stand on the same level as a dragon. The very notion was absurd. Dragons were born of magic itself, ancient when the world was young, inherently superior in every measure that mattered. Humans were brief candles, flickering out almost as soon as they were lit.

  In the end, the elders had chosen not to join the battle.

  The cost was too high, they had said. Too many dragons had already been lost in the First Descent. Their numbers were too few, their survival too precious to risk in what might well be a futile struggle. Let the lesser races fight their own battles. Let them fall if they must. Dragons would endure, as they always had, waiting out the Corruption in their sanctuaries until the world was safe again.

  The Fey had made the same choice, retreating behind their veiled dimension.

  The lesser races stood alone, and somehow, impossibly, they had won.

  Fifteen thousand of them had paid the price with their lives at Yrsult. The best warriors, the greatest mages, the most skilled commanders that the lesser races could muster—all of them had fallen in a battle that raged for many days and nights. But they had stopped the Corruption. Driven it back. Saved their world without the aid of dragons or Fey or any of the ancient powers that had deemed the cost too high.

  When Ozyaranthes had heard the news, he had felt vindicated in his original assessment.

  Fifteen thousand dead. If dragons had joined the battle, it would have been a formality. A handful of dragon elders could have accomplished what had cost the lesser races so dearly. The fact that they had won at all merely proved they had some capacity for determination, perhaps even a certain low cunning, but it hardly elevated them to greatness.

  Sael the Great had survived, reportedly.

  One of the very few who had.

  Ozyaranthes had filed that information away as he might note the survival of any particularly resilient insect—mildly interesting, but ultimately insignificant in the grand scope of things.

  Centuries had passed.

  And then, in a throne room not so long ago, Ozyaranthes had encountered the man himself.

  ...And been turned into a chicken.

  Ozyaranthes's hatred for the man was a carefully tended thing, nurtured in the deepest parts of what remained of his draconic soul. It burned with the cold fire of absolute loathing, the kind of antipathy that could only come from being utterly, completely, and thoroughly humiliated by someone who had then had the audacity to act as if the entire matter was a minor inconvenience rather than a cosmic injustice.

  And now here he was, following the man around. Perched in his cart. Forced to witness displays of casual magical competence that, under any other circumstances, Ozyaranthes might have acknowledged as adequately performed.

  He refused.

  He was a dragon, and dignity demanded nothing less than supreme indifference to parlor tricks, even if they were admittedly well-executed parlor tricks performed by the infuriating mage who had reduced him to his current ridiculous state and seemed entirely unbothered by having done so.

  Ozyaranthes continued preening his feathers.

  He would not give Sael the satisfaction of looking impressed.

  A groan pulled Ozyaranthes's attention back to the scene before him.

  The professor stirred, eyelids fluttering as consciousness began to return. His hand moved weakly toward his head, fingers trembling with the effort. Another groan, this one more coherent, though still thick with confusion and pain.

  Sael knelt beside him again, positioning himself in the man's line of sight.

  "Easy," he said. "Don't try to move yet. You're safe now."

  The professor's eyes opened fully, unfocused and glassy. He blinked several times, trying to orient himself. His gaze darted around the clearing, taking in the scorched ground, the watching guards, the Duke standing several paces away with his arms crossed.

  "What—" The word came out as barely more than a whisper. He swallowed, tried again. "What happened?"

  "You were corrupted," Sael said. "I removed it. You'll feel terrible for a while, but you'll live."

  The professor's expression cycled through several emotions in rapid succession: confusion, disbelief, dawning horror as memory apparently began to return. His breathing quickened, hands clutching at the ground beneath him as if trying to anchor himself to something real.

  "No," he whispered. "No, that can't—I wouldn't—" His voice broke. "Please tell me I didn't..."

  "It's alright," Sael continued. "The entity is gone. You're in control of yourself again."

  "I'm not—" The professor's hands moved to his face, pressing against his temples as if he could physically push away the memories flooding back. "That wasn't me. Those things I did, the people I—God, those were my colleagues. I infected them. I watched myself do it and I couldn't—I couldn't stop—"

  Pathetic, Ozyaranthes thought, watching the human unravel. Though he supposed it was understandable. Lesser beings were so fragile, in body and mind both. Having one's will subsumed by an eldritch entity would be traumatic for a creature with such limited mental fortitude.

  Still pathetic, though.

  The professor's breathing had turned rapid and shallow, verging on hyperventilation. "How long? How long was I...?"

  "Several years at minimum," Sael said. "Possibly longer. The corruption can be subtle in its early stages."

  "Years." The word came out strangled. The professor stared at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else. "I don't... I can't reconcile it. The things I remember doing, the thoughts I remember having—they felt like mine. Like I was making choices. But they weren't my choices. They couldn't have been." His voice rose with desperate conviction. "I would never—I'm not that person. I'm not—"

  "You weren't in control," Sael said, his tone brooking no argument. "The corruption subverts will, not just action. What you remember feeling, what seemed like your own thoughts, those were imposed on you. Artificial constructs designed to make the infection's directives feel natural."

  The professor took several shaky breaths, visibly trying to compose himself and failing. Tears had started tracking down his face, though he seemed unaware of them.

  Sael seemed to falter, uncertainty flickering across his features as he looked at the sobbing man before him. Ozyaranthes had noticed this about him before as he went to buy food for the children in Ashams, the man could was certainly powerful, but put him in front of another lesser having an emotional crisis and he was suddenly at a loss.

  The smart thing would be to offer some reassurance. Console the lesser, create a favorable environment for questioning. Basic social manipulation. But Sael just... didn't seem to know how.

  It was oddly satisfying, actually, seeing him stumble over something so mundane.

  He ended up waiting in awkward silence, the man still trembling pathetically in front of him, until the sobbing finally died down to occasional wet, hitching breaths. Then Sael cleared his throat.

  "Now. I need you to answer some questions while your memories are still fresh. Can you do that?"

  The professor nodded weakly, looking every bit as wretched as he sounded. "I... I'll try."

  "Aldric," Sael said. "I know he wasn't working alone. What were his specific goals within the corruption's network?"

  "I don't know much. The corruption, it didn't give me complete access to everything. Just... impressions. Directives. I knew Aldric was important, that much was clear. A coordinator of some kind. But the details..." He closed his eyes. "It's all fragmented. And I don't know what's real memory and what the corruption made me believe was real."

  "Where are the other cells located?" Sael asked.

  "I don't know that either." Frustration bled through the professor's exhaustion and anguish. "We were compartmentalized. I only knew about our group here in Orlys—the people Aldric had infected directly, the ones I'd infected in turn." His voice broke again. "We were all... separate. Cells, working independently."

  "A distributed network as always," Sael said, more to himself than to the professor. "How did the collective function?"

  The professor's brow furrowed with the effort of recall, his expression still carrying that haunted quality. "It was like... a hive mind, but not complete. Fragmented. I could feel the others sometimes, especially when the corruption was strong. Like voices at the edge of hearing, all working toward the same purpose but not quite connected enough to share specific information." He opened his eyes, staring at nothing. "It felt normal at the time. Like that's how my mind had always worked. But now I can feel the absence of those voices and it's... wrong. Even though I know they were never supposed to be there."

  "What was the directive you all shared?"

  "To summon the Primordial of Corruption back into the world." The words came out flat. "To bring it here and give it form. That's what it wanted. What we all wanted, when the corruption was in control." He looked up at Sael with desperate eyes. "I remember wanting that. Truly wanting it, not just acting on compulsion. How is that possible? How could I want the end of everything?"

  Sael didn't answer the existential question. "You said you had cells. How many did you know of?"

  "Just ours. The one here in Orlys." He glanced at Sael. "Which you've already dealt with..."

  "Hmm."

  This... sounded like a hmm of confirmation. He somehow had very expressive hmms.

  "Right. I suspected as much when the connection suddenly severed." The professor rubbed at his temples. "There were others, I think. Had to be. But like I said, we were compartmentalized. No way to know for certain where or how many."

  "And Aldric's role beyond coordinating your local cell?"

  "I don't know. The corruption kept us isolated even from each other in some ways. I knew Aldric was my friend and colleague, but what he knew or what his specific orders were..." The professor shook his head. "It's all murky."

  His expression turned inward, thoughtful despite the clear distress. "But as the corruption advanced, and my link to the hive mind grew stronger, I started getting... glimpses. Of something deeper."

  Sael's attention sharpened, though his posture remained relaxed. "What kind of glimpses?"

  "The real goal," the professor said slowly, carefully, as if he was still piecing the memory together even as he spoke it. "The summoning... that was always the ultimate objective, yes. But there was something more immediate and practical." He met Sael's gaze. "They're looking for a suitable avatar. Someone whose body the Primordial's essence can occupy."

  Ozyaranthes let out an involuntary "Bwok!", and immediately regretted. This one was a bwok of surprise.

  Because an avatar for a primordial did not sound good. Not good at all.

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