Dragonheart Core

I watched my eighth floor begin to spread its leaves.

No predators, not yet, but the buzzing understory already spread to its own fruition. My numerous bugs only grew by the minute as I provided them with such a plant and mana-rich environment, scuttling through painted ferns and laddercaps, encroaching endlessly as they picked their way upright. The cobweb banyans in particular were a miracle of exploration, providing all the vascular veins stretching to the horizon. My tiered canopies, woven through the towering cypresses, creeping vines throughout, funnel gourds hanging like second suns in the emerald green.

The boundless jaguar hadn't yet made her way down, but I was already brimming with excitement for when she did—would she find the canopies too smothering, too dense? Would there be enough pathways for her up, or would I have to construct more available paths so that it was not a land where all of my creatures lived only on the floor and the top was abandoned? Would she make a home for herself here, in the way she hadn't with the Jungle Labyrinth? Would she show me this design was correct?

So many things to ask. And still Nicau had only just entered the Hungering Reef, making his way over to the lagoon with Chieftess holding Kriya. If I could get her on my side sooner rather than later, hopefully I could gather all the mana necessary to bring this floor into fruition into a proper heart tree. A heartwood, the center of a forest.

Hm. Heartwood. I didn't dislike that.

But for now, I flew, touching up waving branches or smoothing down wayward growths. Peeling through Nicau's memories let me grab more accurate pictures of how the jungle had looked, how a proper land untouched by cultivation and precision formed; while I didn't necessarily want mine that messy, I did want it wild, untamed. A proper building of things that were not humans and would never belong to them. My land, my only. My eighth floor and all the death that entailed.

Something trembled through the mountain. A hit, like a skipped stone over water.

I was a paranoid beast, that I could admit—no shame in acknowledging what had led to my survival. So it was me that immediately dropped the mana I had been planning on using to bring about more prey into my burgeoning eighth floor and instead flew to find it, points of awareness spiraling through my halls. A hunt like a predator, too many memories of the Priestess of Abarossa filling me.

Foolishly, foolishly, I looked up. To my Fungal Gardens, to my split entrances, to where I wanted invaders to enter.