Chapter 55: Way Back When
Two hundred years ago.
Powder fell over the world in a great era of white and grey. It settled on the ruins of cities and the bones of fields and the shoulders of men who marched beneath a single united banner, a last alliance of everything that still drew breath. On the horizon, the world tree burnt. Its collapsing shadow stretched across the whole sky at sunset, and no one alive could remember what the sky had looked like before it broke.
A shadow flew over that world.
It owned nations by then. It terrorised everything it conquered. The Devourer, they called it in every language that still had speakers left to use the word. A dragon large enough to swallow districts whole, black-scaled, red-eyed, fated in every prophecy to end the world. Golden cages hung from its many horns, swinging in the wind of its flight, and inside those cages sat its favourite prizes.
Princesses.
Daughters of kings and emperors, taken from every court it had broken. The lucky ones had already starved. The rest sat in the cold and swayed with the wind and would not leave their cages, because the cages did not open.
It took what it wanted. It killed what it wanted. It ate what it wanted. No single force could stop it, and every force that had tried lay folded into its shadow somewhere below.
And it wanted everything.
Not merely gold and land. Everything, past the material, past the countable. Its dark heart held one desire only, total and without shape, and the world bent beneath it.
People ran, and there was nowhere to run to. Humans, elves, orcs, and vildt. All fell the same. Only the fae endured, tucked away in their hidden, sideways kingdom, spared for the simple reason that the beast had never considered them worth a thought. Small things, hiding from the storm above them.
But the fairies had taken in survivors during those years, and the survivors brought ruin of their own. The great races crushed the delicate order of the little kingdom from inside it. Food grew thin. Tempers grew thinner. And one night, a revolt, furious that the fairies had hidden instead of fighting, dragged the fairy queen from her toadstool throne and killed her in the square of her own court.
That was the toppling point. The fairy kingdom ended there, in the dark, strangled by the very people it had sheltered.
The things that lived in the fairy kingdom, the dark, slithering things that were kept away by the fairy queen’s magic, came. They came from the bogs and the waters, and from the dark, strange forests inside the other world, and they ate everyone inside.
The great dragon descended on a wild city.
Its landing alone killed thousands, its weight coming down across an entire district with the force of something fallen from heaven. Stone folded. Streets vanished. Those who survived the impact ran in every direction, crowding into cellars and wells and each other, while the beast opened its maw above them.
No roar came. No fire.
Instead, it drew in.
The world shook. The air itself bent toward the beast, and the people below fell mid-stride, dead between one step and the next, torn from their own bodies in screaming streaks of light that poured upward into the dark of its throat.
It ate souls.
An entire city died in an instant. Hundreds of thousands, gone between one breath and the next. Almost the whole of the vildt race left the world that day, and the Devourer rose from the empty streets, satisfied, and flew home to its black mountain.
There, only one person in the world stood against it.
A princess of the eastern empire waited on the stones of its lair when it landed. She sat on her knees with her family's sword laid across her lap, and she watched the beast settle its enormous bulk without flinching. The dragon lowered its head, a thousand times her size, and looked at her.
She was the only one it permitted to remain free. The only one it spoke with. The only one it treated with something close to respect. No historian ever learnt why. There was just something between them, secret to the two of them alone, and it would stay that way.
But for that reason, it had chosen her as its bride.
She hated it. She defied it at every step, with schemes and sabotage and open insolence, and none of it mattered, because to the beast her defiance was a cute diversion, a pet's trick.
Until the day it returned and saw what she had done.
Eggs. Its brood, the young that would have devoured all life in this world and the next. Smashed and broken, every last one, their shells cracked open across the floor of its lair. And the princess sat among the ruins with her yolk-covered sword across her legs, calm and content, and stared up at the dragon, which faced a rage no living thing had ever seen from it.
Its roar cracked the moon itself, they say.
And in its instinct, blind with fury, it lunged down over her and consumed her whole.
That was its mistake and it was her trick and intent.
Blood trickled down its angled jaw, and the dragon went still.
Its eyes widened. Its body locked rigid. It had never swallowed a princess before. The rage had made it careless.
The essence of a princess began to tear it apart from within.
The armies of the living came while it was bound and dying. Every nation that remained gathered at the foot of the black mountain in one unified cause, and the greatest heroes of the age climbed it together.
It was weak. It was chained. It raged one final time, released the last of its power, and then it was killed.
The ash of it fell for months after that still. It piled over the corpse in insurmountable amounts, tonnes and then kilotonnes, and the mountain drank it all in. Somehow, it all seemed to be drawn here by an inexplicable force.
Years passed.
Soil grew over the ash. Rock formed, impossibly. The peak rose, taller and taller, hardened by some supernatural pressure into black glass. And deep in the bowels of that stone, a corpse lay buried.
A rat burrowed through a little hole in the dark.
It found endless charred flesh, and it began to eat.
There was enough down there for a million lifetimes over.
Barjuchne sat there with her mouth slightly open, her head tilted, staring at F.P.
The hoard room was quiet. The story had taken a while.
"...What the fuck?" Barjuchne asked.
"And that is why I hate people and I want my kingdom back," explained F.P. She sat with her arms crossed on the dragon's knee, entirely composed. "And why I found myself content to torture your kind for years."
"Yeah, no. I got that part. That tracks," said Barjuchne. "But how... I mean... What?"
The fairy studied her. "You can believe me or not. It doesn't matter. I don't care." She flicked a strand of dark-blue hair from her face, only for it to fall right back over the one eye it always covered. "The point is that below this mountain lies the corpse of the last dragon. To this day, the energy of the million souls it consumed continues to leak upward from here. This is the pinnacle point."
F.P. gestured around herself, at the gold, at the stone, at the warm glow of the whole living mountain.
"That is why this place is so rife with magic. It is a mass grave."
Barjuchne's eyes moved left, then right, while she processed that. Her home. Her gold. The place she had woken up in, the first thing she had ever known in this world.
The egg room sat directly above a graveyard.
"So... okay," she said slowly. "What does this mean in reality?"
"It means that you are here because something drew you here. Something that is not fully gone yet." F.P. crossed her arms. "In my opinion, more than the bones of the last dragon remain buried under this mountain."
The floor trembled.
Gold coins slid down the treasure slopes in long cascades, chiming, and dust sifted from the ceiling of the chamber.
Somewhere far below, deep enough that only a dragon's ears could have placed it, something shifted in the darkness.