The snakes eyes seemed to search all over the world, circulating and wavering, all of this within just a few fractured seconds.
After that the entire body of the snake, that had been shrinking this entire time and was now merely double the length of a gigantic, but still realistic boa constrictor as it seemed to be incredibly reluctant to answer but still did.
"You.... weren't sent by the church ?"
The question that the now much smaller monster had posed to Cades was incredibly confusing to him.
Countless questions instantly came up within his mind but then he realized that he could just ask, instead of thinking and come up with countless possibilities, that were all probably predestined to be false.
As such he posed his own question with quite a shaky voice.
"What... do you mean ?"
The snakes eyes, now focused on Cades once more, still with a bloody shield in front of their pupils, began becoming less and less focused, twitching as it began analysing the ehetrian once more and as it finally seemed to realized something.
With a mixture of the pathetic and imposing voices that it had previously been using it began talking with an interchanging pattern of those very same voices.
"You aren't an avian ?"
As the snake was talking the voice began shaking and its mind becoming less and less focused, it was almost as if the snake was defending against the holes as it talked.
The voice was undoubtedly hiding the fact that the mind of the snake was breaking apart because of the blood loss and various other reasons.
But Cades, stupefied by the shaky question posed by the ancient wyrm, answered it reluctantly.
"I'm an ehetrian, not an avian.
But you still haven't answered my question, you gigantic, white worm."
The snakes eyes seemed to grow a bit more blurred as it didn't even realized the derogatory comment added onto the answer to its question at the end and begun rattling its fractured mind, for some reason trying to answer, a reason which the snake itself didn't seem to know.
The most likely reason seemed to be that the snake simply couldn't resist answering the questions after all the damage it took, maybe parts of its brain were destroyed that prevented it from doing exactly that, or maybe it was another, more personal reason, but the snake still decided, if one could call it deciding, that it would tell the truth.
It would tell the once tiny being in front of it that was now much taller than where its eyes were located why it thought that the being had belonged to an order that followed a god or goddess.
With a incredibly fractured voice, swinging from low to high, it began answering.
"I assumed that you.... belonged to... the gods ch-church.
They.. know abo..ut th-the King tha-th I... was awaiting in th-this accursed lake."
As Cades heard the answer he realized two things.
First, the ancient wyrm, no matter how much power it had left, wouldn't be able to last for long, secondly, it didn't seem like it knew much about this "king" that it had been awaiting for all this time, or at least it seemed to still somehow be reluctant to tell him.
But as Cades was thinking about this he simply asked a question straight to the point.
"WHO is this 'king' that you're talking about exactly ?!"
The once beautiful, powerful, imposing, gigantic monster was now barely as 9 feet long and quickly continued shrinking but its eyes that were now barely remaining focused on anything now began answering, or at least trying to answer that very last question that Cades had posed towards it, but the rate at which it seemed to die was far too quick for the snake to answer the whole question at once.
So much so that the snake began talking with a barely audible audio but was barely able to say five words in total.
"The crusader king.... enemy.... gods....."
The snakes focus finally wavered, the imposing voice restlessly vanished, and its body barely as big of a normal snake, barely three feet long.
As it finally broke apart, mind, body and everything, the final glint of endless wisdom vanished out of the ancient marbles that the wyrm had called its eyes for over a thousand years and they blackened out the great being now nothing more than the corpse of a normal-sized, bloody white snake.
Cades felt unbelievable confused after everything that had just happened, there were countless questions coming up within his mind.
But there was one question that he simply couldn't understand, one question that tied all other questions into a bouquet of mysteries.
As Cades stood there, in the middle of the once ancient lake that now barely reached up to his ankles and felt all those mysteries accumulate up into his throat and finally he spurted out a single question.
"Who is the 'Crusader king' ?"
One thing was certain, the wyrm had been trying to tell him something important at the end, something that summed up what the crusader king stood for.
And as Cades saw it there were only two possibilities for what it said, either that the crusader king was someone who would crush the enemies of all the gods, a benevolent hero in that case, or that he was a horrendous, disgusting heretic that has vowed, or will vow to destroy the gods.
In any case it didn't affect Cades, not right now and in all probability never, unless that being had anything to do with what happened on ehetria.
Finally concluding his train of thought Cades spread his wings looked to the east, where the sun was located, a direction that he had previously decided on as this was where the next continent was rumoured to be situated and rose high up into the skies.
Hesitated for a moment, looking at what was situated beneath his feet, the ancient lake that was now more of a gigantic, even puddle with patches of sand between it, hesitated once more and then finally started flying away, leaving the thoughts about the "crusader thing" in the dust behind him.