“So, you’re telling me that neither of you have theme music?” Elijah asked incredulously.

  “I really have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hu Shui stated. Characteristically, Benedict remained quiet. In the wake of the time loop, he’d become even more introverted than usual.

  “You know how in movies and TV shows, when a character shows up, they have a corresponding piece of music that accompanies the scene? Like Darth Vader and the Imperial March.”

  “I don’t watch Star Trek,” Hu Shui responded. “Or television in general. My…I never had time when I was a child, so I never formed the habit.”

  Elijah just stared at him, his jaw hanging slack. Then, he just shook his head.

  “What?” asked the Astral Duelist.

  “Star Wars.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “It’s Star Wars. Not Star Trek,” Elijah pointed out.

  “Is there a difference?”

  For a second, Elijah was struck speechless. But then, he once again shook his head and said, “I just don’t know how to respond to that. You have no idea what you’ve been missing. Epic battles between good and evil. Love. Romance. Bad dialogue delivered haltingly by good actors. And yes, there is a major difference.”

  Then, he explained just what those differences were, spending nearly half an hour going on and on about the two prolific franchises. For his part, Elijah had always been partial to Star Wars. Meanwhile, his sister had preferred Star Trek, which caused a plethora of arguments growing up.

  It wasn’t that he disliked the latter. He enjoyed it well enough. However, he’d always connected with Star Wars on a more fundamental level.

  “Star Trek sounds more enjoyable,” Hu Shui said after Elijah was finished. “Exploring the heavens is a noble endeavor.”

  “Counterpoint – lightsabers.”

  “I prefer video games,” Benedict blurted, interrupting the flow of the conversation. As he said it, he picked at his fingernails with a knife. There was still blood beneath them, and he struggled to remove it entirely. He looked up. “Preferred, I guess. I don’t even know if they exist anymore. Either way, Final Fantasy is more engaging than either of those.”

  When Benedict turned his attention back to his nails, Elijah shared a look with Hu Shui. Then, he went back to the original subject, asking, “So, no theme song?”

  Hu Shui shook his head. “No. I never considered it.”

  “Princes of the Universe,” interjected Benedict.

  “What?”

  “Princes of the Universe. By Queen. That’s my song,” he said.

  It took Elijah a moment to conjure the beat in his head, but then he blurted, “From the Highlander soundtrack?”

  Benedict shrugged. “I guess? I never saw it.”

  “Wait, wait, wait…you never saw Highlander?”

  “That was the one with Sean Connery?” Benedict asked.

  “No! I mean, yes. He was in it. But Christopher Lambert was the star. I swear – I hate it when people forget about him! It’s all about a Scotsman playing an Egyptian who’s pretending to be a Spaniard,” Elijah complained. “But Christopher Lambert is the backbone of that movie.”

  “Like I said, I never saw it. I just like the song,” Benedict admitted. “I…um…I like all of Queen’s songs.”

  Elijah cocked his head to the side. “Huh. That fits, I guess.”

  “What does that mean? Why does it fit?”

  Elijah gestured at the man’s outfit. “I mean, Freddie Mercury would definitely approve.”

  Benedict gave a slight smile at that compliment, though he didn’t verbalize a response. Instead, it was Hu Shui who asked, “What about you?”

  “Huh?” asked Elijah when he realized the question had been directed at him.

  “What is your theme song? You started this entire conversation. It’s only fair that you share.”

  “Oh. That’s easy. Welcome to the Jungle,” Elijah answered. “But it does waver between that and two others. Sometimes, Immigrant Song pops into my head. But every now and again, it’s Ride of the Valkyries. You know, from Apocalypse Now.” He thought for a second. “Yeah. That’s definitely all of them.”

  Hu Shui said, “Your tone says otherwise.”

  “Uh…”

  “I told you mine,” Benedict pointed out.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “It’s dumb.”

  “Come on. We just spent months fighting through a time loop. We died almost a hundred times together.”

  “Eighty-seven.”

  “That’s almost a hundred,” Benedict stated.

  Elijah sighed. “Fine. But nobody gets to make fun of me.”

  They both agreed to that condition, though their smiles suggested that neither would hold up their ends of the bargain. Finally, he just shook his head and muttered, “Physical.”

  “What? I didn’t hear you.”

  Elijah let out a dramatic sigh. “Physical. You know, Olivia Newton-John,” he said. Then, he adopted the appropriate cadence, singing, “Let’s get physical. Physical. You know it. I know you know it. Everyone does.”

  “Oh, God…”

  “That is…interesting,” Hu Shui said.

  “It’s just the chorus. I don’t even know the words to the rest of the song,” he lied. In fact, he knew them all far better than he would ever admit. In his defense, the song had featured quite prominently in his mother’s aerobics tapes. And given that she’d worked out every single afternoon, he’d heard it more times than he could count. And dogged by the impressionability of youth, he couldn’t forget them if he tried.

  “No judgement here,” Benedict said, raising his hands in surrender.

  “I’m judging,” Hu Shui stated. “I am definitely judging.”

  Elijah just shook his head. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you guys,” he complained, though in the back of his mind, he felt it was a good way to get them to loosen up. They’d been camping in the arrival chamber of the Aureum for almost a week, and in that time, the other two had kept mostly to themselves. In that respect, Elijah wasn’t much better. He had other things on his mind, like cultivation and studying their surroundings.

  Doing so had come with a few key lessons, mostly concerning the flow of ethera through what amounted to a giant ritual circle that encompassed the entire room. Elijah still didn’t quite understand how it all fit together, and he suspected that he might never figure it all out. It was fast becoming time for him to accept that he just wasn’t built for that kind of thing.

  In a lot of ways, his shortcomings made sense. For the most part, he was a creature of instinct. He could overcome that nature, but he was always strongest and most effective when he steered into it. His companions were different. Hu Shui needed to plan things, and with obsessive meticulousness. Not surprising, considering his background.

  By contrast, Benedict’s nature blended those two extremes. He wasn’t averse to relying on his instincts, especially when it came to inscribing ritual circles. But he was also more than capable of examining them in depth and determining the meaning behind the arrangements of glyphs, symbols, and lines.

  Elijah suspected that was the best approach, though in practice, he struggled to embrace that philosophy.

  In any case, he explained the origins of that third bit of theme music, then added a bit about how he’d lost his parents. In the aftermath of the car accident that had killed them, he’d revisited many of the locations and activities they’d shared, but none had hit him quite as hard as when he’d popped that aerobics DVD into the player.

  He’d shed a few tears that day, and he’d even taken the video with him when he’d moved to Hawaii. When he’d been diagnosed as terminal, he’d gathered it – along with all the other mementos of his parents – and sent everything ahead of him to his sister’s place. As far as he knew, those boxes had been lost when the world had been transformed.

  “You are lucky,” Hu Shui said after Elijah finished with his explanation. “I was not close with my parents.”

  “I wasn’t either,” Benedict added. “My father wanted nothing to do with me, and my mother was too afraid of him to leave.”

  “I had the opposite problem,” Hu Shui countered. “My parents were very involved in my life. At least until the accident.”

  “What accident?” asked Benedict.

  Hu Shui didn’t answer – not immediately, at least. Instead, he just looked away, as if he was lost in thought. After a few moments, he finally said, “I was a prodigy. Gymnastics. I was identified early on, and I was sent to a training academy when I was six. I was lucky. My parents lived nearby, so I still got to see them periodically. The others…most of them saw their families once or twice a year.

  “And then it all came to an end when I was paralyzed during training,” he went on. “I still remember it like it was yesterday. I was on the rings, and somehow, one of the straps broke free of its mounting. When I hit, one of my vertebrae shattered, and my spine ruptured. I immediately lost feeling in my legs.”

  He shook his head, then looked from Benedict to Elijah. “You have no idea what that’s like,” he said. “One minute, I think I’m going to the Olympics, and the next, I’m a cripple. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t even control my bowels. I was in a diaper for nearly two years until I regained enough sensation to…well, you get the idea. The provincial sports bureau supported me for about six months before they cut me off entirely.”

  He snorted in derision. “I couldn’t compete anymore, so I was of no use,” he stated. “My parents tried to pretend that they didn’t love me less after that, but I could see it in their eyes. They still supported me. They cleaned me. They gave me all the help they could manage. But the love…that was gone. Apparently, parental love isn’t quite as unconditional as some make it out to be.

  “My grandfather saved me. I was maybe thirteen when he took me to the Beijing Planetarium,” Hu Shui continued. “He’d helped build it – as a menial laborer, but he took such pride in it. He pushed me under the domed star theater and pointed up at the heavens. And he told me that, while I might be crippled, there was nothing wrong with my mind. He told me that I could still reach for the stars.”

  “And that’s how you became an astrophysicist?”

  Hu Shui chuckled. “Not at all. It took a few more years before I committed to that path. I was still depressed. Directionless. And his words, while well-meaning, fell on deaf ears. I was a crippled teenager in an unforgiving world. Telling me to reach for the stars felt like the most patronizing thing I’d ever heard,” he admitted. “But when he passed away, I revisited the planetarium and saw it with near-adult eyes. That was when it all came together for me. After that, I obsessed over the need to solve the mysteries of the universe.

  “The rest,” he finished. “Was history, and I ended up in Harare, working at the University of Zimbabwe as a professor and researcher.”

  “Long way to go just to study astrophysics,” Elijah remarked. “Is there more to the story?”

  Hu Shui shrugged. “There always is. In my case, there was a woman.”

  “What happened to her?” asked Benedict.

  “I married her. She’s in Gatehold even now managing the Conclave. It would not exist without Nyasha,” he stated.

  “I see.”

  “What about you?” Elijah asked Benedict. “Anyone special back home?”

  He just shook his head. “No.”

  Elijah didn’t need the awkward silence to recognize that Benedict didn’t want to talk about it. So, he moved on to the most pressing issue. “I think we’re all recovered, right?” he asked. They both nodded. “Then we need to get ready to finish this thing off.”

  “What should we expect?” asked Hu Shui.

  Elijah shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “But if previous Primal Realms are any indication, then it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.” He’d already recounted most of his experiences in the other Primal Realms, though he’d omitted quite a few details. One thing he made certain to convey was just how difficult the task before them would be. He glanced around the golden chamber, then said, “Get a few hours of sleep. Eat what you can. Then, we’ll start scouting the way.”

  If you'd like to read more of Path of Dragons, we're almost two full books ahead (book 14 just started) on Patreon. That's 180+ extra chapters, so a ton of extra content for those of you who can't wait to see what Elijah will get up to. Anyway - check it out .

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