The Lookout and the Dragon

The goblin army is broken, but its survivors have gathered around Shrike's Lookout, the desert stronghold of an ancient sorcerer whose magic still warps the land centuries later. The stranger lands in a sandstorm among ruins rife with anomalies, where the veil between dimensions runs thin.

Here the stranger takes up an ether stone and learns to draw ethereal spears from its magic, the only weapon that can harm the ether phantoms drifting through the ruins. Sand serpents, stone given life, coil through the fog, and lanterns lit with ether mark the way through the storm. Aurelius notes uneasily that the Shrike was never known for this kind of magic.

At last the sorcerer from the catacombs shows himself, and Aurelius hails him by his own name. The doppelgänger orders them away, summons the dragon Asper to cow them and, when that fails, flees on its back to the floating heights of the Lookout. Aurelius is left to wonder whether this rival is a future self, a self from another timeline, or one his own meddling has made.

Cornered among the floating ruins, the other Aurelius names his grievance: the people whose future the stranger protects ruined his good name out of fear of his invention, the very time-travel platform the stranger rides. He, too, comes from the future, he declares, and he means to change it. Aurelius comes to suspect that this was the invention the High Council rejected, and that by averting the orc conquest he may have created the very enemy who caused it.

The dragon descends, bound to its master by a spell, its hide too thick for fireballs. The stranger turns its own blaze back upon it with the shield until Asper falls, and the other Aurelius, weakened, falls with it. Aurelius then claims his double's body, traps his rival's soul in an artifact for the Sanctum, and sets off on the vacation he had long promised himself.

"Oh, I forgot what it's like to have limbs!" — Aurelius