Chapter 108: Draken, God of Assassins?
*Early afternoon. Northwest clearing.*
The dagger came down.
And Nathan, with the last 40 mana points remaining in his system, with broken ribs, with his flank pierced, with his vision reduced to a blurry central cone, did the only thing his body could still do.
He pushed.
With his right hand extended.
With his open palm against Yorel’s chest.
Without active skill. Without Tactile Entropy. Without Soul Reap. Just the brute physical push of a man who had decided in the last fraction of a second that he wasn’t going to die with a dagger plunged by someone who’d deceived him for two days.
Yorel was launched backward.
Approximately three meters.
The black dagger slipped from his hand during the trajectory. It fell to the ground a meter from Nathan. With its tip embedded in the earth. With the inscriptions glowing very subtly with a dark red light.
Yorel landed on his back.
He rolled once.
He stood up.
Without showing signs of pain. Without heavy breathing. Without the trembling eyes he’d shown over the past two nights. Just the calm of someone who had been playing a role and now, with the performance discarded, was showing his real face for the first time.
Liaraen, kneeling beside Nathan, turned.
With her father’s green sword still in her right hand.
With the guardians’ black blood covering her dress.
And with her pale green eyes moving from Nathan to Yorel to the dagger and back to Yorel with the specific speed of a major elven house’s daughter who was processing in real time that the person she’d trusted for two days had tried to kill the man she’d decided to protect for the next ten months.
Without saying anything, Liaraen stood up.
She positioned herself between Nathan and Yorel.
With the sword steady in front of her chest.
Yorel looked at her.
With the first complete smile Nathan had seen from him during their entire acquaintance.
Wide.
Without filter.
Without the host’s warmth he’d shown in the settlement. Without the humility of a marginalized vegetarian. Without the processed horror of the shelter. Just the smile of a man who was enjoying the moment because it was exactly the moment he’d been planning for a long time.
"Liaraen Sael’thoryn."
Liaraen stood still.
Without lowering the sword.
"Yorel."
"You don’t need to pretend you didn’t know me anymore. Nathan already figured it out. You figured it out half a minute ago too."
"I don’t know who you really are."
"No. Correct. You don’t know. But you’re going to know in approximately the next five minutes."
Yorel took a step forward.
Liaraen raised the sword two centimeters.
Yorel stopped.
With his smile maintained.
"Elf. I’m going to explain what happened. So that you and he can understand before the end. Villains who don’t explain are villains without pretension. I have pretensions."
Nathan, from the ground, with blood accumulating on his right flank and his breathing growing heavier, found his voice.
"Talk."
Yorel turned to him.
"Hunter Voss. I appreciate that you can still hear. I’m going to make this brief. You’re losing a lot of blood. We don’t have indefinite time."
Nathan kept his eyes open.
With the strength he had left.
Yorel began.
---
"Let’s start at the beginning. I am a bearer of Draken’s Seal."
Liaraen tightened her grip on the sword’s hilt.
Nathan processed it from the ground.
*Draken. One of the Seven Minor Ones. The god of assassins.*
*Alright. There it is.*
Yorel continued.
"I received the seal at nineteen. It was my choice, not a passive consecration. I was seeking purpose and I found the doctrine. Draken’s doctrine isn’t simple. The popular version says the seal is given to assassins by vocation—people who kill for work or pleasure. That’s a crude simplification. The real doctrine says Draken blesses those who understand death as an art refined through practice and ambition."
Yorel took another step forward.
Liaraen didn’t move.
"My seal came with a particular magic. We call it tendon puppetry. I can extract tendons and connective tissue from my victims while alive or after death. I can use those tendons as threads to control other bodies. Alive. Dead. Fragments. Any biological configuration that has anchor points. It’s a fairly literal magic. Nothing abstract."
Yorel opened his palms upward.
And from his fingertips, with the calm efficiency of someone who’d practiced that skill for decades, threads began to emerge.
Thin.
White with a reddish sheen.
Like still-living muscle fibers.
Ten threads per hand. Twenty in total. Extending backward, toward the clearing, toward the twenty fallen residents.
The threads settled on the bodies.
They found the anchor points.
And the twenty residents who only minutes ago had collapsed with the end of the parasite’s distributed consciousness stood up again.
Standing.
All of them.
With their eyes now completely white. Without the killing intent redirected by the alpha. Without their own will. Without anything.
Just bodies.
Puppeted by Yorel through the tendon threads he controlled from ten meters away.
Nathan looked at it from the ground.
"You have them."
"I have them. Yes. I had them before the infection. I have them now. I’m going to have them until I use all of them in the ritual."
Liaraen spoke then, with a calm voice but with tension in every syllable.
"What ritual?"
Yorel turned to her.
"Draken has a major cycle. Every fifty years, the doctrine permits the execution of a communion rite. A practitioner who gathers enough lives offered at the same moment and in the same space can ascend a step in the god’s recognition. Steps that grant seal improvements. Amplifications of magic. Access to techniques most Draken bearers never obtain."
"How many lives?"
"The standard version of the doctrine requires twenty. I, however, decided to take it to a different extreme."
Yorel moved one of his hands.
And one of the twenty residents—a warrior—began walking toward the clearing’s center with the mechanical coordination of a puppet. He stopped near the dead alpha creature’s body. And with the precise movements Yorel imposed through the threads, he knelt and began cutting the creature’s flesh with his own short sword.
Yorel continued explaining as the puppet worked.
"Draken’s doctrine allows two increases if not only human lives are offered but also blood from primary cycle creatures. The alpha creature is descended from an unofficial primary cycle deity. Its flesh is sacred in a sense Draken specifically respects. I’m going to offer the twenty settlement bodies along with the alpha’s flesh. I’m going to receive the double increase."
Liaraen processed that.
"Yorel."
"Yes."
"You planted the parasite in the tree."
Yorel smiled wider.
"Yes."
"How?"
"I’m going to explain. It’s interesting."
And Yorel began to speak with the specific pride of a craftsman who’d developed his work over decades and finally had an audience capable of appreciating it.
---
*Flashback. Approximately ten years earlier.*
Young Yorel, with fewer gray hairs and the same thin body, walking alone through the deep forest.
Carrying a small cage.
Inside the cage, a single vidhraki larva.
Approximately the size of a thumb. Dark red. With the parasite’s primitive consciousness before settling into a major host.
Yorel had spent months searching for the larva.
He’d crossed three forests.
He’d paid dark contacts on Veil routes to locate it in its original habitat.
And he’d brought the larva back to the settlement where he’d lived for years, waiting for exactly this piece to set the plan in motion.
Yorel arrived at the clearing where the meat tree—still young—was just beginning to show the first signs of maturity. He looked at the trunk. He took out a knife. He cut a small opening in the fleshy bark. And he deposited the larva inside.
He sealed the opening with his own blood.
With Draken’s seal techniques that allowed him to seal wounds with magical efficiency.
And he withdrew.
*Months later.*
Yorel watching the tree from a distance.
The larva had settled. It had begun distributing its microscopic fibers through the tree’s sap. The tree’s meat continued producing normally, but now loaded with the parasite’s spores.
Yorel waited patiently.
*A year later.*
The first settlement residents began extracting meat from the tree during their normal harvesting rounds. They cooked it. They ate it.
The infection began.
Silent.
Distributed.
Yorel watched with the calibrated calm of the planner.
*Three years later.*
Half the settlement infected.
Yorel introducing the "sacred tree" doctrine with the humble voice and invented stories of a man who claimed to have read about it in ancient books. The residents, already with the parasitic consciousness infiltrated within them, accepted the doctrine without resistance. The triennial ceremony was established. The tree’s meat became sacred food.
Yorel declared himself vegetarian.
For "personal convictions."
The residents mocked him. They slightly marginalized him. Yorel let the marginalization happen.
It suited him.
*Five years later.*
All settlement residents infected. Including newborns who grew up consuming the meat from childhood.
And Yorel, with the distributed parasite consciousness already fully established, began doing what he’d planned from the beginning.
Fusion.
With his puppetry magic, Yorel began inserting his own tendon threads into the infected residents’ bodies. The threads coexisted with the parasite consciousness. The residents continued to appear controlled by the parasite, but in reality, Yorel was weaving a second layer of control on top of the first.
The vidhraki didn’t notice.
Or if they did, they didn’t process it as a threat because Yorel also seemed to be part of the settlement’s functioning.
Yorel refined the fusion for years.
He learned to move residents with a combination of parasite commands and thread pulls. He learned to hide his own signature under the distributed parasite signature. He learned to make the parasite consciousness perceive his interventions as part of its own normal functioning.
Until, at some point in the last five years, the fusion reached a level where Yorel could move residents without needing the parasite.
The puppet worked both ways.
With the parasite active or without it.
Yorel had built a redundant system.
*End of flashback.*
---
Yorel stopped speaking.
Nathan, from the ground, had listened to everything with the calm mind of someone who’d lost too much blood to react emotionally, and with the growing understanding that Yorel was exactly the kind of villain Draken’s doctrine produced in its purest version.
Methodical. Patient. Without moral ambiguity. With ambition articulated in service of a minor deity that precisely approved that kind of ambition.
Nathan spoke, his voice hoarse.
"The alpha."
"What about the alpha?"
"It said ’it wasn’t my choice.’"
"Yes."
"And you just said the same thing before trying to stab me."
"Correct."
"Who decides?"
Yorel smiled.
"Draken decides. And Draken gave me the instruction for this ritual approximately twenty years ago. I’ve been executing it ever since. The alpha, when the parasite consciousness settled into it upon the mother tree’s death, began sharing memory with the rest of the colony—including my memory. And at some level, it understood that it too was part of the ritual. The phrase is a formula. We Draken practitioners use it when we recognize that we are instruments of the god’s will."
"It’s not your will."
"It’s not my individual will. It’s my collective will integrated with the god’s. The distinction is theological. Draken would explain it better if you had his seal."
Nathan processed it.
*Alright.*
*Religious fanatic with decades of planning and puppetry magic. Without external motivation. Just doctrine and ambition.*
*Worse than the alpha.*
*At least the alpha was a parasite operating by amplified instinct.*
*Yorel is a person with full consciousness who chose this.*
Yorel turned to Liaraen.
"Elf. I’m going to make an offer."
Liaraen didn’t lower her sword.
"Go ahead."
"Leave the clearing. Leave. Let Nathan stay here. Don’t participate in the ritual. Draken has no interest in elves. Aelthoren has its own gods. Elven seals fall into categories Draken doesn’t touch. If you leave, you walk out alive. And the twenty puppets will let you pass without obstructing your route."
Liaraen looked at him.
Without moving her sword.
"And Nathan."
"Nathan is one of the twenty-one lives of the ritual. The twentieth was the warrior already preparing the alpha’s flesh. The twenty-first is him. When I complete the twenty-one, the ritual activates. I’ll receive the double increase. The bodies and flesh will be consumed by Draken’s manifestation."
Yorel opened his hands.
With a broad smile.
"Elf. It’s a reasonable offer. Nathan is going to die here regardless of your decision. His body is failing. The blood loss is irreversible without medical intervention neither you nor I can provide in this clearing. If you leave, you live. If you stay, you die with him. Draken will accept your life as an unplanned bonus to the ritual. You’ll receive a respectful death within the doctrine’s conventions."
Liaraen spoke without turning her head toward Nathan.
With the calm voice she’d developed over the last few months.
"Yorel."
"Yes."
"I’m not interested in your offer."
"Elf."
"I’m not interested. Draken can keep his ritual. You can keep your puppets. I’m staying with Nathan."
Yorel paused for a moment.
With his smile attenuating slightly for the first time since he’d stood up.
"I knew you were going to respond that way. But the doctrine requires the exit to be offered. It’s been offered. Noted."
Yorel moved his hands.
The twenty threads extending from his fingers tightened.
And the twenty puppets began walking toward the clearing’s center with the specific coordination of a military unit under a single command.
Surrounding Liaraen and Nathan.
Liaraen didn’t move from where she stood between Nathan and Yorel.
With the sword steady.
With a stable posture.
And with the voice Nathan heard over the sound of the twenty puppets moving.
"Nathan."
Nathan looked at her from the ground.
"Yes."
"Hold on. I’m going to resolve this."
"Sprout."
"Nathan."
"Don’t approach him without the sword in front."
"Nathan. I’m going to resolve it."
Nathan nodded.
With the last physical gesture his body could produce before his vision narrowed to the point of nearly closing.
And Liaraen, with the bright green sword of the Sael’thoryn lineage steady in both hands, took the first step forward.
Toward the twenty puppets.
Toward the man who’d planned for decades.
Toward the ritual Draken awaited.
With the specific determination Nathan had seen in her for the second time over the past two days.
And with the awareness, deep down, that although the sword was helping her, although the lineage enchantment was active, although she’d eliminated eight high B-Rank reinforcements during the previous fight, this fight was different.
Because it wasn’t against forest creatures.
It was against a Draken practitioner who’d refined his magic for decades.
And against twenty bodies of people she’d seen running toward Nathan minutes before.
Yorel stopped smiling.
With the calibrated calm he’d shown since the turn.
"Go ahead, elf."
Liaraen lunged.