BECMI Chapter 266 – Forty Years Later…
Cirru yawned loudly. Her stomach began to rumble as her palest blue eyes snapped open, lightning crackling around the white of her frill, and she felt a ravenous hunger start to fill her awareness.
She was hungry, the kind of hunger she’d only felt a couple times in her life, but this was even more intense.
A warm pressure slid off her, and she turned her head, taking a moment to recognize the huge Bat that had been draped against her.
He looked smaller than before. He’d easily been of a size with her, but now it looked like he had shrunk.
His Hat looked as prim as ever, the feather as keen, and his Monocle was still in place.
-Mistress has meal waiting outside,- he /bowed to her with a sweep of his dark leathery wing.
Cirru got to her feet, raised her head up… and bonked into the ceiling of the cavern where she’d chosen her dragonsleep to take place in. She blinked down at Duum, who grinned at her, then hop-jump-walked out of the cavern ahead of her, to the clearing outside.
She was surprised to find that he still didn’t look like food to her anymore.
A bit awkwardly, she put her feet down and lowered her head, feeling her new size and power, reveling in it, even as her hunger seemed to ache into her bones. She slowly and carefully moved out after Duum, careful not to knock into the stones like a child again, aching to test out her wings, her speed… but mostly, she was hungry.
She could smell the meats and seasonings as she came outside, wafting about and hooking into her nose like a chain, leading her helplessly after the great Bat that was now gliding low above the ground, silent and smooth, like a dark shadow, warm and supple and comforting…
They were very undraconic thoughts, but she didn’t have to be ashamed of them, as he was leading her to the food.
Coins and jewels clinked and clattered as her portable hoard shifted under her claws and fell from her hide. It took only a flicker of attention to confirm that not a coin of it had been removed, each trophy singing to her in a melody of its own, assuring her of its purpose and meaning as it did so.
Mistress still considered it a colossal waste, she knew, but dragons would be dragons. She’d seen mistress Burn away a hundred times her hoard in gold, and knew greed simply held no sway over her. She was more at risk of a raven swooping in to steal a shiny than in Mistress taking back any of the metals and jewels of her hoard.
Really, her most prized hoard item was her wardrobe, anyway, but she couldn’t sleep on that!
He led her to the cliffside clearing over the ocean, one of their favorite roosting places, where they could look out over the whole island and the waves there, a domain that wasn’t, their chosen retreat from the world while she had her Dragonsleep, and they avoided messing around with Time and challenging causality.
Mistress got extremely, mmm, taut, whenever Cirru brought up something willful and draconic to do, besides just watching and observing time passing. After all, she was now old enough to take a mate…
But that would be the death of her, having children when no such children ever existed, depriving some other dragon of a mate and the children who should have been born. She would be wiped from reality, sent into a fake dream all the worse because it would be a fruitless dream, its existence weighted against her, crushing her down, until all the powers of Time and Fate arranged for her death and the dream died with her, never having been and never more to be.
There were grills and fires and pots and pans and boiling waters and icy buckets, things steaming and crackling in oil and flipping on slabs of stone and metal, spices from a hundred lands wafting through the air, and it was all adorning SO MUCH MEAT.
Saliva fell crackling and sparkling from her lips as Duum glided up to a mighty tuna, fresh pink flesh all carved and cooked and coated with a dusting of twenty different spices. The Bat who had been watching over her closely raised a long dewclaw, a razored crimson arc extending from it, and slid it through the entire body of the massive filet with no hesitation.
-Eat,- he /said cheerfully, dark eyes dancing, and she stalked forward to open her jaws. He placed the first cut inside her mouth.
Spices and the cold flesh of the fish exploded over her tongue like they were melting together. Duum bobbed his head up and down at the way her eyes rolled up, and continued to cut.
There was a lot of food to get through, and there was no doubt she was going to get through it all.
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I listened to her bones pop and her scales crinkle and settle. It sounded like a war was taking place in her stomach as Duum and I leaned back against Cirru, who herself was sprawled against the side of her perch, head out where she could watch over the horizon, but her swollen belly was definitely not in any condition to go exploring.
“Better than some wild and savage hunting for random things which probably wouldn’t even taste that good?” I asked the dragon, patting her side as she digested an amount of food equal to her body weight.
The stage five advance to Adult status was a major size increase, to elephantine in mass and adding fifty percent in length. Cirru was clearly half again as long as Duum, who was not at all small, but her longer tail and neck were part of that, of course. She was probably close to double his weight now, too, on account of a much heavier build in her main body.
Dragons, they just keep growing.
Cirru’s horns sparked, the equivalent of a groan. “So much good food, Mistress. This is the only way to awaken from a proper Dragonsleep!” she admitted happily.
“I’ve been taking notes on what you liked and disliked during our travels for the last few decades. Thought I’d bring back some dishes you enjoyed and help you settle your dreams and memories properly.”
Cirru blinked, realizing that the slew of dishes she’d been served did indeed track linearly with places they’d visited in the past, in the order that they’d visited them in! Eating them had been like revisiting all those places once more, reviewing what she’d experienced, and indeed, bringing it all together with her new insights and power.
She repressed a quiet shudder. It was like Mistress knew Dragonsleep better than proper dragons did!…
I naturally had been keeping track of her mental state, so as not to be surprised when she actually awakened.
She was well past her first century now, and now an Adult by the standards of her people. However, she was definitely a step beyond any normal Blue dragons in her comprehension of magic, and definitely in vitality and size. The white streaks on her scales had only grown with her shedding, forming beautiful snow-white accents and streaks on her hide, wings, and horns. Even the lightning she sparked with was whiter and bluer than normal Blues, making it plain she was a rare mutation or hybrid or something, and not to a White dragon.
Immortal Power was good for something.
“I completed it with your old Heartscale. Here.” I flicked the scale out and floated it over to her eye.
I felt her quiver underneath me as she beheld the Rune of her Truename. It summed up all that she was, was open to all that she could be, and anyone who could comprehend it could take it and command her as her slave forever, or until her Name truly changed.
If they didn’t have it, however, fuck them! Her Name would withstand them forever. Even an Immortal would have a nigh-impossible time buckling her willpower by force now.
The only one she had to fear was me, and I was the one giving the Rune to her. As long as she held it, no other being could invoke it, or study and research it!
She exhaled long and low to see it. She slowly lifted up enough to expose her current heartscale, grasped the floating Rune, and pressed the smaller, fallen scale carved so intricately and delicately to its larger counterpart.
There was a crackling, sparking shimmer and rumble, like two beats of a large heart, as the Scale phased into her and centered itself behind her breastbone and in front of her heart.
Her eyes opened wider, and lightning crackled from them, dancing blue-white up her frill and horns, then down the ridge of her spinal crest.
Nobody knew her Truename but her and I, and I had given her the Rune, so even I couldn’t use it against her.
She had achieved one of the great statuses of a dragon, that she could not be commanded by force against her will.
It would only drive her further to greatness!
She bowed her head to me. “Where to now, Mistress?” she asked respectfully.
“Back to the library,” I said calmly. “I know, it’s quiet and lonely, but we all know we have to keep a low profile here to stop from being Time-wiped. Besides, you should be aching to see what you can pick up with new magical insights.”
She did manage to nod eagerly at that. “My V’s opened, Mistress! I will soon be able to Teleport!” she declared proudly. Because that was the mark of a true Wizard, and being able to pass herself off as one was very important to moving through mortal society.
“We’ve got about two more years before the Portal rebuilds and our old selves exit with the Company through them. Plenty of time to work on your V’s and Reserves and the like,” I assured her calmly.
In other realms, dragons learned magic as sorcerers, dredging up magic from ancestral memories, maybe learning a rare few on a personal level, and mastering them with deep Casting pools of power.
Sorcery was very rare here, and actively discouraged by Immortals, their clerics, and unsurprisingly, wizards who didn’t want the competition of someone who could use all their magic but didn’t have to study for years to learn it all.
Me being an elven (halvyri! hah!) sorceress would have totally blown the minds of many who were convinced I was just about the most uber elven wizardess there was.
Heh. Elven Wizardry was an invisible Theurgic Class to me. I only had four actual Levels in it from Racial Levels, the rest was all from Theurgies!
The last few decades had been relatively boring, mostly because I was not really allowed to fight anything that would be missed or couldn’t be smoothed over with a little temporal energy from a IX Valence.
I caught up on the last thousand years of things going on since the Doom of Darkmoor had wiped it from existence. The wounded megalith of Nown had shifted its axis, lands fell, others rose, Immortals played willy-nilly with the planet. Whole civilizations died, and others started climbing back from barbarism with more or less speed. Darkmoor was buried under the ocean, then those lands were hauled back up out of the sea, their past wiped away in atomic fire, and repurposed for other things, as the new ‘homeland’ of the nifloids.
Even knowing what was coming, and knowing I could, if not stop it, put a severe crimp into it, I could only withhold my hand or be shunted away.
To my Sims and I, this was history, and it would not deviate, we would!
On the other hand, it gave me a pretty good idea on what was going to happen on the other side of the pond when the Doom came for Darkmoor there.
The cryopods of the Barhund crew I would be leaving safe in the care of my Sims, until I had a place for them to go to.