The fire kept pouring from Erend. It was ceaseless stream of red and gold fury that bathed the forest floor in blinding light.
Orzhal-Kur's silhouette was long gone swallowed by fire but still Erend didn't stop.
Her screams had already vanished into the roar of fire but he could feel a faint flicker of life that stubborn and clinging still coiled within her form.
She wasn't weak enough yet. She was too entrenched in whatever madness she had embraced.
He narrowed his eyes and focusing. The urge to end it now tempted him, but he resisted. Killing her wasn't his goal. He just needed her broken and too weak to fight. But alive enough to speak. That meant he need deliberate control on his fire.
Erend took a deep breath through flared nostrils, and the fire began to bend, curling inward, thinning, and retreating from an all-consuming inferno into a focused spiral of heat.
The ground steamed and split beneath him, smoke spiraling high above as he maintained just enough pressure to smother her resistance without letting her die.
A little bit far away from him, Eccar stood with arms folded on the highest limb of a charred tree that somehow remained upright in the chaos.
His expression was almost amused, his broad wings catching the glow of the fire.
"I knew it," he murmured to himself with a lazy smile. "It always ends when one of us turns into Dragon form."
He hadn't thought about it much before about the gap in power, not truly.
But now, watching Erend from a distance, the truth struck him plainly. The difference between their normal forms and when they became a Dragon was vast. Like comparing a candle to a sun. Even in partial transformation, Erend's strength decided the battlefield in the blink of an eye.
The vortex of fire slowly died down, flickering out with a soft hiss. Smoke drifted in lazy curls over the scorched earth.
Eccar stretched his arms and rolled his shoulders.
"Alright," he said. "Guess it's time to ask questions."
With a flap of his wings, he leapt from the branch and glided toward the smoking crater.
Erend stood in the middle with his body once more turned into human shape. Steam rose gently from his shoulders and his red-and-black scales were fading back into skin, crackling softly as they disappeared.
His face was calm but his eyes were sharp.
He walked slowly toward the crumpled body at the center of the blast.
Orzhal-Kur lay motionless. Her bark-like skin was cracked and blackened, vines around her withered into ash.
The face that stared back at them now wasn't the creature's mask of madness from before but the young woman's face that became her vessel again.
Eccar landed beside Erend at the same moment. Together, they looked down on her.
"Tell me what I want to know," he said coldly. "And I'll give you a quick death."
Orzhal-Kur's body trembled. Her lips moved slowly, dragging breath through damaged lungs.
Her one remaining eye opened. She looked up at them, at the two Dragonborn standing over her like echoes from a long-buried nightmare, and in her heart rose not just hatred sadness.
"You… you shouldn't exist… anymore…" she rasped. Her voice sounds like wind through dying leaves.
"Why?" Erend demanded. "What do you know about us? Why did you call us… something that disturbs the balance of the worlds?"
"That," Eccar added, crossing his arms, "is one of the few things we care about right now."
Orzhal-Kur's burned lips twisted into a bitter expression. Her eyes shifted slowly, first to Erend, then to Eccar.
"You don't even know…" she whispered. "They didn't tell you… They never tell you and just let you wreak havoc."
Erend didn't flinch. "Then you tell us."
She coughed, black ichor trailing from her mouth. She let out a laugh that sounded like cracking wood.
"Because your kind weren't made to protect the balance. You were made to break it! You think yourselves guardians or heroes… But once… once, the Dragonborn were executioners of their own order. Destroying what couldn't be controlled."
Erend and Eccar exchanged a glance. A quiet tension fell between them. The weight of a truth neither of them had ever considered began to settle in.
Orzhal-Kur's voice grew fainter. "You don't know what you are or what you could be. But I saw it once. I lived through it once. And I won't see it happen again…"
She coughed again, blood and fire mixing in her throat.
"Even if I had to burn everything."
Erend knelt beside her now. His tone no longer cold, just tired.
"Then tell us who made us. And why. Tell us where this all started."
Orzhal-Kur's eye fluttered. Her breaths were growing shorter. But her lips moved again, and one last whisper escaped them.
"That damned place… the Hollow Star. There is were the grave of the Dragon located… That is your place supposed to be."
And then her chest stilled.
A moment passed, then another. But she didn't move anymore.
Eccar exhaled and looked down at her ruined body. "So… that's it."
"Not yet," Erend said. He stood up slowly, eyes fixed on the distance. "We have a name. We have a place to visit."
Eccar looked up toward the smoke-stained sky. "The Hollow Star," he said softly.
Erend nodded. "That is probably the place where Kaelor, the Ashen Tempest Dragon's bone located. The place where we visited before but have no idea."
Eccar nodded. He also thinks about the same things. That place where he and Erend first see the huge skeleton of their predecessor, the Ashen Tempest Dragon Kaelor. Which eventually lead them into the sealed world of the Six Pillars of Dominion.
Eccar exhaled long before saying. "That problem can wait for later, right?"
"Yeah, damn. I want to go there right now!" Erend grumbled. Then he also sighed heavily. "But you're right. Now we have to finish what happened here. The main bad guy hasn't even come out yet."
"And maybe, he will give more information about us," Eccar said.