Chapter 152: Finding Ophelia
After heading back home after the entire ordeal, Ren decided to focus on more development for the time to come until their next move was needed. Ophelia was making moves, but rushing to catch her now would be bad. He had to ensure that he secured his home first, and then after that, he could focus on finding her.
The next day after they returned, he finally decided that it was time to have Grent work on the divine armaments.
Ren walked into the smithy the next morning with his mind already made up.
"Grent," he said.
The dwarf looked up from the bench where he had been arranging his tools with the particular care of someone who had a system and did not appreciate that system being disturbed. He read Ren’s expression in a second.
"It’s time?" he asked.
"It’s time," Ren confirmed.
Grent set down the file he was holding and was off the bench before Ren finished the sentence, moving to the storage where the dragon scales had been kept, pulling them out and laying them across the main work surface with hands that were already thinking three steps ahead of whatever his mouth was doing.
"Finally," Grent muttered, running his thumb along the edge of one scale, feeling its properties, his eyes going to a place that was not quite the room anymore. "Do you know how long I have been waiting to work with material like this? Decades. Actual decades."
He began gathering the additional materials, pulling from different corners of the smithy with the efficient movement of someone who had mentally prepared this workspace a hundred times before today arrived.
Ren leaned against the doorframe and watched him work.
The fire came up fast, the forge breathing with a heat that pushed against Ren’s skin from across the room, and Grent’s hammer found the first piece of material before the temperature had fully settled, the rhythm of it filling the smithy with the particular sound that said real work was beginning.
"So," Grent said between strikes, not looking up. "This business with the spiders. How bad is it actually?"
Ren crossed his arms.
"Bad enough," he said. "Ophelia is behind it. Coordinating them, using them to take over people and use them as vessels. We have been dealing with the fallout of it for a while now."
Grent hammered twice, turned the piece, hammered again.
"And you know it’s her for sure?"
"Ophelia, yes. She calls herself something like the mother. The spiders answer to her."
Grent was quiet for a moment, the hammer still moving in its rhythm, the sound of it steady and unhurried.
"If you know who it is," he said finally, "why are you here talking to me instead of going after her?"
"Because rushing in without knowing where she is or what she is actually capable of is how you lose," Ren said. "I need to secure things here first."
Grent made a sound that might have been agreement or might have been the exertion of a particular hammer strike. Hard to tell with him.
"She already knows you are after her," Grent said, matter of fact, his eyes still on his work. "You understand that."
Ren looked at him.
"You have been disrupting her operations, pulling her infected back, freeing the people she took over," Grent continued. "Whatever she is running, you have been throwing things into it consistently. She is not blind." He turned the piece again. "There is no element of surprise waiting for you. She knows you are coming. The only question is whether you know where you are going."
Ren was quiet.
He turned it over properly, the way Grent had laid it out, and found that the dwarf was simply right in the direct, unsentimental way he was right about most things.
"The only one who might know where she is," Ren said, more to himself than to Grent, "is Leon."
Grent did not ask who Leon was. He went back to his hammering.
Ren pushed off the doorframe.
"Keep working," he said.
"Was not planning to stop," Grent replied without looking up.
He found Leon in the open ground near the edge of the settlement, sparring with two of the lizardmen, moving between them with the loose, easy rhythm of someone who had recovered fully and was now simply enjoying the fact that his body was cooperating with him again. He looked like himself, which was the first thing Ren checked.
Leon saw him coming and broke away from the spar, waving at the lizardmen and jogging over.
"Ren," he said. "What’s up?"
"I need your help," Ren said. "The spider that took you over. Now that you are free of it, you should have some residual memory of where it came from. Where it was operating out of. Where Ophelia is."
Leon’s expression shifted, going inward for a moment, and Ren watched him search through whatever the experience had left behind.
"There are flashes," Leon said slowly. "Images. I do not have a clean map, but there are things I remember seeing that I should not have seen as myself." He looked at Ren. "You think I can find it?"
"I think if we go looking, you will know it when you see it," Ren said.
Leon nodded once, decided.
"Alright," he said. "Let’s go."
Ren stepped back and shifted.
The sovereign shell dissolved and the full dragon form came back, filling the space around him, crimson lines blazing, wings spreading to their full span. He lowered himself enough that Leon could get up, and Leon climbed onto his back with the particular attitude of someone who had decided this was simply a thing that was happening now and there was no point in making it strange.
Ren rose into the air.
The forest opened up beneath them as he climbed, the settlement shrinking below, the trees stretching in every direction as far as the eye could follow, and somewhere out there in all of it, Ophelia was moving.
They were going to find her.