Titan King: Ascension of the Giant Chapter 1715 Roots of Ruin

The World Tree roots that belonged to the Titanion Realm crossed the rift between dimensions and drove down into Timira. This was no simple merging. It was a devouring, ruinous and total.

The world's life-force began to wither, the rules that held the ecology in balance teetering toward collapse, and every living thing in Timira felt the tremor run through its very soul.

"Who are you?" Out of that despairing tremor, a hysterical, unwilling roar came up from deep beneath the Snail-Dragon tundra, and after it a still more violent heaving of earth and mountain. A strange creature hauled itself out of the crust, mountains on its back, its body long as a dragon's. A Snail-Dragon.

But in Orion's eyes it was no Snail-Dragon. For all that the thing before him brimmed with life, it gave off a reek of rot, inside and out. Its shell rose like a mountain, yet hung dull as dead stone, the faint glimmer of life left on it all but gone. The Snail-Dragon's feelers drooped, limp, sagging over its head, its eyes long since shriveled, leaving it heavy and hollow-seeming.

A Snail-Dragon like that—why brim with life at all? Because a human face was set into the Snail-Dragon's shell, and the life came from that face.

Whump—the answer to that face's question was the trident Orion hurled. It ran the face through, ran through the Snail-Dragon the face was grafted onto with it, and drove the pair down deep into the earth.

"Mountains on its back, body like a dragon—that'd be the Snail-Dragon progenitor from Timira's creation myth, wouldn't it?" Thaddeus of the Order of the Dandelion was a lover of myth; in every world he came to, he'd take in the local legends, and the hobby had turned up no small number of treasures for him. The moment this Snail-Dragon appeared, Thaddeus had read its provenance.

"Mordava and his mount?" Aednor put the question—not that myth interested him too, but that Timira's fabled powers did. To his mind, the so-called creator god was most likely that being above demigod fourth stage. Aednor set store by it. If Elara had no card in reserve, the one who'd have to stand and face Mordava in the end was, most likely, him.

"Eight to one it's him. Of the Snail-Dragons we've seen in Timira, none had bloodline that could grow to this." Thaddeus was sure of it. Since the war began they'd seized no end of Snail-Dragons for study, trying to settle whether the creatures counted as dragonkind at all. They knew the strange things inside and out, you might say.

"Pity—that Snail-Dragon progenitor's already rotted through." Aednor was a power himself; of course he could see the progenitor had gone badly wrong.

"Rotted? It's dead? Wasn't it alive a second ago—did the throw kill it?" Thaddeus was lost, then came round fast.

"No. It died long ago." Aednor shook his head. Only a creature dead a long while could be called rotted.

"Then what was it that just turned up?" Thaddeus was more baffled still; a low-tier demigod, he couldn't see to the bottom of the Snail-Dragon.

"A dead thing. An empty corpse. What spoke was the man grafted inside the Snail-Dragon's body." Aednor's tone went subtle by degrees, for he'd caught a few threads out of the ordinary.

"Heh. Interesting—Mordava and his mount. Tell me—man and Snail-Dragon both being demigods, whose life runs longer?" Aednor looked at Elara, come down to the ground now, and couldn't help sharing his find with this princess of such formidable nerve.

"The Snail-Dragon, of course." Elara had the answer out before she'd thought.

"You mean Mordava grafted himself into his own mount to go on living—drained the Snail-Dragon progenitor's life-force dry?" One arm folded across her chest, the other hand propping her chin, Elara fell to thinking in earnest. "Shouldn't a demigod's lifespan run very long?" Some things you can't see to the bottom of short of making demigod. Elara couldn't work it out, and looked up to ask Aednor.

"Very long. But we're not gods in the end—we don't get immortality, and a demigod too comes to a day of rot at last. Your Highness, if it weren't for a shot at immortality, the handful of us would never have come out of seclusion to make this run with you." A trace of rue showed on Aednor, quickly reined in, and he turned it to teasing Elara.

"Why didn't that Snail-Dragon fight back?" Even a mount raised up and brought to heel, Elara reckoned, might well turn on its master at the brink of death—like that black dragon she'd raised some years back, which chose to turn on her in the end over a single dragon-sinew.

"And how do you know the Snail-Dragon progenitor didn't fight back?" Aednor smiled. He'd looked the progenitor over closely just now; the mountains on that thing's back ran seamed and gullied all over—plainly there'd been a fierce struggle in life, a hard resistance.

"Fair enough." Elara nodded, granting Aednor the point. "No matter, though. My daddy's come in person—Mordava hasn't long to live, and neither does this world." Elara hopped up onto the shell of the Snail-Dragon mount and teased the infant with strands of her hair, so sure of herself her whole body gave off light.

"Why? Why devour Timira for no reason at all—this is my territory, my Divine Kingdom!" With a rolling rumble the crust churned, and the Snail-Dragon progenitor Mordava was grafted into burst up from underground again, hurling question after question at Orion.

The answer to Mordava was a giant palm Orion brought down offhand. It blotted out the sky and crushed the Snail-Dragon progenitor flat, the way you'd swat a gnat. Just as they all thought Mordava finished, a different World Tree root took shape out of the void, and on it stood an old man with a Snail-Dragon shell on his back.

Mordava.

"You think yours is the only Divine Kingdom with a World Tree?" Mordava roared. He stirred no trouble, courted no enemies, had stayed sunk in sleep the whole time—and even his descendants had inherited his mild bent, courteous and welcoming to the outsiders who came to wander Timira. And for all that, it had still drawn down a foreign foe.

"Kill. Drive the outsiders out—drive out the Dark Deity." It was past questions of right and wrong now. What Mordava meant to do was guard his territory, protect his Divine Kingdom, let his life go on inside it. For Mordava this was a fight to the death. Win, and only then could he go on living. So, with his Divine Kingdom's World Tree, Mordava roared and hurtled at Orion.

On the other side, Orion stayed silent. Trident in hand, he stepped out, his stride quickening and quickening. Treading the World Tree roots, treading the void, he became a streak of light and tore forward.

—

"Just a phantom will?" The one who cried out was Aednor, Vice-Master of the Order of the Dandelion. Only now did he see that what had descended was no Orion in the flesh at all, only a phantom will. The reason the phantom will didn't speak was that it was no more than a will with the instinct to fight.

"Demigod sixth stage." Aednor came to it all at once—what stood before them was not the fifth-stage giant lord of the intelligence files. "The intelligence is wrong. Rhazuun's led me astray."