The Dragon Heir

Interlude 3.5

The trees stood twisted, shriveled husks of their former selves, not a trace of life clinging to their bark. It didn’t feel like some targeted curse. No, this was something worse—like the very air had leeched them dry just by existing. Vorak wouldn’t put it past something exactly like that.The Veilwoods stank of burnt sage and… something else. He scrunched his nose. Definitely something fouler. Sulfur, maybe? Or was it that sickly metallic tang of fresh-spilled blood? Hard to tell.

Every bright-eyed youth in Varkaigrad had grown up on hushed whispers of this haunted stretch of forest. But not Vorak—he didn’t just hear the stories. He lived them. He knew firsthand the kind of madness this place could birth.

And now, time had looped back on him. Again. Right back to the brink of something unnatural. Last time, he’d been the one to investigate when the fog started creeping out, swallowing folks whole before slinking back into the trees like it had never been there. That fog was legend. No one really knew how it worked—only that these groves had once been sacred. The ancient beastkin had gathered here, offering their kills to their ancestors, feasting by firelight in what was once a hallowed ritual.

Well, they still did that. Only now, it was on a grander scale, a whole damn festival—The Spirit Hunt.

And yet, here they were, when Spirit Hunt was not even a month away, and the weird shit was already piling up high enough to choke on.

Vorak crouched, his gloved fingers brushing the ashen remains of a ritual circle. The symbols etched into the mossy earth weren’t the work of amateurs—too precise, too deliberate. Inverted tetragrams encased in a looping, unreadable script. A summoning, no doubt. But of what?

That question had been gnawing at him since the day his divination alarms shrieked so loud he damn near soiled himself.

He’d warned them. Told them exactly what had crossed over. But funny thing about reputation—it takes years to build, but one bad call? One little misstep? And suddenly, you're the village madman.

Decades in the Iron Pact, one of the highest-cored diviners in the order. That was supposed to mean something. But then came that one jump—just one—and everything went to shit.

Now, instead of real work, he was Pact’s senile watchdog, exiled to babysit dusty relics at the district’s ass-end. A , spit-shined and ignored. Then that strange awakening happened, and that silver-haired Drakkari girl from the alchemy tower—Jade, was it? He’d seen something in a vision, suspected something. Turned out to be wrong, and just like that, his standing plummeted further.

Even Andrzej, that milk-smeared brat he’d taught to before he’d grown chest hair, had wrinkled his nose at Vorak’s soiled robes. The whelp Vorak had once fished out of a privy after too much mead!

Fools. An entire carnival of them.

Andrzej, to his credit, looked into it. A few divinations here, a few leads there, and he even pinpointed the exact place it happened. But when no one else sensed a damn thing? He was . Since when had the Iron Pact been staffed with so many incompetent fucks?! Ancestors preserve them.

Still, even with confirmation of the location, something was . Summonings left scars. Tearing a hole in reality wasn’t some neat and tidy affair—it the world, and wounds took to heal. But here? . No residual energy, no splintered threads of the world’s fabric, not a of something having crossed over.

That was impossible.

Vorak had it. He had from his goddamned eyes because the sheer immensity of that thing had his defenses like paper. It was here. It . And yet, no breach. No scar. No sign.

A rupture in reality took to fade, always visible to those with the eyes to see. This left only two possibilities: either happened—which was a lie—or someone, , had parted the fabric of existence with such precision, such delicate control, that it left no trace.

Which was impossible.

That level of mastery would require cognition beyond human limits. A mind so far removed from sanity that even attempting such a feat would liquefy the brain of a lesser being. And yet, someone—or —had done it. Not just a door, but closed it so seamlessly that it may as well have never existed.

Final verdict? Vorak was a raving madman. His already-wounded reputation took another plunge straight into the abyss, and with more pressing threats looming, all investigations were shelved.

And fair enough—there a crisis on the horizon. A certain organization was resurfacing. The . The singular demonic cult of all Vraal’kor.

Funny, really. Almost the same name as his own. Because it the same thing—.

Andrzej, of course, had the gall to suspect of being involved. Thought he was pulling some grand misdirection, throwing up a smokescreen.

As if Vorak hadn’t bled for the Pact since that prig was still pissing his linens! The accusations didn’t stick. But still, impossible or not, he was here again.

Three in the gods-damned morning.

Snow fell in whispering sheets around him, catching the edges of his cloak, melting on his gloves as he clutched a divination crystal. Cold. Unyielding. And .

Even with his spell active, there was no vision. No resonance. No murmurs from the Astral Plane. Just the same dead void as before.

Every summoning left something behind—echoes, ripples, scars in the veil.

But this?

This was like reality itself had been .

By a hand far more meticulous than his own.

Vorak’s eye twitched. Why——had he dragged this walking hemorrhoid along?

"It’s to you, you scale-licking turd! Unless you’d like to wear your tongue as boot polish!"

People called him grumpy. was a fucking understatement. He was a bristling porcupine in a world of feather pillows, and the pillows could choke on their own fluff.

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Sergiy, a young enforcer-in-the-making, hovered at the edge of the clearing, his uniform annoyingly pristine, his expression just a little dismissive for Vorak’s liking. The boy had a knack for getting himself into detention and an interest in sealed artifacts. Trouble followed him like a stray dog, and yet, here he was.

" But didn’t the scouts report disturbances in the city? No missing people, no fires, no… crawling out of alleys." His gaze flicked to the burned ritual circles. “Look, everyone else thinks you’re off your rocker, but me? I’m… intrigued. Just—any chance the ritual ? Backfired? Poof, no monster?”

Vorak exhaled sharply, knees protesting as he stood. He swept a hand over the ash. It clung to his gloves like powdered bone.

“Failed rituals don’t erase their own stink, lad. They reek. They . They leave behind enough metaphysical pus to fill a brothel’s chamber pot.” He jabbed a finger at the circle, its precision mocking him. “? This is a taxidermist’s wet dream. All the parts, none of the stench. Spend less time fondling shockblades and more in divination lectures, and you’d know what this is called.”

Sergiy raised a brow, gauntleted fingers drumming the hilt of his shiny new shockblade—a graduation gift Vorak endorsed. “Enlighten me, .”

“A staged silence,” Vorak growled. “Someone scrubbed the scene cleaner than a whore before confession. Which means either they’re covering their tracks… or how goddamn untouchable they are.”

The boy yawned, wide and theatrical. "But why go through all the trouble? If they summoned something, why it? And if they didn’t, why leave at all?"

"Distraction."

The word slipped out before Vorak could temper it.

Three sleepless nights of poring over reports, of tracing every in the city, of being dismissed as a old bastard. But he didn’t give a rat’s arse. Something happening. things, all at once.

The cultist nest flushed from the Lower District sewers. A hidden chamber, a . A hanged man, inverted, cursed to the bone, and a moat of corpses. They’d only known about it thanks to those two kids who managed to escape. More could be saved because of them. But not the ones already sacrificed.

And then, the whispers of the emerging.

And tomorrow. Or rather, . Since it was 3 AM already The day everyone was holding their breath for. Something was coming, and it was going to be .

Coincidences were for fools and poets.

Vorak turned to Sergiy, voice a low rasp.

"Three days ago. That sewer raid. What did the investigators find?"

Sergiy blinked, his cocky façade flickering as he scraped together the details. “Uh… the shrine, right? Investigators said it was built from the same grime-caked bricks as the rest of the sewers. Whole operation was tucked into a section sealed off when Varkaigrad’s tunnels were first dug. Found chambers no one’s pissed in for centuries.” He shrugged, but his fingers tightened around his shockblade’s hilt. “Why? What’s it matter?”

Vorak’s grin was a sickle. “When. Were. The. Sewers. Built?”

“Hundreds of years ago?” Sergiy parroted, then froze as the implication slithered into his skull.

“,” Vorak hissed, stepping closer until his shadow swallowed the boy. “We’ve been living atop a festering wound for generations. A chunk of those tunnels was walled off with illusions so slick, not a single drunk, rat, or Pact lackey stumbled into it. Until now.” He leaned in, breath reeking of bitterroot tonic. “A temple, boy. A gods-damned , polished and primed for butchery, squatting in our literal shit. And you think that’s just… ?”

Sergiy paled but held his ground. “What’re you , old man?”

“Use that mush between your ears!” Vorak snapped, jabbing a finger at the kid’s temple. “Or did your instructors fill your skull with sawdust and wishful thinking?”

“Cryptic bullshit isn’t a ,” Sergiy shot back, defiance brittle. “Spit it out.”

Vorak sighed. It wasn’t something he could just spit out. But it had been gnawing at him.

The missing children. No one had investigated. Sure, they were from the Lower District, but they were still , still of the united front. had they dismissed the sewers—the first place any half-competent enforcer would’ve scoured—until two gutter rats led them there by the nose? was the Pact suddenly hyperventilating over tomorrow’s “grand threat” while letting rot fester in the shadows?

It stank. Like a carcass stuffed with lilies.

Like something else was bubbling beneath.

His thumb ran over the obsidian amulet at his throat, the surface etched with warding runes, anti-divination sigils. “The Iron Pact’s brass,” Vorak growled. “They’re polishing their swords while the rats gnaw the floorboards. A cult resurrects itself. A summoning leaves no scar. A shrine blooms in the dark, fed on our blindness.” He spat into the snow. “Either our leaders are thicker than troll snot… or they’re at the storm.”

The , dormant for a decade, now rising again. The Iron Pact shifting. A without a .

A cult, sacrificing right under everyone’s noses.

Vorak muttered, his breath misting in the cold air. "What if they’re complementary? All these events, packed into such a short time frame—"

Then the thought struck him. A bolt of realization.

Sergiy frowned. "But what’s the point? Even here, if no one actually summoned anything—"

"They did."

Vorak knelt, pressing his palm to the earth. Cold seeped through his gloves, biting deep. Snow had been cleared from the site earlier, but another layer was already beginning to gather. He barely noticed.

"The summoning . That, I can guarantee. But whatever they called… it didn’t . Whoever performed the ritual what they were doing."

Sergiy’s expression darkened. "Then bother?"

"There are many reasons." Vorak’s voice was grim. "Since ancient times, people have stumbled upon places too wild to exist and for boons from them. The summoner receives their gift, and whatever it returns to the void. But all such entities are by nature. No boon comes without a contract—contracts too to fully grasp. By the time the fool understands what they've done, it's already too late."

"So… it might be worse than summoning the thing itself."

"That depends on the entity," Vorak admitted. "But we should be our world’s fabric shields us from places where even fears to dwell. And yet—some fools will find ways to tear at that veil. Summoning is illegal for a ."

He stood, but this time, there was something different about him. A glint of satisfaction.

"If it’s all connected," he murmured, "I might just be able to how."

Sergiy caught the shift in his tone. "?"

"By obsessing over the details."

Golden spell circles flared into existence behind Vorak’s head, swirling like celestial gears. His mana transmuted into something —something . His eyes darkened, black bleeding across them like ink spilled upon an ocean.

His staff struck the frozen ground.

"I’ve been looking at this ," he said. "Anti-divination only works when a query launched at the Astral Plane is imbued with . But right now, we don’t need to track a or . We have a of events—seemingly —but linked nonetheless."

"The answer lies in simplicity itself."

His gaze snapped to Sergiy. "Grab some parchment. ."

Sergiy obeyed, yanking a scroll from his satchel.

Immediately, images flooded Vorak’s mind. He let the visions through him, transcribing them with frantic precision—each stroke of ink capturing the essence of the three events.

Then, parchment in hand, he placed it over the ritual site.

His voice dropped to a whisper.

For the first time, the did not answer.

Instead, something .

A figure—. A maiden of impossible beauty, her form poised, her elegance undeniable.

She stood with her back to him.

A silhouette cut from moonlight and menace. She stood atop a mound of elven corpses, her talons buried in a skull’s sockets. Sinews dangled from her lips like grotesque pasta. Her face—, her —was ecstasy incarnate. Not hunger. .

Then she turned.

Vorak’s gut clenched. He knew that face.

“Jade,” he breathed.