Path of Dragons 13 - Chapter 84 - Testing

“Do you have any concept of how dangerous it could be?” asked Benedict.  “No.  How dangerous it would be.  There’s no question about it.”

“It might be our only chance,” Elijah insisted.

“And it will probably kill you.  Or you’ll be lost in the void, entirely incapable of finding your way out.”

“I have abilities to guide and protect me.”

“I don’t think you understand what the void is.  It’s the space between realities, connected to an infinite number of dimensions.  Some are tiny, no bigger than an atom.  Some are enormous and span as much space as our dimension.  There are some that are entirely conceptual and incomprehensible to us.  If you go the wrong way…”

“I won’t.”

“How can you guarantee that?  You of all people should understand that abilities and spells aren’t instant win buttons.  You have to guide them.  Mold them.  You need to –”

“I know!” Elijah shouted, interrupting his friend’s very reasonable objections to his plan.  He took a deep breath.  “I know.  I just…”

“You just want to get home.”

“Is that so bad?  I know you don’t care about Earth’s fate, but I do.”

“I never said I didn’t care, Elijah.  I said that there’s nothing left for me back there.  I know you have people there, but I don’t.  Everyone I love is here.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about my home planet.  I do.  I just refuse to approach the problem recklessly.”

Elijah wanted to respond, but he didn’t know what to say. 

No – that wasn’t true.  He knew exactly what he wanted to say, but he also recognized just how unproductive that would be.  Lashing out at Benedict in frustration would help no one, and it stood the risk of alienating one of the only people on Gorveth who truly understood his situation.

Instead, he just let out a sigh and turned away.  For a long moment, he just looked out at the landscape, not really seeing the strip of verdant land that had once been the Abyssal Moat.  Like Druhmor, it was covered in dense vegetation that made it look like a jungle.  To most people, it probably looked like an uncoordinated tangle, but Elijah could see beneath the surface.  He could recognize the order underlying everything.

Because he’d been the one to build the framework upon which everything had grown.

Usually, that acknowledgement was a source of great pride.  But now?  Elijah just saw a cage.  Shackles that wouldn’t let him loose.

“I have to try,” he said at last.

“I know,” Benedict responded.  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t.  I’m just saying to give it some time.  Test things out.  Study the effects of your new abilities.  Once you’re comfortable with everything, then you can go.  And you can do so knowing that you’ve put yourself in a position to succeed.”

Elijah knew Benedict was right.  Not surprising, considering he could look at the situation objectively.  By contrast, Elijah was anxious and excited, and all he could see was the hope fostered by the evolution of Shape of the Sky into the Shape of the World Serpent. 

“You’re right.  I know you’re right.  I just…no.  I’ll wait,” Elijah said.  “I’ll take your advice.  Testing first.  Just tipping my toe in the water before diving in.”

Benedict seemed relieved at that. 

“But there’s no time like the present,” Elijah pointed out, already shifting forms.  In less than a second, he’d taken on the form of a world serpent.  By all rights, suddenly losing his arms and legs should have been incredibly disconcerting.  However, the combination of Elijah’s instincts and the fact that he’d lived and fought in so many different forms coalesced into an innate understanding of how he was meant to move. 

Before Benedict could respond, Elijah slithered through the air, reaching full speed after only fifteen seconds or so.  That was announced by a loud sonic boom that echoed across the terrain. 

For a while, Elijah just flew. 

There had always been freedom in the act of flying, as if neither gravity nor his personal issues could weigh him down.  Elijah embraced that feeling as the landscape turned to a blur beneath him.  Soon enough, he left the protective embrace of Treebie’s limbs behind and threw himself toward the upper atmosphere. 

When he’d reached an altitude of a few miles above the planet’s surface, the monsters stirred.  Massive tentacles came after him, but he was moving far too quickly for any of them to catch.  In addition, he suspected that the new form would hold up quite well to such attacks.

After he’d flown for a while, Elijah decided to truly start the testing process.

The first order of business was to see how effective Scales of Infinity was.  He’d already established that the ability protected him from the void, but would it also keep him safe against the corrosive nature of corruption?  To find out, he gained even more altitude.  Even as the air thinned, the corruption thickened – a process that continued until he burst through the black clouds surrounding the world and into the true abyss.

Monsters the size of mountains loomed in the distance, their massive tentacles dangling into the upper atmosphere.  Clouds of smaller creatures constantly attacked them as well as one another, solidifying the air of conflict that characterized the abyss. 

Elijah’s scales sizzled, but the pain was no worse than a minor rash.  And that was without flexing his Mantle of Authority.  He still had the protection of his silver-tier body and the passive state of his mantle, but the bulk of the effect clearly came from Scales of Infinity.

The other advantage of Shape of the World Serpent over Shape of the Sky was that its flight was entirely magical.  By contrast, his old flight form relied on biology and physics to stay aloft.  The difference allowed Elijah to move in the weightless environment of the abyss just as easily as he flew through the planet’s atmosphere.

Now that Elijah wasn’t distracted by the dissolution of his body, he could truly appreciate Gorveth’s size.  Most of the planet was cloaked in black clouds, so he had difficulty mapping landmasses and seas.  However, he couldn’t escape the reality of just how large it was. 

Seeing that, his previous estimate that it was five times the size of Jupiter seemed far too conservative.  The scale was enough to humble even a recently advanced demi-god like Elijah.

But it was nothing compared to the abyss itself.

The purple streaks of corruption were always visible, even on Gorveth’s surface.  However, now that Elijah’s view was unobstructed by the black clouds, those violet rivers were even more vibrant and imposing than ever before. 

Even knowing what he knew about it, Elijah couldn’t deny that the abyss was beautiful, in its own way.  Terrifying.  Wrong.  And completely antithetical to every instinct he possessed.  But beautiful, nonetheless.

He found himself staring off into the abyss for far longer than he’d planned, and he became distracted enough that one of the mountainous monsters got a little too close.  Its skyscraper sized tentacle lashed out, slicing through the abyss like a cutting torch.  Elijah didn’t hesitate to use Dimensional Leap.

He slid through an unseen crack in reality and into white nothingness.  Elijah was only there for a few seconds, but in that time, the pressure he’d felt during his first trip returned to constrict him.  However, due to Scales of Infinity, it slipped around him, never gaining a good grip.

Though his foray into the void was no longer than before, this time saw him far more prepared to analyze his environment.  And at first, he was overwhelmed by the sheer emptiness of it all.  But when he looked closer – or rather, when he trusted Coiling Path – he saw things far more clearly.

It wasn’t empty.

Instead, it was comprised of an infinite number of branching paths that he could sense, but not see.  At the ends of those paths were other dimensions.  Distance and space had no meaning, and yet, he could feel that some were much further away than others. 

But that was all he could discern before he spilled back into his own reality. 

It took a second to reorient himself, but when he did, he found that his aim was a little skewed.  He’d intended to remain just above the planet’s atmosphere, but instead, he’d ended up on the underside of the obscuring black clouds.

The sea spread out below him.  Against the backdrop of the true abyss or the void, it seemed far less imposing than before.  That wasn’t surprising.  After staring eternity in the face, a few waves – no matter how large – just failed to impress him.

That was a dangerous attitude, he knew.  He’d learned to survive Gorveth, but if he allowed himself to underestimate the monstrous denizens, they were still capable of killing him. 

With that in mind, Elijah reasserted his sense of caution.

He didn’t return to Druhmor, though.  Instead, he tore across the Restless Sea at top speed, and eventually, he reached land.  He didn’t stop there, though.  He kept going for hours until he saw Dravkein. 

The city remained abandoned, though most of the buildings were still in good shape.  It was only when he landed that he realized that something very important had changed.

Here and there, scraggly bushes had sprouted.

Only a few of them.  Maybe ten in total.  And they clearly weren’t thriving.  However, it only took Elijah a few moments to recognize them as the same sorts of bushes he’d once planted in the Abyssal Moat. 

Elijah knelt by one of the thorny plants, inspecting it with Soul of the Wild and Nature’s Design.  It only took a few moments to confirm that it was virtually identical to his first phase of corruption-fueled vegetation when he’d upgraded the plants he’d harvested back in the Broken Crown to better exist on the excised world. 

The only explanation for its existence was natural reproduction.  Elijah wasn’t sure how the seeds had crossed thousands of miles of hostile territory, but the evidence that they’d done so stood before him. 

It felt like a miracle.

For the next few hours, Elijah flew around the area, though at a much slower pace.  And he discovered that what he’d found around Dravkein was no isolated event.  There were thousands of bushes scattered across the landscape.

Afterward, Elijah returned to his human form and settled down on a cliff to give it some thought. 

On the surface, a few plants didn’t seem like such a big deal.  However, for Elijah, they represented something he’d not considered.  If those bushes were capable of reproduction, if they could survive on their own, then his goal was much closer than he had any right to expect.

But even more, it proved that the momentum of his previous effort would likely continue driving the planet toward vitality.  Those few plants that had managed to take hold were just a herald of what was to come, and if Elijah’s expectations were even close to accurate, they would serve to set the stage for Treebie’s expansion. 

That was when it hit him.

“Gorveth doesn’t really need me anymore,” he said to himself.

That was not to say that the job was finished.  It most certainly was not.  Elijah recognized that, at least.  But he also knew that, while he could facilitate Treebie’s growth and hasten the planet’s terraforming, it would almost assuredly proceed with or without his input.

And that was a depressing thought.

For so long, Elijah had clung to that project as a singular handhold that prevented him from plummeting into a deep and depressive pit of apathy.  Now, even in the wake of his spell evolution, he felt the weight of that same depression on his shoulders.

Idly, he acknowledged that it wasn’t so different from a parent watching their child move out of the family home and start their own life.  Elijah was happy that Treebie – and the planet – could survive without him.  But that came with a distinct lack of purpose that he didn’t really want to confront.

But he knew he needed to work through it.

Otherwise, he’d end up going down a dark road.  So, after contemplating it for a while, he picked himself up, shifted back into the Shape of the World Serpent, and returned the way he’d come. 

As he went, he began to establish a plan for how he wanted to move forward.  Because as always, Elijah needed goals.  Benchmarks.  He needed something to work toward, or he would go insane.

With that in mind, he turned his attention to a new task.  One that might help him return to Earth.