Crusader King

Cades had been flying for some time, in a almost obsessed state, when he realized that if he came to a city, no matter what, they would not be happy to see him if he was covered in blood.

So, Cades landed in a nearby beautifully, crystal clear lake that he had previously found, landed, and scrubbed all of the filth and weeks-old, crusty blood from his body.

When he was done the small lake was tainted slightly red.

Cades, himself, had not even realized how much filth there had been on him, he had only been thinking about his goals, and never even thought about taking care of himself.

After he was finally clean Cades had been flying around everywhere in the hope that he would find one of the ancient empires that had still persisted to this day.

He had been to over a dozen, but he found nothing there, except for trees and nature covering ancient ruins.

Neither did he find any intelligent lifeforms.

He had killed hundreds of monsters while travelling through the entire continent and even restored his coat that had been burned during his fight against the eximimus queen.

The monsters were everywhere, there was a unsurmountable amount of them, all over the continent.

After travelling for an entire week, something had finally happened.

While he was inspecting the remains of a weak kingdom that had existed during the epoch of the creation of the trusted atlas he saw an avian, a species reminiscent of an ehetrian, all be it having an eagle's head.

Cades had felt elated and landed on the ground, right in front of him.

The avian had been scared at first, especially because Cades looked insane, although he had furiously cleaned himself beforehand.

Actually, maybe he really was insane, he didn't care anymore either way.

After some time he had managed to calm the avian down and manage to communicate to him that he wanted to know where the nearest city was located.

This was not a simple task in any way.

The avian and Cades did not speak the same language, Cades had no idea what the avian was saying and the avian had no idea what Cades was trying to say.

It didn't help that Cades was grinning the whole time because he finally met another intelligent lifeform that wouldn't instantly try to kill him.

But in the end he was able to commune his intent to the avian by using the atlas and pointing at different cities until the avian flapped his wings, flying into the air and gestured something of which Cades assumed that it was supposed to mean that he should follow him.

Cades flew behind the avian for three whole days in the exact opposite direction of where he came from until he arrived at a humongous city.

The city was quite beautiful, it was surrounded by gigantic stone walls, consisting of medieval houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys.

At the centre of the city he could see a gigantic temple for a god, Cades assumed that it was the goddess "Karira", the goddess of safety and rescue.

It seemed like the temple was the one in charge of the city as the avian started leading him to the temple instead of any other building.

The temple was a magnificent construct made out of what seemed like a kind of greyish white wood.

It was modelled after an ancient greek temple, there were various sources of warm light all over the temple and various golden-silver statues of the goddess.

The goddess wielded a golden sword in her right hand, had long waving hair with each strand of the hair having been chiseled separately with a lot of effort.

She was smiling and holding a huge, silver shield in her left hand.

The avian led him into the temple while those that Cades assumed to be priests and priestesses gawked at him with their mouths wide open.

Cades had no idea why they were looking at him like that because he hadn't seen himself in a long time.

He looked wild and uncontrollable, his tangled hair was now long enough to reach his shoulders and his dirty fingernails were about half an inch long, a side effect of all the healing he had been going through.

His once pale skin was now covered in bloody patches, all be it only in places that Cades himself could barely see.

The teeth that he once brushed every day were now slightly yellowish.

His clothes were the worst part, he was wearing a dark brown fur coat with a old, worn-out, practically broken tool belt, other than that his clothes were ripped apart everywhere and barely held together only because Cades had been sewing them together over and over again.

Cades could've made himself new clothes, better clothes even, but he didn't want to.

He, himself, didn't realize this, but he subconsciously didn't want to switch to new clothes because they reminded him of his parents.

All of that was however not the main reason that the priests were gawking at him with fear in their hearts.

The priests were of various different species, as the goddess of rescue and safety only turns those into her priests that had been saved by her paladins which were also chosen through the same method, but all of them were scared because of the intense bloody presence emanating from Cades. 

Another contributing factor was probably also the fact that ehetrians were a incredibly rare species, rarely ever leaving ehetria.

Well, they had been before the incident on ehetria.

They walked through the light grey, wooden halls of the temple for quite some time and took some turns, it seemed like the avian actually knew his way around here pretty well.

As Cades thought about that fact the avian stopped in front of a massive door made out of the same material as the exterior of the temple and started knocking on it.

After multiple knocks the door was pushed open from the other side and out came a ehetrian that Cades knew very well.

The ehetrian had long, neatly kept blonde hair, grey eyes, white wings and was about 15 years old.

It was Mangel.