Chapter 30: Sa Woman
"I GOT IT!!!"
The sound that ripped from Cecilia’s throat was less a cry of triumph and more the visceral, guttural roar of a gambler who had just bankrupted the house on a single, desperate roll of the dice.
She skidded to her knees on the ashen ground, a move that would have shredded her robes if they weren’t already sponsored by the apocalypse.
With the reverence of a priestess and the frantic energy of a back-alley dealer, she plunged her hand into the glowing, intangible slot machine that was her chest and pulled out her winnings. A single, shimring vial of liquid hope.
"Arkai Dawnoro, open your mouth! Quick!" she demanded, brandishing the elixir like a holy hand grenade.
Arkai, the great Black Wolf King who had just minutes ago been composing his own epic ballad of a death could only blink. His massive, dying wolf head swiveled slowly, a movent that cost him what felt like a pint of blood, to look at Oathran.
His eyes, clouded with pain and existential confusion, telegraphed a single question. What in the seven burning hells is happening? Is this a side effect of the brain damage?
But the Dragon Lord, the majestic being of legend and power, was currently failing at his one job, that was maintaining a dignified composure.
"BWHAHAHAHAHWAHHAHWAHH!" he managed to choke out, wiping a mirthful tear from his eye. "Open your mouth, she’s about to save you."
Save ?I have personally t and shaken hands with the afterlife. What part of this suggests ’saving’ and not ’last rites administered by a beautiful, shrieking madwoman’?
Cecilia, whose patience for male hesitation, dying or otherwise, was famously finite, decided diplomacy was for people with less pressing appointnts. With a strength that belied her slender fra, she pried his colossal, fanged jaw open.
"COUGH! COUGH! COUGH—COUGH—WHIMPER..."
He gagged as she upended the contents of the vial down his throat. It tasted like distilled starlight, peppermint, and overwhelming female determination.
"Swallow! Quick! Don’t die!" she ordered, rubbing his massive chin and neck with both hands like trying to get a stubborn pill down a household pet.
"BWHAWHAWHWAHHAHAHAHAHHA—"
This sent Oathran into a fresh paroxysm of laughter, his majestic wings flapping weakly as he gasped for air.
And then, the miracle happened.
The elixir hit his system like a divine ’Control Z’ command. It was a cool, liquid lightning that raced down his throat, a sensation so alive it felt like a fuck you to the death that had been so confidently setting up shop in his body.
He could feel it, yes, actually feel the catastrophic burnout in his core, the fractures he’d accepted as permanent, healing themselves back together. The searing pain in his lungs, the tear in his very life force, simply... vanished.
The gaping damage inside was gone. The pain was gone. The only thing it didn’t do was refill his mana or regenerate anything, not that it needed to. His famous werewolf regenerative power would catch up soon, but his well of power remained bone-dry.
Well, at least the cracked vessel holding it was now miraculously whole again.
He was no longer dying. Now he was just... very... very embarrassed.
Cecilia, for her part, let out a sigh of bone-deep relief that it seed to deflate her entirely. She simply folded, collapsing onto the ashen ground beside the very large, very confused wolf.
Arkai, now operating with a body that was miraculously no longer a crumbling ruin, decided a shift in form was in order. Perhaps being a giant, pathetic-looking wolf was contributing to the humiliation.
In a ripple of muscle and a weak crackle of energy, he shifted back to his humanoid form. Still tall, still powerful-looking, but currently naked, wearing the expression of a man who’d just been yanked back from the brink by a supernatural force he couldn’t begin to bill.
Oathran, now chuckling, knelt beside his wife. He gathered her into his arms, pulling her against the solid wall of his chest, his wings subtly curving to envelop her in his body heat. "Good job, my Saintess."
He pressed a kiss to her temple, his thumb gently stroking her freezing cheek, trying to rub so warmth back into the skin that had braved a volcanic tantrum.
Wait.
Pause. Pause.
The gears in Arkai’s newly-healed head, which had been spinning freely in a void of shock, suddenly caught on a single, previously overlooked word.
"Saintess...?" The question left his lips before he could stop it, his eyes widening as he sat up straighter, the ash falling from his shoulders in a grey shower.
Cecilia turned her head from the comfort of Oathran’s embrace and offered him a gentle smile. "Lord Dawnoro," she said, her voice soft but clear. "We finally et."
Arkai’s gaze faltered, his mind racing, scrambling to connect the impossible dots. Could it be...?
No. The tiline was wrong. The world was wrong.
"My na is Cecilia. Cecilia Araceli," she continued, as if she was introducing herself at a garden party and not on the freshly-salted rim of hell. "We exchanged letters a couple of tis."
Ah.
She was the ’fake’ Saintess he’d been trying to find...?
The one whose ticulous, life-saving warnings had been replaced by that insulting, saccharine scroll about ’golden peace’?
The heartless woman by the river... the Dragon Lord’s wife... was the ’fake’ Saintess. The one he owed a debt he could never repay, and the one he had failed...
As if reading the cyclone of guilt and realization on his face, Cecilia tactfully looked away. Her eyes lifted to the vast, bruised sky, then towards the distant, gurgling rumble of the successfully-deflected mountain.
"You’re one of the lords who always heeded my warnings," she said, absolving him of bla and placing it squarely on the nebulous ’error’ that had intercepted her final, crucial letters. "It seems this ti an error had happened to cause such a catastrophic mistake."
Arkai froze solid.
"Saintess... Araceli..." he breathed her na.
They were all the sa person.
But... hold on.
That still didn’t make any sense! The last he’d heard, Cecilia Araceli had married his friend’s son, becoming the Tiger King Vasiliev’s daughter-in-law seven years ago!
So what in the na of all that was holy was she doing married to a Dragon Lord and saving his life on a mountain?
"Lord Dawnoro, it’s cold out here. Let’s talk in a better setting later. Also, we still need to dig out the survivors in the town below. Let’s go," Cecilia said, her tone shifting from ethereal savior to pragmatic project manager with dizzying speed.
Arkai blinked, the existential crisis of her identity montarily sidelined by the practicality of her statent. Right. The survivors. The catastrophe.
They needed to return. Now.
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