*Day 14 - After the Foundry*
The impossible flowers were already dying.
Ora watched them wilt in the crater where the Foundry had been, their wrong-colored petals turning to ash that smelled like memories. Each flower that died took something with it—a sound, a color, a possibility that would never exist again. The permanent taste of ash coated her tongue, metallic and bitter. Her body ran seven degrees below normal now—cold enough that her breath created frost patterns in the air, and her touch left ice crystals on whatever she held.
"They were never meant to last," Vash'nil said from beside her. His voice still had too many harmonics, like three people trying to speak through one throat. "Beautiful things born from corruption never do."
"Speaking from experience?"
The young dragon—if he could still be called young after what had been done to him—tilted his heads. All three of them, each one looking in a different direction but somehow all focused on her.
"I am experience," he said simply.
The dragons had made camp around the crater. Eighteen massive forms creating a perimeter, not for protection but for containment. They were waiting for something. Ora could feel it in the way they held themselves, wings half-spread, ready for flight or fight.
"They're afraid," Sussurro-Vel whispered in her mind. The blade's consciousness was stronger now, more present since accepting her corruption. "Not of enemies. Of you."
"They should be."
"Should they?" Kaelen approached, still limping from their escape. "You saved us all. Saved them from becoming pawns in Vorgoth's game."
"I didn't save anyone. I just chose a different ending."
"Sometimes that's all salvation is."
S'pun-duh emerged from the crater, covered in spores that glowed faintly in the dying light. He'd been studying the flowers, trying to understand their impossible biology.
"Fascinating," he said, brushing rainbow-colored pollen from his beard. "They're not actually flowers. They're possibilities. Each one is something that could have been if the God-Eater had activated. Vorgoth's paradise, frozen in botanical form."
"And now they're dying."
"Everything dies. But these..." He held up a single petal that shifted between existing and not. "These are dying because we chose to continue. Every moment we exist, we're killing his perfect world."
"Good."
But even as she said it, Ora felt the weight of it. Every choice was a murder of infinite possibilities. Every step forward killed a thousand paths not taken.
Malakor approached from where he'd been burying his father. His hands—claws—things that were neither—were covered in dirt that sparkled with fragments of corrupted reality.
"I need to show you something," he said. His voice had stabilized since Vorgoth's death, the different aspects finding temporary harmony in grief. "About the God-Eater. About what we actually stopped."
He led them to where the sphere sat, inert but somehow still hungry. Its surface had scarred where Vash'nil's scream had cracked it, the scar tissue a different kind of wrong than the rest of it.
"My father was lying," Malakor said. "Not about what it would do—that was true. But about why he built it."
"He said he wanted to end suffering."
"He wanted to end his suffering." Malakor touched the sphere, and images flickered across its surface—memories pulled from its creator's mind. "My mother's death broke him. But not how he claimed. She didn't die trying to stop him from creating me. She died giving birth to me. Naturally. Simply. The one thing all his power couldn't prevent."
The images showed a woman with eyes like Malakor's human aspect, singing to herself as she worked in a garden. Then pain. Blood. A child born as his mother died, no grand tragedy, just the casual cruelty of mortality.
"He couldn't accept it," Malakor continued. "That sometimes things just end. No meaning, no purpose, just... ending. So he decided nothing should exist if it could just randomly cease."
"That's insane."
"Is it?" Malakor looked at her with all his aspects. "You've felt it. The corruption. The space between life and death. Isn't part of you tempted by the simplicity of nothing?"
Ora didn't answer because the answer was yes. Every day. Every moment. The corruption whispered it constantly—how easy it would be to just let go, to stop choosing, to embrace the absence.
"But you continue," Kaelen said softly. "We all do. That's what makes us more than the nothing."
A roar split the air. Not attack—announcement. Aetherios was calling assembly.
---
**The Judgment**
The dragons arranged themselves in a circle with military precision. At the center: Ora, Vash'nil, and surprisingly, Pyrrhus, still dripping from his forced ascent from the Abyss.
"The immediate threat has passed," Aetherios began, his voice carrying the weight of absolute authority. "But questions remain. Decisions must be made."
"About what?" Ora's hand went to Sussurro-Vel's hilt.
"About you. About what you've become. About what happens next."
"I thought we covered this. World's still ending, just slower. We continue until we don't."
"That's not enough." It was Silenus who spoke, ancient and patient. "You carry the power of a corrupted god. You've killed six dragons. You're becoming something that hasn't existed since the first fracturing. We need to know your intentions."
"My intentions?" Ora laughed, and reality flinched at the sound. "I intend to find the Distillers. I intend to make them pay for orchestrating all of this. I intend to survive long enough to see my sister's dream of harmony made impossible by the world's corruption. Good enough?"
"No." Umbraxis stepped forward, shadow-wreathed and hostile. "You're a weapon without a wielder. A blade that cuts everything it touches. You can't be allowed to wander free."
"Try to stop me."
The tension crystallized. Eighteen dragons versus one corrupted girl. The math was simple. The outcome, less so.
"Wait." Vash'nil moved between them, his wrong body rippling with possibility. "I have a proposition."
Everyone turned to the broken hatchling.
"Binding," he said simply. "Not slavery. Partnership. One dragon to one Ashkore. Shared purpose, shared power, shared responsibility."
"That's obscene," several dragons said simultaneously.
"Is it? We destroyed her world. She's hunting our manipulators. Our goals align. And..." Vash'nil's three heads aligned to look directly at Aetherios. "We need her. The Distillers have weapons we don't understand. She's the only one who's survived direct corruption and remained... functional."
"Functional is generous," Ora muttered.
"You're sane enough to make choices. That's more than most corrupted can claim."
Aetherios considered. The ancient dragon's eyes held calculations too complex for mortal understanding.
"Who would bind with her?" he asked finally.
"Me."
Everyone turned to look at Pyrrhus. The youngest dragon, barely adult, still bearing the marks of his imprisonment in the Abyss.
"You?" Aetherios's voice held disapproval. "You're unstable. Emotional. You—"
"Destroyed Crysillia. Started all of this. Failed to resist the Distillers' manipulation." Pyrrhus's head drooped. "I owe the greatest debt. Let me pay it."
"The binding is permanent," Silenus warned. "If she falls to corruption, you fall with her. If you die, she dies. There's no breaking it once made."
"I know."
"I don't agree to this," Ora said.
"You don't have to," Aetherios said coldly. "Either accept binding or face judgment. Those are your options."
"That's not a choice."
"No. But it's what you get."
Ora looked around the circle. Eighteen dragons, each one capable of ending her. Maybe she could take some with her, but not all. And then what? Die gloriously? Leave the Distillers unpunished?
"Fine," she said. "But conditions."
"You're hardly in a position—"
"I accept your binding," she interrupted. "But in exchange, all dragons swear to hunt the Distillers. Not just passively resist. Actively hunt. Make them pay for using you as weapons."
Silence. What she asked went against dragon nature. They were preservers, not avengers.
"Additionally," she continued, "Vash'nil comes with us. He's too broken for normal dragon life anyway. Let him learn to be something new alongside us."
"Acceptable," Vash'nil said before anyone could object.
Aetherios looked at each dragon in turn. Silent communication passed between them, decisions weighted and measured.
"Agreed," he said finally. "Pyrrhus binds with the Ashkore. They hunt the Distillers with our support. Vash'nil accompanies them as... witness."
"Then let's get this over with."
---
**The Binding Ritual**
They used the crater where impossible flowers died, the ground still soft with potential.
The ritual was older than civilization. Before dragons burned cities, they bound with concepts—Justice, Mercy, Vengeance. Now Pyrrhus would bind with something more complex: a corrupted girl who was becoming something else.
"This will hurt," Silenus warned, drawing symbols in the air with claw and flame.
"Everything hurts. Get on with it."
Pyrrhus faced her, and for the first time since Crysillia, they truly looked at each other. He was magnificent in his destruction—scales that shifted from gold to crimson, eyes that held the memory of a thousand fires. Young by dragon standards but ancient by human.
"I'm sorry," he said. "For Crysillia. For your family. For starting this cascade of horror."
"Apologies don't resurrect the dead."
"No. But they acknowledge the debt." He lowered his great head until they were eye to eye. "I offer my fire to temper your vengeance. My wings to carry your purpose. My life bound to yours until ending takes us both."
The ritual wanted her to respond with formal words, acceptance of partnership. Instead, Ora spoke truth:
"I hate you. I'll probably always hate you. But hate's just passion misdirected. Maybe we can aim it at something useful."
"That's the worst acceptance vow I've ever heard," Umbraxis muttered.
"It's honest," Silenus said. "That's enough."
He spoke words in the dragon tongue that predated language itself. The symbols he'd drawn began to glow, then burn, then become something more than light.
Ora felt it immediately—a pulling at her essence, not unlike the God-Eater but opposite. Instead of unmaking, this was making. Creating a connection that shouldn't exist.
Pyrrhus screamed first. The binding hit him like corruption in reverse, Ora's darkness flooding into his flame. His scales flickered between states, solid to liquid to gas to something outside physics.
Then it hit Ora, and she understood why he'd screamed.
His memories crashed into her—the joy of first flight, the terror of first kill, the manipulation of the Distillers presented as holy mission, the horror of realizing he'd been used, the months in the Abyss being slowly digested by living darkness, the desperate hope that somehow, somehow, he could make it right.
But more than memories. His essence. The part of him that was fundamentally dragon—ancient, proud, connected to forces humans couldn't comprehend.
It mixed with her corruption like oil and water forced to become one substance.
She was on fire. She was frozen. She was nothing. She was everything.
She was—
"Bound," Silenus announced, and reality snapped back into focus.
Ora gasped, on her knees without remembering falling. Beside her, Pyrrhus was similarly collapsed, his great form shuddering.
But she could feel him. Not thoughts exactly, but presence. A warmth where her corruption was cold. A light where her darkness pooled.
"How do you feel?" Kaelen asked, helping her stand.
"Like someone grafted a sun to my shadow."
*Not inaccurate,* Pyrrhus's voice echoed in her mind. Different from Sussurro-Vel's whispers. Louder. Warmer. More present.
*Get out of my head.*
*Can't. Bound, remember? We're stuck with each other's mental noise.*
*Fantastic.*
But even as she complained, Ora felt something she hadn't expected: stability. The corruption that constantly ate at her edges had something to push against now. Not stopping it, but slowing it. Giving her more time before the inevitable consumption.
"The binding took," Aetherios announced. "They are one purpose now. Let any who would harm one face both."
"Touching," Malakor said. "But we have bigger problems."
He pointed north, where the sky was wrong. Not corrupted—organized. Clouds moving in formation, carrying something that made reality nervous.
"The Distillers," Vash'nil said, his broken sight seeing more than others. "They know what we did. They're sending response."
"How many?"
"All of them. All that remain." His three heads tilted in different directions, tracking threats visible only to him. "They're done being subtle. They're coming to finish what they started."
"Good," Ora said, testing her new balance of corruption and dragonfire. "Let them come."
*You're insane,* Pyrrhus said in her mind.
*You're bound to insane. What does that make you?*
*Properly fucked.*
Despite everything, Ora almost smiled.
---
**Preparations**
They had three days before the Distillers arrived. Three days to prepare for war against beings that had manipulated dragons into genocide.
The dragons dispersed to gather allies—or at least warn others to stay away. Only Pyrrhus, Vash'nil, and Silenus remained with Ora's group.
"We need a plan," Kaelen said for the fifth time.
"The plan is we fight," Ora replied for the fifth time.
"That's not a plan. That's a death wish."
"Sometimes they're the same thing."
But she knew he was right. The Distillers weren't just powerful—they were clever. They'd orchestrated the destruction of Crysillia without lifting a finger. Direct confrontation was what they expected.
"We need to be smarter," Malakor said. His aspects had settled into a rhythm since his father's death—human for thinking, dragon for strength, weapon for killing. "They expect us to fight like heroes or monsters. We need to fight like them. Indirect. Manipulative."
"I don't do indirect."
"You do now," Pyrrhus said aloud, his voice strange coming from dragon throat. "We're bound. Your corruption, my fire. But also your rage and my patience. We balance each other."
"That's the theory."
"Then let's test it."
What followed was three days of the strangest training Ora had ever experienced. Not combat—she knew how to kill. But cooperation. Learning to let Pyrrhus's calm temper her rage. Learning to let her determination fuel his doubt.
The binding grew stronger with each hour. She began to feel his physical sensations—the weight of wings, the furnace of dragon-heart. He felt her corruption's hunger, the constant pull toward entropy.
"This is deeply uncomfortable," he said during one session.
"You burned my city."
"Fair point."
Vash'nil trained beside them, learning to control his broken form. He could shift between states now—solid, liquid, gas, and something else that hurt to perceive. Each state had advantages. Solid for strength, liquid for infiltration, gas for area effect, and the other thing for making reality cry.
"You're all insane," Marcus said, watching them practice. "You know that, right?"
"Sanity's overrated," S'pun-duh replied, cultivating new species of combat fungi. "Adaptation's what matters."
The dwarf had changed since the Foundry. His symbiosis with the fungal network had deepened. He could feel things through spore networks now, a sensory web that extended for miles.
"They're coming," he announced on the evening of the third day. "The Distillers. I can feel them through the mycelium. They're... wrong."
"Everything's wrong now," Ora said.
"No, differently wrong. They're not corrupted. They're... perfected. Like someone took the concept of 'human' and refined it until nothing human remained."
"How many?"
"Seventeen. Plus something else. Something bigger. Older." His eyes went wide. "Oh no."
"What?"
"They're not coming to fight us. They're coming to recruit us."
Before anyone could respond, the sky opened.
Not split—opened. Like reality was a door and someone had found the handle.
Through the gap, Ora saw them clearly for the first time.
The Distillers.
They were beautiful the way mathematics was beautiful. Perfect proportions, perfect symmetry, perfect presence. But their perfection was aggressive, hostile to the imperfect world around them.
Seventeen figures descended, each one unique but unified in their wrongness. They wore robes that were also armor that was also skin. They had faces that were also masks that were also nothing.
And behind them, in the gap, something vast watched. The thing that had made them. The original Distiller.
It spoke without words, directly into consciousness:
"Children of chaos. You've delayed the inevitable. But every delay serves purpose. You've proven worthy of elevation. Accept distillation. Become perfect. End suffering through transformation."
"Counter-offer," Ora said, drawing Sussurro-Vel. "You fucked around. Time to find out."
The perfect beings looked at her with expressions that might have been amusement or pity or nothing at all.
"The corrupted one speaks defiance. Expected. Accounted for. Observe."
One of the Distillers raised a hand, and Ora's corruption responded without her control. It surged, trying to consume her from within. But then Pyrrhus's fire pushed back, the binding turning what should have been instant death into mere agony.
"Interesting," the Distiller noted. "Binding achieved. Adaptation successful. You learn."
"We do more than learn."
Ora moved, not with human speed but with corruption-enhanced velocity. Sussurro-Vel swept toward the nearest Distiller—
And passed through empty air.
The Distiller had simply existed elsewhere, no movement, just transition.
"Physical assault. Primitive. Ineffective." It raised its hand again, but this time reality itself attacked.
The ground beneath Ora became probability—might be solid, might be void, might be fire. She fell-flew-burned-froze simultaneously.
*Together,* Pyrrhus roared in her mind.
She felt him dive from above, fire brewing in his throat. Not normal dragonfire—corrupted fire, tainted by their binding. It hit the probability field and gave it definition, forcing it to choose a state.
Ora landed on solid ground that steamed with impossible heat.
"Better," the lead Distiller acknowledged. "But insufficient."
All seventeen raised their hands in unison.
What happened next wasn't an attack. It was a lesson.
Reality became optional in a sphere around them. Not corrupted or broken—simply suspended, waiting for someone to tell it what to be.
In that space, the Distillers showed them visions:
The world ending in dragon fire.The world ending in corruption.The world ending in perfection.The world ending in ice.The world ending in song.The world ending.The world ending.The world ending.
"All paths lead to conclusion," the lead Distiller explained. "We offer transcendence before termination. Evolution beyond ending. Join or rejoice in futility."
"I choose futility," Ora said through gritted teeth.
"Choose quickly. Time diminishes."
They gestured, and Ora saw it—the world from above, corruption spreading like infection from a thousand wounds. Not just from Crysillia or the Foundry. Everywhere. The world was dying, had been dying since the first breaking.
"Years remain. Perhaps decades. Then cascade failure. Then nothing." The Distiller's perfect face showed what might have been sympathy. "We offer alternative. Controlled transformation. Guided evolution. Suffering ends because sufferers transcend."
"Into what? You?"
"Into possibility."
They showed her—beings of pure thought, unbound by physics or mortality. No pain because no nerves. No loss because no attachment. No fear because no death.
"That's not transcendence," Kaelen said, stepping forward despite the reality suspension. "That's erasure. You're not evolving us. You're deleting everything that makes us us."
"Identity is isolation. Isolation is suffering. We offer unity."
"Fuck your unity."
It was Vash'nil who attacked this time. Not with claw or flame but with his wrongness itself. He became the thing that shouldn't exist, the broken dragon who'd survived impossible tortures.
His very presence was antithetical to perfection.
The Distillers recoiled—actually moved backward, their first genuine reaction.
"Anomaly," they said in unison. "Unaccounted variable. How do you persist?"
"Through spite," Vash'nil answered, his three heads speaking in harmony. "Through refusing your simplicity."
He expanded, not physically but conceptually. His wrongness spread, infecting the perfect space they'd created. Suddenly, the suspended reality had options besides what the Distillers offered.
"Now!" Malakor shouted.
He moved with all his aspects at once—human cunning, dragon strength, weapon purpose. His blade, forged from his own broken essence, cut through not the Distillers but the space between them and everyone else.
The perfect beings found themselves isolated in their own suspended reality.
"Impossible," they said, but uncertainty had entered their voice.
"You forgot something," Ora said, stepping to the edge of their prison. "You're so focused on perfection, you forgot that broken things can be sharp. Can cut. Can make things bleed that shouldn't have blood."
She pressed Sussurro-Vel against the barrier Malakor had created. The blade sang with hunger, with purpose, with acceptance of imperfection.
It pierced through.
Not much. Just a small hole. But enough.
Ora's corruption flowed through, and for the first time, the Distillers felt what they'd inflicted on others.
The slow dissolution of self. The hungry void between states. The weight of entropy.
They screamed—perfect harmonies that shattered into discord.
But the vast thing watching from beyond hadn't moved. Hadn't reacted. It observed its seventeen children being corrupted with something that might have been interest.
Then it spoke directly to Ora:
"You would make interesting Distillers."
The gap in the sky began to close, taking the suspended reality with it. The seventeen perfect beings were pulled back, corrupted but not destroyed, changed but not ended.
"This was test," the original Distiller said as reality reasserted. "You passed. Next time, no restraint. Prepare or perish. Choose wisely."
The sky healed, leaving only normal stars and the memory of perfection corrupted.
Everyone stood in shocked silence.
"We won?" Marcus asked eventually.
"No," Ora said, feeling the corruption spreading faster from the effort. "We just graduated from prey to threat."
"That's not better."
"It's different. Different might be enough."
She looked at Pyrrhus, bound to her fate. At Vash'nil, broken but unbroken. At her companions who'd followed her into impossibility.
"They'll be back," she said. "Stronger. Prepared for our tricks."
"Then we'll have new tricks," Malakor said. His aspects had unified during the battle, finding harmony in opposition to perfection.
"We'll need more than tricks. We'll need an army."
"Or," Kaelen said quietly, "we need to become something they can't distill. Something too chaotic to perfect."
"You have an idea?"
"Several. All terrible. All necessary." He pulled out a journal, pages covered in symbols that hurt to read. "The Foundry gave me access to Vorgoth's research. Not about the God-Eater. About transformation itself. About becoming other."
"That sounds like what they want."
"No. They want controlled evolution. Guided transcendence." His eyes gleamed with dangerous knowledge. "I'm talking about weaponized chaos. Deliberate wrongness. Becoming so fundamentally broken that perfection can't process us."
Ora considered. It was insane. Dangerous. Probably fatal.
"Tell me more."
---
**The New Path**
As dawn broke over the crater where impossible flowers had grown and died, the group that had survived the Distillers' test made plans that would horrify heroes and confuse villains.
They would not fight perfection with corruption.
They would fight it with choice.
The choice to be wrong. To be broken. To be incomplete and contradictory and impossible.
The choice to continue despite everything saying they should stop.
"We'll need others," Silenus said. The ancient dragon had watched the battle without intervening, measuring, calculating. "Others willing to break themselves for the chance to remain themselves."
"I know where to find them," S'pun-duh said. "The Underground Markets. The Forsaken Cities. The places where the already-broken gather."
"Then that's where we go."
Ora stood, feeling the weight of binding, corruption, and purpose.
"The Distillers want to perfect the world through unity," she said. "Fine. We'll break it through diversity. Make it so chaotic that their perfection becomes meaningless."
"That's not a salvation," Silenus warned.
"No. But it's a choice. And sometimes that's enough."
Above them, the sun rose wrong—too many colors, too many directions. The world's corruption was accelerating.
But so was its defiance.
In the crater, a single impossible flower bloomed again. Different from the others. Uglier. More broken.
More real.
Ora picked it, and it didn't die. It couldn't. It was too wrong to follow even the rules of its own wrongness.
"Perfect," she said, and meant it.
---
*End Chapter 15*
---