When Judgment Learned to Kneel

I stood there waiting for him to say something.

Minutes passed.

Bahamut stared at me, but not really. His eyes were fixed somewhere beyond my face, beyond the broken thrones, beyond the ruined stone and old scars carved into the floor. Whatever he saw was not the room as it stood now, but the room as it had been.

The room as I had left it.

“Sir,” I said carefully, “are you all right?”

That pulled him out of the haze.

He blinked once, then pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head, almost embarrassed by his own silence.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I was reminiscing.”

Reminiscing.

I looked around the throne room.

The cracked dais. The fractured walls. The scorch marks that magic had never fully erased. Two broken thrones still standing like monuments to a family that had eaten itself alive.

“Sir,” I said, “this does not seem like something worth reminiscing about.”

A small, tired smile touched his mouth.

He stepped down from the dais and came toward me. Not as a king descending on a subject. Not exactly. More like a man walking through a house after a funeral, touching the furniture because grief has made memory physical.

He placed a hand on my shoulder.

“It reminds me of a different time,” he said. “Simpler. Not better. Do not mistake me. But simpler.”

I raised an eyebrow.

What the fuck did he remember?

Did Tamara have some spell over him back then? Had grief polished the blade until he forgot which way it had cut? I wanted to ask. I wanted to peel the memory open and see whether he was lying to me or himself.

But there was another question sitting heavier on my tongue.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He gave a quiet chuckle, warm enough that for a moment I could almost see the boy he had been beneath the god he had become.

Before he could answer, I shifted the conversation.

“Sir, may I ask who came before me?”

His expression changed.

So I clarified quickly.

“I mean the god who left their position before my birth.”

The words made my stomach twist.

My birth.

Saying it felt foul. Like swallowing a name that belonged to someone else and pretending it nourished me.

Bahamut turned from me and sat on the steps of the dais. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands folded beneath his chin. For a while, he simply studied me.

Too closely.

As if he could see through bone, title, and borrowed beginning.

As if he knew I was not his new son at all, but his old father standing in front of him wearing a second life.

“I did not think that would be your first question,” he said at last. “The previous god who abandoned her station. Hm. You surprise me.”

He let the silence stretch.

I hated that.

Then his eyes narrowed faintly.

“I assume this has to do with the blessing that activated in the Dale today. You paused before returning.”

There it was.

Garyx had told him.

Or Bahamut had been watching through other means. With this palace, this council, this living map, who the hell could say?

“Yes, sir,” I said. “When I felt the blessing, something inside me responded. It felt… hollow.”

A half-truth.

The safest kind of lie.

Bahamut lowered his hands between his knees and looked down at his knuckles. He began rubbing one thumb over the other, a small fidget that seemed too human for the Platinum Dragon. It made him look less like a manipulator and more like a man choosing which painful thing to say first.

“That is unexpected,” he said quietly. “But not a flaw in you. It has to do with the method I used to create you.”

Now he had my attention.

“What do you mean, sir?”

Bahamut stood and summoned a longsword into his hand.

The weapon was beautiful in a severe way. A serpent-like dragon coiled around the guard, its mouth open near the blade as if whispering into the steel. He lowered the tip to the floor and began carving into the stone before me.

Runes.

Circles.

Binding arcs.

I recognized pieces as they formed.

Mystra’s arcane grammar. Clean, elegant, mortal-divine spellcraft refined through centuries of use. Then the primordial language I had taught him, old enough to make the palace remember its first stones. And beneath both, uglier and stranger, the broken syntax of Pandemonium and the Abyssal tongue of dead or forgotten gods.

The combination sent a chill down my spine.

Void-magic threaded the circle.

Not pure nothingness, but near enough to make my soul tense.

Bahamut carved my name in primordial at the center.

Lendys.

“I perfected this summoning circle recently,” he said, “with help from Mystra and Null.”

Null.

My eyes widened before I could stop them.

Bahamut noticed.

“Does that name mean something to you?” he asked. His voice stayed gentle, but his gaze sharpened. “Do you feel anything when you hear it?”

I shook my head, forcing disbelief onto my face.

“I learned of Null from Otigen,” I said. “Nothing more. Only that he was forgotten or lost to the world thousands of years ago.”

Bahamut watched me for a moment longer.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to NovelPhoenix for the genuine story.

Then nodded.

“Not lost. Not dead.” He looked down at the circle again. “He is very much alive. He dwells in the Astral void, searching for something he believes was taken from him.”

He wanted me to bite.

I could feel it.

So I did not.

“How does this relate to the one who left her station?” I asked. “And I find it odd you still will not name her.”

I took a few steps closer and held his gaze, giving him just enough defiance to notice.

Bahamut sighed.

“Tamara was a failure,” he said. “But her failure taught me a great deal.”

There it was.

He had tried to bring her back.

Maybe not as she had been. Maybe not whole. Maybe not with memory intact. But he had tried. And whatever emerged had not played mother, saint, or obedient mercy long enough for his liking.

A dark, satisfied thought moved through me.

Maybe he had seen her cruelty too.

Maybe she had finally shown him the face she showed me.

“How was she a failure?” I asked. “And why was she a lesson, sir?”

Bahamut looked away.

“She was rebellious,” he said. “To an almost exhausting degree.”

That sounded so petty I nearly laughed.

“She would not remain in the palace. She would not answer summons reliably. She refused to bless the metallic flights. She would not lend her power to the war effort, not even when shown what Tiamat and Zariel were doing on Faerûn.”

His voice tightened, but not with simple anger.

Grief lived there.

Old frustration too. A son trying to speak about his mother as a failed divine asset because saying she broke his heart would have been too naked for a throne room.

“I was not trying to control her,” he said, softer now. “I was trying to keep her from vanishing again.”

For one moment, I almost believed him.

Then I looked back at the ritual circle and saw the Abyssal knots twisting through the runes.

“Not trying to control her,” I repeated.

His jaw flexed. “You do not understand what it costs to call something back from scattering.”

No.

I understood better than he knew.

He continued talking, but the words blurred as I studied the circle. The nonsense in the Abyssal lines annoyed me. Not because it was wrong. Because it was clever. Brutishly clever. A cage disguised as a cradle. A summoning that did not merely invite a soul home but taught the returning shape where to stand.

Bahamut was still speaking of Tamara’s defiance when my temper snapped loose.

“What the fuck do her teenage moods have to do with this ritual, Bahamut?”

The chamber went silent.

He stared at me.

I realized a second too late what I had done.

No sir.

No reverence.

Just his name, thrown like I had every right.

Bahamut’s shock lasted less than a heartbeat.

Then his eyes widened for another reason entirely.

“There,” he whispered.

A gleeful, almost frightened expression spread across his face.

He moved toward me quickly. “Right there.”

He glanced toward the double doors. “Velih.”

The golden consort waiting near the entrance hurried in with a mirror at once.

Bahamut held it in front of my face.

Black bled from the outer edge of my sclera.

For one brief moment, power swelled inside me—deep, older than divinity, a pressure from beneath the name dragon itself. Then it receded before I could understand it, before I could hook my claws into the feeling and call it back.

I stared at my reflection.

Bahamut stared too.

Not like a tyrant gloating over a weapon.

Like a starving man watching a locked door finally open.

“That power,” he said, voice barely contained, “belonged to the original Lendys.”

I said nothing.

“In the ritual I used to call Tamara, I thought she might possess something similar. Some remnant of the first order. Some deeper principle beneath the divine.” He handed the mirror back to Velih without looking away from me. “She did not.”

His gaze sharpened.

“But you do.”

I kept my face still.

Barely.

“The power Lendys held in my youngest days rivaled the First Ones,” Bahamut said. “But when he returned from Faerûn before his fall, he believed himself restored. He was not. He was drawing from me. Siphoning my strength through the bond between us after the death of his mortal vessel.”

That explained it.

His weakness then.

His fading.

The way he had stood diminished before me in the old palace without realizing how much of himself he was pouring into the man who would ruin him.

Bahamut kept speaking, and I hated that I wanted every word.

“This is different,” he said. “What stirred in you does not draw from me. It pulls from something deeper than divine power. Something rooted in the draconic soul before domain, before worship, before hierarchy.”

His expression softened for a fraction of a second.

“You may not understand what that means yet. I barely do. But if it can be studied, if it can be made safe, if even a lesser echo can be replicated in the flights—”

He stopped himself.

Too late.

I heard the hunger.

Not greed, exactly.

Worse.

Hope sharpened into obsession.

“What do you mean by harness it, sir?” I asked.

Yes.

Bring the respect back.

Let him hear what he wanted. If he was anything like his mother, reverence would loosen his tongue faster than a blade.

Bahamut drew a breath.

“I want to study it,” he said. “Understand it. See whether it can be replicated in lesser dragons.”

Another stunned silence settled in me.

“Why?”

He tilted his head, as if the question itself confused him.

“To save more people.”

He said it with such conviction that for a moment I almost doubted my own suspicion.

Almost.

“To end threats before they metastasize. To give the flights a defense against Tiamat’s corruption, against infernal breaches, against the kind of things that devour villages before a messenger can reach us.” His hand curled at his side. “I am tired of arriving after the dead are already counted.”

That was the human part of him, I think.

The part I did not want to see.

Not cold procedure. Not a throne wearing my son’s face. A grieving god who had buried too many failures under strategy because strategy was easier than helplessness.

But the power he wanted was not salvation.

I had felt it.

It was not made to shield trembling villagers or heal burned children. It was destruction given instinct. A primal command to identify an enemy and end it so completely the world learned fear from the absence.

It belonged in someone like Garyx.

And yet it had been born in me.

Looking at Bahamut’s bright, desperate interest, I saw Tamara in his features. Not her cruelty. Not exactly. Her certainty. Her ability to make a virtue dangerous because she loved it too much to question what it cost.

Mercy had made Tamara monstrous.

Salvation could do the same to him.

So how the fuck was I supposed to keep it from him?

The thought moved to the front of my mind and settled there.

Bahamut watched me, waiting.

He would not let this go.

Not now.

Not after seeing the black in my eyes.

So I lowered my head a fraction and said the words I would regret later.

“What will you have me do, sir?”