He doesn’t fight the Executor. He destroys it. Talons tearing through armor plating that should be impervious. Teeth finding gaps in the creature’s defenses. Fire—actual dragonfire, the first I’ve seen him use—erupting from his hands in concentrated bursts that melt armored metal.
The Executor fights back. Lands strikes that would kill anything else. Opens wounds across Kaster’s arms, his sides, his back. The divine poison seeps into each injury, that wrongness I’ve learned to recognize burning through his flesh.
He doesn’t stop.
He tears the creature’s arm off at the shoulder. Drives his claws through its eye socket. Rips out chunks of flesh and throws them aside like garbage.
The Executor falls.
Kaster doesn’t stop.
He keeps tearing. Keeps destroying. Long past the point where the creature stopped moving, long past the point where any tactical purpose ended. His hands reduce the armor to shreds. His fire chars what remains.
Pulp. That’s what’s left. Pulp and silence and the wet sound of violence continuing past all reason.
Fear would be reasonable. Horror at what I’m witnessing—the capacity for destruction, the complete loss of control, the dragon unleashed without restraint.
I feel neither. What moves through me instead is something closer to recognition—a loosening in my chest, a settling of something that has been braced against the world for a long time. An understanding that this—all of this—happened because the informant died. Because we lost our chance at answers. Because the gods took another piece of the puzzle and ground it into dust.
His rage isn’t random. It isn’t mindless.
It’s grief expressed in the only language he knows.
The violence ends.
Kaster stands in the center of the destruction, breathing hard, covered in divine blood that steams against his skin. His wounds are closing slowly—the poison fighting his healing, but losing. His hands shake with residual fury.
The informant lies in pieces near the eastern wall. What’s left of him. The Executor is a ruin of melted armor and scattered flesh.
The silence in the shrine is absolute. Even the echoes have died.
I push myself up from behind the altar. My shoulder screams protest—the masonry hit did more damage than I initially registered—but I ignore it. Pain is familiar. Pain I can handle.
Kaster’s back is to me. His spine rigid. His hands opening and closing at his sides, talons extending and retracting in cycles that speak to control barely regained.
I should stay where I am. Give him space to process. Wait for the violence to recede and the man to return.
I move toward him instead.
My feet carry me across the shattered paving stones. Around the puddles of blood. Over the debris from the collapsed wall. Each step brings me closer to a creature who hasn’t fully returned from the violence.
Dangerous. Stupid. Necessary.
I stop within arm’s reach.
His breathing is ragged. Harsh. The sound of a body pushed past its limits and refusing to acknowledge the fact. Heat radiates off him in waves—dragonfire still burning beneath his skin, looking for outlet.
My hand moves before I give it permission.
Fingers wrap around his wrist. Not tight. Not demanding. A steady pressure against the pulse that hammers beneath his skin, rapid and erratic and wrong.
He goes absolutely still.
Time stretches.
I hold his wrist and wait for him to pull away. To snarl at me for approaching while the violence still runs hot in his veins.
He doesn’t.
