Chapter 47: Those Around
The coastline crunched beneath her with salt and char.
The naga captain pulled herself onto the rocks with both arms, her heavy serpentine lower half dragging behind her across the barnacle-crusted stone. Her scales were scraped raw in long patches where the debris had caught her midwater. Her hat was gone. Her cutlass was gone. Her crew was gone.
She lay on the rocks for a long time, breathing and rasping out saltwater.
The sea moved behind her, indifferent. Wreckage turned in the current. A spar drifted past, trailing rope. Something that had been a mast section bobbed in the shallows, its wood blackened and split.
She got up eventually, her wounds stinging from the salt.
Her fleet was gone. Fifteen years of work. Ships stolen, bought, won in card games and taken by force. Crews she had trained and trusted and fed. All of it, reduced to burning timber turning in the waves.
She should have been angry. She was, somewhere underneath. But the dominant sensation was something else.
The dragon.
She had dreamt about it while drowning. Was that odd?
Nine heads rising from the water, each one a different colour, each one breathing something different. Fire and ice and lightning. She had watched her frigate torn in half between two sets of jaws. She had given the order to abandon ship, which was the first time she had ever said those words.
The hydra.
For a while, the naga sat on the shore and let the wind dry the salt on her skin and in her hair and thought about it.
That elf had jumped into the water after it. The small one, the merchant's daughter. She had seen that too. Her hostage had climbed the rail and gone over the side without hesitation, swimming after a sinking dragon as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
That was interesting.
The captain had known people who would die for their crew. She had known people who would kill for their ship.
She had not known many who would drown for a monster.
The naga stowed that away for now. Information was currency, and she was currently broke.
She began the long process of coiling herself upright and looking inland. The coastline stretched in both directions, empty and indifferent. Somewhere to the north, a mountain waited.
Wherever it was, wherever it had gone to, she was not done with it yet.
A tattered, burnt, and waterlogged hat washed up before her. She grinned, picking it up.
“Barjuchne,” she said to the world, salt water slicking past her broken scales as she slithered across the shore. The massive naga cracked her neck in both directions, rolling out her shoulders. With a hand, she plucked some seaweed off of her shoulder, sending both it and the crab that had been holding on flying back into the sea.
Elsewhere.
The forest near the mountain was quiet. An auspicious sign.
The scouts had been in position for days. Their camp was invisible, built into the natural depressions of the terrain, camouflaged with materials that matched the local foliage. They did not cook. They did not smoke. Even this far out from sight, they communicated in hand signals and short written notes passed between positions.
Noise would scare animals. Scared animals would act differently. Differently acting animals would attract attention.
— Everything was paid attention to, no matter how minute.
There were four of them.
The one in charge was called Xiang-Mei. She had a scar across her face that ran from her left temple to the corner of her mouth, clean and white. Her hair was a sheet of dark silk. Her eyes were dark as river jade and steady, as they had been looking at things for a very long time without finding most of them interesting.
She was interested now.
The obsidian gate was visible from her position, a dark shape against the mountain's face. Patrols moved in patterns around its base. Goblins, mostly, their small forms carrying spears and shields along carved paths. Lizardmen worked the outer perimeter in pairs, but those had changed in composition.
Previously, they had only ever walked in twos. Now, the lizardmen travelled with chained whelps as a third companion.
This was their fault. The slip they made. The patrol they had to eliminate likely alerted the mountain’s forces.
Xiang-Mei had carefully counted the defender’s rotation cycles. She had timed the shift changes. There was a gap in coverage on the western slope that lasted approximately forty minutes each morning.
Her second, a lean man, crawled into her position with a sketch rolled inside his sleeve.
"The gate is solid," he said, his voice barely above breathing. "Magically reinforced. We can't cut through it. But the goblins use a side passage for regular traffic."
Shen took the sketch and studied it. “Tunnels?”
"Extensive. The mountain is hollow. We can't map the interior without entering."
"Numbers?"
"Thousands just on the outer faces. An unknown quantity inside.” He shook his head. “This is a perfect fortress. If alerted, sieging it will be impossible with even ten thousand strong men. And that is without minding the dragon in our plans.”
"I'd rather that we did,” she replied quietly.
Xiang-Mei looked back at the gate through her spyglass. A goblin patrol crossed the lower path. One of them stopped and looked toward the treeline. He stood there for a few seconds, his head turned, his jaundiced eyes scanning the shadows. He liked to drink plum wine, but it was what consumed him.
"The dragon itself?" she asked.
"While absent, whatever command structure exists seemed to have been being handled by subordinates." He scanned the sky. “It hasn’t been seen outside of the mountain yet since its return.”
"Which means it's injured or tired. Trapped inside of its hole, the beast is like a frog in a well." Xiang-Mei rolled the sketch and placed it inside her jacket. "We continue observing as the Emperor commands. Go. Find out more about this side tunnel."
He nodded and slid back to his position.
This kingdom was weak. It was a nation of fools and led by one man of the same make, son of heaven or not.
She would see to it that her people would not make the same mistakes. The emperor’s bloodline, her bloodline, would have its revenge.
The heat of the brooding chamber should have set her hair on fire, but Veliah was completely immune to the magma’s radiating presence.
Actually, it felt kind of nice.
She sat on the stone bridge, her legs crossed, her hands on her knees, staring at the egg in its alcove. There was a tiny, thin crack in the shell. She had been sitting here for hours.
The egg was hers. Or rather, it had been made ‘from’ her.
The dungeon had taken something from her, some essence, some spiritual energy, and used it as fuel to create the thing that sat in that alcove, growing, forming, preparing to break free any day now.
She did not know what was inside it.
That was the problem. The system window had described some sort of imprinting. The hatchling would carry traits from both parents. But what did that mean?
Barjuchne was a dragon. A hydra now, apparently. Before that, a wyvern. Before that, a thing that had been a person and had become something else entirely. And she was an elf.
What would a child of that union even look like? Would it have scales? Would it have wings? Would it walk on two legs or four? Would it speak, or would it roar?
— Would it be a person?
Veliah's mother had died when she was a girl. She did not remember much. The smell of the herbs her mother had used in her hair. The way her hands had felt when she held Veliah's face. The sound of her voice reading from a merchant's almanack as she invented stories using the terms there, because it was the only book they had. She did not remember being held. Not clearly. The memory was there, somewhere, but it had been worn smooth by time and grief, the details lost. She knew it had happened, because all mothers held their children, surely, at least once.
But she could not reproduce the feeling, and the absence of it was hollow.
She had no model for this. Her father had been a poor example of parenthood in every direction. Veliah obviously knew what not to do. But she did not know what to do instead.
Rou-ya appeared at the chamber entrance. She sat down beside Veliah. She was still pale from her recovery. The dungeon's drain had taken something from her too, and the recovery was not quick.
The goblin princess said nothing for a while. She looked at the golden-speckled egg, next to the first. She looked at Veliah.
"You're scared?" Rou-ya said.
"I'm not scared." Veliah's hands stayed on her knees. "What if it's not... what if it comes out and it's... wrong? What if it's something I can't love?"
Rou-ya was quiet for a moment. "Is that a real fear or is that your father talking?"
Veliah looked at her.
"Because that sounds like something a man who sold his daughter would want you to believe," Rou-ya said. "That you're not capable of caring for something. That you'll fail." She shifted on the stone. "My mother said the same things to me, in different words. That I wasn't good enough. That I'd never manage. That my purpose was to serve someone else's plan."
The goblin princess looked at the eggs. The crack on the central one caught the magma’s light.
"I don't know what's in there," Rou-ya said. "I don't know what mine will look like either. Ei seems confident, but Ei thinks everything is an ant. None of us know what we're doing."
She reached out and took Veliah's hand.
"But we're going to figure it out. All of us. Together."
Veliah looked at their joined hands. The elf's pale fingers against the goblin's green skin.
"My mother died when I was young," Veliah said. "I don't know how to do this."
"Neither do I," Rou-ya said. "None of us do. F.P. was raised in a dead kingdom by nobody. Again, Ei is a literal ant. And Blibli didn’t even exist that long ago, so. You know." She squeezed Veliah's hand again. "We're all just pretending we know what we're doing together. I guess that's what a family is."
Veliah looked at her. The goblin princess looked back with golden eyes that were steady despite the exhaustion in them.
"You're going to be good at this," Rou-ya said. "I know that because you're already here, worrying about it. That's more than my mother ever did."
Veliah squeezed her hand back.
Ead, having earned enough of the dragon’s ‘good princess points’, which seemed to be a system uniquely applied to the fairy and herself, had been untied. This did not appear to be a real currency, rather, a sort of trust-ranking game the dragon apparently liked to play with its lower-ranking captives.
The dungeon was extraordinary.
She had known this from the available literature, but literature was a poor substitute for direct observation. The ambient magical density in the lower corridors was higher than anything she had encountered in years of academy training.
The stone itself was saturated, as if it had been soaking in raw magic for centuries. She could see it move sometimes, as if it were alive.
Nobody ever talked about it, but the dungeon itself was an organism, wasn’t it? It lived and breathed. It moved. She had asked Barjuchne about it directly, the two of them watching a wall expand to make a new chamber all by itself, and the dragon just shrugged at her, saying, 'Yeah, it just kind of does that,' as if this were not interesting at all.
It was, in fact, very interesting.
The fungus was the most interesting part.
She had found it everywhere. On the walls, in the cracks, and across the ceiling of nearly every chamber. It grew in thin patches, faintly luminous, its colour a pale green that shifted to blue in lower light.
The goblins called it Shimmer. The fairy princess had mentioned it briefly in a previous conversation, calling it parasitic, but Ead's preliminary analysis suggested something more complex than simple parasitism.
It was concentrating.
The fungus absorbed ambient magic from the stone, yes, but it did not consume it. It stored it. The magical density at the centre of each fungal patch was measurably higher than the surrounding stone. The effect was small in isolation, but the cumulative total across the entire dungeon was significant.
Hundreds of patches, each one a tiny reservoir of concentrated magical energy, all feeding into the same system.
The question was, where was the energy coming from? Yes, some places were more inherently magical than others. The former world tree valley, the great reach to the northwest, or the witching hole. But this mountain was unusual even amongst unusual places.
She had asked most of the princesses. One by one, they had given her nothing useful.
F.P. had told her to stop asking stupid questions and go away.
The twin saintesses had told her that the magic was divine in origin and that she should pray for understanding.
The ant-Vildt princess had told her that the fungus was harmless and that she should focus on more practical matters, such as acquiring aphids for the colony and that hives often had fungus. It wasn't unusual.
Ead sat in her working area, surrounded by samples and notes, and reviewed her findings.
The concentration effect was real. The source of the ambient magic was unclear. The fungus was a symptom, not a cause. Something in this mountain was producing extraordinary quantities of raw magical energy, and the Shimmer was simply the visible evidence of that production.
She needed more data.
Ead, the scholarly princess, was considering her next line of inquiry when Blibli appeared.
The slime princess emerged from a crack in the floor with the cheerful inevitability of water finding a way through stone. She reformed into her usual shape and looked at Ead with her widest eyes. The slime manifested together beneath Ead’s large hat, lifting it up as she rose to the top of her head.
Slime people, as they were called, were an interesting sub-variant of slime. Humanity considered them neither monsters nor elevated. They were just sort of ignored, generally, as an in-between state. There weren't enough of them in existence for it to be a topic of interest for society as a whole. Scholars would call them awake and aware of life, whereas the stance of the Adventurer's Guild is that they're just more clever monsters, like goblins. But, given the good-natured mannerisms of slime people, it was frowned upon to hunt them. They were a quirk of existence.
Personally, she found it fascinating. Slimes were basic, primitive organisms, hardly more 'alive' than a jellyfish was. But if they converged together, their collectivity caused the rise of the emergent property of sapience.
Why this wasn't the scientific obsession of the era, she did not know.
"Hello! What are you doing?"
"Working," Ead said, without looking up. The chair creaked as she shifted.
"F.P. said you were being annoying and that I should go bother you instead because you’d like it!” said the slime with glee.
“Oh. Is that so?” replied Ead, tapping her notes as she thought.
“You know, I found something interesting once too!" Blibli said, bouncing slightly on her base. She looked like she wanted to tell a story she had tried to tell to a dozen other people, but all of them had told her they were too busy to listen to her childish ramblings.
Ead's pen stopped. She looked up.
The slime princess was beaming at her with an enthusiasm that suggested she had been waiting for an opportunity to share this information for some time.
"What kind of something?" Ead asked, curiously.
"I saw a really big rat once!" Blibli said, practically glowing because she was finally being engaged with.
Ead looked at her. The slime princess beamed back, but her expression melted and she looked around, becoming visibly insecure. She was hyper-expressive and readable like a picture book. After only a few seconds of silence, it appeared that she became distraught at not being immediately reengaged with. Five seconds in at just being looked at, and she started to melt.
"...How big?" Ead asked finally.
Blibli sprang back together, acknowledged. This creature thrived on focused one-on-one attention. It needed it, like water.
The slime princess considered this. She extended her pseudopods outward in all directions, stretching her mass to approximate a shape that was clearly meant to represent something very large. She pulled air into herself, making a bubble.
Then, her body couldn't hold the form for more than a few seconds before snapping back, but the point was made.
"That big," Blibli said. "It was where the rats live!"
Ead studied her for a few moments, her pen tapping faster by the second. "Oh… I see. And… where do the rats live?" asked the scholar, interested.
Blibli quivered and then pointed downward. Through the floor. Through the stone.
She pointed down toward something very deep below the mountain.