AllFreeNovel
Share Us
NATALIE
Ilooked around, peeking out the door then closing it. Finally, I faced the room. We were back at Eir’s castle. Eir, the goddess of Healing and Rehema’s mother, had grown so weak, she’d gone into the Goddess’s alternate reality to try and heal, herself.
Lucian was with the Goddess, and Brian was helping with the wounded in the city. After a few minutes of searching, I found a suitable room for what I wanted to do.
I needed to speak to Tedara.
Pulling the sleeve of my blouse up, I examined my pale discolored arm. I’d tried to astral project to Tedara when a flare of pain traveled from my elbow down to my fingers.
Only then did I realize how much the unstable chaos I’d consumed was affecting me physically. My veins were visible through my skin, but were more pronounced from the inner crease of my elbow down to my mid-arm.
I couldn’t let this stop me, though. Tedara was calling, and she wasn’t letting up.
After my chat with Lucian, her whispers had started again. Our connection had grown so much that now I could tell when she wanted to speak to me, when she needed to be heard.
The room had a large brown sofa, somewhere I could get comfortable, but more importantly, the room was spelled to be soundproof. I couldn’t hear anything once the doors closed, and I knew I would have the privacy I needed.
I felt sick, but around the others, I had to pretend to be okay. Alone, I could face what I’d done, and I could access the Primordial who might be able to give me some answers. So I sat down, and like the times that I'd done this before, I closed my eyes and allowed my body to relax. My chaos was tied to Tedara, and I allowed it to take me to her.
Astral traveling was complicated and dangerous—my spirit would be traveling between two realms, the God Realm and the Red Realm where Tedara had been banished to. I was expecting her to beg me for her freedom, as she'd done before, but I still wasn't sure I could trust her.
Tedara had been hurt by the birth of greed and darkness and had wanted to start over by destroying everyone and remaking the realms—kind of like the great flood in the Bible. When the Imperium—Zeus, Hekate, and the other creator gods—disagreed with her methods, Tedara had rebelled…but she’d eventually lost the war she started.
The last time we spoke, I got the impression that she was starting to understand that perfection wasn't possible, or even desirable. Even as a Primordial, she wasn't perfect. After all, if she had been, she wouldn't have started a war that had killed so many.
With free will, gods did what they felt was right or wrong, and so did their creations.
Tedara’s heart was in the right place—not wanting there to be greed and war—but she’d definitely gone about it in the wrong way. And in the end, she’d become exactly what she’d been fighting against. Had she learned her lesson? I thought so, but I wasn’t ready to bet the realms’ existence on it.
When I opened my eyes, the room was gone, and I found myself standing in a vast wasteland of red fog and crimson skies. I was on a mountainside, at a cave's entrance, and inside, I heard chains rattling.
I made my way inside, and even with my heightened sight, I couldn’t see through the darkness ahead.
“You’re dying.” Tedara’s soothing voice echoed through the cave, and I stopped walking. “You need to release the chaos you absorbed last night. It's tainted! You learned control and stopped the side effects of not accepting my power, but now you're right back where you started.”
“I know,” I replied. “But I had to do something. And I'll release it soon—I just need some time. It’s Cedric, you know. The Dragon King is the one behind this. He's the one feeding on your power.”
“Cedric,” Tedara mumbled the name, and her chains rattled. “A dragon king with a voice like fire and ash, how fitting." She chuckled dryly. “Dragons were made to be protectors,” she said. “My brothers and sisters and I first wanted to make them mindless animals, powerful ones. But that was until we saw their potential to be more. The gods ruled, and the dragons became our protectors."
When I’d first spoken to Tedara, her words had been incoherent and confusing. Being banished for so many centuries, alone and trapped, I’d thought her mind had broken. But she was speaking more clearly now. Had she changed? Or had I?
“Cedric thinks dragons are the real gods,” I said. “He started this war so that the dragons would be on top. And he intends to kill all the gods.”
“Greed,” Tedara growled. “The vile stain of greed.”
“And he’s found a way to make others chaos users, like him and me,” I added, before Tedara could go off on a lecture about the evils that needed to be eradicated from the realms, even at the cost of the innocent. "Do you know how he's doing it? We'll lose the war at this rate, because I'm the only chaos user the good guys have. Cedric's getting stronger, and he's finding ways to strengthen those on his side."
“He’s doing it through testing and torture. That’s how he’s managed to pass on my chaos to others, to make it into the thing inside you now,” Tedara replied weakly. “You’ve seen the labs, have you not?”
"Yes, I have. But how can I fight that? He's getting stronger by the day."
"And as he grows in strength, I weaken," Tedara added with frustration. "There is only so much I can do, trapped in this cave. I took a chance on you, but you know the effects of chaos. Cedric did tests on my chaos, making it less potent so others could use it without killing them, but it's unstable."
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I know he’s been distributing syringes containing the virus, and that those are volatile. We thought that was his goal.”
“No,” Tedara replied. "That was him making use of something that didn't go as planned. He's trying to perfect the passing on of my powers. I'll be his source of power for eternity if he wins this war, Natalie. But more importantly, there will soon be others as powerful as him if he can make my chaos manageable enough for his dragons to contain."
I turned away, my eyes searching the darkness, but I was lost in thought. Cedric was enough of an issue. But if there were other dragons using chaos at his level, this war would be completely one-sided.
