Chapter 30: Revelations
Much like a low-income-family kindergarten run by a three-time divorcee, the mountain was filled with violence on a daily basis.
Outside the obsidian gate, the vibe of the path up toward the dungeon had become something between a battlefield and a marketplace. The air smelt of blood and burnt stone and the sharp mineral scent of the region. But, despite that, adventuring parties of usually three to five people pushed through the outer passages in steady rotation, their voices carrying the tension of people who knew that they were doing dangerous work. The goblins met them at every defensive point, and the sounds of small, brutal skirmishes echoed through the mountain's upper passages with the reliable regularity of a working schedule.
It was brutal, but it was routine.
This is just what adventurers did, and, in the same vein, this is just what goblins did. They were both simply going about their business.
Further down the mountain trail and closer toward Jaesowen Vale, away from the worst of the fighting, a different kind of industry had taken root.
Hunters moved through the scorched tree line where the dragon whelps prowled, tracking the creatures for the parts they left behind. Scales, claws, and teeth fetched good prices in the villages below. The ashen trees that had absorbed months of passive dungeon energy were being harvested, their wood dense with magic that made it worth more than common oak by a factor of ten. Better still, the dungeon’s regenerating magic caused the ashen trees to regrow overnight. Obsidian gatherers worked the cracked stone fields at the mountain's base, prying loose slabs of black glass and chipping them into manageable pieces. A woman with a healer's sash moved between two injured hunters near a cluster of rocks, her hands glowing faintly as she pressed them to a gash along one man's forearm, her other hand already held out for a coin she was expecting in return.
A whole economy had grown from the shadow of the dragon's mountain.
People sold what the mountain produced. People bought what those sellers offered. Villages that had once feared the Black Peak now sent their young men toward it with packs and tools and the cautious optimism of people who had discovered a new mine.
The dragon knew of this, but she was busy right now.
Far to the north, on roads wide enough to swallow villages, an army marched.
It was not a small force. Even without detailed information, the king had made his decision weeks ago, and the machinery of a nation had turned itself toward this single purpose with all the inevitability of the ocean’s tides. The armies of the northern counties marched alongside the eastern levies. The cavalry of the capital rode in disciplined columns that stretched further than a man could see from end to end. Supply wagons formed a train behind them that would take an hour to pass a fixed point.
Banners moved in the wind. The colors of a dozen regional lords mixed with the crown's own standard, gold on deep blue, and the sword with a crown hilt that represented the king's absolute authority.
The officers rode at the front with maps. They had studied what information existed about the dragon and her mountain.
Despite the lack of information about what lie in wait for them down south, they were confident that they knew enough about what to expect.
After all, a dragon was unexpected but ultimately, nothing new. Right?
At the head of it all was a golden carriage, glimmering in the sunlight. Inside was the princess of the nation, a servant brushing her hair with a comb made of pure silver. Her voice carried out from its windows, ordering the army to march faster.
They didn't.
But an officer did relay the order anyway, so it looked like they were listening to her.
Back inside the dragon’s mountain dungeon.
The hotspring treasure chamber was hot and dim, lit by the deep orange glow of magma from the lower chambers. Barjuchne had reshaped the walls herself into an inwardly curved half-dome that concentrated the heat and steam with Ei's guidance. The wet, hot air buzzed with the constant ambient hum of dungeon magic moving through stone. It caused the droplets of condensation on the walls to drip and run faster, as the subtle vibration shook the dungeon.
She found it satisfying, listening to the hum of the energy moving through the heaps of gold. It was like listening to the dungeon purring.
Barjuchne sat with one leg crossed over the other, leaning back against a throne of stacked golden coins. Her tail curved around the base of it with casual ownership.
The two blonde-haired saints knelt on either side before her, where she had pushed them down onto their knees.
Despite the circumstances that would send most into a terrified frenzy of begging and crying, the two of them simply knelt with a composed grace. Their identical faces were tilted toward the dragon with expressions of absolute, unironic empty sincerity. It was like looking at a pair of dolls that a craftsman had gone out of their way to make beautiful, but to the point where the rest of them seemed empty in contrast. Their eyes shone but were hollow behind them.
Barjuchne found the two of them to be deeply uncanny.
"What are you talking about?" Barjuchne asked, not understanding what they had just told her. The snarl in her voice was habitual rather than hostile.
"Prophetic visions have sent me here," said the first, the condensation running down her skin.
"Visions that were given to me, and me alone," said the second, her damp robe suffocating her.
They turned to face each other for a brief moment, then back to the dragon. "Heaven aligns with your will," they said together, their voices falling into perfect tandem. "It has sent me here to test you, and I find you to be true."
Barjuchne looked at them for a long moment. Then she looked down a little bit further.
The fairy, F.P., sat on her scaled thigh with the compact, deliberate posture, having decided that this was her seat and the dragon's opinion on the matter was irrelevant. Her dark blue hair fell across one eye, weighed down just the same by the heavy, wet air as everything else. Despite looking like she was drowning as she sat there, her small feet were crossed at the ankles, and she did her best to look like she was in control. She had been listening to the twin priestesses with the particular expression of someone hearing a foreign language and finding it provincial.
"What the hell are they talking about?" Barjuchne asked the fairy princess.
The fairy lifted one slender finger and drew a slow circle in the air. Small crackles of residual magic followed the motion, sparking and fading. She watched them.
"Magic reaches this world in many forms," she began. "Some of it is wilder, and some of it is more -" She glanced at the twin priestesses with a brief, sideways look of contempt. "- domesticated." The word landed with the delicacy of a dropped stone. "While some of us make our own through our own power, others are granted theirs by sources larger than themselves," said F.P. She tilted her head. "These ‘greater powers’ have desires and schemes all of their own." She looked at Barjuchne. “Gods,” she clarified. “Allegedly,” she noted.
"Your powers are granted by Heaven," said the first saintess, her eyes moving to the fairy with calm certainty. "The same as mine."
"One and the same," said the second.
F.P. made a small sound with her tongue. She rolled her eyes in a slow, theatrical arc. "Unlikely," she said, and looked up at Barjuchne.
The dragon had her head resting in her open palm, elbow on the arm of the coin throne, watching the exchange with the focused attention of someone doing complicated arithmetic.
"They're saying that their gods set you up to be here," explained the fairy simply.
Barjuchne's claws tapped against the gold beneath her in a slow rhythm.
‘Gods’. She hadn't given much thought to gods since waking in this body, which in retrospect was a significant oversight. She had reincarnated, after all. This proved that souls clearly existed here in some functional, transferable way. If souls existed, what else did? And if something with desires and power had arranged for her to be here, specifically here, in this mountain, in this form, with this particular set of instincts burning in her chest, what did that say about the shape of things?
What would such a theoretical entity be planning, if it existed?
The priestesses seemed sincere in what they were saying, at least proving that they themselves believed it. Barjuchne had watched enough faces to know the difference between a lie and genuine conviction, and what she saw in their identical expressions was genuine.
But that didn't mean they were right.
She sat with that for a moment, then spoke.
"You invaded my home," said the dragon, accusingly but firmly. Her voice came out flat and even, which was somehow worse than anger. "You hurt those under my protection. You almost killed two of my most precious treasures."
Her hand shifted behind F.P., her thumb moving in a slow, absent stroke against the fairy's dark-blue hair.
The fairy princess went very still. She turned her head slightly, looking back at Barjuchne with an expression that moved through surprise and landed somewhere quieter as she found herself included in that statement. Something unguarded flickered in those eyes. She didn't say a word. She looked away again.
"Surrender or not," Barjuchne continued, her eyes on the twin priestesses, "explanations of some ‘cosmic plan’ or not, I won't forgive that easily.” She leant forward with hard menace very clearly in her red eyes. “How do you intend to make this right?"
The twin priestesses looked at each other.
Then they both looked at the dragon.
"I am the will of heaven," they said together. Their voices had dropped into that perfect unison that made the air feel slightly heavier. "This is my body, but I have many avatars." Their eyes were calm and certain and vast in a way that eyes usually weren't.
"Your ‘Heaven’ has nothing to do with this place," said F.P. She swiped a dark blue strand of hair out of her face. It fell immediately back into place. She didn't try again. “I can assure you that.”
The twin priestesses rose from their knees with fluid grace. They stood at equal heights with equal posture, facing the dragon from either side.
"Your heart desires everything," said the first. “Does it not?”
"All of it," said the second.
"Gold," said the first.
"Power," said the second.
"Land," said the first.
They leaned in together, their movement synchronised. "Souls?" they finished in unison, asking. “We can give you what you don’t have yet.”
Barjuchne looked at them.
"We will give you all of this. Everything," said the twin saintesses. "As conditional penance."
"I don't think penance usually has conditions," replied Barjuchne. "But I'm listening. What do you want from me?"
"Show us the way," said the first.
"Toward Heaven's desires," said the second.
"Commit to become as powerful as you are in prophecy. Fulfil the aims of Heaven here on the lower world that we inhabit," they said together, "and we will be yours. All of us. We offer you humanity."
The treasure chamber went quiet except for the low, constant sound of gold shifting under breath and the distant echo of goblin activity in the upper passages.
Barjuchne's fingers tapped against the coins.
The two of them were so damn creepy.
Then she looked down.
"What do you think?" she asked.
Silence.
F.P., who had been staring at the middle distance with studied indifference, slowly turned her head. She pointed one finger at her own chest. "Me?" She looked genuinely uncertain for a moment. "You're asking me?"
"You know the most about these matters," said Barjuchne, her eyes staying on the priestesses. "What do you think?"
F.P. was quiet. She was doing something private behind her expression, some quick rearrangement of her internal weights.
Then she sat upright. Her spine straightened. Her hands folded over her crossed knee. Something shifted in her bearing, a quality she shed rarely, the casual armour of contempt dropping just enough to let something older and more regal show through. She looked, for just a moment, exactly like what she was.
"You want what's yours, don't you?" the fairy asked.
She didn't wait for an answer.
"Then take it. Take it all." Her one visible eye was level and sure. "And don't limit yourself to the tangible. Think of what could be yours." The corner of her mouth curved. “Not just the gold of a nation. That’s unremarkable. Hundreds of dragons before you have had that and it did them no good.” She looked at her nails, as if going out of her way to show she wasn’t actually that interested. But the quickness in which she did it showed that she was feinting, and poorly at that. “I’ve told you before, there are other things that you can have in your hoard that are less… tangible but of no less value than gold. Perhaps this is an opportunity toward that end.”
The dragon was quiet for a few moments.
Then she rose, standing tall over the priestesses.
F.P., who had been sitting on her leg, moved without hesitation, climbing up the dragon's chest with small movements and settling herself onto Barjuchne's shoulder.
"Kneel," said the dragon. “And remember that you belong on your knees when I'm in front of you,” said the dragon. “Until I, alone, have decided that you are redeemed.”
The saintesses dropped without needing to be forced this time, their white robes pooling around them, their faces tilted upward.
Barjuchne reached down. Her hands found their chins, her long, sharp, black claws curling carefully along their jaws, tilting their unblemished faces toward her. Her draconic, ruby eyes looked down at them both.
"Pray," she said. "To me,” the dragon made it clear to them. “Now," she ordered. "As you are mine. Forever."
Both saintesses reached up at the same moment. Each took one of the dragon's hands in both of their own. They lowered their faces toward her fingers and pressed their lips to her fingers in a kiss with the complete solemnity of a sacred act.
Then they bowed their heads.
"I am yours," said both of them in unison.
The prayer that followed had no words that anyone else in the room could hear. But the air showed it.
Light began to pour from the points where their lips had touched the dragon's skin. Holy magic, radiant and warm, spilt outward from the contact in expanding rings that moved through gold and stone alike. The wet coins around them reflected it in ten thousand small mirrors. The walls were lit from within.
A system window materialised before Barjuchne's eyes.
A second window followed immediately after.
From there all the way toward the distant horizon, the world went white in a flash of holy magic.
On the mountain's slope, a hunter had just driven his blade into the flank of a draconic whelp and was pulling it free when the light arrived. It came from behind the mountain. From its peak. A flash of prismatic white that crested the black stone silhouette and spilt across the sky.
The fighting everywhere stopped.
The white light crested and held for one suspended moment. Then it broke.
The obsidian surface of the mountain's peak shattered in its outer layer, the magic running through the stone too intense for the rock to contain. Slivers of black glass launched upward into the air in great scattered clouds, catching the light and spinning.
From below, from a distance, they looked like feathers.
Thousands of black feathers drifting upward against a white sky, the mountain below them shaped into a silhouette that rose toward heaven like the tip of a spear thrust upward through the ground.
Every priestess on the mountain's slope stopped.
Every chaplain in the marching army columns raised his head from his scripture.
Every healer in every village, every bishop in every cathedral, every ordained member of the faith in every nation, in every corner of the known world, went still at the same moment.
They all looked toward the horizon.
And they all heard the same thing.
It was not a normal sound. Rather, it was something from within. It was a knowing that arrived complete and sudden.
Thousands of eyes fixed on the silhouette of the black spear on the horizon and the feathers of shattered obsidian drifting in the brightness above it. It was revelation, and this was the prophetic sign of its coming.
Sister Marythe had ridden for weeks without adequate sleep to reach the royal capital from Jaesown Vale. She had eaten in the saddle and slept in roadside inns for two hours at a time, driven by the knowledge that what she carried was too important to delay.
Haggard and near to death, she had finally arrived at the capital.
She had cleaned herself as best she could, straightened her travel-worn robe, and pressed her hair flat with damp hands. She had stood in the antechamber of the royal palace and breathed slowly, preparing herself for the gravity of an audience with the king himself.
The great door groaned open.
An old attendant shuffled out, his posture precise despite his age. "Sister Marythe. His Majesty, the king, will see you now."
Finally. She stepped toward the door.
And stopped.
The window at the end of the antechamber had gone brilliant white. The light came through the glass and hit the stone floor and the walls and the ceiling all at once.
Her clothes moved.
The fabric of her robe pressed against her and then billowed away from her, as if wind had passed through a sealed room that the attendant couldn't feel. Her hair lifted from her neck and settled again. Despite being in a closed-off room in the castle, with closed windows and thick walls, that breeze passed over her.
She understood.
Not with her mind. With something deeper than her mind, the part of her that had always known why she chose this life.
"I…" she started.
She turned.
Not toward the throne room. She turned away from it. The priestess turned back toward the doors she had only just come through, toward the road she had ridden for so many hard weeks, toward the south and the mountain and the thing at its peak that had just made itself known to every member of her faith simultaneously.
"Sister?" The old attendant blinked, his face creased with polite confusion. He had not noticed the light that she had seen. "Sister! The throne room is this way! The king is waiting!"
She walked away.
Her feet found the first step down. Then the next. The palace doors ahead of her, the city beyond, the road back south beyond that.
All across the world, in the same moment, in the same breath, the same words moved through endless thousands of mouths. Every priestess, every priest, every monk and every bishop. Every humble soul who had seen the faith for themselves in the sunrises of their simple farms and the sunsets of their ivory towers spoke at once and the world shook in that collective swarm vibration.
"I am yours."
Marythe said it again as she reached the street, her feet already moving south together with a tide of white robes as members of the faith stepped out of their chapels, cloisters, and churches. Doors and windows opened all across the capital city and people began to move collectively. Some of them began a great pilgrimage. Others stayed where they were and began to pray, sending their wishes and spiritual energies.
"- Heavenly Dragon, Barjuchne."
The priestess started running, perhaps even faster now than she had gone on her way up here to the north to begin with when she had intended to bring her report to the royal castle.