Paragon of Destruction

But slowly, he began to realize that this was no attack. The blinding pain wasn’t an enemy’s ambush, but the Essence of his own world.

After countless years in the Shadow Realm, his Sense had been sharpened beyond recognition. In a world that held only deathly silence, he had learned to hear a whisper from a thousand miles away.

Yet he had returned to his own world. And here, Essence was ever-present — so much of it that his Sense was completely overwhelmed.

For several days, all he could do was to lie on the ground and endure the ceaseless assault, hoping that his Sense would not take too long in adjusting to this new environment.

He was confident that it would adjust, however. The situation wasn’t so different from the one in Uvar, where his Sense had been battered by the unbound Essence of a past battle.

Here, the onslaught wasn’t nearly as chaotic. What he Sensed wasn’t an onslaught of unbound Essence, but the brightness of a world that hadn’t been stripped of all life. And as the days passed, he gradually grew accustomed to his own world once more.

After a week, he had recovered enough to stand up and move around. While his Sense was mostly useless — it was still too sensitive for this world — the torrent of sensation was no longer so blindingly intense it completely overwhelmed him.

The first thing he did was examine his surroundings. As expected, he had returned to the spherical chamber with its starmetal walls. And at the center of the chamber lay the shadowy vortex — the portal to the Shadow Realm.

Arran let out a deep sigh when he saw the mass of darkness. Within the Shadow Realm, years would have passed already. And yet, Karanos had not succeeded in closing the tear in reality.

The sight was disheartening, but Arran knew there was nothing he could do.

It would take him some time to prepare to leave the dungeons, and until then, he would keep watch over the portal. Perhaps Karanos would succeed in closing it yet, or perhaps the man himself would emerge after failing his task. Either way, Arran would be there to witness it.

There was another possibility, of course — that something else would emerge from the portal. And if that happened, Arran wasn’t confident in his ability to handle it. But the Essence of his own world might briefly overwhelm an invader, and that might give Arran a chance of defeating it.

He didn’t consider leaving immediately. After what Karanos had done for him, remaining here until he knew there was no direct threat to Amydon was the least he could do.

Instead, he sat down in the spherical chamber and opened his void ring. He had work to do.

First, he retrieved a small mirror from the void ring, curious to see what years in the Shadow Realm had done to his appearance. The result was both unsurprising and unpleasant — he was gaunt and pale, with traces of gray in his roughly cut hair and beard. His face held traces of age, too. If someone who didn’t know him saw him now, they would likely think he was a middle-aged man.

The sight was unsettling, but Arran merely looked at it with mild curiosity. He knew that once his body recovered, the signs of age would mostly fade away. Perhaps a few years would be added to his appearance when his recovery was complete, but no more than that.

Yet another surprise awaited him, and one far more unpleasant than his appearance.

Numerous years had passed while he was in the Shadow Realm, and now, he saw that his body wasn’t the only thing that had been affected. The vast trove of dragon meat within his void ring had almost completely withered away, the Natural Essence within it all but gone.

Arran cursed in frustration at the discovery. His body needed Natural Essence to recover, and he had thought the dragon meat would provide him with the means for that. But without that, the process would be a long and difficult one.

A quick search through his void ring confirmed Arran’s fears. None of the food he carried had survived the years — centuries, most likely — he had spent in the Shadow Realm.

The only things left in his void ring that contained Natural Essence were Panurge’s bottles of wine.

While he’d traded most of the ones he’d received to Lord Sevaril, about a hundred of the bottles still remained. And while the food in Arran’s void ring had withered away, the wine was still rich in Natural Essence — though considerably less so than the dragon meat had been.

Wary of the self-proclaimed god’s gifts, Arran gave the wine a thorough inspection using his much-sharpened Sense. He was relieved to find no signs of danger, but he was surprised to find that the Natural Essence it contained was subtly different from that around him.

It reminded him of the difference between his own Shadow Essence and that which he had encountered in the Shadow Realm. Although the two were almost completely the same, there was a slight disparity between them — as if they’d come from different sources.

The discovery caused Arran to frown in wonder, as he realized that the wine must have come from another world than his own. And if that was the case, the same would likely be true for Panurge himself.

After a moment, Arran shrugged, then put the matter aside. The important thing was that the wine was safe to drink, and that it would allow him to make a first step toward recovering his lost strength.

He spent the week that followed drinking up almost all of the wine, his Dragon’s Ruin hungrily devouring the Natural Essence within. He left a few bottles in reserve for emergencies, but no more than that — restoring his strength as quickly as possible was his foremost task, and it was one that could not wait.

The wine allowed his body to recover somewhat, though not as much as he had hoped. Compared to the dragon meat, it was a paltry treasure, and one that he would have ignored if he had any alternatives. But he didn’t, and so, he settled for the wine.

The week passed with little sign from his sword, which didn’t surprise Arran. His own Sense had been overwhelmed after passing through the portal, and the sword’s Sense was much keener. Even if it couldn’t feel pain — something of which he wasn’t certain — it would need time to adjust to this new world.

More worrying was that there was no sign of change to the portal, either. By now, many years would already have passed in the Shadow Realm, and Arran was starting to fear that Karanos had failed.

If that was the case, the task of closing the portal would fall to Arran. And so far, he had not even the slightest idea of how to do that.

He gave the matter some thought, then decided to head to the city in the upper cavern. Karanos had said there were three books among his possessions, with one of them containing the mage’s notes about the Shadow Realm.

Arran doubted the notes would be of much use, but they were the best lead he had. Or rather, the only lead — because other than Karanos’s notes, he had no idea where he could even begin to look for answers about the portal.

Unwilling to leave the portal unattended for long, he quickly left the spherical chamber, then hurried through the caverns to the city above.

The caverns were exactly as he remembered them — filled with treasures that were discarded like trash, and without any sign of unwelcome visitors.

When Arran reached the underground city, he found himself impressed with it once more. By now, his Sense had grown accustomed enough to this world to be useful again, but it was still incomparably sharper than it had been before.

And with his sharpened Sense, Arran now saw that the city was even more impressive — and strange — than he had previously realized. Sprawling across much of the cavern, its large buildings held an alien beauty, as if they had been designed by people with an aesthetic wholly different from any Arran had ever encountered.

The strangeness of the city caused him to wonder whether its builders had perhaps come from the world he had left behind, fled through the portal when they realized their own world was falling to a flood of Shadow Essence.

Perhaps they had even been the ones who created the portal in the first place — a path of escape they built once they knew their world was doomed.

These were possibilities Karanos had not mentioned, but ones Arran could not reject. And if there was any truth to them, it meant that the Shadow Realm’s inhabitants — or their descendants — might still live in this world.

Yet Arran had no way to confirm or refute these speculations, and after a few moments of idle thought, he put them aside.

Instead, he made his way through the ancient city, hurrying back to Karanos’s old quarters. There, he would find the mage’s notes — and, hopefully, some answers to the many questions he still had.