In my defense, it has apparently beenfive hundred yearssince I reacted to anything, so maybe I can be forgiven for a delayed reaction time, but on the other hand I don’t have time for it.
Godsdamnit. He really thinks he needs to defend me from the priests, and now he’sstillgoing to get himself killed.
And what was thatlookall about, then?!
I haven’t had to make decisions in—literally an age, apparently—let alone quick ones.
But wrath, my old friend, is always with me.
The dragon was supposed toshelterhere, damn it all. Use the temple architecture to lay ambushes to take the priests on one at a time, separated and weakened.
If I had actually managed to get my wits together in time to tell him that, maybe it would have mattered.
Now I will have to move to handle it, because he isnotdying for me.
The priests are almost here; my senses are starting to reconcile how they expanded during my trance.
I don’t have much time.
Move, Wrath.
The hand I clenched before, I move again, using the movement to create a pattern to pass my power through.
One thing I will say for meditating for hundreds of years is that there is now zero mental strain to run a kata. Those paths in my mind are well-worn.
My fist glows magenta.
Then that glow gradually moves up my arm as I begin to move my fingers, then across my shoulder and up to my head as I turn it, gently testing the motion, then down the other side, flowing down my torso and through my legs until my feet tingle with the power reigniting me.
My muscles aren’t decayed from being in magical stasis; I simply haven’t needed to move them, separated as my mind was from my body in order to hold the Quiet steady. Now I have to reforge that connection, remind myself how.
Deliberately, I rise to my feet.
I pick up the dragon’s pack. There might be something important to him in it, and if hedoeshide and the priests come to search, they shouldn’t get to have it.
I look at the wall that once encased me in a living tomb.
At the giant hole a dragon I’ve never met made in it for me to walk through.
And I step through it.
I remember walking these halls, flanked by priests of the Order of the Agents of the Arcane.
I remember the serenity of years past, and then later, the dread, knowing what was to come, and what I had to do.
Celestial Sanctuary Temple has been my shelter and my prison—self-selected, but nevertheless—for half a millennium.
And now, it’s time to leave it.
When I get to the entry chamber of the temple, I hear voices beyond the doors.
“We outnumber you,” an unfamiliar voice says. “You know it’s over for you. You might as well come quietly.”
And the dragon replies, simply, “No.”
I feel the priests’ magic increase—they’re running an attack form. People who aren’t sages amplify their magical power by working in concert, performing katas together in perfect sync. It is their combined focus that compounds their power.
“I gave you a chance,” their spokesperson says. “Now it’s on your head.”
