>>5443451>>5443444The faintly-humanoid shape towers over your slowly-shrinking form, but you do not flinch. Lighting sizzles the air around you, filling your nostrils with the stench of zone and burning ghoul-flesh, but you continue to keep your chin raised, looking into the sun-like brightness of its blank face, as if to maintain the gaze of unseen eyes.
“You have my things,” you begin, nodding to the shoggoth-sword and the corpse(?) of the Ghoul Supreme alike.
The electrical entity says nothing, simply twitching and shuffling about with pent-up energy, flexing and coiling its ‘limbs’ in a peculiar and unsettling jitter-dance.
“Return them to your master,” you assert, impressing in your tone and stance all your willpower.
The lighting sparks and crackles—angrily? In amusement? You cannot say. Then, to your surprise, the storm-sprite speak, and in the True Speech!
“By what right do you call yourself ‘master’?”
“I am called Theral, the Dragonborn,” you announce. “I am Bronze Dragon King of the Bloodrise, where you were captured and bound to this ring.”
You lift the ring, now set with only a single, icy-blue gem. The lightning elemental flinches slightly, then twitches forward as if to seize it. You do not step back, but INTO the electrical embrace, even as it singes and sizzles your scales.
“I am descendant and heir of the Red Dragon King, your first master,” you say levelly, biting back the pain and resisting the involuntary tremor of your electrified muscles. “I released you, and I can bind you again. You are MINE, elemental… And you WILL yield.”
There is a pause, the energetically-charged mists flowing over and around you as the elemental lurches forwards…
>20…And then, with a sound like a displeased hiss, the elemental collapses to the floor, spreading and dispersed with a few final arcs, and granting you access to your prize. Hamaraska watches, barely restraining Honemdyn from fleeing at the explosive final display of your elemental. In the Drow’s eyes you see awe, amazement—yet another true believer and convert.
In the eyes of the Junior Novice, also watching quietly from a safe distance, you see terror blossom into a sort of fearful reverence. You sense no more chance of rebellion from that one, having witnessed you tame a living storm.
With a quiet sigh of relief and no small sense of self-satisfaction, you take up your shoggoth-sword. You pat its blade until its rolling eyes blink shut and its squirming dimensions settle back into sword-shape, with cutting edge. Then, with a final stroke, you claim your ultimate victory.
You leave the chamber to meet the retreated dark elves, shoggoth-sword in one hand and decapitated, overlarge Ghoul Supreme head in dangling from your other by its whiskers. Hamaraska walks on one side of you, with their pet and your following close behind.
A mote of sparking light follows a short distance behind them: your newest recruit, of sorts.
