Chapter 95: 95. The expelled Shamans

They found Elder Moss three kilometers outside the Ironmane settlement’s eastern edge.

He had not stayed far after Marak’s expulsion order came through.

Elder Moss was a wolf-folk, older than any Owen had encountered in Vashari. His muzzle was white. His grey eyes had stopped trying to look alert and had settled into something else entirely.

He was sitting cross-legged in the Ashplain grass when they found him, staff across his knees, apparently waiting.

“Young Dragon,” he said, without opening his eyes. “You smell exhausted… Did you use a power that has a significant cost?.”

“You can smell that????” Odessa said.

“I can smell mana…” Elder Moss said, opening his eyes. “At my age, the senses expand into registers younger people haven’t developed yet.” He looked at Owen with those clear, ancient eyes. “Sit. We have things to discuss and you need to recover before you do anything else requiring significant output.”

Owen sat.

The others arranged themselves around the elder—Leah cross-legged beside Owen, Yuki on his other side, Odessa and Alfred settling into the configuration of people who had been doing fieldwork together long enough to find comfort in dirt. Marak’s messenger hovered at the group’s edge. But Leah gestured at him and He sat.

“The void erosion…” Owen said. “What do you know about it?”

Elder Moss was quiet for a moment. “The old texts—the ones the demon destroyed when she expelled us, or tried to, because we had already moved them—describe something called the Hollow Tide. A demonic ability. Very old. Hmm” He paused.

“It doesn’t attack matter. It attacks the will of matter to remain coherent. Every physical object has a kind of insistence on being itself at the mana level. Solid things insist on being solid. Alive things insist on staying alive. The Hollow Tide undermines that insistence.”

“It makes things stop believing they should exist…” Owen said slowly.

“A crude way to put it, but directionally correct.” The elder’s eyes moved across Owen’s face. “The fact that your scales held against it suggests the Dragon King bloodline — yes, I can smell a distinction of royalty in you— your bloodline has a fundamental coherence that resists the Hollow Tide’s principle. But that resistance is not perfect. And sustained exposure will—”

“Would erode it” Owen finished.

“Yes” the elder confirmed. “Which is why extended engagement with this demon is a significant risk. Not because she can break you in a single exchange, but because every exchange moves the threshold.”

Owen thought about the dungeon field fight. The narrows. The hall today.

“She’s not trying to kill me in a fight,” he said. “She’s trying to erode my coherence until the void erosion reaches a layer that my resistance can’t hold.”

“Yes,” Elder Moss said. “She is a very patient creature.”

“How do I counter it?”

The elder looked at him steadily. “This Draconic Resonance skill of yours that you used today pushes back the Hollow Tide because it is an extremely powerful assertion of draconic coherence. You are insisting on your existence so completely that the Tide cannot find purchase.” He paused. “If you can maintain that quality of insistence—not the full skill, which costs too much, but the underlying principle—at a lower output, continuously—”

“A passive layer…” Owen said. “A baseline resonance running under everything else.”

“Theoretically possible,” the elder said. “Practically difficult. It requires a quality of self-knowledge that most beings never develop because they never need to. You would need to know yourself so completely that the assertion of your existence became automatic rather than effortful.”

Silence washed over them.

“You have seven days,” the elder said. “Perhaps eight. The formation is—”

“Accelerating. We know.”

“No,” the elder said. His voice had changed. “You know the acceleration rate from a week ago. I have been sitting near the formation for three days without other demands on my attention.” He looked at Owen with those clear, ancient eyes. “The rate has increased again. Yesterday, significantly.”

“How significantly?”

“My estimate is five days. Possibly four.”

The group absorbed this.

“She’s pushing harder,” Yuki said. “After today. She knows we’re closer than she planned for.”

“She’s trying to force the manifestation before we can reach it,” Leah said.

Alfred leaned forward. “If it manifests while she’s at the formation and we’re not—”

“She enters first,” Odessa said. “Controls the dungeon’s internal conditions. Whatever fragment of Dominus’s power is inside, she acquires it before we can.”

The Ashplain wind moved through the grass.

“How far is the formation from here?” Owen asked Elder Moss.

“On foot, with current terrain? Two days.”

“And if I fly?”

Elder Moss looked at him. “If you fly, you arrive exhausted and with reduced mana reserves in a location where the most dangerous demon you have encountered is waiting with full void erosion and months of preparation.”

“And if I don’t fly, she enters first,” Owen said.

“Yes.”

Owen was already standing. “Then we move tonight. All of us. I’ll pace myself.” He looked at Elder Moss. “Will you come?”

The old wolf-folk elder looked at him for a long moment. Then he pushed himself to his feet with the careful deliberation of very old bones making an unaccustomed demand.

“I have been sitting in the Ashplain grass for three days,” he said, “waiting for a reason to stand up.”

He paused.

“Yes. I will come.”

Leah stood. “We need supplies. The messenger can ride back to Marak—tell him we’re moving to intercept. We’ll need the northern route cleared entirely. No delays. No scouts. Nothing between us and that formation.”

The messenger nodded and was already moving toward the horses.

Yuki pulled out her pack. “Two days means we move through the night. Owen, can you sustain that?”

“I have to…” Owen said.

“That’s not a good enough answer.”

“Then the answer is I don’t know,” Owen said. “But I know what happens if we don’t try.”

Alfred was checking his supplies with a methodical efficiency. Odessa was already making notes, backup plans, contingencies.

Elder Moss gathered his staff and looked at the formation’s location to the east, invisible in the Ashplain distance but present somehow, felt rather than seen. Something shifted in his ancient eyes.

“She does not know we have recalled the shamans,” he said quietly.

“No,” Owen said. “She doesn’t.”

“Then that becomes our advantage. Whatever she has prepared, she prepared for different circumstances. She didn’t prepare it with us in mind” The elder turned to look at Owen directly. “The Draconic Resonance was passive once. You pulled it into active form today. But if you can reverse that—if you can make it passive again, embedded so deeply in your being that it becomes your baseline—”

“I would need days to practice,” Owen said. “Days that I no not have.”

“Yes…” the elder agreed. “But she doesn’t know you’re attempting it. Every moment she believes you’re recovering from the skill’s cost is a moment you’re actually becoming something she hasn’t prepared for.”

Uru pulsed from Yuki’s shoulder—one sharp, decisive pulse.

They they moved.

The Ashplain grass parted behind them as they walked east, and the formation pulled closer with every step, and somewhere ahead of them in the darkness Azmireth was working on contingencies that were already obsolete, preparing for an engagement that was about to change its fundamental nature.

Just a few more days and in that time, everything would shift.

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