The dragon's harem

^Keep her body safe, don’t destroy it, don’t bury it, just leave it in the snow.^ Arad immediately shifted back with Tyal and jumped away on his own.

He didn’t have that much time to explain more. If he wasted another second, the silver umbilical cord would escape his sight.

Arad already has a guess about what that cord is. It is the silver thread that ties a person’s soul to their body. Once someone dies, their soul leaves their body, and that cord snaps.

Zenia’s body was here, fighting Tyal. That means on the other side of the thread is her soul, trapped by the Cronos Raptur.

Even in his tiny humanoid form, Arad was still fast. The cord got pulled away at a blinding speed, but Arad was faster, running after it like its shadow.

The silver thread flew through the chasm’s caverns, and Arad was running down the walls after it. He jumped from one protruding stone to the next one, stepping through the void whenever he needed to turn to avoid losing momentum.

Soon, three dead Titans showed up out of nowhere. Those were other bodies that the Cronos Raptur used. But unlike Zenia, something looked odd about them.

Arad’s contact with them lasted but a fraction of a second, but he managed to notice that they were slower, weaker, and their magic was erratic and unstable. It wasn’t a problem with the Cronos Raptur, but with the hosts themselves, their bodies were losing their edge.

What worried Arad more is that the silver thread tying them to the man’s body of the Cronos Raptur was rusted and crumbling, as if being consumed by maggots.

The souls of those bodies should be already crumbling inside the real abomination’s body. That’s why he sent Zenia outside and kept those here. After years, maybe even centuries, of abuse, those poor souls would crumble and perish.

By this time, Arad had a pretty solid guess on how the Cronos Raptur’s power worked. The Abominable horror traps its prey’s soul when it dies, just as Arad does. But instead of turning them into Void beings, it binds them back to their corpses and uses them like undead puppets.

And if Arad’s guess is right, Zenia should’ve been awake for the whole time, feeling her frozen, dead body slowly rotting away through the years of abuse.

Arad won’t let her suffer any longer. Today, he’ll kill the abomination and end it. He could remember what Vorvadoss did, how much chaos and destruction that fiend caused, and the rage Arad felt while chasing him across the void.

This Cronos Raptur was in for a nasty surprise. Arad had already shifted into his draconic form, albeit keeping it small enough to fit through the caves. He used his powerful draconic limbs and wings to propel himself forward faster than any mortal form could.

He is a Void Dragon, and the one hiding deep within the chasm is an abomination, his prey. At that moment, all human logic was thrown out of the window and a cold, merciless draconic consciousness took over.

All that remained was a cold, calculating will to murder and consume the invading horror.

Arad’s void spread through the whole cave, giving him direct feedback about everything inside and outside the chasm. Four thousand kilometers in each direction, he could feel it all. The stones of the caves, the murmur of water, the snow, the raging wind, two titans having sex in the middle of the mountain range… wait? Even he had to pause for a second. The crazy fools.

But that was a welcome surprise, if not for it, he might’ve gotten too focused on slaying the abomination as a dragon and ended up blasting the whole place, titans included. Even the wisest and most caring of men forget the ants crawling on the ground while drawing in murderous rage.

How many wizards think about the bugs on the ground before blasting the villain with a fireball? None. But in Arad’s case, he had to think about them.

A second later, Arad had located the Cronos Raptur, the original body deep within the chasm, almost three thousand kilometers deep into the crust of the world.

[Void Step]

****

In the middle of a titanic cavern deep underground stood a man, a massive, sapphire-skinned Titan of mind-boggling proportions. His majestic silver hair and beard danced with the violent magic surging from his body like waves of thunder.

The Titan was almost 18 kilometers tall, a god to all mortals unfortunate to lay eyes on him. This wall of muscles and bones shuddered for a second, confused as to how one of its hosts had been utterly violated by an unknown thing.

This Titan was Cronos, the Titan’s Monarch of time, and he was already dead. His body was worn like a suit by Raptur, the abominable lord of pleasure and joy.

Raptur was named after his power by Nyar. He can whisk away people’s souls and trap them within their bodies while controlling their bodies like dolls. The souls can feel, see, and sense everything that their controlled bodies feel, but instead of pain and agony, Raptur shifts that into pure pleasure and joy, keeping them chained inside him.

At times, he’ll let them feel the pure agony their bodies are in and torture them for years, and then grant them but a moment of pure pleasure and joy. He’ll then use that moment and the fear of pain to control and manipulate them.

After decades of suffering, many of those souls just crumble away, losing all sanity and turning into mindless husks of energy, only serving as controllers for their bodies.

But some powerful ones can last for far longer, endure whatever torturous pain the horror fed them.

Through the centuries Raptur spent here, he had chained many souls, but he, too, was chained here. Damnable Cronos, the bastard, never failed to get in his way when he tried to control living Strom Titans, his people. Even after death, Cronos’s will still burned strong within his soul, and his body had refused to move a muscle.

But today, and strangely just now, Cronos’s hold grew weaker, and weaker. Then it faded away. Cronos finally perished, resting in peace and letting Raptur run wild with his body.

But why? Raptur was busy dealing with the fight between Zenia and her old friend Tyal. How come Cronos’s stubborn soul decided that it was okay to rest now? Why, now?

Raptur’s question was answered almost immediately when a black claw pierced his chest. Arad wrapped Zenia’s silver thread around his wrist like a rope and pierced the Titan’s body with his other claw, ripping Zenia’s soul out.

Raptur couldn’t see past Tyal’s visor, but Cronos’s soul did, and he saw it, the peaceful void.