Chapter 24 Chapter 23: The End of the War

Exhausted, Cadderly conveniently walked through the door Aballister had made ahead of him, through the walls no longer covered with billowing smoke, and into the room where he had left Danica.There were a dozen enemy soldiers wandering about, complaining loudly to each other, but behold, what a panic they were when the young priest suddenly appeared in the middle of them!They screamed and punched each other, fighting to get away from the dangerous man.After only a moment, there were only six soldiers left in the room, and they maintained their sanity enough to draw their weapons and face the young priest.

"Go find Dorigen!" one of them yelled at the other, and the man ran away immediately. "Stand back, I warn you!" the other man snarled at Cadderly, thrusting his spear forward threateningly. Cadderly's head ached; he didn't want to fight this group, or anyone at all, but it was hard for him to ignore his precarious situation.Although it pained him quite a bit to do so, he invoked the song of Denir, and when the man poked forward again, he found that instead of a spear, he was holding a wriggling, apparently unhappy snake .The man shrieked and threw the creature to the ground, scrambling back away from it, though it didn't attack.

"Your friend is in our hands!" cried the man who ordered his companions to find Dorigen. "If you kill us, they won't live!" Cadderly didn't hear the second sentence at all.Hearing that his friends were prisoners—and not dead—raised his hopes.He rested back against the wall, trying not to think about the fact that he had just destroyed his own father. A moment later, Danica ran into the room, slammed into Cadderly's arms, and threw her arms around him, giving him a hug that nearly crushed him. "Aballister is dead," the young priest said to Dorigen over Danica's shoulder.

Dorigen gave him a questioning look, and Danica stepped back an arm's length away, staring intently at her beloved. "I know," Cadderly said quietly. "You know he's your father?" Danica asked, her expression as pained as Cadderly's. Cadderly nodded, his lips pressed together, trying to keep his jaw from trembling. "Evan needs you," Danica told him.She studied the young priest carefully, then shook her head suspiciously, seeing his obvious exhaustion. Dorigen led Cadderly and Danica to the room they had set up for the wounded.All four of Cadderly's friends were there—although Vander could barely see any injuries—along with a handful of human soldiers from Wall Trinity.Orcs and other goblins had followed their own custom of killing badly wounded companions.

Pikel and Xuelin are both sitting up, although neither looks quite stable yet.Their faces lit up when they saw Cadderly approaching, and they motioned for him to go to Ivan's.Ivan lay on a cot nearby, pale as a dead man. Kneeling beside the yellow-bearded dwarf, Cadderly was surprised to find that Ivan was still breathing because of the sheer number of bloody wounds on his body.The young priest knew that even the stubborn Ivan didn't have much time left.He knew he had to find the strength no matter what, followed the song to reach the healing magic field, and generate powerful magic.

Quietly, Cadderly began to chant, and then he heard music, but it was faint, so faint.Cadderly reached for it with psychic power, felt the pressure on his temples, closed his eyes and sank into its flow, guiding it.He wandered through the lesser notes of healing magic, knowing they wouldn't do much to heal the dwarf's worst wounds.The song became a crescendo of beating in his head, at Cadderly's command, into the realm of the most powerful healing magic. The next thing the young priest realized was that he was lying on the floor, looking up at Danica's worried expression.She helped him sit up, and he looked at Ivan in despair.

"Cadderly?" Danica asked, and Cadderly understood that there were several questions in that call alone. "He's so tired," Dorigen replied, coming and kneeling beside them.The magician looked into Cadderly's blank gray eyes and nodded, understanding the situation. "I've got to use that magic," insisted the young priest, and immediately got into the song, struggling as it seemed blurrier again now. Twenty minutes later, he woke up again. At this time, Cadderly realized that he still needed to rest for several hours before he could only try to enter the strongest healing magic domain again.While looking at Yiwen, he also knew that this dwarf would not live that long.

"Why are you doing this to me?" Cadderly asked aloud, asking his god, while everyone around him eyed him curiously. "Deniel," he whispered to Danica. "He abandoned me when I needed it most. I can't believe he let Ivan die." "Your God, does not control the non-key fate of the non-key participants," Dorigen said, approaching the two again. Cadderly gave her a disdainful look, obviously asking what a wizard knew. "I understand the nature of magic." Dorigen replied to that haughty expression. "The magic is there and can still be accessed, but you have no power. It's not the god Denir's fault."

Danica moved, as if to attack the woman, but Cade immediately grabbed the monk and pulled her back, nodding in agreement with Dorigen's argument. "So your magic is temporarily disabled," Dorigen commented. "That's all you can do for a dying dwarf?" At first, Cadderly thought she meant this unexpected remark, asking him to say goodbye to the dwarf, like a friend would do, but after thinking about it for a while, the young priest began to understand it differently. .He motioned Danica to go away, and spent a moment pondering for possible answers. "Your ring," he said suddenly to Vander.

The Fubo giant glanced quickly at his hand, but the group's initial excitement was quenched immediately. "It won't work," Vander explained. "You have to wear the ring when you're wounded to be useful." "I beg you to give it to me," Cadderly said, not in the slightest discouraged by the disappointing explanation.He took the ring from the cooperative giant Fubao and put it on his finger. "There are two types of healing magic," Cadderly explained to Vander and the others. "There are two, although I have only used one of them so far, and that is to ask God's blessing to restore cracked skin and broken bones."

Danica began to ask further questions, but Cadderly had already closed his eyes and began to chant again.It took him a while to catch up with the flow of the song.He felt the pressure on his temples again as he followed the draining flow of the song, but he took it lightly, knowing he didn't have to go that far this time. Gathering around the crib with Dorigen, the four friends gasped in unison to see that the severe wound on Ivan's throat had just disappeared, and then gasped again to see the wound reappear on Cadderly. neck! The young priest continued to force words out of his mouth, blood bubbling out of his slit throat.Another wound faded away from Ivan, reappearing in a similar place on Cadderly. Danica yelled for her beloved and began to move forward, but Dorigen and Sherin held her back, rationally asking her to trust the young priest. Soon, Ivan relaxed peacefully, and Cadderly fell to the ground with every brutal wound the dwarf had suffered. "Ugh." Pikel moaned unhappily. "Cadderly!" Danica yelled again, and she broke Shailene and Dorigen's hands and ran to him.She put her head on his chest and listened to his heartbeat, pushed the curly brown hair away from his face, and pressed her face against his, whispering to him to live. Vander's laughter made her turn her head angrily. "He's wearing that ring!" roared the Fubo giant. "Oh, wise young priest!" "Ooh!" Pikel squealed in delight. When Danica turned her head, Cadderly lifted his head and gave her a peck. "This really hurts," he moaned, but he managed to smile as he spoke.His head slowly fell back to the ground, his eyes slowly closed. "What's wrong with him?" Ivan complained loudly, sitting up, looking around the room with a confused face. By the time his friends had pushed Ivan aside and put Cadderly on the cot, the young priest was breathing better and his many wounds were undoubtedly healing. Later in the night, the priest, still quite tired, rose from his bed and moved about the makeshift infirmary, singing softly again, tending to the wounds of his other friends, as well as those of the Trinity Wall soldiers. "He's my father," Cadderly said frankly.Rubbing his wet eyes with one hand, the young priest tried to get used to the sudden burst of memories that had assailed him, memories he had buried all those years ago. Danica moved closer to him, wrapping his arm tightly in hers. "Dorigen told me," she explained. For a while they sat together in the quiet darkness. "He killed my mother," Cadderly said suddenly. Danica looked up at him, a look of horror on her beautiful face. "It was an accident," Cadderly continued, eyes staring straight ahead. "But not everyone is right. My father... Aballister was always experimenting with new magic, always pushing energies to the limit, testing the limits of his own control. One day, he magically created a A sword, a gigantic gleaming greatsword, would hack and slash through the air, drifting as it pleased." Cadderly couldn't help a small, ironic chuckle. "He was so proud," said the young priest, shaking his head, tossing his unruly sandy curls from side to side. "So proud. But he couldn't control the spell. He went beyond his magical training, and then, before he could unenchant the sword, my mother died." Danica whispered her beloved's name and pulled him tighter, resting her head on his shoulder.However, the young priest moved away so that he could look directly at Danica. "I can't even remember her name," he said, his voice shaking. "I can see her face clearly again, it was the first face I saw in this world, but I can't even remember her name!" They sat in silence again.Danica thought of her dead parents, while Cadderly rummaged through the reams of swiftly passing images, trying to find some meaningful memory of his youngest.He also remembered one of Master Avery's reprimands, which the fat man had called Cadderly a "Gondian disciple," referring to a special sect of priests who created unique and often destructive utensils and weapons, without considering the consequences of their own creations.Now that Cadderly knew about Aballister and remembered what had happened to his mother, he could better understand what his beloved Afri was worried about. However, he is different from his father, he silently reminded himself.He found God Denier, found the truth, and also found the calling of his own conscience.Moreover, he had helped to bring this war - the war that Aballister had recklessly started - to an end in the best possible way. Cadderly sat there, overwhelmed by emotions: long-buried, confusing waves of memories, an empty longing for what he might have once had, and lots of messy, more recent memories—now he could understand them in a new light.A deep sadness he could not deny washed over him, a mourning he had never felt before, for Avery, for Pertelope, for his mother, and for Aballister. Yet the grief he felt for his father was not for the man's death, but for his life. Cadderly saw that distant world again and again, the red ground closing tightly above the fallen wizard, a sad end to a wasted, misused gift. "You have to do that," Danica said unexpectedly.Cadderly blinked at her in disbelief, but surprise quickly turned to relief.How well she knew him! He nodded back to her, showing a sincere and resigned smile.Cadderly felt no guilt for the actions he had taken; he had found the truth in a way his father had never done.It was Aballister, not Cadderly, who had forced that ending. Dorigen entered the room, and the chandelier in her hand lit the small room. "The soldiers at Wall Trinity have completely dispersed," she said. "All the leaders are dead—except me, and I have no desire to do what Aballister started." Danica nodded approvingly, but Cadderly scowled. "What's going on?" the surprised monk asked him. "Are we going to let them run around and maybe do more damage?" he asked. "There are as many as three thousand soldiers left," Dorigen reminded him. "You have no other choice. But rest assured, young priest, for the threat to Carraton, the library, and the entire district has truly died down. And I will return to the library with you to face your superiors judgment." my superior?Cadderly thought in disbelief.Headmaster of Thobicus Academy?This thought reminded him that if he wanted to follow the path laid out before him by God Denir, there were still many things to be done.One battle is over, but there is another to be fought. "Their judgment will be severe," Danica replied, and it was clear from her tone that she did not want any serious harm to the repentant magician. "They may impose..." Danica's heavy voice trailed off as Dorigen nodded in acceptance. "No, they won't," Cadderly said quietly. "You will come back, Dorigen, and you must atone. But with your ability and sincere desire, you can contribute in many ways. You, Dorigen, will help heal the wounds of this war. scars, and make this area a better place. That's the right thing to do, and that's the path the library will take." Danica looked at Cadderly with a skeptical expression, but that expression faded as she surveyed the determination so deeply displayed on the young priest's face.She knew what Cadderly had done to Headmaster Thobicus in the first place to get them to come here; and now she wondered what Cadderly would do to the man once they returned to the Moezhi Library. Do. Again, Dorigen nodded, and she smiled warmly at Cadderly.The man who had spared her life in Simista Forest would apparently spare her again now. "Wise Cadderly, tell me," Dorigen said emotionally, "is compassion a strength, or a weakness?" "Strength," the young priest replied without hesitation. ※※※ Cadderly stood on the rocky slope above Trinity Wall, with five of his friends beside him. "You have ordered them to abandon this place?" he asked Dorigen, who was climbing up to join them. "I tell the humans that they are welcome to Kaladon," replied the magician. "Although I doubt how many people will go that way. I want ogres, orcs, and goblins to get out of here and go to find a lair in the mountains to live in. Run away and don't do more damage." "But many of them are still in the stronghold?" Cadderly asked factually. Duo Ruizhen looked back at the unfinished part of the wall of Trinity Walled City and shrugged. "Ogres, orcs, and goblins are stubborn monsters." Cadderly surveyed the fort thoughtfully.He remembered that in the previous realm, the earthquake he had caused had buried Aballister, and now he could do the same, destroying the Trinity Wall and sweeping the hillsides.With a murderous grin, the young priest entered the Denier's Song in search of that powerful spell. He couldn't find anything that could recreate that earthquake at all.Confused, Cadderly pressed the notes, seeking spiritual guidance. Then he understood.His release of energy in the previous realm was a response to primal emotion, not consciously caused by magic, but forced out by events happening around him. Cadderly laughed and opened his eyes to see his six companions standing around him, eyeing him curiously. "What's going on?" Danica asked. "You want to destroy this fortress," Dorigen reasoned. "Ah, do it!" Ivan roared. "Cleave the ground and let it fall!" "Ooh!" Cadderly looked around at his friends, who believed him to be invincible, like a god.However, when his eyes fell on Xuelin, he found that the elf girl was shaking her head slowly.She can understand. So is Danica. "Cleave the ground and let it fall?" the monk asked Ivan in disbelief. "If Cadderly can pull off such a feat, why were we still running around the damned place?" "We became expecting too much," Xuelin added. "Oh." Pikel had said it, but it was exactly what Ivan was thinking too. "Well, then, come on." Ivan said after a long pause.He put his hands on Cadderly's back and pushed the young priest along. "We still have to go over the mountains for a month, but don't worry, my brother and I will take you all through safely!" That's a good start, Cadderly decided.Evan is taking the lead and taking some responsibility. A nice start to a long road.