"It would seem they intended to use our Valyrian steel as magical anchors for Akua's sacrifice," she noted, inspecting her blade for damage. "Thankfully, their ritual did not go exactly as planned."
She used the heavy claymore to push herself up from the broken pillar.
"Come. We must leave this place and find the legions," she said, turning her fierce green gaze toward the heavy timber doors.
We did not linger in the vestry. With Dark Sister securely in my grip and Ana wielding her massive Valyrian claymore, we pushed open the heavy timber doors of the temple and stepped out into a burning hell.
The night air was thick with the suffocating stench of sulfur, roasting flesh, and blowing ash. The sprawling city of Qohor was dying. We stuck to the shadows of the narrow alleyways, moving with desperate, agonizing caution. The streets were utterly infested with the shadow-possessed. We hid behind crumbling stone walls and shattered merchant stalls to let the larger, shambling hordes pass blindly in the dark.
When evasion was impossible, we fought. Unlike the blunt candlestands I had used earlier, the rippled steel of Old Valyria sheared cleanly through the dark magic. Dark Sister drank the shadowy ichor with every fatal thrust, severing the dark tethers and dropping the possessed as empty husks.
We moved block by block, the distant, rhythmic roar of thousands of men shouting and the heavy clashing of Roman steel echoing from the east.
"The main vanguard," Ana whispered, her back pressed against a soot-stained wall. "We need to head toward the sound—"
She was cut off by a sudden, catastrophic pressure inside my skull.
It hit me like a physical blow from a warhammer. My vision violently flashed white. I dropped Dark Sister, my hands flying to my temples as my knees buckled, sending me crashing hard onto the bloody cobblestones.
A torrent of pure, unadulterated agony flooded my mind. It was not my own. It was a torrential, suffocating wave of blistering fury, primal desperation, and sheer, crushing helplessness. The emotions were so vast, so incredibly alien and consuming, that they threatened to drown my very consciousness.
I writhed in the mud, gasping for air as the torn stitches in my side burned.
Caraxes.
The realization slammed into me through the haze of agony. For hours, ever since I had been dragged into that subterranean temple, I had felt a dull, hollow numbness in my chest—a void I had been too distracted by blood loss to properly identify. Trahar's dark, esoteric arrays must have muffled the blood-tie.
But now, the dam had shattered. The connection was restored, and it was violently dragging me into my dragon's torment.
"Daemon!" Ana was instantly at my side, her hands gripping my shoulders. "Daemon, what is it? Are the wounds opening?"
"Caraxes..." I choked out, my fingers digging into the mud as a phantom sensation of heavy, crushing chains wrapped around my throat. "He is in agony."
As if validating my words, a massive, earth-shaking roar ripped through the night sky from the northern districts. But it did not end in a triumphant blast of fire; the roar fractured, decaying into a high-pitched, desperate, canine whine that rattled the teeth in my skull.
"He's in the north," Ana deduced instantly, her emerald eyes hardening. She hauled me up by the straps of ruined armour I had gathered on our escapades outside the temple, her unnatural strength easily bearing my weight. "Come on. On your feet. We have to move."
I snatched Dark Sister from the muck, forcing my battered legs into a stumbling jog. We abandoned our stealth, rushing blindly toward the northern square.
The journey was a waking nightmare. My head throbbed with every frantic heartbeat, the backlash of Caraxes' pain completely shattering my focus. When a trio of shadow-possessed lunged from a shattered doorway, I swung my sword clumsily, entirely missing the lead attacker.
The rusted blade of the possessed would have taken me through the neck had Ana not stepped into the breach. Her heavy Valyrian claymore sheared through the attacker's torso in a brutal, horizontal arc. She shoved me behind her, parrying a second strike before kicking the third possessed squarely in the chest, sending it flying into a stone wall with bone-shattering force.
She saved my life a half-dozen times in the span of three streets, compensating for my stumbling, half-blinded stupor as I fought a war inside my own mind.
As we pushed further north, the roars and agonizing whines grew louder, echoing off the burning manses. The physical proximity to my mount finally allowed me to mentally brace against the onslaught. The blinding pain in my skull receded to a dull, throbbing ache, but the tether remained partially closed off. I could feel his exhaustion and his fury, but no matter how hard I pushed my own consciousness toward him, I could not send any comfort or command back. He was completely isolated in his panic.
We rounded a wide avenue, aiming for the glow of the northern fires, only to freeze in our tracks.
A massive horde of the shadow-possessed—easily numbering in the hundreds—was surging down the street directly toward us. But they were not hunting. They were fleeing. They scrambled over each other in blind, mindless terror, running from whatever unnatural destruction was occurring in the northern square.
We were standing directly in their path. There was no cover. I raised Dark Sister, my arms trembling from exhaustion, preparing to be drowned beneath the tide of dark ichor.
Then, a voice of iron-clad discipline cut through the shrieking horde.
"Hold the line! Advance!"
From the intersecting street to our right, a wall of interlocking red shields slammed into place, completely cutting off the horde's escape route. A pristine, heavily armed Roman legion stepped into the fray with terrifying synchronization.
Leading the formation was a woman of imposing height and sheer, lethal grace. She was clad in bespoke silver plate armour etched with golden trails, the left side of her breastplate warped and scorched pitch-black from extreme heat. At the centre of her chest rested a heavy, embossed symbol of what seemed like a sword surrounded by a circle. This was a paladin just the same as the one I saw in King's Landing.
She did not wait behind the shields. She waded directly into the fleeing mob, a silver longsword in her hands. From my exhausted perspective, she looked like an avenging god. She moved with brutal efficiency, her blade a blur of silver light as she cleaved shadow demons in twain, her martial prowess entirely devoid of wasted motion.
"Put the strays to the sword!" she roared over the din, her fierce brown eyes scanning the slaughter. "Do not break formation! Grind them into the mud!"