BECMI Chapter 52 - Dragonsleep
P+18 years…
Cirruluxul’s hoard was bigger than it had been, and it was all of gold. None had been gained by combat or tribute, however, so it didn’t have as much harmonic resonance.
It didn’t matter, in the end. Cirruluxul had advanced herself to maximum hit points, had the magical skills of a dragon a century older than herself, and was rippling with the muscle and vitality of dragons twice her age, in a smaller frame. Physically, mentally, and spiritually, she exceeded all the limits to advance to the next tier, and it was time for her to sleep.
I watched her curl up on the thick leather sheets atop her gold. The silk sheets she used in her human form were carefully rolled up off to the side, and the oxen-sized blue dragon with the unique white streaks on scales and claws gave me one last look before laying her head down, curving down the length of her body and tail, and closing her eyes.
It took her less than a minute to fall asleep, meditation training allowing her to descend deeply into the frame of mind needed to begin triggering the ancient magic that would evolve her to the next age level.
She already knew I would be guarding her and that she would be safe. The dragonsleep should take at least a month, but we had at least another two years before the Portal could possibly reform, even with the help of a Rune of Time to lay a foundation for it, and that was monumentally unlikely after an exploding Immortal blew things up, yo.
I sighed and retreated from her, ringing her in a few protective spells to give her more confidence in not being disturbed, and sat down at the far end of the room.
We might have been able to depart by now, but no. The gammathauma had changed, and with it, the disruption to time had actually increased for a period.
It had all been sucked away, down to the northeast, under the lands that one day would be Zanzyr. The ambient gammathauma in the area from the Crimson Cataclysm had been drawn away, changed, and was now concentrated in a point miles below what would one day be Zanzyr City.
A fusion reactor turned into a generator of a para-mana field. I’d been able to see Immortal hands messing with it all just by watching the gammathauma from way over here… and a couple of my Sims from closer, with Astral Wards up and protected from the radiation which had largely been cleaned up and drawn away, sucked into and changed into whatever the fusion reactor had been altered to.
Some gawdawful Artifact with such great power the magical field it generated would be sensed a thousand years from now, drawing mages from this world and beyond to it, birthing new magicks and a magocracy ever-eager to discover more of them.
All as expected, although I had a very precise fix on the location of the thing now, and a much sharper read on the gammathauma.
I was already figuring out how it worked, especially by the way it resonated with the Soul Crystal inside the Orb capping Dread, here. The energies had to be gathered and condensed, then leashed and sent forth with spells drawing on them, forming an extra mana effect which could raise the power and impact of those spells by a remarkable degree.
Amusingly enough, the Cataclysm and the Ruin of Darkmoor had been responsible for creating the soul crystals, too, flashes of wild magic and radiation mixing, mutating, and warping the stone and mundane elements into things with nigh-perfect resonance with the Radiance itself, and gammathauma in general.
I hadn’t felt anything gathering said crystals up, so most were not aware of them. The shadenelves were already deep underground and digging deeper, blaming humans for the explosion that had sent them fleeing in the Underdark once again… and harvesting the older soul crystals, which had just received a surge of potency and whose veins had grown much larger.
I’d also found that all those soul crystals up on the surface had rapidly degraded down to brittle and impure quartz, or even disintegrated into sand, which fully explained why no one up here knew of them. There were probably thousands of acres of ground covered with them from the explosion, which had all cracked and shattered away to nothing when touched by the sun.
Sending out my Sims to gather some large ones for my purposes and for their own use was a no-brainer. If nothing else, shielded Crystals inside Energized Black Sapphire could be held using Time via Quintessence against the degradation, and would ensure that my Sims would be able to wield Cryptomancy if needed.
This also effectively made me the first mage of the gammathauma/Radiance, and the spell effects I discovered the original Radiance magicks. Gaebrel’s gifts to his Priests hadn’t begun until a little over five centuries before my time, meaning that it was likely they’d been discovered on the surface first, then copied by the Immortal for passing on to my mother’s people.
Opportunism at its finest, I thought, shaking my head. The Soul Crystals had first allowed Gaebrel to endow Priests among the elves. The Radiance spells had actually come later...
The Radiance would be unusable in the past, not existing before the Crimson Cataclysm, even if the gammathauma did. Whatever the Immortals had done had put the Radiance into effect and made it possible to tap, and that wouldn’t exist at our next jump.
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Her transformation was slow and largely subtle, at least until it got to the point of bones expanding, scales stretching and popping off under the pressure of new growths underneath them, and the inevitable crackling and snapping of lightning coursing over and around Cirruluxul as her power, built and hoarded against this moment by word and deed and effort, beat out of her Dragonheart and took her to the next stage of dragondom.
In gaming terms, she was advancing from a Juvenile to a Young Adult, going roughly from age 14-15 in human terms to 18 or so.
Her body would go from roughly the size of a bull to somewhat larger than a rhino in mass. The big jump to adulthood when she reached her first century would see her rising to the mass of an elephant… although considerably more stretched-out, of course.
I watched her growing bigger and longer, scales popping off one by one and littering the floor, which I dutifully collected. She could wear armor made of her own scales, if she wished, or gift them to another.
Her heartscale was also a convenient place to carve her Truename Rune, ensuring that such magic could never be used against her, including lesser versions of them. I could also use her Truename to ladle boosted Buffs onto her, as Truename Magic was perfectly capable of helping as well as harming.
I had informed her of that, of why I had done it, and the fact that I’d done something similar for myself. Where I would conceal her Name-Rune and mine was a separate issue…
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P+19 years...
Cirruluxul’s eyes flared open. She caught my scent, her eyes fixed on me… and then past me to every single bit of meat in the larder and pantry, hundreds of pounds of it, heaped up on the tables.
“Dig in,” I told her indifferently.
She looked at me, I looked back at her, and she trembled, then bowed her head first.
Then she launched herself in a ravenous lunge towards the meat, and began to gobble it all down.
Preservation Cantrips had kept it all quite hot and fresh, and I’d spent hours making it all up with different sauces and juices and cuts. It didn’t take her long to slow down, even as hungry as she was, just to appreciate what she was eating with groans and grumbles and little moans of pleasure.
She was probably regretting that she couldn’t take human form and eat all of it, and thus enjoy it even more.
It did take her a good half hour to down a full ton of meat, equivalent to taking down something really big and edible, and I just sat there calmly, watching her put it all away. There were lights flashing inside her as the food was processed with quite alarming speed, but she literally needed to flesh herself out after growing so large, almost tripling in mass and fifty percent larger than before.
I said nothing as she finally overcame her appetite enough to pace over in front of the bar and look at herself in the mirror there.
Her white scales had regrown in and were now part of the pattern, instead of looking painted across her. She was also much bigger, and loomed up, backing up to try and get a full view of herself.
I Holo’d up a mirror image of her so she could examine how she looked more fully.
She preened for a couple minutes, grabbed more beef, posed a few more times, grabbed some lamb, paced around some, ate some fish, and continued doing that for another half hour.
“Your magical abilities should have increased, as your draconic magic foundation did,” I eventually informed her. She paused in her threat display, looking inside her head and going through her spells, all of which had silently been expended as magic to fuel her growth and were currently empty.
She most certainly had more of them than before, however.
“My, my fourth Valence has opened up!” she exclaimed in disbelief. “Those, those are not normally gained until one is an elder of my kind!”
“Mmm.” I waved the fact away dismissively. “IV’s. Your goal is V’s, at the very least. You will continue your practice and your rep counts until your magic has improved enough to Cast V’s. Anything less than the ability to Teleport is simply insufficient for a proper dragon.”
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Cirruluxul straightened up proudly. She was literally centuries ahead of where a dragon of her species would normally be in terms of magical ability, but Mistress was totally unimpressed by that and simply didn’t care about what she had thought was the only way for a dragon to gain power and strength.
She also looked far more dangerous, both more muscular and vital, than she remembered her siblings being at this stage, and knew she had clearly surpassed them by any measurement. She might even be the equal in power to a red of her own age!
The thought was extremely heartening, and worth all the tedium of what she had gone through. Indeed, if this continued onward, she might very well develop into the most powerful blue dragon ever!
The thought had stars dancing in her eyes. To be as mighty as the great and ferocious reds, or the powerful and noble golds!…
Of course, she had to get out of here first, and that, that task still lay before her.
“Mistress, have you a clear knowledge of how much longer we will be trapped?” she inquired of me.
I looked away, considering the fact.
“I have been learning how to write an improved Rune of Time. This has helped the temporal energy to gather and settle down around the existing enchantments, defying the chaos without. As I continue to wield it, it is shaving time off what will be needed.
“Our ultimate time needed has receded from forty-five years down to forty-four already. I am hoping that with continued practice, I can get it down to forty. We are currently in year nineteen. You have actually been asleep for most of a year now.”
Twenty-one more years. Cirru looked at the Holo of herself in the mirror, digesting how long she had been in dragonsleep, and reflected that returning in glory to her people was still some time off…
“Do we continue with our work and our schedule?” she asked, wondering how Mistress could stay so unfazed by this imprisonment. She was not a dragon, after all…
“Of course. There is still a great deal to be done.”
Helped by her icy duplicates wandering the world without and bringing treasures and lore back to their creator, Cirru knew.
“Yes, Mistress. But I am still hungry…”
I pointed, her head turned towards a box sitting there. “Quartz crystals. For your bones and teeth.”
Her eyes lit up with voltage, and she stalked towards the box of uncut crystals, already starting to hum with her presence...