Chapter 68 : Breaking the Contract
Small Ling struck first. Evan felt the sword-intent break under the strike, the lightning's precision cutting it apart before it fully formed, and in the same instant he cast Grand Disintegration — the dissolving light scattering across the lance, breaking apart the sword-intent and the radiance wrapped around it. Shur recoiled. The last of the spell's light dissipated before reaching Raphael.
The instant his Disintegration cleared, Evan's rapier was already moving, the sword-aura extending to dozens of cubits, cutting down through the air. There was a faint thread of sword-intent in it now — barely there, the first time he'd consciously produced something that felt like it. Raphael saw the strike coming and his expression carried mild amusement. At his level, this posed no real threat. He didn't bother defending against the sword. The lance came up instead, a line of light wrapped around it, driving toward Evan's chest, the air around it going wrong with the force of it. Shur's scales blazed and the dragon took the sword-stroke directly rather than yielding ground.
Evan let the smile show. His sword continued down — and his body began to blur. His left hand extended, fingers shaped like a pointing gesture borrowed loosely from sword-mysticism he'd half-remembered from Earth fiction, and strange syllables left his mouth as the right-hand sword-light dispersed into nothing. The blade had been a distraction. Yin-Chill Strike was the real attack, and he had never expected the sword alone to win this exchange.
Raphael didn't startle. The light around his lance expanded, wrapping his entire body, lance and rider becoming a single line of light and intention, and Evan felt — for the first time clearly — what it meant that this man could not be matched by force alone.
He let his mind go empty. His outline became uncertain, a soft black haze that made him almost impossible to locate precisely, though Raphael's attention stayed locked on something that felt like his actual position. There was no time to think further. They crossed.
They didn't collide. In the final instant, Raphael felt Evan's form simply scatter — the lance passed through nothing, though some instinct told him it should have connected. The certainty of a kill had been there and then it wasn't, and in the gap, the Yin-Chill Strike arrived, carrying decay alongside its cold. Raphael wasn't afraid of it — he trusted the dragon to absorb whatever it was.
His attention had stayed fixed on one point throughout — a locus he believed was the lich's true spiritual center, regardless of how the form shifted. His lance and his sword-intent had both been aimed at that point. He had felt, for a moment, the certainty of a kill.
Then cold arrived where his attention had been concentrated, and it wasn't aimed at the body at all.
The soul. Raphael's focus broke in the half-second it took to understand this. His sword-intent slipped, and the locus he'd been tracking simply vanished from his awareness. The lance found nothing. Holy light kindled inside him reflexively, spreading outward across his skin, and the Yin-Chill Strike's effect on him was minimal — his faith-based defenses caught most of it before it did real damage.
The two of them had traded positions. Evan reappeared, his form solidifying, coughing once — his voice rough and then clearing. The sword-intent in Raphael's strike had done real damage to him despite everything. He had no answer for outrunning a dragon, but his hands hadn't stopped working through the problem.
Black smoke condensed and solidified into the Spear of Hadir — now carrying something new, a quality of decay that had developed alongside his growing strength. Anyone who survived the initial detonation would still face the rot the black smoke carried into any wound it touched.
Raphael, having missed his strike, felt the loss of the opportunity keenly. If the Yin-Chill Strike hadn't carried that double attack against body and soul together, the lich would already be on the ground.
Shur's eyes had gone wild, something dark moving behind them. Raphael raised the lance again, his expression gone cold and absolutely still, locked on Evan.
White light arrived from the side — Small Ling, transformed. Not the juvenile body anymore but the full adult form, wrapped in dense ivory radiance that made its outline impossible to read clearly, lightning crawling across the edges of the light. It became a line of white force and drove directly at the dragon.
Raphael wasn't shaken. The lance swept up to meet it, and the collision lit the forest like daylight, concentric shockwaves rolling outward. The unicorn was thrown clear, blood in the air. Shur's scales had cracked from the impact, visible damage along its flank. Raphael stood unmoved.
Evan threw the Spear of Hadir as soon as the opening appeared. Raphael's head snapped up, the lance coming around, light meeting light, and the Black Forest lit white and then black as the spear detonated — a dark mushroom cloud rising, a skeletal shape visible briefly inside it, screaming.
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He didn't have time to assess the outcome directly. He read it from the aftermath: both massive presences had gone uncertain, contracting, retreating from each other.
He went to where Small Ling had fallen. The unicorn had reverted to its young form, breathing hard, unconscious. He cast Life Rain — the water-based healing technique, not death magic — and told Shuang to keep watch over it while he rose back into the air.
……
Raphael had taken real damage in the collision — without the unicorn's strike weakening him first, the Spear of Hadir wouldn't have been enough to hurt him at all. As it was, it still wasn't fatal. But Shur had taken the worst of it. The dragon had already been wounded by the previous exchange, and the explosion compounded the damage: scales shattered, a wing torn open, the dragon nearly falling from the air. Worse than the physical injury, threads of black smoke had begun working their way into the wound, alive in a way that smoke shouldn't be.
Raphael felt his own vitality beginning to drain in response.
He understood immediately what was happening. He and Shur shared a life-bond — a same-fate contract, the kind that linked dragon and rider permanently, theoretically a path to extended life through sharing a dragon's longer lifespan. The contract worked both ways now, and Shur's death was about to become his own.
The dragon was rotting from the inside. Raphael's expression cycled through several things. He looked at Shur. Shur looked back at him.
He decided to break the contract. The Church's standard arrangement put the human partner in nominal control, but dissolution still required the dragon's consent.
"Break it," Shur said.
Raphael's relief was visible. The two of them began the incantation together, and the bond's light flared — fire burning in reverse, an image of the original contract document reconstituting itself from ash before their eyes, two names visible on it for a moment before both faded into nothing. Both of them made an involuntary sound. Blood appeared at the corner of each mouth.
Raphael felt the release. In the dragon's eye, something that might have been contempt.
Raphael saw Evan attending to the unicorn and understood his window was closing. With the contract broken and injuries on top of an unfavorable position, he had no appetite for continuing this fight — he wasn't certain he'd lose, but he wasn't certain he'd win either, and certainty was something he valued. He vanished into the trees.
He carried something with him beyond the injury: a deepening hatred for the lich who had cost him this much.
……
Evan flew toward where the dragon had fallen.
Shur's mouth curved into something that wasn't pain. The rot stopped advancing through its body the moment the contract's light went out.
It had waited for this. At Borbert Castle, in the tower, it had encountered the Book of the Undead and begun secretly cultivating death magic in parallel with its bound service to the Church. It had been suppressing that cultivation ever since — until today, when it let the rot show, let its own life appear to be failing, knowing exactly what that would do to a man who valued his own survival above almost everything.
The contract broken, the suppression lifted. Death-element energy surged through the dragon's body and the rot reversed itself entirely, the wounds closing, the scales reforming — except now they came in differently, the deep red shifted to a grey-tinged crimson. The dragon raised its head and called out across the forest, a sound that carried something Evan recognized with a chill: the signature was shifting, taking on an undead quality layered over the dragon's natural fire.
Raphael, already retreating, heard the same sound and felt his blood go cold. He had no idea what had actually happened. He assumed the worst possible interpretation — that the lich had somehow turned Shur into something undead, a corpse-dragon, while the dragon was already dying. His hatred deepened into something that would outlast this encounter by a great margin. He kept moving and didn't look back.
Evan readied a spell, watching the dragon's color change, uncertain what he was looking at.
"Lich. I mean you no harm." Shur's voice was unmistakably its own, level and without aggression. "I've freed myself from Raphael. We were enemies before because I had no choice. We're not enemies now."
Evan looked at it. No hostility in the bearing. He let the spell go. "Where did Raphael go?"
"He ran. He believed my life was failing from your magic. The same-fate contract meant he'd die with me, so he dissolved it and left." The dragon shifted shape — a woman with red hair, striking, fully human in appearance, standing where the dragon had been a moment before.
"Doesn't that contract require both parties to agree to dissolve it? I thought it wasn't the kind of arrangement one side can unilaterally end."
"It does require mutual consent. I agreed. He was relieved — he assumed I was dying for real. What he didn't know is that I encountered the Book of the Undead at Borbert Castle, the same as you did. Your magic couldn't actually hurt me by the time it landed. I'd been planning this for some time. I should thank you, in a manner of speaking."
"Borbert Castle. You saw the Book of the Undead too. So did Raphael, presumably?"
"He did. He confessed it to the Church immediately afterward and apparently managed to forget the experience entirely. The Maker doesn't concern himself with these things — the deeper mysteries between gods and mortals aren't something the Church's people are equipped to understand." Shur's tone carried open contempt.
"What's the actual difference between gods and humans, in your understanding?"
"A god is fundamentally a living being — formed by humans or other living things through worship, through cultivation. The proper relationship is one of teaching, not intervention. That's the limit of what I know. The Creationist Church's priests use the arrangement for their own benefit. Less than a tenth of the Sacred Text is genuine. The rest is fabrication."
"I see," Evan said.