Chapter 128: Dragon Communion
"Our ancestral home... what specific classification of sanctuary defines that world?"
"My eternal home..."
"The northern oceans dividing those shores score as infinitely more vast than the absolute expanse of Lake Varan, the colossal island chains are as expansive as the whole of Limgrave, and un-counted tens of thousands of dragons soar majestically across the high sky. Within that realm, human clans, the Misbegotten craftsmen, and the beastmen lineages coexist behind a common shield of total harmony—exactly parallel to our current camp—and their generations have seamlessly multiplied across the soil for millennia."
"Does your voice preserve the breath to tell my heart about the Sky City... the monument that permanently echoes across your prayers?"
The weathered Wyvern Warrior's cloudy eyes froze slightly across the dark, and a long-lost, brilliant gleam re-materialized deep within his pupils, which had grown somewhat unfocused and hollow due to absolute physical exhaustion. Even his gravelly baritone involuntarily rose multiple octaves across the wind.
"The Sky City... Farum Azula... constitutes nothing less than an un-rivaled, reality-bending miracle engineered through the heartbreaking, life-long labors of un-counted generations of our ancestors. It operates across time as an eternal beacon guiding the spirits of all intelligent lineages throughout the millennia, and stands as the final, non-negotiable resting place consecrated to house the souls of all dragons when their flight reaches its baseline."
The young white dragon slowly lowered her snout, her aching, immature wings feebly flapping against the rushing mountain air as she locked her throat into a long, heavy silence.
Tracing the silver scales mapping his back, her senses could keenly feel the old warrior's increasingly cold body temperature. The thick, metallic stench of fresh blood lingered continuously across the slipstream, causing her heart to violently contract with a profound dread. A mere quarter of an hour past, the old man had aggressively thrown his own massive frame forward to shield her vulnerable chassis from seven colossal great-bow arrows launched by the hunting vanguards. A traumatic deficit of that magnitude hand-delivered to a broken, mid-tier dragon of his advanced winters scored as a near-certain decree of absolute cellular death.
"Father... my wings will transport your frame across the tumultuous currents of the Storm Sea to breach the gates of Farum Azula this instant watch," she whispered tentatively following a long pause, her voice shaking against the gale. "The high priests ruling the temple will undoubtedly command the sovereign incantations required to salvage your life readouts, will they not?"
"Hehehe..." The Wyvern Warrior forced a weak, rattling chuckle through his teeth, only for a thick torrent of black, stagnant blood to violently erupt from his jaws. "Silly child... if our flight desists from utilizing the primary spatial teleportation portals, strictly those noble Ancient Dragons and high-purity Greater Drakes command the raw thermodynamic voltage required to successfully brave the storms after crossing the threshold of their full adulthood. Your wings are so young, and your frame is manually hauling the dead weight of my broken chassis. My intellect simulates the dark certainty that our vanguard would mathematically fail to even sight the coastlines of Moongrum before our shapes became helpless prisoners clutched within the nets of those pursuers."
He hoisted his weathered head high into the freezing wind, opening his eyes wide to drink the absolute totality of the high, clear sky, before drawing a long, heaving breath into his lungs. "Arrest your wings, child."
"Across the battlements of Stormveil, our banners were completely routed; at the lower valleys of Stormveil, our numbers sustained a secondary, high-casualty liquidation. What followed was a permanent nightmare tracking the keeps of Kenneth Haight, the Sacrificial Bridge, and the wastes of Moongrum. Ever since my hands initial isolated your presence across the crags, the solitary maneuver my strength could execute was to wander day and night alongside your shadow, permanently fleeing from the blades... cough, cough, cough—"
Following a violent sequence of racking coughs that threatened to utterly shatter his chest walls, the old warrior finally regulated his breathing amidst the freezing air, his voice dropping into a hoarse, scraping whisper. "Arrest the flight... my spirit... my spirit records absolute zero desire to continue executing this flight across the mud."
"Father... your command—" The young white dragon hesitated, the velocity of her wings visibly decelerating across the currents, yet her heart still strained to project a secondary argument across the space.
"But your own lifecycle remains exceptionally young. Regardless of what specific atrocities your steel intersects down the timeline... never allow your soul to forfeit the anchor of hope," the old man instructed slowly, firmly, the dim, dying light within his pupils gradually flaring with an incandescent brilliance.
"One day, when the light of the eternal beacon violently ignites its flame a secondary time, its majesty will flawlessly guide every lost soul drawing breath across the cosmos back to their authentic homeland. Farewell... my beautiful child."
Those terminal syllables escaping the old man's lips emerged so ethereal, so faint they seemed to dissolve entirely into the whistling morning breeze before clearing his jaw. Utilizing the absolute final fraction of his vital reserve, his massive claws delivered a sudden, powerful thrust against the white dragon's shoulder plates, tumbling his heavy chassis straight down toward the green earth below!
The white dragon unleashed a mournful, soul-shattering shriek that echoed across the peaks, folding her wings to execute a frantic downward dive without a single secondary calculation, desperately attempting to scoop his adoptive father's torso clear of the void before his armor struck the flagstones—only for her flight to be ruthlessly, violently arrested in mid-air by a dense rain of heavy iron arrows launched from the tracking vanguards below!
Catastrophic blood... tearing wounds... absolute darkness... and permanent flight. Her cognitive networks possessed zero capacity to reconstruct what specific horrors wove across her frame following that watch. In the final accounting, her vessel collapsed into the custody of an elite task force whose steel was dedicated explicitly to hunting down the surviving remnants of the fallen Storm Dynasty—it might have defined a standard legion operating beneath the seals of the Golden Dynasty, or comprised high-coin mercenary outriders harvested from the arenas of Caelid, but the data node had completely ceased to matter across her board.
Did three winters clear the calendar since that checkpoint... five full cycles of the sun... or a duration infinitely longer?
Entirely beyond her control, the monumental chains forged from high-density black steel and the gargantuan mountain iron cages that continuously changed masters across the black market locked the absolute totality of her childhood within a permanent, pitch-black night.
Certain masters deployed cold pliers and iron scalpels to ruthlessly peel the living scales from her hide to forge specialized armor plates for the peerage; alternate practitioners wove thick silver needles deep into her veins to draw her blood, excitedly shouting across their laboratories that the crimson fluid constituted the perfect, high-purity ingredient required to synthesize restricted alchemical potions. Following un-counted thousands of agonizing tortures that out-registered the absolute tolerance limits of human imagination, her mind had truly erased the dataset, harboring an absolute refusal to ever remember a single drop of the past.
Freya—that defined the authentic name her father had whispered across her cradle, and it constituted the absolute, terminal treasure she kept securely buried within the deepest basements of her soul.
"Tell me the data line... does the biological stability of that dragon truly register a safe configuration?" a masked alchemical warlock asked, his fingers adjusting a tray of surgical knives.
"Three independent high-potency binding arrays, seven specialized weakening compounds circulating through the veins, balanced by a continuous infusion of structural narcotics—maintain your faith in my metrics, friend, that beast currently records a neural output as thoroughly neutralized as a dead marsh snake," his colleague responded casually, smoothly rubbing a clear disinfecting liniment across the surface of his heavy leather gloves. "Direct your eyes toward the parallel sector; our contracted knight required merely a pair of basic tranquilizing doses to completely lock his motor control loops into this configuration."
Tracking the vector of his hand, Maxwell's massive silhouette stood securely bound to a reinforced iron operating table tilted at a sharp forty-five-degree angle. His heavy eyelids hung wide open across the space, yet the absolute entirety of his skeletal muscles scored as completely, absolute relaxed, his rhythmic, deep respirations indicating his consciousness had entered a profound, narcotic-induced sleep state.
"But the target defines an authentic Greater Drake. Operating under this half-dead, severely degraded biological status, what specific countermeasure handles the crisis if the dragon heart extracted during the primary incision lacks a sufficient tier of energetic activity, or if the beast cellulares out entirely mid-way through the transplantation surgery? Would that outcome not constitute an absolute, catastrophic waste of such an exceptional piece of rare experimental flesh?"
"Tsk... your calculation balances. This immediate frailty likely tracks back to long-term architectural imprisonment and severe nutritional deficit across her previous holdings. It rarely manifests with this density across standard drakes, but it presents a dangerous variable following the completion of these pre-operative parameters. Speaking down the line, the previous masters who commanded her leash comprised nothing more than a pack of ignorant, un-vouched barbarians who possessed zero comprehension beyond the rough mechanics of industrial bloodletting and crude scale harvesting. A Greater Drake commanding a genetic bloodline of this purity defines a supreme asset class... by what logic did those fools allow her parameters to erode to this altitude!"
"Then ensure her heart desists from hitting absolute zero!" A freezing, high-voltage command suddenly exploded from the arched doorway of the laboratory. "The high-tier liturgical incantations my scepter hand-delivered to your circles were engineered explicitly to stabilize the vitals across these specific bottlenecks. If this dragon perishes before the surgery successfully locks down its terminal phase... the absolute totality of your assistants will be ruthlessly buried parallel to her carcass!"
The two alchemical sorcerers who had been organizing the heavy bone saws instantaneously straightened their spines, executing a deep, terrified bow to validate the arrival of the newcomer. "The command is locked down, High Priestess Cassia!"
Displaying zero hesitation on the clock, the two practitioners aggressively drew razor-sharp scalpels across their own wrists. The thick, dark crimson that gushed from their veins desisted from dropping onto the floor flagstones; instead, the fluid violently swirled through the air to transmute into two mysterious, reality-bending blood runes that floated forward to cleanly imprint their burning geometric matrices directly onto Freya's silver scales.
The twin brands, radiating an intensely powerful aura of pure bloodline energy, flickered with an immense, rhythmic pulse that sounded exactly like a heavy lung expanding across the dark. Every single watch the runes ignited their crimson light, Freya's massive frame sustained a minor, involuntary tremor. Following more than ten successive cycles of the ignition, her shallow, rattling respirations finally shifted to log a calm, immensely powerful, and thoroughly stabilized baseline.
Concurrently, the blood-red brands gradually exhausted their luminous voltage, leaving nothing more than a sequence of dark, dried crimson stains across the surface of the silver hide.
"High Priestess... the alchemical surgical grid has successfully stabilized its parameters. Shall our knives execute the initial opening play?" a sorcerer asked cautiously, his voice lowering.
"Let the incision launch this microsecond. The variables surrounding this sector score as highly anomalous, and our strategy commands an exceptionally tight chronological runway," the priestess commanded, her long black robes rustling as she pulled a pair of reinforced gloves across her hands.
She fixed her fanatical, burning gaze onto the pinned frame of Freya—who sat firmly locked down beneath the un-yielding weight of the enchanted iron chains—an intense, manic light exploding deep within her eyes as her mouth murmured a quiet vow that sounded like a self-contained prayer. "May the great, primordial Mother of Blood dwell across this dark chamber to witness... that the knives of your children are about to present your altars with yet another world-shattering miracle of flesh!"