15 Pilgrimage

Tucked beneath the Comforter of her pillow stuffed bed, Thea was sound asleep. A boy lay there on top of the blankets, an arm rested across her shoulder with its very hand caressing her lower lip.

Caden lay on his side beside her, his eyes closed as he was asleep, slumbering away. The world was silent for the time being. He was already thinking up his next target. Yet there was something that was confusing him. He didn't understand what was going on. The wall that had passed through what he would think is the entire world, had changed things. The question was, where did all the evidence go? Who did this and why? There were many assumptions he could make, but he knew for a fact that the Doctor Fate he knew from the comics didn't exist. Only the Golden Helmet he had seen when he watched Constantine's television series on the CW.

The door to the bedroom would creak open slowly, he could hear the feet of a woman slip into the room. It wasn't Moira, it wasn't anyone related to the Queen Family. Judging by the smell, smell and size of the individual he could put it to the scale of five foot four and a hundred and five pounds. They had fair skin, brown hair, bright brown almost copper eyes, they were wearing red lipstick.

He could get a waft of her odorless body wash, a few spritz of perfume. By the sound related to the movement of her hair, he could tell that it was shoulder length.

Caden's eyes opened partially as he heard the door click closed, yet he didn't move and kept his sleep pattern of breathing. He could visualize the person in his head, they were closer than anyone had been before to his backside.

The object in her hand didn't match anything he had smelled before. It reeked of burnt ozone, spent energy. The shape was clearly that of a pistol, a side arm. In that moment, he knew very well who the person was who entered the room as she spoke, "Pretending to sleep, won't stop me from killing you."

The voice was arrogant and overconfident. It was clear this woman was the Pilgrim, member of the Time Masters. She was an assassin which killed people when they were young, often by executing them as children or even infants.

Caden nonchalantly sat up as he heard her threaten his life. He simply looked over at her, with a brow raised slightly. "Oh? Hey Pilgrim... This is rather unexpected."

The Pilgrim blinked a few times seeing his blue eyes glowing in the dark room. It almost made him out to be a monster that she very well knew of. She had been sent to remove him, to eliminate him at the youngest version of himself available after rescuing his victims. Yet even after she had saved them from death, they turned to ash directly after the event was supposed to happen. No matter how many times she rewound their deaths, they just on turning back... There was nothing she could have done.

She reached out one hand as he went to climb off the end of the bed. She rewound time within close vicinity to herself, yet it didn't affect him, only their surroundings.

"Why am I marked for removal?" Caden asked, though he could think of a single reason, he was an aberration that would threaten Vandal Savage's rise to power, the supposed true timeline.

The Pilgrim didn't respond and instead grinning as she charged her weapon. It gave a steady hum, the barrel began to glow. She misinterpreted his inaction to attack her as him being dumbfounded, giving up, fear or even just letting her kill him.

Caden gave off an unnatural coolness in his eyes as the weapon discharged. The bolt of green energy connected with his chest, but instead of burning through him, it stretched and dissipated cleanly.

In that moment, the Pilgrim paused seeing that it did no damage to him. She knew he was a dragon, but dragons have been quelled before with a weapon of this stature. "What are you?" She discharged several shots, but it was hopeless as the same thing kept happening over and over again. Why was her weapon from the future not working on a measly dragon? He wasn't even phased by the thermal damage, let alone the kinetic and concussive.

"My name is Caden Price, I am a Dragon Lord, the Dragon Lord of Starling City." He dubbed himself the Dragon Lord of Starling City.

Thea who had been awoken by the sudden expulsion of the energy weapon, sat up in the bed and watched as Caden moved in a blurr. She couldn't even track him with her eyes until he was centimeters away from Pilgrim.

"And I'm trying to sleep," unlike the time before, there was a sickening ripping sound through leather and then into flesh. The slow cracking of her sternum and ribs reverberated throughout the room and into the hall outside Thea's bedroom door. This was soon accompanied by a sloshing sound as his hand glided through the Pilgrim's chest cavity and grasped her spine.

It was a delayed reaction as she gasped, her back arching as he pulled her close to himself, her face against his right shoulder and her hand on his left.

His hands intrusion into her chest, had sent the ribs and pieces of her sternum into her heart and lungs. There was extensive irreparable internal damage throughout her body now, and it only continued to get worse, the only thing holding her up was his hand around her spine that could be seen through her back if she weren't wearing the leather tunic.

"I am to assume you are the reason things had changed," He asked as he turned his head, inhaling the natural scent of her hair. It was odorless, just like the bodywash she had used recently. "You erased the minds of Moira, and I'm assuming Walter. I'm going to assume you tried the same with Thea..." Caden begin to grin widely revealing his draconic teeth, temporarily cracking his skin in process, scales becoming visually apparent around the eyes.

The Pilgrim couldn't speak even if she wanted to, she had already gone into shock, in just mere seconds she would be dead. "I rather liked you, though you were destined to die anyways."

As Caden felt her life force was coming to and end, he squeezed her spine until it shattered, then he breathed his aquatic bluish green flame onto her person. Her body quickly turned to a pale white ash like the bodies had done before. Even if they were to recall her prior to her attempt at killing him, she would vanish just like the others, thus removing the Pilgrim from future events.

Thea just sat there on her bed, staring at the pile of ash and blood which now stained her floor. "That... Who was that?" She couldn't help but blink as if astonished by what had just happened.

Caden looked over at Thea with his head tilted to the side slightly. "The Pilgrim, I don't know her actual name or know if she has a real one." He'd yawn slightly before crawling back onto the bed, the blood which had been on his body was now gone, assumingly burnt away or absorbed. "But she belongs to an organization known as the Time Masters," he scoffed as if the name meant nothing to him, or was completely irrelevant. "As an assassin that goes back in time and kills people as their younger selves."

Thea stared at him for a few moments before flopping right back onto the pillow, partially in surprise and another in disbelief. "Time travel is real...?" Her mind was going back to the point where her brother had left with her father.

The idea of going back and saving her family from the tragedy came to mind, but something felt as if it was trying to shove it into the back of her head. The idea kept ceasing, but she kept thinking on it. Her eyes looked over at Caden as he was just looking at her, he knew what she was thinking about. She could see it in his eyes.

Thea took the ring off her finger and placed it on the nightstand beside her bed, he said nothing on the subject, yet she could feel the suppression of her one thought alleviated.

"The unspoken contract..." She muttered quietly to herself and shook her head, a faint smile across her lips. "Was it some form of submission contract?" With the lack of ring on her finger, she was beginning to think back on the killing of the Claybourne Pharmaceuticals CEO and his son.

"Subordination," Caden corrected her as she had spoken of the ring which came with the contract which would protect her. He hadn't lied, just hadn't told her everything.

Thea frowned hearing him state that it made her his subordinate, rather than Partner, like he had said before. He said he would be HER weapon, HER shield, HER partner. Why was she on the bottom? She didn't know what was worse, that it influenced her mind or that it made her vulnerable at his suggestion.

"You can sleep on the floor for the rest of the night," she snarled as she pulled the blanket over her head and turned over, "Dickhead."