Path of Dragons

It was almost certainly a bad idea.

Elijah was well aware that he should have at least gone back to the cultivation cave to let everyone know what he was going to do. Yet, as he stepped past the threshold, he pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the excitement building in his chest.

The door itself had been a pain to bypass, and Elijah had been forced to brute force it in his guardian form. Now it lay in pieces. Probably not very scientific of him to destroy it, but that just proved what he already knew about his nature. He might have been trained as a scientist, but he definitely didn’t comport himself as one.

Just like a certain whip-wielding archeologist.

He smiled as he considered that comparison and stepped through the doorway. The air on the other side had already mingled a bit with the outside atmosphere, but there remained a stale smell to it that hinted at what he might find deeper inside. Elijah pushed One with Nature as hard as he could, but he could sense nothing in the subterranean ruins. So, relying only on his mundane senses, he descended a set of worn and mud-covered steps.

He reached into his Ghoul-Hide Satchel and retrieved a mundane flashlight. It was a purchase he’d made back in Seattle, and rather than running on batteries, it used a matrix of enchantments to convert ethera into electricity. Elijah didn’t know precisely how it all worked. That it did was all he really cared about.

When he flipped the switch, the flashlight cast the narrow stairway in bright, white light. Moisture glistened on the walls, and green algae coated everything. Unlike other ruins Elijah had visited, there were no decorations. Instead, it was just a stairway leading deeper underground.

Elijah took one more step, but then he stopped. His heart pounded out of his chest as he realized what he’d missed.

He couldn’t feel the algae.

And yet, he could see it. He could smell the musty odor. The scent of decay filled his nostrils, and even so, One with Nature told him that it was all a lie. He backed away, his mind whirling with confusion. His senses – both mundane and ethereal – had never come into conflict, and so, he learned to rely on them, trusting them fully.

But now, he found himself questioning everything. Panic born of confusion filled his mind and body, and it didn’t fade even when he once again crossed the threshold. He could still feel it. That distinct lack of life waged war against what he saw with his own two eyes.

Even amidst that panic, curiosity rose within him, taunting him with the wanting explanation. Until that moment, he’d thought One with Nature – especially now that it had been enhanced by his specialization – was infallible. But now? He refused to accept that the skill was the problem. The issue had to be with him.

So, he pushed against his perceived limitations, focusing not on life, but on ethera. And then, just when he felt on the verge of bursting a blood vessel or two, he felt it. The area beyond the threshold wasn’t entirely empty. There was no life – not as he knew it, at least. Rather, there was something else. A flavor of ethera he’d never encountered.

It was cold. Decaying. Lifeless. The only word he could use to adequately describe it was death. But once he discovered it, he could sense it spilling through the doorway he’d unblocked and infecting everything around him.

But from what he could tell, it wasn’t harmful.

Life. Death. It was all part of the same cycle. Elijah felt a kinship to it, though, at the same time, it was clearly apart. There was something else woven into it. Something unnatural. He didn’t fully understand it, and he knew that it would require a lifetime of study before he came close to comprehension. Still, it felt dangerous to look too deeply, and in a way he couldn’t hope to grasp.

Maybe one day.

One thing he did understand was that the aura of death wasn’t strong enough to be dangerous to him. Perhaps it would be for some others, but as death was an integral part of nature, he was inoculated against what he strongly suspected was powerful attuned ethera. It could still affect him, but he had the tools to counteract it. Every healer did.

With that in mind, he took a deep breath, tasting the decay in the air, then once again crossed the threshold and resumed his descent. As he did, he felt the death-attuned ethera slowly trying to worm its way into him. He counteracted that by casting Soothe, though he knew that if the density of that aura of death continued to progress, the heal-over-time spell wouldn’t be enough to stave off the effects.

Still, his curiosity drove him forward, and after a few moments, he reached the bottom of the stairs. There, he saw a long hallway lined with what looked like shelves. Stacked three high, they extended from one end of the hall to the next, each column of shelves only separated by a few inches.

Elijah leaned forward, inspecting the contents of one of those ledges. Or cubby hole, more accurately. It was around six feet long and half as tall, extending a few feet into the surrounding stone.

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The skeleton he found made the nature of the ruins obvious.

“A crypt,” he muttered to himself. From their lack of legs and presence of a long tail, he could tell that the skeletons were ta’alaki. When he leaned closer, he realized that the skeletal structures weren’t similar to snakes as he’d expected. Rather, they more closely resembled aquatic mammals like manatees or seals, though with obvious differences like the absence of lower appendages and the presence of four arms. It was an interesting discovery, though not one that had any real bearing on his situation. So, as intriguing as he found the skeletal structure, he only studied it for a few moments before moving on.

With every step down the hall, he felt the density of the deathly ethera increasing, and by the time he reached the end of the corridor, he’d had to add a cast of Healing Rain just to keep up with the decay.

And something told him that on the other side of the door before him, it would only grow stronger. For a few moments, Elijah studied the barrier. It was similar to the one he’d crushed to pieces outside, but even without touching it, it felt flimsy to the point that it verged on crumbling without any input from him.

He hit it with his new staff, and the thing turned to dust.

Elijah coughed, waving his hand in front of him as a thick death aura wafted out of the next chamber, nearly overwhelming him. By reflex, he used Nature’s Bloom. But he knew it wasn’t going to be strong enough, so he exchanged his new Feral Spire for the Staff of the Serpent Healer. The thirty percent increase to the efficacy of his healing spells let him establish an equilibrium, but with each cast using a portion of his finite pool of ethera, he knew it put him on a timer.

Without further contemplation, he stepped through the door and when the dust cleared, he found himself looking at a large chamber, at the center of which was a dais. Upon that dais rested a sarcophagus. Made of silver and gold, the upper portion had been molded to resemble a prone ka’alaki with their arms folded across their chest.

“It really is a tomb,” he said, glancing around. There was nothing else in the room, and though he could see smatterings of color, even the frescoes on the walls had faded so much as to be completely unrecognizable.

He stepped forward, and the coffin began to shake as something crunched underfoot. He cast Healing Rain once again, hoping to keep the escalating aura of death at bay. Another step, and he lost ground. The sarcophagus continued to vibrate, more violently with every passing second. The pattern repeated itself as Elijah slowly closed on the dais, and when he’d reached a point only five feet away, the lid of the gaudy coffin lifted from the base.

A puff of dust rode a wave of escaped air, and the potency of the deathly aura escalated. Elijah took a stumble backward, and when he lifted his hand, he saw rotting flesh flaking away, only to be replaced by new muscle, over which grew fresh skin. A second later, the cycle repeated.

There was a lesson there about the cycle of life and death, but Elijah knew he couldn’t endure it long enough to understand it. In fact, he was on the verge of fleeing when he saw a skeletal hand shove the sarcophagus’ lid to the side. It crashed to the ground, cracking the stone floor and sending a metallic echo to spread through the room.

But Elijah only had eyes for what that hand held.

A glittering leaf. A guide. Answers.

Only then did he glance down to see that the entire floor was covered in bones. Most were so decayed that they were unidentifiable, but Elijah saw a few skulls here and there.

“You seek my treasure,” a voice echoed through the tomb, so loud that Elijah’s first response was to clutch his ears. “Come and take it, child. My burden may yet be relieved.”

Elijah wheeled around, searching for the source. But there was nothing there. However, the sense of decay had continued to climb, and it only took him a moment to recognize that it came from the coffin. Knowing that his timeframe had been cut significantly, Elijah pushed forward. As he did so, he continued to heal himself even as his body rotted and was reborn in a vicious and painful cycle that stretched his willpower to the very limit.

He leveraged his newly evolved Jade Mind to its maximum capacity, forcing the nine apertures in his Mind as wide as possible. Ethera flooded in, racing through the conduits of his Soul and into his Core, only to be drained by his continued healing. There was an equilibrium there, but one that was beginning to tip in the wrong direction.

Elijah lurched forward, his joints creaking with the strain, until he slammed into the open sarcophagus. Clutching the edge, he hung on for dear life as he reached up and wrapped his fingers around the glittering leaf.

Or that was his intention.

In his state, his aim was a little off, and before he could adjust, his fingers closed around the skeletal hand. His strength gave out, but his grip remained firm, even as he fell free of the sarcophagus. Clutching his prize to his chest, Elijah continued to heal as he dragged himself away from the coffin.

One inch at a time, he left a trail of decayed flesh to coat the bone-strewn floor. Yet, with every foot he retreated, the decay dissipated until he finally started making some headway. Then, by the time he reached the door and climbed a few steps toward the surface, he’d managed to leave the worst of it behind.

Even so, the impact of the experience stuck with him, weakening him to such a degree that even dragging himself up those steps was a massive chore. Only when he finally tumbled free of the tomb did he start to feel better.

Then, he vomited, though when he looked at the resultant puddle, all he saw was a green-and-black sludge that didn’t even begin to resemble any food he’d ever eaten.

What’s more, it emitted a dense aura of death that Elijah couldn’t ignore. For a few minutes, he just stared at it before vomiting again. And again after that. For almost an hour, he steadily expelled the run-off from his encounter with that deathly ethera, and even when he finally pushed himself to his feet and stumbled away, he felt it roiling within.

It was only when he was more than a mile away from the tomb that he started to feel better, but even then, Elijah knew it would be some time before he was completely recovered. So, he returned to the cultivation cave, where he began to meditate on the experience.

Looking back, the decision to keep going had been stupid. He could recognize that much. Yet, at the time, he’d felt something driving him forward. Something integral to his very being, as if his very nature was telling him that he needed to experience what the tomb had to offer.

He hadn’t even questioned it. He’d never considered that he should resist, and even after what he’d been through – he knew precisely how close he’d come to dying – he wasn’t sure that he should have fought against those instincts. Because as he meditated, concentrating on the lingering death aura still clinging to him, Elijah could sense that there was a lesson to be learned from the way it interacted with everything else.

He just wasn’t sure what form that lesson might take.

So, still clutching the skeletal hand that was his prize, he continued to dwell on it.

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